Author name: Bob Carter

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Why Psychiatry Itself Is Schizophrenic

Why Psychiatry Itself Is Schizophrenic By Robert Carter/August 20, 2024 Schizophrenia has been psychiatry’s go-to diagnosis of mental “disease” for more than a hundred years. The National Institute of Mental Health defines it as “a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.” The word comesfrom the Greek words for “split” and “mind.” That split mind of psychiatry has existed since the late nineteenth century and can be seen in the divergent paths of its more benign talk therapy tradition contrasted with its physically abusive therapies of electroshock treatments, prefrontal lobotomies and zombie producing medication. Sigmund Freud and Julius Wagner-Juaregg are iconic representatives of these two “split mind” schools of psychiatric practice. They were born within a year of each other, both grew up in Austria in the mid-nineteenth century, they met while they were attending the University of Vienna together and they practiced their own brand of psychiatry until their deaths, also within a year of each other, ust before WWII. Freud found little attraction to the psychiatric search for a physical cause to a mental problem. Wagner-Juaregg, however, was immediately drawn to the physical treatment of mental problems – often by forceful means – perhaps due to his extreme fascination with dissecting animals during his high school years. Freud wrote that “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.” Wagner-Juaregg wrote that “a man with character needs no principles” and he claimed that “common principles” did not apply to him. After becoming a doctor at the University of Vienna, Freud spent a three year period doing psychiatric medical research by dissecting eels and then by comparing the brains of human beings to those of frogs, lampreys and crayfish. Afterward he worked in a local asylum and in the psychiatric clinic of Theodor Meynert, an early proponent of the idea that biological changes in the brain could be the cause of psychiatric illness. Freud soon resigned his University of Vienna position as lecturer in neuropathology. He opened his own practice in Vienna and became known as the founder of psychoanalysis, a verbal dialogue between counselor and patient with the aim of diagnosing and treating uncomfortable mental and emotional conditions. By the time of Hitler and the occupation of Austria by the Nazis, Freud had become world famous for a pioneering “talk therapy,” but because he was Jewish, he was persuaded finally to flee the Nazis occupation. He arrived in London in June, 1938. Unfortunately his four older sisters were then all exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. Wagner-Juaregg, meanwhile, after completing his own medical studies with Freud at the University of Vienna, worked for four years at the psychiatric clinic of Maximilian Leidesdorf, a psychiatrist searching for a correlation between physical and mental illnesses. During this period Wagner-Juaregg became one of the first psychiatrists who conducted laboratory experiments on animals. He then became Director of the Clinic for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in Vienna. Part of his research in these years was in an unsuccessful instigation of extremely high fevers in patients to cure their psychoses. Then, at the end of World War I, the German government started an official inquiry into Wagner-Juaregg’s administration of extreme electric shock therapy to the soldiers he had been treating who had been accused of malingering because they claimed to be too mentally upset to return to battle duty. Before his criminal prosecution began, however, his old associate Sigmund Freud intervened with the German authorities and ended up keeping Wagner-Juaregg’s out of jail and probably saving his career. Wagner-Juaregg went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in treating syphilis patients with high fevers created by injecting them with malaria parasites. The damage caused by the high fevers was seen as an acceptable risk because of the availability then of quinine as a palliative to these negative “side effects.” During the nineteen-twenties Wagner-Juaregg would treat his patients who had been deemed “schizophrenic” because of their excessive masturbation by sterilizing them, thus eliminating that mental “problem.” By this time his fellow psychiatrists in the “assault the body to cure the mind” school had begun employing insulin shock therapy, electroshock therapy and prefrontal lobotomies as their acceptable “cures” for mental illness. After those “treatments” became too unpopular, in 1954 the FDA approved medication as the next “therapy” to treat mental illness by adjusting the “chemical imbalance” in the brain of those with mental “disorders.” The FDA approval for pharmaceutical prescriptions opened the gates for Big Pharma’s growth into the $1.6 trillion industry it is today. After Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, Wagner-Juaragg began supporting the Nazi Party, but his application to become a member of the party was rejected because his first wife had been Jewish. Nevertheless, he began promoting the concentration camp ideology of racial hygiene known as eugenics, and one of his students whom he had influenced went on to write a handbook on racial psychiatry which stated that Jews were prone to mental illness. By then Wagner-Juaregg was also advocating the forced sterilization of the mentally ill and criminals. Freud and Wagner-Juaregg. Two different doctors. Two different approaches to “helping” the troubled. Two different minds. Two very different men.

