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You Probably Haven’t Heard of Ernst Rudin. You Should Have.      By Robert Carter/January 19, 2025       Psychiatry was divided into two schools of practice by 1900. The “talk therapy” guys like Freud introduced a psychoanalytic approach to mental health which tried to help people by having them talk about their emotional and mental troubles. They addressed the mind.      The “biological-cause-of-mental illness” guys like Emil Kraepelin, “the father of modern psychiatry,” who continued their pursuit of an answer to mental illness by addressing the body. They addressed the brain.      The debunked theory of “chemical imbalance” can trace its roots back to these biological cause guys and even to the phrenologists of the early nineteenth  century. From them also came the psychiatric  practices of electroconvulsive therapy and prefrontal lobotomies during the nineteen-thirties to “correct” mental illness.       Kraepelin, like many other psychiatrists of his day, considered  schizophrenia a biological illness, and in 1907 he took on as his assistant at the University of Munich Ernst Rudin. Besides sharing a biological view of mental illness, they both supported the idea that the German race was becoming degenerated by a  “domestication” that was causing higher rates of mental illness.      Rudin began publishing articles on the genetic causes of schizophrenia and he soon became known as the “father of psychiatric genetics,” an advanced theory of body-based mental illness. Rudin’s colleague and brother-in-law was Alfred Ploetz, who himself was known then as the “father” of racial hygiene after the  publication of his “Racial Hygiene Basics” in 1895.      By 1903 Rudin had already argued for the sterilization of incurable alcoholics, and by 1905 he had helped co-found the German Society for Racial Hygiene with Ploetz. In 1917 Emil Kraepelin established the Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich and he installed his cohort Rudin as head of its Department of Genealogical and Demographic Studies.      By 1920 another Rudin colleague, psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, had  published  “Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living.” In 1928 Rudin’s department was expanded greatly due to financial assistance from the American Rockefeller Foundation. By 1932 Rudin was in contact with the British psychiatrist Carlos Blacker and Rudin sent him a copy of the pre-Nazi voluntary sterilization laws.In the 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation funded further studies in psychiatric genetics by      Rudin’s department under the direction of genetic psychiatrists Eliot Slater and Franz Kallmann. Kallmann claimed in 1935 that minor anomalies found in any relatives of diagnosed schizophrenics should be grounds for compulsory sterilization. By that time Rudin’s colleagues had dubbed Rudin the  Reichsfuehrer for Sterilization.      In his 1934 speech praising Adolf Hitler’s racial hygiene program, Rudin wrote “Whoever is  not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care that only the fit produce children.”      By 1942 Rudin spoke of the value of “eliminating young children of clearly inferior quality,” and he began financially supporting the work of psychiatrist Carl Schneider, whose activity at the University of Heidelberg involved setting up a training center for the Nazi Action T4 euthanasia program that killed children “for scientific purposes” at thirty facilities over a three year period.      Although Rudin was arrested after the war for his Nazi activities, he was released in 1947 and only given a 500 mark fine. Speculation is that he avoided being charged at the Nuremberg Trials because of his financial connections to American genetics researchers and to American funding entities.      Some say, however, that Rudin was a more influential architect of Nazi extermination policies than the infamous Josef Mengele, who attended Rudin’s lectures and was employed under him. Investigative journalist Victor Bernstein wrote that psychiatrist Ernst Rudin was “one of the most evil men in Germany.”      How is it that the field of psychiatry so often draws in such evil men?      Is it that the brain-based theories of mental illness are themselves malevolent, or do evil psychiatrists just find that those biological theories are perfect for masking their own evil intentions toward humanity?

