Psychiatrist and Fox News Channel analyst Keith Ablow freely mixes psychiatric assessments with political criticism, a unique twist in cable news commentary that some medical colleagues find unethical.

Commentary by David Bauder as seen on the Website for Channel 10 WISTV in Columbia, South Carolina.

Here are some snippets from the column, with my own brief comment. I recommend that you read it in full at the link above

[...]

He's been a Fox contributor since 2007 after hosting a failed syndicated talk show. Identified as a member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, he hosts a regular segment about behavior titled "Normal or Nuts?" on the "Fox & Friends" morning show. There were published reports this fall that the network had extended his contract.

Rival news networks CNN and MSNBC say they don't have a psychiatrist-commentator under contract. CNN said the closest thing it has to something similar is when profilers come on the air to discuss the mental characteristics of people who commit dramatic crimes, for example. The network said medical experts don't get into politics, but others can have different interpretations. The MRC's Graham said opinion often drifts in when television medical correspondents comment on aspects of Obama's health care plan.

Ablow clearly enjoys being provocative, and his commentaries don't stick to his areas of medical expertise. Within the past two weeks he called for an "American jihad," saying the country should urge all nations to adopt a government form based on the U.S. Constitution. His comment this summer that Michelle Obama "needs to drop a few" pounds was widely noticed.

[...]

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, said Ablow seems more interested in entertaining than in reflecting well on his profession. Lieberman is past president of the American Psychiatric Association, which discourages members from speculating on psychiatric characteristics of non-patients.

"It is shameful and unfortunate that he is given a platform by Fox News or any other media organization," Lieberman said. "Basically he is a narcissistic self-promoter of limited and dubious expertise."

Ablow isn't an APA member, having resigned in 2011 in a dispute over transgenderism.

It's not unusual for there to be an uncomfortable relationship between the medical community and doctors who get into television. Talk show hosts Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz have their critics. Dr. Drew Pinsky took heat for exposing rehab patients to the pressure of a televised recovery.

While doctors are entitled to political opinions like anyone else, the way Ablow tries to connect his views to medical analysis "is really just irresponsible and it's embarrassing for physicians in general," said Ford Vox, a staff physiatrist at the Shepherd Brain Injury Rehabilitation Center in Atlanta.

Ablow has occasionally taken heat from Fox colleagues about his commentaries. Greg Gutfeld of "The Five" said that "we should probably avoid blaming people for tragedies," in response to Ablow's criticism of Obama on Ebola. And the four women co-hosts of "Outnumbered" clearly didn't appreciate the attack on the first lady's weight, made in context of her efforts to promote healthy eating.

Keith Ablow is a doctor without ethics, and is likely accusing President Obama of the the very things that Mr. Ablow is suffering from himself. Things like "severed himself from all core emotions." and so much more. Mr Bauder has done a great service in pointing out the professional hypocrisy and lack of ethics of Mr. Ablow. Too bad that Fox news has decided to profit from his lack of ethics instead of upholding professional standards.

We also note several followup columns on Mr. Ablow such as these

The strange case of Dr. Keith Ablow [Politico]

White House Foolishly Ignores Insights Of Fox ‘Dr.’ Keith Ablow, World’s Worst Psychiatrist [Wonkette]

Fox’s Keith Ablow Doubles Down on Psychoanalyzing Obama as a ‘Narcissist’ [Mediate]

Which is hilarious since Mr. Ablow is ever so likely to be a Narcissist himself.

Of course, he had to something to defend himself, not that it did him any good

Fox’s Keith Ablow fires back after fellow psychiatrists denounce him as a hack

Media Matters posted a mashup of some of Ablow’s past commentaries on Friday, which can be seen below.



On the basis that he is guilty of what he is accusing the President of, Keith Ablow is Toxic, and it is dangerous for your mental health to believe Keith Ablow.

While there may be plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike and and disagree with President Obama, those of discredited psych Keith Ablow are dangerous to American Politics.

Chinese Dissidents Committed to Mental Hospitals

As reported on the PBS NewsHour of September 11, 2009



(Video Link Updated)

From the Transcript

China's emphasis on social harmony provides an incentive for petitioners to press for justice, but it also sets the stage for their persecution. That's because petitioners know that Chinese officials in the central government take unrest in local communities seriously, but the local officials who are being complained about will often seek retribution or try to stop people from petitioning in the first place.

Teng Biao, a professor at the University of Politics and Law in Beijing, says the system itself creates these kinds of problems. He runs an NGO to provide legal aid to petitioners.

TENG BIAO, University of Politics and Law, Beijing: From the top down, the petitioning situation is an assessing index for the officials on their political achievements. If there are many petitioners coming to Beijing from a place, then it will affect the local officials on their promotions and bonuses.

SHANNON VAN SANT: For his work, Teng Biao had his lawyers license and passport taken away. After this interview, Chinese authorities shut down Teng Biao's NGO, and police detained two of his colleagues. Despite the risk, Teng said he will continue his work.

I traveled to Wuhan to talk with another Chinese activist, Liu Feiyue, but he was under house arrest. Liu heads an NGO that is currently following 100 cases of wrongful psychiatric detention. Over the last three years, he says he knows of 500 more whistleblowers and protesters who have been detained in mental hospitals.

Robin Munro, who has extensively researched psychiatric detention in China and written two books on the topic, thinks the practice is widespread.

ROBIN MUNRO, human rights activist: China's experience in this area is far more serious and extensive than any other country.

SHANNON VAN SANT: Munro, who is based in Hong Kong, believes that since there are no national mental health laws protecting the rights of people who have been compulsorily hospitalized, but there are rules limiting arbitrary arrest, hospitals are becoming a convenient means of silencing protesters.

ROBIN MUNRO: Once diagnosed in this way, as dangerously mentally ill, citizens have no rights. They have no legal right to see a lawyer; they have no legal right to be brought before a judge so that a judicial determination can be made.

SHANNON VAN SANT: The Chinese press, including the Beijing News, has reported on the hospitalizations. The story was picked up by the state's official press agency, The People's Daily and Sina.com, where it drew 23,000 comments. Such coverage in Chinese newspapers could imply there is central government support for preventing wrongful psychiatric detention by local officials.

