Author name: Bob Carter

Why Psychiatrists Can’t Think Straight      By Robert Carter/September 25, 2024      A hundred years ago psychiatrists began trying to “cure” an individual’s depression and anxiety – his “schizophrenia,” they called it – by jolting his body into a grand mal seizure.      Insulin shock “therapy” and electroconvulsive shock “therapy” were the brutal tools they used with no measurable “cures’ attained other than the erasure of a person’s memory and, therefore, of the trials and tribulations he might have undergone in life. He was a zombie.      When these inhumane procedures were finally widely revealed to the public in the late 1940s – because they had mostly been administered covertly behind the shadowed walls of psychiatric hospitals – psychiatrists switched to the use of psychotropic drugs to “correct the chemical imbalances in the body” they said were the cause of depression and anxiety. Those also produced zombies.      They still do that. Almost 17 percent of all Americans over twelve years of age are taking an antidepressant today.      No scientific study has found any evidence of a chemical imbalance in the body which is causing mental “illness.” Undeterred, psychiatrists – in collusion with Big Pharma and the FDA — have now launched more studies into genetic disposition and nerve cell circuits in the brain to find exclusively bodily causes for mental illness.      So, what’s the fatal error in their thinking?      That a person is his body. For some reason, psychiatrists have been unable to distinguish between the body and the individual. Everyone who is alive is aware that they have a body. If they take a second, they can  perceive their hands, their feet, their necks, even that large bone atop their spine which we call a head. If one can perceive something, one has to be separate from it. For example, the reason we can perceive a wall in a room is because we are not the wall. If we were the wall, we could not perceive it. There would be no separation.      So too with bodies. Anyone alive can perceive their body. That means they ain’t it. The tribulations of the individual are not necessarily alleviated by addressing a body.      How did psychiatry get so far removed from common sense that they say the individual is a body? How did they get so far away from being able to think clearly?      With their basic premise wrong, that an individual is only a body – like some rat in a laboratory cage — all the conclusions they draw on how to help him — by giving him a lobotomy or electroshock therapy or a psychotropic drug, for instance — will also be wrong.

Psychiatrists: Covert Architects of Human Destruction      By Robert Carter/September 18, 2024      We know of psychiatry’s dark pre-WWII history in Europe.      Austrian psychiatrist Manfred Sakel’s 1927 development of seizure-producing insulin coma therapy to “treat” schizophrenia. Psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti’s 1938 use of the brutal electroconvulsive therapy he had learned from watching pigs being prepared for slaughter, also to “treat” schizophrenia. Nazi psychiatrists supervising the murder of almost 100,000 “unfit” humans in their euthanasia program gas chambers from 1939-1941.      But what about over here in the New World after the war?      Psychiatry’s human destruction continued, but more covertly, in America and Canada in the 1950s through the CIA initiated and psychiatrist run “human experiment” programs such as Project Artichoke and MKUltra. For twenty years unsuspecting subjects were given massive doses of LSD, heroin, morphine, mescaline, and sodium pentothal — usually without their knowledge or consent — in an attempt to develop efficient methods for interrogation. Other unethical mind control procedures and methods were also used, with and without drugs, under the guise of “scientific research.”      A key figure in these now infamous MKUltra mind control experiments was a prominent figure in the world of psychiatry, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association and president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association as well as the chairman of the World Psychiatric Association. Between 1953 and 1966 he was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop procedures and to experiment with drugs that would weaken an individual through brainwashing and psychological torture and force a confession from him during interrogations.      Psychiatrists such as Cameron used the MKUltra program to hone their procedures for manipulating subjects’ mental states and brain functions through covert and extensive use of LSD. Electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal abuse, and other types of illegal torture were also used on the unwitting subjects, who were often chosen because they were easy prey: incarcerated criminals, active military, or students who were lied to about the purpose of this “research.”      Psychiatrist Cameron not only used LSD on his subjects, but such paralysis causing drugs as curare, and he also electroshocked them with a voltage cranked up to thirty to forty times its normal setting. He developed a procedure he called “psychic driving” to “de-pattern” subjects. He would put his victims into drug induced comas for weeks at a time while playing a looped tape of recorded statements that could act as implanted commands on them.      Earlier, in the late 1940s, Cameron had given a lecture entitled Dangerous Men and Women in which he described certain mentally ill personalities that he believed were a marked danger to all members of society. Cameron thereafter espoused and promoted the idea that a society in which psychiatry built and then developed the institutions of government, of schools, of prisons and of hospitals would be a society in which science triumphed over its dangerous and “sick” – that is, mentally ill — members.      Perhaps Cameron saw the MKULtra programs as an opportunity for him to fulfill that evil goal.      Cameron stated, “Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves – and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form — and we shall find ways to put an end to them.”      His ideas of ethnic cleansing paralleled the Nazi psychiatrists’ justifications for the extermination of 100,000 of the “impure” in their gas chambers. Now Cameron was working for an American intelligence agency. Different masters. Same agenda.      There is a further dark irony here. Cameron’s purpose to purge society of its “dangerous” personalities – the mentally ill — actually ended up creating through his MKUltra work two of the most dangerous criminals in modern American history: Whitey Bulger and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.      Both were unsuspecting victims of the MKUltra experiments.      Whitey Bulger, while serving an early jail sentence in 1957 – long before his infamous and brutal criminal career from the 1970s to the 1990s — was given LSD every day for a year, per an NPR report. He had volunteered for what he thought was a beneficial research program in exchange for a reduced jail sentence.Instead he spent the rest of his life never able to sleep more than an hour or two at a time because of chronic nightmares and hallucinations.      After successfully remaining at large for sixteen years, he was finally apprehended and convicted in 2013 of eleven murders of the nineteen he was accused of.      Domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, a child genius accepted into Harvard when he was only sixteen, underwent a total of two hundred hours of verbal abuse in the MKUltra program experiments while at Harvard. Kaczynski was submitted to “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” verbal punishment that attacked his ego and his cherished beliefs and ideas in order to cause a high level of stress in him as a participant in the experiments.      These sessions lasted for three years.      In an article written for the Atlantic in 2000, professor Alton Chase wrote that by the time Kaczynski had graduated from Harvard, “all the elements that would ultimately transform him into the Unabomber were in place.”      After living as a recluse in a Montana cabin for decades, in 1998 Kaczynski was finally apprehended after the longest and most extensive investigation in the history of the FBI. He pleaded guilty to murdering three people and injuring twenty-three others with his mail bomb campaign.      Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, are also alleged to have been the unwitting subjects of the MKUltra experiments.      Not only were Bulger’s and Kaczynski’s lives destroyed by these MKUltra experiments, so too were the lives of the almost two dozen victims of these two crazed, psychiatric mind control subjects.      During MKUltra’s twenty year span, more than thirty universities and institutions had been used to find unknowing subjects for 149 projects involving these psychiatric experiments.      Cameron himself was paid $69,000 dollars to do his research at McGill University.      Who knows how many other destroyed personalities are out there as a result of MKUltraprograms?

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.

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

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.