Mental "Health" as Stealth warfare--a radically critical approach (with art)

originally published at arizona.indymedia.org:

http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/37547.php

sub-heads:

Mental Health industry as corporate?

Good done by mental "health" industry?

Social science used as tool

Giving away our power

If fascism arises

why i speak up

all helpers of colonizer/invader

The following thoughts come as a sort of news item from a ongoing conversation i'm having with indigenous folks. i thought i'd share this in case anyone in these parts found it valuable. Feel free to pass this along to others as you like.

Mental Health industry as corporate?

Most probably don't think that science could be corporate, but they also don't see that corporations are themselves quite oriented to a kind of science--something not too unlike military science. The science of profit and social control, if in meta forms.

Corporations may only seek profit and access on the surface, yet underneath they are subordinate to forms very oriented to social control, even if not state types of such. But i'm getting ahead of myself.

How is psychology and psychiatry corporate? Well, they are about profit (if you run out of insurance funds to pay, too bad for you, usually; even if you get 'sliding scale' help, someone foots the bigger bill, usually taxpayers). They have hierarchies (therapists and other mental health practitioners are subordinated to a relatively small group at the top--the main leaders--whom write and interpret allegedly objective findings and translate such into a bible-like book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

Is that proof enough? Perhaps the social sciences are more religious than corporate, as Thomas Szasz, MD suggests (i.e. in his book _The Theology of Medicine_).

Good done by mental "health" industry?

As for the good being done by this framework (which is fully subordinated to invader's formal interests), i see that they do as any "successful propaganda"--providing a germ or portion of excellence, while working overtime to make war in more covert capacities.

War? But...isn't that a little *provocative* of me? i don't think so...

Now, i don't want to discount the positivity that many people, including those quite conscious about the problems of institutional "help" in this area, keep, regarding the mental "health" construct and all of its implementers (i.e. individual therapists) themselves. i'm thinking specifically of people who would have "nowhere" else to turn; people who are surrounded by people stuck in what i call "city mind"--people whom cannot, for the life of themselves, permit themselves to explore beyond "the box", for whatever reason.

Reasons which could prove important to understand, if we are to understand how modern colonization works systematically.

Social science used as tool

So, such quite conscious people try to make use of the situation as a *tool* in the context of having quite literally nothing else. i mean, it's "a lot of work", apparently, to create communities that we colonized folks have forgotten the value of. Maybe we've quite forgotten how to even begin without asking some specialist...

Scary...

Giving away our power

What i'm trying to get at by wanting a full escape from such institutional imaginations, tho, is that we are giving away our powers. We are giving away our powers to truly meaningful connections with other human beings, independent of colonizer's values and interests. We are allowing our consent to be manufactured into believing that "only specialists" can "help" us, not even biological or extended families, anymore.

So i'm saying that these types of specialists (if not all specialists, even the allegedly "radical" ones) are keeping us away from our power. If we know this, and still try to make use of that as a tool, well and good. But we also often don't know history too well, like the fact that what were called "mental defectives" (i.e. what today are called the "mentally ill") were *forcefully sterilized* and probably a host of other things.

If fascism arises

Having one's name and address in the control of such groups subordinated to the state (or globalist elites, for that matter) can also prove detrimental when/if such states become openly fascist, as with germany in WWII. Did you know, for instance, that mental patients were the FIRST, according to Peter Breggin MD (www.breggin.com), to be killed--and that the model the psychiatrists used was apparently the one used by the nazis on all manner of perceived and real "enemies"? Did you know this?

Knowing this, and the trajectory that the current figurehead president is working overtime on, i would say that things could change quite rapidly...at least against those groups perceived as "the most heinous". The question is, how quickly did .... germany change when the fascists took over? And was there perceptable change before?

why i speak up

i've done a lot of enquiry on this topic especially because i'm a 'survivor' of psychology/psychiatry myself. But what i've found--in very broad searches, usually of university libraries-- i still haven't found anyone going where i'm going more and more with this stuff--making connections, that is, to pre- or de-colonized values and wanting to bring that type of consciousness back. Everything i've found is in some way or another oriented to the so-called "reputability" (re: "validity") of different "schools" all vying for "A Place At the Table" of illusory reform.

all helpers of colonizer/invader

So, even though some of these psychiatric dissidents are quite good, and worth looking into, they all seem to play into the meta situation of colonizer's interests. Here's some i recommend, with this in mind:

www.szasz.com www.stopshrinks.org R.D. Laing's _The Politics of Experience_ (his ideas about schizophrenia are the most "radical" i've yet dug up); Diane Divoky's and Peter Schrag's insights in their book _The Myth of the Hyperactive Child and other means of child control_ (1970s); Anthony Platt (_The Child Savers_) also gets into it pretty deeply as well. Ronald Boostrom, on the Szasz site says things similar to Platt. Finally, Jeffrey Masson's _Against Therapy_ (generally rich in critical thought if i recall accurately--it's been over 10 years since i read that one);

i'd like to see an aboriginal traditionalist approach articulated somehow. Anyone know of anything?

To conclude, the ways things are going, to my imperfect monitoring, aboriginals everywhere are being fooled into the covert ways of invader, and becoming just one more "minority" ethnic group like the Chinese, eastern Indians, and so on. Not very distinct except as a "cultural group", at least on the surface...(and perhaps the only place *to be* in the context of the reality of today's war-oriented society).

Any thoughts are invited!