Posted on 12/18/2005 3:05:55 PM PST by sionnsar
I have an old friend who was married to a Freudian psychoanalyst. Many years ago, she had mysterious back problems that the physicians couldn't figure out. So her husband had her committed to a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston, under the theory that her back pains were psychosomatic.
I paid her a visit there, and it was really scary. You go in, the door closes and locks behind you, you go down all these corridors with the proverbial men in white coats. I thought I was going to go crazy just being there, and I was probably only inside for about an hour.
Later, it was found that she did have back problems, and eventually she was divorced.
It's a whole lot more than that. It's a grab for power, and an awful lot of it.
Bingo! Spot on!!
Quoted for truth.
Me: "Somebody here may know definitively but I believe the origin of the word comes from the assumption that those who speak most loudly against homosexuality are afraid they may be homosexual."
Dirty Harry: "Uh Oh! By that logic we're all closet libs/leftists.."
Funny you should mention that. I've only been here a short time but i have become convinced that there are more trolls here trying to goad us into taking extreme positions that will hurt the conservative movement than there are trolls who say liberal things.
"Foreboding, yes, but accurate, yes. Which is worse than foreboding because the reality of what occured in the Sovieet Union by way of "psychiatry" is among the most amoral, inhumane and vile misdeeds ever in the history of human civilization."
Yes.
"And, that's exactly where -- as this neurologist so accurately writes -- what exists today as "liberalism" is headed in the U.S.: a recreation of the worst from the old Soviet Union and more...communist/Marxism at it's most ardent extreme."
No.
There are real problems in the mental health community but it not like you describe. Some of the new tools are being overused or used by people who are not qualified (even worse) who have a financial motive rather than trying to help.
But many mental issues are being shown to have chemical components. There is resistance to this much as there was resistance to the idea that ulcers are usually caused by a bacterial infection and not by stress.
It doesn't do an y good to label this as liberal or communist or anything else - it is apparently the way God made us and studying and trying to help with issues is good, not bad. M.D.'s with training in psychiatry are the best choice.
Have you noticed how much bigger their hands have grown in the last two decades?
Perrhaps you should reread it.
The first several paragraphs were the foundation upon which the author built his fortress to take his stand.
I found this piece to be the most readable article that I have ever read that was written by a medical doctor.
I found no errors in spelling, grammar or syntax.
Antipsychotics were developed so they didn't have to do permanent lobotomies.
I disagree with your "no" about the perilous conclusion that our form of Liberalism today is headed and it's found in the history of the Soveit Union...
I've even heard physicians say as much, and one, particularly, formerly involved in the APA on a professional level. It's a real and emergent fear -- that the Soviet use of "medicine" to classify persons who hold political and social views different from 'the proletariat', the ruling communist/marxist standard, could be replicated today not only in the U.S. but elsewhere.
What's occured is today we have an entire generation (or more) of people who have no familiarity or even knowledge of past history (the Depression in the U.S., the Soviet rule, fascism in Europe, especially) and in their zeal to insist on extremely 'liberal' (and forced, politically implemented) 'tolerance', they thereby implement the very forms of governments in the past that have been responsible for the most damaging political forms of government: socialism (which gives rise to fascism and communist/marxist governments...take a look at Cuba for starters).
The article here points that out from a physician's experience and perspective. I agree with it. Because, the very danger signals that this article points out as happening now in the U.S. field of "mental health" is exactly what began with similar subtelty in the old Soviet Union. People who originated the rights of the individual and particularly who were dedicated to religious freedom, were deemed a threat to the politic of the government and thereby deemed "mentally ill" and incarcerated and most of them utterly forgotten (and who died accordingly in prisons) agains their will, without any social, legal or governmental recourse to avoid their doom -- it was the social, governmental process that was their accuser, so, thus, they were without recourse to counter the forced judgements.
It's verging on the similar today in the U.S. "mental health" community -- you have an emerging opinion of "dissidents become authority" who are using the mental health process -- or at least organizing toward that effort (see the article again) -- to punish, and thereby silence any version of reality other than theirs, based upon mostly the concepts of extreme permissivenes as standard and suppression of religious ideology (which requires personal response that often deviates with socialism on an individual level).
It's the use of institutional norms to try to suppress the opinions of others but with an intellectually destructive method. An excellent case, as was in the Soviet Union of old, of "science" as corrupt method to insist upon communist/marxist authority. Judeo-Christianity is the most threatening to that, given that it's usually the Judeo-Christian values that are first attacked and maligned as also occured in the old Soviet empire -- the U.S. Left is providing a similar bed for the same to reoccur today.