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Off-Label Drug Prescriptions:

Off-Label Drug Prescriptions: Bending the Rules for More Big Pharma Profit      By Robert Carter/August 16, 2024      An off-label prescription is one that a doctor has written to treat a condition that the FDA has approved it for, but is not the condition that you have. Twenty percent of all prescriptions written today are off-label prescriptions.      For psychiatric drugs, that number increases to thirty-one percent.      Off-label prescriptions are a way for pharmaceutical companies to increase their already outrageous profits by expanding the market beyond what the drug was originally intended for. It’s not illegal — and by those statistics it is obviously commonplace — but the practice raises one more red flag for the collusion between Big Pharma, the FDA and psychiatry.      Surprisingly, a doctor prescribing an off-label drug is not legally obligated to get informed contest from a patient, as is the case with any on-label prescriptions. So this practice also hints at a less than perfect application of the Hippocratic Oath by a doctor to protect one’s patient.      Drugs that are approved by the FDA have to undergo a series of clinical trials that show that the drug is safe and effective for the condition it is designed to treat. Off-label drugs do not have any such research pedigree behind them. Their effectiveness in treating a condition is often merely anecdotal…particularly with psychiatric drugs.      A 2010 article in the The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics found that seventy-seven percent of pediatric antidepressant prescriptions were off-label. Because the “disorders” listed in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals are merely a description of symptoms – not physical causes — in the first place, off-label use of the antidepressants used to treat them is more prone to influence by anecdotal, unscientific conjecture.      The FDA does prohibit the misbranding of medications, which would include the listing of off-label use for a medication, but no court has ruled that a physician must disclose through the informed consent process the potential consequences of off-label use of a drug. That too puts patients at risk.      Most people, in fact, are unaware of the dangers of off-label prescriptions. In one 2006 poll half of all respondents believed that a drug could only be prescribed for its primary, on-label use, as approved by the FDA after successful clinical trials. Two-thirds of those polled then felt that off-label drug use should be banned except for their use in the clinical trials alone.      A sensible viewpoint, but one not shared by the FDA.      The number of psychiatrists who are on the advisory boards of the FDA, and who are also financially connected to and on the boards of pharmaceutical companies is not insignificant. The profit of pharmaceutical companies from off-label prescriptions because of that collusion is also not insignificant.      In 2013, for instance, four pharmaceutical companies – Eli Lilly, GSK, Hoffman-LaRoche and Abbvie — had a profit margin greater than twenty percent. Pfizer had a profit margin of an astounding forty-two percent.      How is it that off-label drug use — with its inherent risks undisclosed to patients through otherwise mandatory informed consent law — still accounts for twenty percent of all prescriptions written?      Follow the money. Archives of Internal Medicine 2006 article

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No Ecstasy for Lykos Therapeutics Right Now

No Ecstasy for Lykos Therapeutics Right Now      By Robert Carter/August 9, 2024      Lykos Therapeutics announced today that the FDA has not approved their application for an MDMA based drug with psychotherapy to treat PTSD because of concerns about how the pharmaceutical company conducted its trials. Lykos Therapeutics was also cited for unethical conduct at one of its research locations after one of its therapists had been accused of practicing without a license and of sexually assaulting one of the participants in Lykos’ MDMA trials.      MDMA – more commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly — is an illicit, mind-altering psychedelic drug that can affect a user’s visual and time perceptions. While usually taken recreationally to chemically increase happiness and energy levels, MDMA can cause potentially severe “side effects” such as high blood pressure, vomiting, heart problems or liver damage, per the National Institute of Health.      MDMA is classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act and it has “no currently accepted medical use,” but it does have “a high potential for abuse.”      Despite that, and apparently prompted by anecdotal “evidence” that taking MDMA may for a few lead to a positive mental shift away from depression and anxiety, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies are now trying to get FDA approval for its use those who have not had relief from taking standard antidepressants.      Such is the interest of this psychedelic avenue of approach that a $3 million professorship was established at Yale University last fall by Vikram Sodhi to study the value of DMT – an illicit derivative drug of the South American shaman potion ayahuasca — to psychiatric treatments for PTSD. Deepak Cyril D’Souza was named the inaugural Vikram Sodhi Professor of Psychiatry at Yale.      “We don’t, as yet, know how long a person needs to have psychedelic effects in order to be able to derive antidepressant effects,” D’Souza said. “Another question is how intense a psychedelic experience do you need order to be able to derive antidepressant effects?”      His questions seem a grim reminder of the MKUltra experiments with psychoactive drugs such as LSD which were carried out by the CIA in the nineteen-fifties to identify drugs that could be used during interrogations. Science Insider has reported that today at least two other pharmaceutical companies are also involved in clinical trials to evaluate the use of psilocybin – known on the street as magic mushrooms – to treat depression.      Despite the early momentum seen for these experimental trials, the Institute for Clinical and  Economic Review reported this year that insufficient evidence has been found for any benefits from the research which would outweigh the known risks of cardiovascular problems, worsening mental health problems, and suicidal thoughts that come from these drugs.

