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.