China's Ministry of Health denied requests for an interview, but sent a list of relevant regulations on treatment of the mentally ill, which said, in part, "The diagnosis of psychiatric disease is, according to the Chinese mental disorder category and diagnosis standard third edition, approved by Chinese medical association and referring to the related standards of international disease diagnosis category."

When asked at a press conference about the increasing numbers of protesters being put in mental hospitals, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said...

QIN GANG, Spokesperson, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (through translator): It's the first time for me to hear the situation you addressed. I don't know about the situation of psychiatric hospitals, but please believe the related Chinese governmental departments conduct administration according to law.

SHANNON VAN SANT: But in Wuhan, another petitioner, Hu Guohong, said he has been forcibly hospitalized in mental institutions four times and that he and his wife, Cheng Xue, have been warned repeatedly by local officials to stop petitioning.

HU GUOHONG, petitioner: They said, "We don't allow you to go petitioning to the upper levels. If you do that, we will beat you to death."

Whistle-Blowers in Chinese City Sent to Mental Hospital

As Reported in the NY Times

Local officials in Shandong Province have apparently found a cost-effective way to deal with gadflies, whistle-blowers and all manner of muckraking citizens who dare to challenge the authorities: dispatch them to the local psychiatric hospital.

In an investigative report published Monday by a state-owned newspaper, public security officials in the city of Xintai in Shandong Province were said to have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal campaigns to expose corruption or the unfair seizure of their property. Some people said they were committed for up to two years, and several of those interviewed said they were forcibly medicated.

The article, in The Beijing News, said most inmates were released after they agreed to give up their causes.

Sun Fawu, 57, a farmer seeking compensation for land spoiled by a coal-mining operation, said he was seized by local authorities on his way to petition the central government in Beijing and taken to the Xintai Mental Health Center in October.

During a 20-day stay, he said, he was lashed to a bed, forced to take pills and given injections that made him numb and woozy. According to the paper, when he told the doctor he was a petitioner, not mentally ill, the doctor said: “I don’t care if you’re sick or not. As long as you are sent by the township government, I’ll treat you as a mental patient.”

In an interview with the newspaper, the hospital’s director, Wu Yuzhu, acknowledged that some of the 18 patients brought there by the police in recent years were not deranged, but he said that he had no choice but to take them in. “The hospital also had its misgivings,” he said.

Xintai officials do not see any shame in the tactic, and they boasted that hospitalizing people they characterized as troublemakers saved money that would have been spent chasing them to Beijing. There is another reason to stop petitioners who seek redress from higher levels of government: they can prove embarrassing to local officials, especially if they make it to Beijing.

The Xintai government Web site noted that provincial authorities had recently referred to Xintai as “an advanced city in building a safe Shandong.” They said that from January to May this year, the number of petitioners who went over the heads of local authorities was 274, a 4 percent drop from the same period in 2007. Although China is not known for the kind of systematic abuse of psychiatry that occurred in the Soviet Union, human rights advocates say forced institutionalizations are not uncommon in smaller cities. Robin Munro, the research director of China Labor Bulletin, a rights organization in Hong Kong, said such “an kang” wards — Chinese for peace and health — were a convenient and effective means of dealing with pesky dissidents.

“Once a detainee has been officially diagnosed as dangerously mentally ill, they’re immediately taken out of the criminal justice system and they lose all legal rights,” said Mr. Munro, who has researched China’s practice of psychiatric detention.

In recent years practitioners of Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, have complained of what they call coerced hospitalizations. One of China’s best-known dissidents, Wang Wanxing, spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric institution under conditions he later described as abusive.

In one recent, well-publicized case, Wang Jingmei, the mother of a man convicted of killing six policemen in Shanghai, was held incommunicado at a mental hospital for five months and released only days before her son was executed in late November.

The article in The Beijing News about the hospitalizations in Xintai was notable for the attention it gained in China’s constrained state-run media. Such Communist Party stalwarts as People’s Daily and the Xinhua news agency republished the article, and it was picked up by scores of Web sites. At Sina.com, the country’s most popular portal, the report ranked as the fifth most-viewed news headline, and readers posted more than 23,000 comments by evening. The indignation expressed was universal, with many clamoring for the dismissal of those involved. “They’re no different from animals,” read one post. “No, they’re worse.”

By Monday evening, the Xintai city government was rejecting the report by The Beijing News as reckless and slanted. In a telephone interview broadcast on Shandong provincial television, an unidentified municipal official suggested that those confined to the mental hospital had gone mad from their single-minded quest for justice. “There are some people who have been petitioning for years and become mentally aggravated,” the official said.

Reached by phone on Monday, a hospital employee said Mr. Wu, the hospital director who voiced his misgivings to The Beijing News, was unavailable. The employee, Hu Peng, said that officials from the local government had taken him away for “a meeting” earlier in the day.

Although he would not provide a reporter with contact information for the former patients, Mr. Hu defended the hospitalizations, saying that all those delivered by the Public Security Bureau were sick. He added that the hospital was not authorized to provide a diagnosis to the patients, only to treat them. “We definitely would not accept those without mental problems,” he said.

Susan Lindauer Competency Hearing in New York City - Political Psychiatry Exposed

From Scoop News, a follow up to our earlier coverage

The Issue of Competency to Stand Trial

After initially evaluating Lindauer, court appointed psychiatrists in New York argued that her clams of innocence and her willingness to produce witnesses to verify those claims were signs of delusional thinking. However, a Maryland based psychiatrist and two psychotherapists with whom Lindauer visited on a regular basis failed to support the notion of delusions or a debilitating mental illness. Lindauer has told federal authorities continuously that she was a U.S. intelligence asset and she offered to prove that in open court.

Prosecutors typically disparage appeals by defendants to delay or avoid trial based on psychological stress or suffering. This case is an exception. The United States Government is the party delaying the trial based on their claims of Lindauer's inability to assist in her own defense.

Today's testimony was limited to what is known as "lay" witnesses. Lindauer's expert witness, a distinguished psychiatrist and academic, will testify at a July 7, 2008 hearing that she's competent to stand trial.