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They Know More, You Know Less

They Know More, You Know Less      By Robert Carter/August 10, 2024      That tends to be a conventional patient’s view of doctors.      It’s not without reason, of course. Doctors have a four year college degree, three to four more years of medical school, internship practice, ongoing education in their medical field, and years of experience with patients.      They should know more than you do.      However, that does not mean you have to surrender your personal integrity to them for making a decision about your own health…physical or mental.      Informed consent laws rose from the mistreatment of four women in the early twentieth century in America and were refined further through the Nuremberg Trials after WWII which prosecuted Nazi doctors and psychiatrists for their enforced experimentation on concentration camp victims.      Today they are your ethical and legal protection from making ill-advised decisions about your own health. A doctor – not a physician’s assistant, or technician, or office staff – is required to fully disclose all aspects of the proposed treatment. That means he or she has to tell you the evidence for your diagnosis, the expected result of his proposed treatment, the expected result of any alternative treatment, and the consequences of you doing nothing at all to treat your condition.      With strictly physical conditions, informed consent works like a charm. That diagnosis is based on the results of some physical assessment – blood tests, MRI’s, CAT scans, etc. – which reveal a verifiable physical condition, and then the patient is told about the recommended treatment, the alternative treatments, and no treatment.      With mental conditions, however, there is no charm. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the psychiatrist’s bible for “mental illness” and lists three hundred mental or emotional disorders. At least that’s what they call them. In fact, they are actually only a description of observed symptoms as they have been voted on by a panel of psychiatrists for inclusion in the DSM.      There is no laboratory test that can be given to find a physical cause for these symptoms. There is no such thing as a detectable “chemical imbalance.”      So the first step of the informed consent process for the diagnosis of a mental condition cannot come from a verifiable fact that is the result of a laboratory test. Therefore that “diagnosis” is only an opinion. And today that opinion most often comes from your general practitioner. Eighty percent of all prescriptions for antidepressants come from regular doctors, not from psychiatrists. They may be experts about the body, but they are not experts about the mind.      You may know more than they do about your own mind…or at least as much. If you are prescribed an antidepressant or psychotropic drug, informed consent law requires that you be told about all of the “side effects” of that prescribed antidepressant or psychotropic drug, the alternative treatments that are available, and the consequences of doing nothing.      When you’re sad after a relationship break-up or the death of a favorite pet, yes, it hurts. And yes a Xanax might numb you sufficiently to not feel the pain. But as you know yourself from your own past experience, that emotional stress from the loss does often go away after awhile all by itself. That is how life works.      So, you really may know more than “they” do, and that knowledge is what you can weigh against what you are told through informed consent law about the effects and the side effects of any prescribed medication.      You don’t have to turn yourself into a temporary zombie with a drug that “may increase the risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior”…a “side effect” far worse than the emotional condition you’re trying to handle.

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Decades of Child Abuse

Decades of Child Abuse and Torture Uncovered at New Zealand Psychiatric Hospital By Robert Carter/July 30, 2024 The New Zealand government released the results today of a Royal Commission of Inquiry, the highest investigatory body of the government, into child abuse from 1950-2019 in various institutions in the country, including religious care facilities, foster care institutions, and psychiatric hospitals. The most egregious crimes against young children and adolescents occurred at the Lake Alice Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Lake Alice, Manawatū-Whanganui, New Zealand. Despite it being a psychiatric facility, most of the children admitted to Lake Alice did not have a mental illness. The Department of Social Welfare records showed that 60% of admissions were for “behavioral” problems, and many of the children simply came from disadvantaged communities. Their mean age was thirteen years old. Former patients of the hospital’s child and adolescent units revealed to the commission that the abuse they endured during the 1970s included being punished by electroconvulsive therapy without anesthetics and being injected with paralyzing drugs such as paraldehyde (a central nervous system depressant). These young patients were also frequently victims of sexual assault on their ward. All of the children who were shocked, drugged or sexually abused named the same perpetrator, Dr. Selwyn Leeks, the lead psychiatrist of the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit. Leeks administered electric shocks to them for minor infractions such as passing wind, being anti-social, being picky about food, “being in a world of his own,” “showing off in front of the girls in class,” annoying others during work periods, and being argumentative, the Lake Alice medical records show. Leeks would use electroconvulsive shock treatments as punishment for what he termed “aversion therapy,” and he applied the electrodes not just to the temples, but also to the children’s breasts, groins and genitals. He also required some young residents to administer shocks to their peers and he forced others to watch while their mates were being shocked. When the first of these children’s allegation about him became public in the 1970s, he dismissed them as coming from “bottom-of-the-barrel kids” who had been lying. Leeks’ unit at Lake Alice had opened in 1972 and over the next six years admitted between 400 and 450 children and adolescents. The unit permanently closed in 1980, but Leeks had already moved to Australia to continue practicing. In August 2006 Leeks was ordered to pay a $55,000 in damages for sexually assaulting a former patient. The victim said that Leeks had told her that complaining would be futile. “You’re a long-term psychiatric patient and no one will believe you,” he said. In 2023 more evidence of his abuse was uncovered, but he was by then 92 and was deemed medically unfit for trial. In 2020 a United Nations committee labeled Leeks’ acts at Lake Alice “torture.” This sad story of an institution originally created to help the unfit and the disadvantaged being turned into a psychiatric torture chamber is not unique. Lake Alice had opened in August, 1950, and its therapeutic rural setting included its own farm, workshop, bakery, laundry, swimming pools, glasshouses, and vegetable gardens. These facilities could be used for the original nineteenth century “moral therapy” concept of work and worthy endeavor being used as part of the therapy for resident patients. Like many similar, charitable institutions around the world which had evolved from the community almshouses of the previous centuries, the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit in New Zealand was intended to be a sanctuary for care and healing. However, like many other once benign institutions for the public good – the word “asylum” means sanctuary, in fact – these facilities became mental hospitals. Psychiatrists now controlled populations of vulnerable, unprotected people, and these too often sadistic “doctors” were now free to unleash the brutality of their insulin shock therapies, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive shocks on the innocent victims without oversight. No one would see, no one would hear, and psychiatry could experiment on or, worse, simply destroy these poor souls without interference. (Thanks to the Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, Member of the Royal Commission Forum, Nelson, New Zealand, and to Susanna Every-Palmer, Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand for some of this information).

