Psychiatry: the modern priest-class

Jon Rappoport

In this society, psychiatrists are the primary definers of mental states. Their efforts are accepted as official science.

The Psychiatric Political State is based on myths and fairy tales about distinct and separate disorders and “good treatment.”

One of the main psychiatric mantras gaining force? “Everyone at some time in their lives will experience a mental disorder.”

But an open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.  

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for several years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.”(Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the (then) latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”

BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many more diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:

“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”

Translation: Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they’ll believe it because psychiatrists place a name on their problems…

Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.

If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s.,” I think I’d make room on the front page.

If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear room above the fold.

If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.

I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.

I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.

And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.

Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.

And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.

Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM-IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.

Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

* acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;

* life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;

* brain damage.

Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

* intercranial pressure leading to blindness;

* peripheral circulatory collapse;

* stupor and coma.

Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:

* serious impairment of cognitive function;

* fainting;

* restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).

Dr. Frances’ label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of toxic Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.

So what about Ritalin?

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

* Paranoid delusions

* Paranoid psychosis

* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis

* Activation of psychotic symptoms

* Toxic psychosis

* Visual hallucinations

* Auditory hallucinations

* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences

* Effects pathological thought processes

* Extreme withdrawal

* Terrified affect

* Started screaming

* Aggressiveness

* Insomnia

* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects

* Psychic dependence

* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug

* Decreased REM sleep

* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia

* Convulsions

* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”

Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and prescribes other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.

In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.

Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.

And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic—when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.”

I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the psychiatric apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health—as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave.

The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders.

Thank you, Dr. Frances.

Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent mental-health professional, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid.

Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows the whistle on his own profession.

So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.

These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.

If I said the moon was made of green cheese, even if I were a Harvard professor, sooner or later someone would ask me to produce a sample of moon rock to be tested for “cheese qualities.” I might begin to feel nervous, I might want to tap dance around the issue, but I would have to submit the rock to a lab.

Dr. Barkley employs a corrupted version of logical analysis in his statement to the PBS Frontline interviewer. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. But if a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is absurd, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”

That logic is no logic at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.

Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.

As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological/chemical fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient.

So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug “safety” approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.

So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.

Under the cover story, it was all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.

Do people suffer, do they have problems, do they experience anguish and pain, do they make choices that sabotage their own interests, do they fall victim to external circumstances, do they long for relief? Of course.

But this has nothing to do with fraudulent psychiatric diagnoses.

It has to do with nutritional deficits, toxic drugs, toxic food and environmental chemicals, abuse, isolation, intimidation, and a whole host of other potential factors.

Psychiatry is trying to monopolize mental states and the understanding of the mind. It has no science, and it has no authentic conscience. It’s a pseudo-medical version of Orwellian politics, flying under the banner of a false professionalism.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails atNoMoreFakeNews.com or Outside the Reality Machine.

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