Lindauer triggered today's hearing by refusing to attend court mandated counseling, a court requirement during her periods of release from 11 months of federal detention. In a recent interview in "Scoop," Lindauer said: "Since August, 2007, I have refused to go back [to court mandated counseling]. I told the Court the game is over. Go to trial or drop the charges, which are ridiculous anyway. They don't have a case, and they know it."

A surprising development was testimony of witnesses who verified that Lindauer had predicted a major terrorist attack in New York City more than a year before the 9/11 attacks

A surprise development occurred at today's hearing in the case of Susan Lindauer versus the United States. A long time associate of the accused, associate professor of computer science at Toronto's York University, Parke Godfrey, Ph.D., testified that Susan Lindauer predicted an attack on the United States in the southern part of Manhattan. According to his testimony, she said that the attack would be very similar to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Godfrey said that Lindauer made the prediction on several occasions, one as late as August 2001.

The testimony occurred in a hearing on Lindauer's competence to stand trial held before U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska, Southern District of New York, in lower Manhattan. On March 11, 2004, Lindauer was arrested for acting as an "unregistered agent" for the nation of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. Prosecutors have delayed the trial for over four years claiming Lindauer was delusional for asserting that she was a U.S. intelligence asset over a period of nine years, including the period covered by the indictment.

This was Lindauer's first real opportunity to argue her competence to stand trial and deny the delusions claimed by court psychiatrists. Lindauer asserts that she had been a U.S. intelligence asset since working on the Lockerbie case and subsequent antiterrorism efforts.

Appearing for the defense, Dr. Godfrey testified under oath that Lindauer told him of her specific concerns about an attack on the United States. She told him that a "massive" attack would occur in the southern part of Manhattan, involving airplanes and possibly a nuclear weapon. The witness said that she mentioned this in the year 2000, which coincided with the Lockerbie trial. And then in 2001, Lindauer also mentioned the anticipated attack in the spring, 2001 and then August 2001. Godfrey said, at that time, Lindauer thought an attack was "imminent" and that it would complete what was started in the 1993 bombing (the original World Trade Center bombing).

After the hearing, Lindauer elaborated that this extreme threat scenario was done in concert with the man she says was one of her CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who has been associated with U.S. intelligence.

Federal prosecutor Edward O'Callaghan tried to diminish the prediction by asking Godfrey if Lindauer presented this a "prophesy". Godfrey denied hearing that word mentioned in their conversations. He stated that Lindauer used the term "premonition." The prosecution did not challenge Godfrey's testimony that Lindauer made the predictions in the time period given by the witness. After the hearing, Lindauer said that she'd called the Department of Justice Office of Counterterrorism in August of 2001 reporting her fears about an attack.

The courtroom where the revelation was made is about a 15 minute walk from the site of September 11, 2001 attack where the former World Trade Center towers once stood.

A Case of American Political Psychiatry: Susan Lindauer's Story

Looks like the politicians have figured out that getting your whistleblowers declared crazy solves everything. Now, if it wasn't for those pesky witnesses and documentations ... Sadly this reminds me of a psychiatrist joke we featured last year, except that is has come true in real life.

We have also put a link to this story on DIGG and on Reddit, so vote this story up, please, if you have an account there.

As seen in the New Zealand news site the Scoop

Also check out previous "Scoop" coverage of Susan Lindauer's ordeal by Michael Collins:

• Bush Political Prisoner Gets Her Day in Court 11 June 2008
  
• American Cassandra: Susan Lindauer's Story 17 October 2007

---

Michael Collins "Scoop" Independent News
Washington, D.C.

This article may be reproduced in part or in whole with attribution of authorship and a link to the original article.

On March 11, 2004, Susan Lindauer was shocked to find FBI Agents pounding on the door of her Takoma Park house in Maryland with a warrant for her arrest. She was more shocked to discover that she was accused of acting as an "unregistered agent" of the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein.

It's been four years since her federal indictment. On June 17, Lindauer will have her first pre-trial hearing, where she will be allowed to call witnesses to disprove the allegations.

Lindauer has never been tried in a court of law—nor allowed any pre-trial hearing to call witnesses to validate claims that she worked as an Asset supervised by U.S. intelligence for 9 years. Instead, she was forced to submit to a psychological evaluation inside a prison on a Texas military base, where she was held for seven months before getting transferred to New York. In all, she was detained for 11 months without a conviction or a guilty plea. Pro se motions for a hearing to prove the authenticity of her claims were ignored.

The psych evaluation culminated in a finding that she was incompetent to stand trial, on the grounds that she was "deluded" into believing that she had worked as a U.S. asset or would not get convicted. The coup de gras was a formal request by federal prosecutors to forcibly drug Lindauer with Haldol in order to cure her of those claims and beliefs, so that she could stand trial. She would be formally cured when she stopped declaring that witnesses would substantiate her story.

This interview follows an article yesterday summarizing the case to date and the critical June 17, 2008 hearing in federal court, Southern District, Manhattan before Judge Preska. The hearing is open to the public at the defendant's request.

---

Collins: When you were indicted there was a broad range of media covering your story. After about a month, things seemed to go dark with the mainstream media. How has your story stayed alive?

Lindauer: I am shocked and disappointed that the mainstream media has failed to cover developments in this story. I hope that's going to change after this hearing, because a functional media is vital to protecting citizens from arbitrary and tyrannical government decisions. By contrast, the bloggers, have kept me alive. During my incarceration, friends like JB Fields (now deceased) smoked the blogs with outrage. He urged folks to write Judge Mukasey. To his own credit, Judge Mukasey actually called a court meeting when JB's readers sent letters and papers to the Court contradicting the official Psych evaluations. Judge Mukasey wanted to know why that documentation was available on the internet but not in his courtroom. He demanded a formal explanation from the Prosecutor and my own attorney, accounting for the discrepancies in their psych reporting. JB Fields blog – and all the other bloggers who picked it up-- saved my life and my freedom. No question.

Collins: You've been in court at least 15 times over four years regarding this case. What's different about this hearing?