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Per Psychiatry, You’re Nothing but a Piece of Meat

Per Psychiatry, You’re Nothing but a Piece of Meat By Robert Carter/July 30, 2024 There is no scientific test that has ever shown a chemical imbalance in the brain as the cause of unwanted emotions. That whole idea came from experiments with rodents in the nineteen-thirties which suggested that paranoia was caused by high levels of dopamine in the brain. While that might or might not be factually true for rats, a rodent is not a human being. Perhaps the psychiatrists’ equation of a rat with a human being was what led them to be okay with the brutality of the treatments they performed on people’s bodies in the thirties to try to “cure” the behavior they labeled as schizophrenia. First came their removal of teeth, appendixes, ovaries, testes, colons, and other body parts to eliminate the “infection” that was causing a patient’s schizophrenia. Surgically removing the ovaries and testes, of course, equaled sterilization, akin to what the Nazi psychiatrists were doing then in the concentration camps. Then came insulin shock therapy. Patients – or more accurately, victims – were put into comas by massive daily injections of insulin into their bodies for weeks on end. Few ever regained their mental acuity afterward. Next came the lobotomy. In the mid nineteen-thirties Antonio Egas Moniz was allowed to drill two small holes in the skull of “patients” from a Portugese asylum and through those openings cut the nerve fibers between the front of the brain and the rest of the brain. It was “blind surgery,” as the psychiatrist could not see what he was actually cutting inside the person’s head. In the late nineteen-thirties American psychiatrist Walter Freeman announced his “improved” lobotomy procedure. He hammered an ice pick through the victim’s eye socket and “wiggled it around” to sever nerve connections in the brain. So enthusiastic was he about this procedure that he began a cross country road trip he dubbed “Operation Icepick” and he drove from one state mental hospital to another to promote his operation being used on patients who had long since lost their right to consent to such barbaric treatment. In 1940 alone, an estimated five thousand lobotomies were performed in America Then came electroconvulsive therapy, another brutal assault on a body thanks to psychiatry’s misguided attempt to “cure” schizophrenia. A seizure was induced in an anesthetized patient by attaching electrodes to the sides of the head and unleashing up to four hundred volts of electricity across the brain. In 1952 many of these barbaric psychiatric procedures – so many of which were hidden from public views by being inflicted on the innocent inmates of psychiatric institutions – were to a large degree replaced by psychiatrists prescribing psychotropic drugs. In that year the FDA approved the use of Thorazine, the first drug to be approved for the treatment of mental disorders. With Thorazine, there were no holes left in the eye sockets, no broken bones from massive electrical shock, no permanent catatonia from recurring insulin overdose. Instead, you just took a pill. But the results were similar. One ad for Thorazine during its first major Big Pharma drug marketing campaign stated that it “reduces or eliminates the need for restraint and seclusion” and “reduces destruction of personal and hospital property.” That marketing soon expanded from asylums to the general public. By 1964 fifty million prescriptions for Thorazine had been filled. The income of its Big Pharma manufacturer, Smith, Kline and French, skyrocketed the company’s profit with an eightfold increase in revenue. Psychiatry’s war with drugs had begun. It was a war against us. A war justified by the still unproven idea of a chemical imbalance in our brains.

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