RE: And there is Nothing Voluntary about Therapy. It is Not Science. It is BS, and as such it is Fraud.
Not voluntary? Hey, I know of gays who are not happy with their current state who ask an organization called NARTH to help them.
See here: http://narth.com/
THEY GO VOLUNTARILY. THEY WANT IT.
Regardless or not whether you believe it is a fraud, these people WANT IT.
A free society should now prevent them from voluntarily doing so?
In other words, you believe that government should decide for people what is and isn’t foolish?
As I said, if reparative therapy is a fraud, PEOPLE WHO VOLUNTARILY (EMPHASIS) GO THROUGH IT, WILL SOON REALIZE IT AND IT WILL SOON BECOME OBSOLETE.
You believe that bureaucrats should decide that for us instead of us deciding it for ourselves?
WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE?
The line has already been drawn. Read the Federal Civil Rights Statutes.
I have No trouble with people who’ve been hoodwinked into thinking that they’re gay seeking a way out of it: NONE.
My point is that we as a nation have unknowingly invited a poisonous viper into our midst under the erroneous assumption that it is harmless. It is no more simply harmless through being Foolish — to saying nothing of it being illegal — than as PJ O’Rourke put it, “Giving Whiskey and Car Keys to Teen Age Boys”.
Therapy is a gateway which opens onto a road many have never glimpsed. But those who Have carry scars, psychological damage, and tales of physical violence perpetrated against them which rival a Nightmare on Elm Street movie.
Robert Whitaker is a journalist whose spent the last 25 years covering the mental health field. This is excerpted from his latest book, Anatomy of an Epidemic.
Pg 245
The Disability Numbers
There are no good studies yet on the percentage of “early onset” bipolar patients when they reach adulthood, end up on the SSI and SSDI disability rolls. However, the astonishing jump in the number of “severely mentally ill” children receiving SSI speaks volumes about the havoc that is being wreaked. There were 16,200 Psychiatrically disabled youth under 18 years old on the SSI rolls in 1987, and they comprised less than 6 percent of the total number of disabled children. Twenty years later, there were 561,569 disabled mentally ill children on the SSI rolls, and they comprised 50 percent of the total. This epidemic is even hitting preschool children. The prescribing of psychotropic drugs to two-year-olds and three-year-olds began to become more commonplace about a decade ago, and sure enough, the number of severely mentally ill children under 6 years of age receiving SSI has tripled since then, rising from 22,453 in 2000 to 65,928 in 2007 (98)
Moreover, the SSI numbers only begin to hint at the scope of the harm being done. Everywhere there is evidence of a worsening of the mental health of children and teenagers. From 1995 to 1999, psychiatric-related Emergency Room visits by children increased 59 percent. (99)
The deteriorating mental health of the nation’s children, declared U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in 2001, constituted a “health crisis.” (100) Next, colleges were suddenly wondering why so many of their students were suffering manic episodes or behaving in disturbed ways; a 2007 survey discovered that one in six college students had deliberately “cut or burned self” in the prior year. (101) All of this led the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate what was going on, and it reported in 2008 that one in every fifteen young adults, eighteen to twenty-six years old, is now “seriously mentally ill”. There are 680,000 in that age group with bipolar disorder and another 800,000 ill with major depression, and, the GAO noted, this was in fact an undercount of the problem, as it didn’t include young adults who were homeless, incarcerated, or institutionalized.
That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a “serious mental illness.” That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness.
98: Social Security Administration, annual statistical reports on the SSI program, 1996-2008, Social Security Bulletin, Annual Statistical Supplement, 1988-1992
99: Pediatric Academic Societies, Pediatric Psychiatric admissions on the rise,” May 16, 2000 press release
100: D. Satcher, Report of Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2001).
101: B. Whitford: “Depression, eating disorders and other mental illnesses are on the rise, Newsweek, August 27, 2008
“A free society should now prevent them from voluntarily doing so?
In other words, you believe that government should decide for people what is and isn’t foolish?”
Foolish isn’t the issue. If Therapy carried no greater risk than the consumer walking away feeling they’d wasted their time and money, I’d be Fine with it.
But in way too many cases, it Doesn’t. The consumer gets shuffled off to a psychiatrist and bamboozled into a nightmare of junk drugs and debilitating labels.