Lindauer: The other meetings are called "status meetings." It's a formality to show that I'm still in the system. This is the first time I have been granted the right to call witnesses into court to authenticate my story. The Prosecutor has said that I am incompetent to stand trial because I am convinced of my innocence and cannot grasp that I might be convicted. Specifically, the Prosecution has used psychiatry to argue that my belief that I worked as an Asset for the U.S. Government constitutes delusional thinking. In a bizarre legal twist, the Prosecutor has argued that since I am delusional, I should be denied the right to call witnesses to prove that I am telling the Truth. Allegedly, my belief in the existence of witnesses is a function of my delusional belief in my innocence. Is that crazy or what? Talk about Kafkaesque!

Carswell's report was significant in one way that must be noted: Their staff testified that I suffer no depression, no bipolar disorder, no schizophrenia, no hallucinations or hearing voices. They said that I was socially interactive and my behavior was appropriate to the detention. Dr. Vas testified before Judge Mukasey, "that he looked really hard, but he couldn't find anything" after 7 months incarceration.

Collins: Of all the affronts and stress you've experienced in this open ended prosecution, what's been the most offensive element?

Lindauer: I am furious about the abuse that I have suffered. I regard this as a Soviet-style attack on my rights to dissent from the government. After my arrest, I was ordered to attend weekly psych meetings for a year, during which we discussed articles in the Washington Post—and nothing else. After Carswell, I spent another year in court-ordered psych meetings. The only point of conversation was how psychology has grievously harmed my life, depriving me of freedom, damaging my reputation, and terrorizing me by interfering with my rights to call participatory witnesses, who could straighten out the matter within minutes. Beyond that, the court quack surfed the internet looking for clothes and weekend entertainment for her daughter. Since August, 2007, I have refused to go back. I told the Court the game is over. Go to trial or drop the charges, which are ridiculous anyway. They don't have a case, and they know it..

Psychiatry was corrupt enough to help the Bush White House out of a jam, which says a lot. Forensic psychiatry is a profitable business. In my opinion they are charlatans and court prostitutes who are abusing their access to the Courts in order to get money out of the state and federal budgets. They have little or no value. For myself, I have never engaged in therapy or counseling. I would never confide personal affairs to them, or listen to anything they have to say. In a weird twist, anything I say could get reported to pre-trial services. It's not private. They were a huge waste of my time, burning the clock on my 6th Amendment rights.

Collins: How do you react to your treatment by the prosecution and their mental health experts?

Lindauer: Psychiatrists are terrified of witness testimony to the point of psychotic reaction. They're so insecure as to be deeply threatened that reality will impose limitations on their phony authority in the courtroom.

The consequence for due process of law is quite terrifying. One horrific shrink—Dr. Robert L. Goldstein, a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University-- actually testified that the depth of my belief in witness testimony confirmed the "seriousness of my mental illness." He said the Court must be patient and tolerant of my requests to call witnesses. He said it showed I was still very sick, and the Court should pity me for not understanding that these people were a figment of my imagination.

I was a prisoner in shackles at the time. I experienced a total state of shock that this corrupt quack could actual testify that my requests for due process demonstrated my incompetence to stand trial. As a "professional psychiatrist"—who had never spoken to me OR my witnesses, Goldstein nonetheless assured the Court that he would stake his professional reputation on their non-existence.

It was the most terrifying and Kafkaesque experience of my life. Truly it proves that psychiatry is out of control in the Courts. They invent and fabricate, and if the truth contradicts them, they don't even care. As Dr. Vas at Carswell put it, "we'll just tell the Court you made it up. Who do you think the Judge is going to believe? You or me? I am a doctor!"

I am firmly convinced that Congress must change the laws so that defendants can file for punitive damages against this sort of quackery. Judges should have the right to file sanctions against psychiatrists who blatantly lie to the Court—which would have to be reported to other Judges, if they testify in other cases. In the most extreme cases of outright perjury, wherein the psychiatrist verifies the truthfulness of a defendant's story and then lies about it as a so-called expert witness, then the matter should be turned over to a grand jury for indictment. I have no mercy for this garbage.

Collins: The wheels of justice grind slowly for you. It's been almost four years and there hasn't even been an evidentiary hearing. How could the process have been simplified?

Lindauer: If the Court wanted to know if my witnesses would validate my story, the Judge could very easily have set a hearing date & called everybody into Court to answer questions. Authenticity would have been established, one way or the other, within the first 15 minutes of testimony. Then the question would be answered. Finished. That's Due Process 101.

What does this say about psychology in the court-room???

In my experience, court psychology is rife with corruption and fraud. Immediately after my arrest four years ago, the psychologist referred me to himself, and then was shocked to find out that I was wholly disinterested in anything he had to say. I told him that I had no intention of changing anything about myself. In one year I intended to be exactly the same person that I was when I walked into his office.

I took a cook-book to the first meeting and forced him to listen to recitations of recipes, sans commentary. When he asked if I intended to cook any of the recipes, I assured him that I would never do such a thing. I said that I consider his insights to be as useless as a recipe that I would never bake.

He had the sense to be embarrassed. From that day on, he always had a copy of the Washington Post, and we discussed news articles and current affairs. That continued for a year. He might have enjoyed it. I didn't. I don't recall that we discussed anything except my complaints about how our court-ordered psych meetings interfered with my employment, since the bail order stopped me from working full time. I had to take a part-time job, which killed me financially. I made perfectly clear that he was wasting my time.

After almost a year of this, I told him point blank that I refused to continue. I told him that he contributed nothing to my life, except to stop me from buying groceries, paying my utilities, and forcing me to borrow money to pay my mortgage and my property taxes-- because he was so selfish as to persist in interfering with my employment, so he could make money off the court.

Collins: What happened after this period of "freedom" after your initial hearings.

Lindauer: Life got to be good again until the fateful day when i was ordered to go to Carswell.

I was told that I would be held for no more than 120 days. That's 4 months. And Judge Mukasey's clerk assured my uncle, who attended the court date, that more likely I would be home within 60 days, because the Judge expected the psych evaluation to be finished rapidly. Then it would be over. Ok, I could do that. I'm a pretty tough lady.

I went in on October 3, 2005 and waited for my release. I got tons of letters of encouragement from friends. I stayed active, walking four to six miles a day on the track, reading lots of books, working at the law library and entertaining myself with NYT crossword puzzles.