John D. Rockefeller Single-handedly Ruins American Medicine      By Robert Carter/December 23, 2024      By the early 1900s John D. Rockefeller had become the richest man in the world by taking over the American oil industry and making it his own personal monopoly. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court found him guilty of illegal business practices and racketeering.      He had to find himself another business venture that might be equally as profitable.      “Hey, how about drugs?” he decided.      Although the health of his own immediate family had always thrived on homeopathic remedies, he knew that these natural cures could not be patented. No money there.      But synthetic drugs could be patented, and there was BIG money there…if he could figure out how to corner that market, just as he had with his oil  monopoly.      He figured it out.      First, he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the country’s most reputable medical schools – University of Chicago and Yale, to start with – provided they agreed to teach only allopathic, pharmaceutical based medicine. No more natural, nutrition based remedies would be spoken in those hallowed halls.      Then he invested in the German pharmaceutical giant I. G. Farben.      Yes…the same guys who from 1930-1938purged their company of every Jew, used 30,000 prisoners from Auschwitz as free, forced labor in one of their factories, and concocted the Zyklon B poisonous gas to help Hitler kill over a million prisoners in his gas chambers.      Next Rockefeller funded Abraham Flexner to tour the Rockefeller funded medical schools to  “evaluate” the new  treatments they were teaching. His 1906 Flexner Report helped persuade U.S. lawmakers to enact legislation that would license only those physicians trained in patented, chemical based pharmacology and surgery.      The AMA began a campaign of ridiculing any non-allopathic medical practices as “quackery” and soon our country’s natural remedy doctors were mostly out of business.       No more “Take two vitamin C and call me in the morning” from an American doctor.      Meanwhile the FDA had been evolving from the earlier Bureau of Chemistry, and it inherited from that agency the proviso that there was a “plausible deniability” for any legal culpability for harmful effects of the chemicals they monitored. That legal protection against pharmaceutical companies’ lawsuits remained in place until recently.      By 1916 Rockefeller had became the world’s first billionaire.      In 1930 Rockefeller expanded into psychiatry his influence over American medical practices when he established the Yale School of Psychiatry with a ten year grant totaling $1,000,000.      The 1930’s were already turning out to be a heyday for psychiatrics as they began conducting their experimentation with electroconvulsive shocks and trans-orbital lobotomies … all hidden from the public by using subjects from within their own psychiatric hospitals.      Kind of like the psychiatrists’ own little concentration camps.      In the 1930s Yale Medical School Professor C.E.A. Winslow worked to publicize and popularize America’s growing “mental hygiene movement,” and he helped position mental health treatment next to physical health treatment. Doing so helped usher in the age of massive public psychotropic prescriptions which began in the 1950’s after the brutality of psychiatrists covertly administering electroshock and lobotomy “treatments” had been publicly exposed.      Ironically, almost ninety-nine percent of all these psychotropic  pharmaceuticals contain petrochemicals, and so the Rockefeller family is still deriving its fortune from oil, even if today some of John D’s descendents do donate philanthropically to humanitarian non-profits.      However, we can still thank John D. alone for gifting us with what is now the medical mafia: Big Pharma, the FDA, and psychiatry.

LSD and Mini-ECT: Psychiatry Says They’re Just What Your Kid Needs      By Robert Carter/December 6, 2024      On October 30 th the Child Mind Institute held its annual On the Shoulders of Giants Symposium. The theme of the virtual event was promoted as “a celebration of scientific achievement in child and adolescent psychiatry” and two “breakthrough” treatments for childhood mental disorders were touted as next generation innovative therapies.      The two treatments?      Deep brain stimulation and an LSD derivative medication.      Just what your kid needs, eh?      Deep brain stimulation is a sort of street legal  variation of electroconvulsive shock. It’s used to fend off the legal restrictions looming on the horizon for banning the use of ECT’s horrific voltage being applied to youngsters. Four states have already passed legislation against its use on minors and more state legislatures will probably follow suit.      To treat a child with deep brain stimulation, a small electrode is surgically and permanently placed in the brain to deliver an electrical impulse that is supposed to regulate a child’s moods. The shocks are emitted twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.      The FDA has only  approved deep brain  stimulation for such  physical disorders as  Parkinson’s Disease and dystonia, both chronic diseases of the brain. The National Institute of Health notes that “it is not  understood precisely how DBS affects the  dopaminergic networks within the brain” and that “DBS is not entirely without risk, and complications such as infection, hemorrhage, and even mortality have been noted.”      Nice, huh?      The other “breakthrough” treatment of the Child Mind Institute symposium is the proposal for an LSD derivative medication to treat child anxiety.      LSD was classified as an illegal Schedule 1 drug in the 1960s because it has a "high potential for abuse" and is without any "currently accepted medical use in treatment." In fact, in the 1950s psychiatrists used LSD research to try to replicate the effects of mental illness, and their infamous MKUltra  experiments used LSD on often unsuspecting subjects to help develop workable mind control techniques.      The United States Drug Enforcement Administration has reported that the use of LSD in psychotherapy largely has been debunked” and “drug studies have confirmed that the powerful hallucinogenic effects of this drug can produce profound adverse reactions, such as acute panic reactions, psychotic crises, and ‘flashbacks’ especially in users ill-equipped to deal with such trauma.”      Like young children.      Although the symposium literature lists these two treatments as  “breakthrough,” that term is actually only a designation used by the FDA – “breakthrough therapy” — to expedite the development and review of drugs that might demonstrate improvement over available therapy. It’s a fast track to clinical trials so that potentially more dangerous medications can be brought to market more quickly through clinical trials.     Go, Big Pharma. Their funding of seventy-five percent of the FDA’s pharmaceutical department budget will have been a small price to pay for the profits possible when these two “breakthrough” therapies are FDA approved for public consumption.          With approval, Big Pharma’s huge marketing budget can then be directed toward convincing you that a little LSD and a little electroshock really is just what your kid needs. (A thank you to Barbie Rivera of Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, Miami for alerting us about this in her recent newsletter).