I didn't mean to sound dismissive of the concerns and/or fears. I have actually worked to try to have the local county mental health department decertified as a medical facility and thus cut off their federal funding(unsuccessfully though I did get some concessions.)
My "no" was directed as a summary of the current state of affairs. It's not unlike our government - lots of problems but so much better than other governments.
Yes, of course "chemical" basis for some deviations from norms as to how behaviors are manifested, but, isn't everything? Isn't everything, physically, "chemical" in nature? "Chemically" influenced and manipulated?
The best medicine does not begin and end there. Unfortunately, today, most of it does for convenience sake and in a sense of time efficiency ("it's a chemical imbalance; take these [chemicals] and call me in the morning").
Psychiatry (people with medical degrees who were specialized in a clinical practice of that type) was the method by which the old Soviet government (as also the German Socialist Party approached) implemented the concept of "deviation" and "abnormality" to and about people who maintained, particularly, relgious values despite the communist/marxist requiring silence from society in that regard.
Yes, it's a case of liberal versus conservative. Psychiatry is nothing more, ultimately (read the article) than a committee of individuals deciding based upon social understandings what is a deviation from their understanding of normal/acceptable, to boil this down to the essence of the process of how disorders are deemed to be. It's quite possible for a committee under the influence of politico-social ideology to perceive others outside that influence to be abnormal. As happened in the Soviet Union.
And seems to be occuring with some today in our western "mental health" area, given what this article says. And, as I wrote earlier, I've heard discussed before by many among physicians and attorneys specializing in healthcare.
It's a case of who determines and how they determine what to be abnormal. In the case of today's American Psychiatric Assn., for instance, their philosophy is to TRY to implement an intolerance -- manifested as a professional opinion -- for and about Judeo-Christian values that hold that homosexuality is abnormal, "disordered thinking" as Pope Benedict describes it.
What's occuring is the Liberal Left (Ginsberg on the S.C., as a great example of this level of Liberal intellectualism, such as that is, who has said that the legag age for consentual sex should be reduced to twelve or something similar -- something that NAMBLA wants lowered but also entirely removed from legality, with the ACLU supporting most of their abuses of social restrictions on sexuality) is using the concept of "freedom" to try to secure a legality to suppress religious freedom (which poses restrictions to otherwise permissiveness in many areas of human behaviors).
I do find it very similar to the historical and historically bad deeds that were implemented in the Soviet Union inorder to suppress and penalize religious ideology that limited their sense of "freedom" for their form of suppressive government.
It's a convoluted understanding but even more predatory and impending for that reason. The article was written by a guy with the credentials and clinical examples to evidence the process.
"And, as I wrote earlier, I've heard discussed before by many among physicians and attorneys specializing in healthcare."
You are saying the medical professionals you know believe that their profession, through psychiatry, is pushing the United States into a Stalinist type environment and therefore conservatives should oppose psychiatry?
It's funny, but in Texas it's almost impossible to involuntarily commit someone. Except for that pesky "danger to themselves or others", but even still I think they can only keep you for three days. It's a conundrum. Can't commit the people that need to be committed (street bums, hobos) but people with money get snatched off the street.
My psychiatrist told me I'd better not go on disability for alcohol/drug abuse because I'd never get it off my record, and word gets around. All HIPAA does is keep relatives from seeing the patient.
Isn't a spirochete the little bug with syphillis that infects the brain? Perhaps he's trying to tell us something.
This is always an attempt to apply a Hegelian Dialectic, also known as thesis-antithesis-synthesis. This is played out as Thesis: You are a homophobe. Anti-thesis: No, I'm not. Synthesis: You must do X, Y, and Z to prove you're not. You break the dialectic before it gets started by agreeing with the thesis. As you said, if you do that, no argument is possible, only stunned silence, or screaming and cursing.
No, I am writing that it is my opinion and the opinin of others that it's quite possible that could happen here in the U.S.
And for the reasons I wrote. And as did this neurologist write in his article.
There's nothing in anything I've written that suggests that "conservatives should oppose psychiatry."
What the neurologist/physician points out in his article here is that anyone CAN be committed based upon a physician's decision. And can be held there based upon that and only that.
And that the results possible are/can be profound.
And, thus, that it's worth looking over as to who decides what and how.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.