Only the prison staff on the Texas military base had other plans. They didn't want to let me go home. They actually argued for the right to detain me indefinitely, and forcibly drug me until I could be cured of claiming that I had ever worked as a U.S. asset.

I was released after 11 months. Judge Mukasey retired on the day of my release. I want to be clear that the man is my hero. Though I was detained, he issued a lengthy and well considered decision that blocked the Prosecution from forcibly drugging me. It's a decision that deserves to be considered in other cases in the future. I am profoundly grateful to Judge Mukasey. He has a great and formidable legal mind.

To this day, I am still pre-trial. I have never been convicted of a crime, nor accepted a guilty plea. All of my most fundamental rights under the precious Constitution of the United States have been revoked because a crooked psychiatrist made up a bullshit story & lied to a federal judge.

Collins: What did you do to get things moving with the court?

In August, 2007, I refused to go back to the Court-ordered meetings. Judge Loretta Preska is now hearing the case. In August I stopped attending the meetings, and told the Court that it's time to drop the charges or go to trial. If the Prosecutor wants to pretend that I'm delusional, I would gladly call witnesses for a pre-trial hearing on competency, at the earliest possible date, to smash his arguments all to hell.

In September, October and November, the Prosecutor desperately tried to get my bail revoked and get me sent back to Carswell. That motivated friends to cough up the legal fees for my new attorney. Everybody was terrified that he might prevail and the Court might actually send me back to Carswell.

I refused to let them intimidate me into backing down.

My mother would be proud if she was still alive.

Collins: What will you try to prove in court on June 17, 2008 and where do you go from there?

I am confident that my witnesses will establish that I most definitely worked as long-time asset supervised by individuals in U.S. intelligence. At that point, I hope the Justice Department would seize the opportunity to end the case before we have to go into the specifics of my work. It would be hugely embarrassing for politicians in Washington, if a trial exposes how badly the politicians have mismanaged opportunities to engage the U.S. in counter-terrorism. They are not the innocent of bystanders of intelligence failures that they pretend to be. They made serious mistakes in leadership that they have refused to acknowledge. Assets like me are just the scapegoats for bad policy decisions.

ENDS

This article may be reproduced in part or in whole with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

Normal man held for 55 years in a mental institution. He was not ill..

We came across this case of a person held in a mental hospital for 55 years despite no mental illness.

Can you be held for 55 years without any charge?

Yes, if you are in Sri Lanka. Last Thursday, eighty three year old Thantriye Singho was released from police custody after 55 years. He was arrested in 1953 and all this time he was never charged with any crime.

Why was he arrested in the first place in a time so long ago that none of us can even remember? He was caught carrying a sword in a suburb near Sri Lankan capital Colomo. It is not clear if possession of sword was even a crime at that time. Soon after his arrest, the court sent him to a government hospital for psychological evaluation and treatment.

He was declared mentally healthy and transferred to regular unit of the hospital. But he spent next 55 years of his life in that hospital without the authority bringing any change against him.

A human rights group uncovered his case while doing work on mental patients. They informed the man’s relatives and got a court order for his released.

It is not the fist time this happened in Sri Lanka. Only few months ago another man was released after spending 50 years in custody without any charge. By the time he got out he was 80.

The Century of the Self - A BBC Documentary

A BBC Documentary on Google Video, describing how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. An interesting view into the minds of folks in government who look to sell us their agenda.

More specifically it is about the rise of the Public Relations industry, and the Role of Edward Bernaise (a nephew of Sigmund Freud) in the creation and development of this field, especially in the realm of politics.

This probably would not air in the USA, for a variety of reasons, including much footage that dates back to the early Clinton and Blair years. Has an odd conservative twist to it.

Each part is about 1 hour long.

Part 1 - Happiness Machines



Part 2 - The Engineering of Consent



Part 3 - There is Policeman Inside all our Heads He Must Be Destroyed



Part 4 - Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering (Engineering politics)



There is more info here, at the Information Clearing House website.

Sigmund Freud introduced the idea that humans were in a struggle with their animalistic natures and if this goes unchecked then people will run around naked destroying things and society will fall apart. He apparently had very little confidence in humans.

This idea was widely accepted especially in the upper classes thus confirming of the fear that Democracy left unchecked could destroy their society. If the people could not be trusted to control their basic animalistic nature, then how would they know how to vote?

In steps Freud’s nephew Edward Bernaise. Propaganda during war was nothing new, but Bernaise saw an opportunity to use the unconscious desires of humans to manipulate the masses in times of peace also. Bernaise believed that by fulfilling the unconscious desires of people would change a potentially unruly population into a controlled docile one.

Bernaise invented the much used term “public relations,” and used it to turn the population of the United States into consumers. Before Bernaise worked his magic, the American population only bought goods according to their needs. It was practically unheard of to buy something for any other reason.

Bernaise made it acceptable to make a purchase based on desires.

Using Hollywood through product placement, and the media, he changed the population into an easily placated self-absorbed group where before they were actively participating. Over the years, this has changed Democracy from a function of the entire society into less than a passing diversion. It is not by accident that here in the United States we have perhaps a lower voter turnout than anywhere else in the world.

Bernaise put his methodology to the test in many areas. Bernaise, being approached by the tobacco company, effectively double their customers with one wave of his wand. He asked had a few women light up after a march in front of the press and in a movie or two prominent actresses were instructed to smoke and almost overnight erased the stigma of women smoking. After this victory and his ideas tested and proven, Bernaise was ready to move onto bigger things. He was involved in all sorts of advertising and promotion from the automobile industry to governmental agencies that needed public support.

Although there have been many attempts to oppose these methods as unethical, they have gone largely unopposed. As long as industry is making money and politicians are passing the laws they are pushing for the industry, they will continue to go unopposed.

This is pure propaganda and is intended to be a psychological attack at the essence of humanity to evoke a non-response to governmental malfeasance and other societal issues as well as to evoke a gluttonous consumer based society. If that seems to sum up much of how the world seems to consider most Americans, at least we can now tell that it is not by accident.