Killing Vets Softly with a Psychiatric Solution      By Robert Carter/November 20, 2025      U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced this week that American active duty military suicides are up again in 2023. The number of military who have  committed suicide has been a rising trend since 2011.  The Army and the Air Force had the largest rise in  suicides with the number of active duty troops killing themselves going from 331 to 363.      Austin said these numbers “urgently  demonstrate the need for the Department to redouble its work in the complex fields of suicide prevention and post-vention. There’s still much more work to do, and we won’t let up.” He added the Department of Defense is “moving urgently” to put changes in place by increasing “mental health assistance” to troops.      Part of Austin’s program focuses on education of troops on gun safety, locks, and storage. That seems an odd target as active duty troops probably have more access to firearms than any other population in the country, and they also have more training in their use and their safety than anyone else.      The problem is in the urge to commit suicide, not in the means available to do it. The increase in what Austin calls “mental health assistance” to active duty troops will undoubtedly include easier access to counselors, therapists and psychiatrists as well as the tools that are included with that therapy.      Psychotropic medication, of course, is one of the most frequently used “tools.”      According to a 2013 Military Times report, antidepressants and anticonvulsants were the most commonly prescribed psychotropic medications for service members with mental health conditions. Records show that from 2001 to 2009 alone, the Defense Logistics Agency, which manages the entire Department of Defense supply chain, spent $1.1 billion on common psychiatric drugs and pain medications.      Austin’s current proposal to increase “mental health assistance” for the military will undoubtedly boost that drug budget well beyond that $1.1 billion.      Can it be that the military does not know of the studies that show that taking psychotropic medication increases one’s risk of committing suicide?      Research shows that Xanax, for instance, the benzodiazepine drug most prescribed for anxiety, doubles the risk of suicide for those taking it. One study has shown that after taking Xanax, a person has a 54% increase in suicide thoughts or attempts at suicide.      Could it be that the billion dollar military expenditure on psychotropic drugs is itself the cause of the continuing increase in active duty military suicides?       Now there’s a chance that even more psychotropic drugs will be prescribed and further increase the number of suicides…the very deaths they are supposed to prevent.      “Strumming my pain with his fingers,      killing me softly with his song.”