The methods had been used for years to promote the hard to sell policies of the government, but starting with Clinton and Blair a new use was found. Polls were taken to find out what the voter desired most. These finding were easily turned into speeches and in the cases of Clinton and Blair, won elections.

Blair took it one step farther and used it to set policy while Clinton simply did what he and his advisors thought was best after the election was won. Blair took polls and no one seemed concerned about the rail system in Britain, so little funding was appropriated until trains began derailing and killing people. Politicians soon learned that people’s concerns were not always in line with their needs.

Of course if they had studied Bernaise and the methodology of the polls, they would have known this. Now, politicians use the polls to write their speeches and continue to do what they feel is best regardless of what they say in the speeches.

This is why Bush talks about peace and wages war and all the other double speak that persists, to placate to the desires and not the needs of society which effectively placates the masses.

One would think that the population would eventually catch on to this trick, and perhaps some have, but the public relations business is stronger and more centralized than ever. Just a few short years ago, there were over 50 media stations broadcasting news to Americans. Now there are only five. This number could go lower soon, but at this point the company heads are all of one voice pounding out PR about whatever they want us to think we want.

The journalism schools in the U.S. are very few and most have switched over to public relations. Journalists will soon go the way of the dinosaur if something does not change this horrible trend.

A Critical History of Psychiatry

A synopsis of the book, as seen on Barely a Blog (now with an updated link)

COERCION AS CURE: A CRITICAL HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY
By Thomas Szasz

All modern history, as learnt and taught and accepted, is purely conventional. For sufficient reasons, all persons in authority combined, by a happy union of deceit and concealment, to promote falsehood. - - - Lord Acton

For more than a century, leading psychiatrists have maintained that psychiatry is hard to define because its scope is so broad. In 1886, Emil Kraepelin, considered the greatest psychiatrist of his age, declared: “Our science has not arrived at a consensus on even its most fundamental principles, let alone on appropriate ends or even on the means to those ends.”

Contrary to such assertions, I maintain that it is easy to define psychiatry. The problem is that defining it truthfully — acknowledging its self-evident ends and the means used to achieve them — is socially unacceptable and professionally suicidal. Psychiatric tradition, social expectation, and the law — both criminal and civil — identify coercion as the profession’s determining characteristic.

Accordingly, I regard psychiatry as the theory and practice of coercion, rationalized as the diagnosis of mental illness and justified as medical treatment aimed at protecting the patient from himself and society from the patient. The history of psychiatry I present thus resembles, say, a critical history of missionary Christianity.


The heathen savage does not suffer from lack of insight into the divinity of Jesus, does not lack theological help, and does not seek the services of missionaries. Just so, the psychotic does not suffer from lack of insight into being mentally ill, does not lack psychiatric treatment, and does not seek the services of psychiatrists. This is why the missionary tends to have contempt for the heathen, why the psychiatrist tends to have contempt for the psychotic, and why both conceal their true sentiments behind a facade of caring and compassion. Each meddler believes that he is in possession of the “truth,” each harbors a passionate desire to improve the Other, each feels a deep sense of entitlement to intrude into the life of the Other, and each bitterly resents those who dismiss his precious insights and benevolent interventions as worthless and harmful.

Non-acknowledgment of the fact that coercion is a characteristic and potentially ever-present element of so-called psychiatric treatments is intrinsic to the standard dictionary definitions of psychiatry. The Unabridged Webster’s defines psychiatry as “A branch of medicine that deals with the science and practice of treating mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders.”

Plainly, voluntary psychiatric relations differ from involuntary psychiatric interventions the same way as, say, sexual relations between consenting adults differ from the sexual assaults we call “rape.” Sometimes, to be sure, psychiatrists deal with voluntary patients. As I explain and illustrate throughout this volume, it is necessary, however, not merely to distinguish between coerced and consensual psychiatric relations, but to contrast them. The term “psychiatry” ought to be applied to one or the other, but not both. As long as psychiatrists and society refuse to recognize this, there can be no real psychiatric historiography.

The writings of historians, physicians, journalists, and others addressing the history of psychiatry rest on three erroneous premises: that so-called mental diseases exist, that they are diseases of the brain, and that the incarceration of “dangerous” mental patients is medically rational and morally just. The problems so created are then compounded by failure — purposeful or inadvertent — to distinguish between two radically different kinds of psychiatric practices, consensual and coerced, voluntarily sought and forcibly imposed.

In free societies, ordinary social relations between adults are consensual. Such relations — in business, medicine, religion, and psychiatry — pose no special legal or political problems. By contrast, coercive relations — one person authorized by the state to forcibly compel another person to do or abstain from actions of his choice — are inherently political in nature and are always morally problematic.

Mental disease is fictitious disease. Psychiatric diagnosis is disguised disdain. Psychiatric treatment is coercion concealed as care, typically carried out in prisons called “hospitals.” Formerly, the social function of psychiatry was more apparent than it is now. The asylum inmate was incarcerated against his will. Insanity was synonymous with unfitness for liberty.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new type of psychiatric relationship entered the medical scene: persons experiencing so-called “nervous symptoms” began to seek medical help, typically from the family physician or a specialist in “nervous disorders.”

This led psychiatrists to distinguish between two kinds of mental diseases, neuroses and psychoses: Persons who complained of their own behavior were classified as neurotic, whereas persons about whose behavior others complained were classified as psychotic. The legal, medical, psychiatric, and social denial of this simple distinction and its far-reaching implications undergirds the house of cards that is modern psychiatry.

The American Psychiatric Association, founded in 1844, was first called the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane. In 1892, it was renamed the American Medico-Psychological Association, and in 1921, the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

In its first official resolution, the Association declared: “Resolved, that it is the unanimous sense of this convention that the attempt to abandon entirely the use of all means of personal restraint is not sanctioned by the true interests of the insane.” The APA has never rejected its commitment to the twin claims that insanity is a medical illness and that coercion is care and cure. In 2005, Steven S. Sharfstein, president of the APA, reiterated his and his profession’s commitment to coercion.

Lamenting “our [the psychiatrists’] reluctance to use caring, coercive approaches,” he declared: ” A person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with a history of multiple rehospitalizations for dangerousness and a reluctance to abide by outpatient treatment, including medications, is a perfect example of someone who would benefit from these [forcibly imposed] approaches. We must balance individual rights and freedom with policies aimed at caring coercion.”

Seven months later, Sharfstein conveniently forgot having recently bracketed caring and coercion into a single act, “caring coercion.” Defending “assisted treatment”–a euphemism for psychiatric coercion– he stated: “In assisted treatment, such as Kendra’s Law in New York, psychiatrists’ primary role is to foster patient improvement and help restore the patient to health.”

Psychiatry and society face a paradox. The more progress scientific psychiatry is said to make, the more intolerable becomes the idea that mental illness is a myth and that the effort to treat it a will-o’-the-wisp. The more progress scientific medicine actually makes, the more undeniable it becomes that “chemical imbalances” and “hard wiring” are fashionable clichés, not evidence that problems in living are medical diseases justifiably “treated” without patient consent. And the more often psychiatrists play the roles of juries, judges, and prison guards, the more uncomfortable they feel about being in fact pseudomedical coercers — society’s well-paid patsies.

The whole conundrum is too horrible to face. Better to continue calling unwanted behaviors “diseases” and disturbing persons “sick,” and compel them to submit to psychiatric “care.” It is easy to see, then, why the right-thinking person considers it inconceivable that there might be no such thing as mental health or mental illness. Where would that leave the history of psychiatry portrayed as the drama of heroic physicians combating horrible diseases?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is right: “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”

Scientific discourse is predicated on intellectual honesty. Psychiatric discourse rests on intellectual dishonesty. The psychiatrist’s basic social mandate is the coercive-paternalistic protection of the mental patient from himself and the public from the mental patient. Yet, in the professional literature as well as the popular media, this is the least noted feature of psychiatry as a medical specialty. Pointing it out is considered to be in bad taste. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which historians of psychiatry as well as mental health professionals and journalists ignore, deny, and rationalize the involuntary, coerced, forcibly imposed nature of psychiatric treatments. This denial is rooted in language.

Psychiatrists, lawyers, journalists, and medical ethicists routinely call incarceration in a psychiatric prison “hospitalization,” and torture forcibly imposed on the inmate “treatment.” Resting their reasoning on the same faulty premises, psychiatric historians trace alleged advances in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses to “progress in neuroscience.” In contrast, I focus on what psychiatrists have done to persons who have rejected their “help” and on how they have rationalized their “therapeutic” violations of the dignity and liberty of their ostensible beneficiaries.

I regard consensual human relations, however misguided by either or both parties, as radically different, morally as well as politically, from human relations in which one party, empowered by the state, deprives another of liberty. The history of medicine, no less than the history of psychiatry, abounds in interventions by physicians that have harmed rather than helped their patients. Bloodletting is the most obvious example.

Nevertheless, physicians have, at least until now, abstained from using state-sanctioned force to systematically impose injurious treatments on medically ill people. Misguided by fashion and lack of knowledge, sick people have often sought and willingly submitted to such interventions. In contrast, the history of psychiatry is, au fond, the story of the forcible imposition of injurious “medical” interventions on persons called “mental patients.”

In short, where psychiatric historians see stories about terrible illnesses and heroic treatments, I see stories about people marching to the beats of different drummers or perhaps failing to march at all, and terrible injustices committed against them, rationalized by hollow “therapeutic” justifications. Faced with vexing personal problems, the “truth” people crave is a simple, fashionable falsehood. That is an important, albeit bitter, lesson the history of psychiatry teaches us.

One of the melancholy truths of the story I have set out to tell is that, stripped of its pseudomedical ornamentation, it is not a particularly interesting tale. To make it interesting, I have tried to do what, according to Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the “greatest poet “does: He “drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet … He says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.”

To this end, I have, where possible, cited the exact words psychiatrists have used to justify their stubborn insistence, over a period of nearly three centuries, that psychiatric coercion is medical care.

Psychiatrist ordered to Mental Hospital after blaming Ritalin for School Violence in Court Cases.

Not sure where to go on this one. Sounds like she is getting into trouble for upsetting the status quo. From the Sydney Morning Herald

A psychiatrist known as a "hired gun" in court cases has been ordered into treatment by medical authorities after being accused of a dubious diagnosis.

Yolande Lucire has been reprimanded by the NSW Medical Board after its professional standards committee disagreed with a diagnosis she made in a medico-legal case and questioned her professionalism.

The eastern suburbs forensic psychiatrist is well-known in legal circles and her testimony in a criminal trial last year sparked a NSW judge to slam doctors for creating a generation of "Ritalin kids", who were now committing violent crimes.

Dr Lucire said she could not defend herself because of a non-disclosure order, but said the matter "did not relate to patient care". She can continue to practise.

Dr Lucire suggested her controversial stance on the links between the antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and suicide meant some in the psychiatric fraternity questioned her ability.

Dr Lucire, who is the partner of former federal Labor senator and former president of the Evatt Foundation Bruce Childs, charges upwards of $500 to be an expert witness in criminal and civil cases.

The medical board took issue with her diagnosis of residual organic hallucinosis in a patient and she was ordered to see a board-approved senior psychiatrist "for the purpose of seeking and taking advice with a view to improving some aspects of her practice of medicine".

She said she would comply. Dr Lucire has more than 30 years' experience in psychiatry, including lecturing in universities and 12 years as a forensic consultant at Long Bay prison hospital.

In the trial of a 20-year-old man on assault and indecency charges last April, Judge Paul Conlon relied on Dr Lucire's testimony that the accused showed characteristics of borderline personality disorder when he was taken off an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug at 16 after a decade on it.

His judgement, which made the links between the drugs and violent young offenders, caused controversy.

Artem Basyrov, A Case Of Punitive/Political Psychiatry?

from the Daily Mail:

A Russian opposition activist has been sent to a psychiatric hospital by authorities a day before a planned demonstration.

Artem Basyrov's detention is the latest in a series of incidents suggesting a punitive Soviet-era practice is being revived under president Vladimir Putin.

Mr Basyrov, 20, was ordered to be held at a hospital in the central region of Mari El on November 23, a day before planned demonstrations, said Alexander Averin of the opposition National Bolshevik Party.