How to Sue a Shrink      By Robert Carter/November 3, 2024      We are not advocating here the willy-nilly suing of a psychiatrist. In this increasingly litigious society there are already far too many frivolous lawsuits.      However, if one suspects a psychiatrist has strayed from professional, legal or ethical standards of practice, one can report the individual to the state licensing board. There are also a number of websites with standard report forms to submit which list the specifics of the suspected transgression. CCHR and PsychSearch are two such reputable websites, and they immediately forward these reports to the appropriate authorities.      One can, of course, also sue a psychiatrist for malpractice, if the facts warrant it.      State laws do vary, but generally speaking, any time a medical professional’s actions no longer adhere to a standard of care used by the majority of responsible health care providers, a psychiatrist may be subject to a lawsuit as well as to discipline by a state medical board.      Here are the two most common categories of legal transgressions by a psychiatrist which show a level of negligence that would support a malpractice suit.      More practically, this list can also be used to assess for non-standard practices that should be reported to medical authorities, regardless if there are grounds for a successful lawsuit or not.      General unethical conduct: Having a sexual relationship with a patient Verbal or physical abuse Planting false memories in a patient. Trading medical treatment for other goods or services Failing to keep a patient’s medical information confidentialMedical malpractice:Failure to adequately deliver and have a signed Informed Consent procedure Not carrying out a thorough neurological evaluation when the condition calls for it Failure to adequately test and monitor a patient’s response to medication Any other significant p rescription medication errors Misdiagnosing a patient’s condition Failing to adequately monitor a patient, especially one with a risk of suicide Improper record keeping, including falsification of medical records      Should you sue a shrink?      Yes…if there are obvious grounds for it. Apparently, there often are.      The website PsychSearch offers a list of psychiatrists – state by state and country by country – who have either been disciplined by their medical boards or have been successfully prosecuted for medical and ethical “sins.”      It is not a short list.      In fact, according to a 2020 article in Clinical Psychiatry News, “Forty-one percent of U.S. psychiatrists have been sued for malpractice at least once.”      That’s close to a fifty/fifty chance you have that the psychiatrist you see has a practice…or that he has a malpractice.

“Chemical Imbalance” and “Major Depressive Disorder”: Pure Orwellian 1984 Newspeak      By Robert Carter/October 17, 2024      “…but if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”      George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, wrote those words in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Although his essay was a post-WWII warning about the manipulative use of language for political purposes, his analysis of the deterioration of a person’s ability to think clearly when using language that has been purposefully corrupted is pertinent to Big Pharma’s marketing of psychiatric medication.      Orwell argued that the deceitful use of language that is then placed into public use easily leads the public to accept ideas without examining them. If language has been corrupted by distorting the meaning of words, a new false vocabulary tends to prevent the public from thinking clearly enough to be able to reject the false terms in it.      Consequently, the purveyors of corrupted language can easily become the “authority.” The insider knowledge they claim through their distorted vocabulary — because it’s a false representation of reality — inhibits public access to actuality.      Corrupt and deceitful terms not only distort the language. They also distort the truth.      This insidious corruption of public thought is all the more dangerous because it is so subtle. In his novel 1984 Orwell called this technique of governmental brainwashing “Newspeak.”      It is the marketing tool used by Big Pharma and psychiatry today.      Take the term “chemical imbalance.” It has so fully entered the public consciousness – despite no laboratory test ever having given any proof that such a thing exists – that millions of Americans now freely ingest antidepressants based on this bogus theory that there’s a bodily chemical imbalance that can somehow be re-balanced by taking a psychotropic drug.      The American government doles out millions of dollars in funding for mental health initiatives based on the groundless idea of “chemical impbalance.” Last month alone, the Biden Administration gave grants of $68.5 million for behavioral health education, training and community programs, based on their acceptance of “chemical imbalance” as the cause of an already bogus psychiatric diagnosis for disorders such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).      Major Depressive Disorder is one more corruption of language by psychiatry which bends its definition away from truth, and that term has now become a popularized psychiatric buzz word. By labeling someone with MDD, antidepressants can then be prescribed…antidepressants that are dangerous enough to warrant the most severe of FDA black box warnings.      Like many other “disorders,” MDD was adopted by the American Psychiatric Association for inclusion in their 1980 edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That “diagnosis” – which, when called that, is made to sound like a valid medical term, but it is not — is only based on individual’s own reported experiences, and their behavior as reported by relatives or friends, along with a list of manifested symptoms. There is no laboratory test for this “disorder.”      However, Big Pharma was able to reap $18.5 billion in antidepressant sales in 2023 because of this manipulation of language that has convinced people that antidepressants are unequivocally good for them…even though 54.7 percent of Xanax users have attempted suicide or had suicidal thoughts.      Both of these terms – chemical imbalance and major mental disorder — have entered the public vocabulary courtesy of the $1 billion per month marketing expenditures of Big Pharma in America alone (2022 figure). These two misleading terms – as well as many others from the DSM – have corrupted the public’s ability to think clearly about mental illness. And therefore about the truth.      That’s a form of brainwashing.      This corruption of language has unfortunately prevented too many public from seeing that this Big Pharma emperor has no clothes on.

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