The party is part of the Other Russia coalition which organised the so-called Dissenters' Marches across the country this year.

Mr Basyrov ran for the local legislature as an Other Russia candidate.

Police who originally detained him claimed he had assaulted a girl.

A local psychiatric board agreed, deciding the activist suffered from a mental illness and he was committed to the psychiatric hospital three weeks ago.

He was only transferred from an isolation ward and allowed to have visitors on Thursday, said Mikhail Klyuzhev, a National Bolshevik member from the city of Yoshkar-Ola.

The allegations against Mr Basyrov were "idiocy" and were "part of the hysteria" before Russia's parliamentary elections which were held on December 2, Mr Klyuzhev added.

Supporters said Mr Basyrov did not appear to have been mistreated.

A psychiatric board is due to review his case at the end of the month.

His case is the latest example of journalists or opposition activists being involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals in Russia.

During the Soviet era, dissidents were frequently committed for protesting against Soviet policies.

Last week, Reporters Without Borders said Andrei Novikov, a reporter for a news service connected with Chechen separatist government, was released after nine months in a psychiatric hospital.

Earlier this year Larisa Arap, an Other Russia activist and journalist, spent six weeks in a psychiatric clinic.

Supporters said this was punishment for her critical reporting.

The Global Initiative on Psychiatry, a Dutch watchdog, says psychiatry continues to be used for punitive, political purposes in Russia.

Prosecutors in Mari El were not available for comment last night.

The Political Use of Psychiatric Drugs in Deportation Proceedings

From the Dallas News

The federal government would like to forcibly sedate and deport an immigrant-restaurateur who resisted his removal last August with repeated screams because of fears he'd be murdered back in his native Albania.

But an unlikely champion from East Texas has penned a private bill in Congress that would allow 32-year-old Rrustem Neza to stay in the country until early 2009 – and give him time to receive a full rehearing of his political asylum case.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, who sits on the House judiciary subcommittee on immigration, is opposed to loosening immigration. But he believes the government's treatment of Mr. Neza is "intolerable" and "callous."

Mr. Gohmert, a former district court judge, spoke to President Bush about the case this week, a staff aide said.


"I am a strong believer in following the laws regarding immigration," Mr. Gohmert said in a written statement. "However, we have laws to allow people to remain here based on asylum and the need to protect their lives."

Mr. Neza fears he will be killed back in his homeland because of his knowledge of a political assassination of a democracy leader in Albania, a European country of 3.6 million that fought off communism in the late 1990s.

Two of his brothers have won asylum. And two of his cousins were killed in Europe because of the knowledge they had regarding the assassination of Azem Hajdari, said Mr. Neza's Dallas attorney John Wheat Gibson.

The Gohmert bill could effectively stall Mr. Neza's deportation until early 2009.

Private bills have been issued before on behalf of individual immigrants. But the Gohmert measure is unusual because immigration now stirs such quick rancor.

Carl Rusnok, an ICE spokesman in Dallas, said he couldn't comment on the Neza case because of litigation in Los Angeles over the policy – "on rare occasions" – of forced druggings for certain deportees.

Such medications had been administered to deportees "for their own safety and the safety of people on the plane," he said. In the past, Mr. Rusnok has noted that Mr. Neza came into the U.S. using a false Italian passport and has an order for deportation against him.

On Aug. 8, at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Mr. Neza repeatedly screamed, "I am not a terrorist," when immigration agents tried to board him on a flight.

Airline officials refused Mr. Neza's passage after he told them he was being "illegally deported," according to documents in a federal district court in Abilene.

Though Mr. Neza was denied political asylum, there are two pending appeals. And a judge is expected to make a decision on whether immigration officials can sedate him.

"My main concern is to prevent the deportation," said his attorney, Mr. Gibson. "The drugging is just one more mean thing they are doing to this guy to deliver him into the hands of the assassins. My ultimate goal is to keep him out of hands of the assassins."

Others see it differently.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that wants tough enforcement of immigration laws, said it's "unwise for someone to go over the heads of those who have adjudicated the case."

As for the possibility of sedation, he added, "We cannot allow policy to exist that if someone yells and screams all bets are off and the laws are not enforced. Otherwise, we'll have a lot of kicking and screaming."

Due process

But such druggings by federal immigration agents are stirring controversy.

In early October, the ACLU filed a motion in federal court in Los Angeles to stop U.S. immigration authorities from forcibly drugging deportees about to board commercial flights.

The ACLU is seeking class action status for its suit, which stems from the forced drugging of an Indonesian minister and a Senegalese man with anti-psychotic drugs.

The issue of forced druggings gained prominence during the nomination hearing of ICE chief Julie Myers on Sept. 12. In her testimony, Ms. Myers said current ICE policy prohibits sedation without a court order, and, thus, the court order provides the deportee due process under the U.S. Constitution.

ACLU attorney Ahilan Arulanantham said the practice raises serious questions.

"Immigrants are not animals, and you cannot forcibly drug them," said Mr. Arulanantham, who has also been in contact with Mr. Gibson, the Dallas attorney for Mr. Neza.

At Cornell Law School, immigration law specialist Stephen Yale-Loehr said the "case raises serious concerns about when the government can forcibly sedate a person to carry out a deportation order."

"A court should review the allegations carefully to make sure Mr. Neza's due process rights are not violated," Mr. Yale-Loehr said.

Arguing safety

In the interim, U.S. government attorneys Scott Frost and Tracy Short argued in a court pleading that "there is exceptionally strong public interest in the enforcement of duly enacted laws of the United States."

Drugging Mr. Neza with a sedative by a psychiatrist employed by the U.S. Public Health Services will have multiple beneficial effects, the attorneys argue in their pleading. "It will prevent Neza from committing assaultive acts against others, it will allow the United States to enforce its immigration laws, and it will ensure the safety of Neza and others during the removal."

The federal government cites a 1996 Texas case involving a deportee with the surname of Bechara, who threatened to bring down the plane if he were forced on the plane.

But Mr. Gibson counters that Mr. Neza made no such threats.

Mr. Neza was apprehended after filing a liquor license application for his Lufkin restaurant, called Joe's Italian Grill.

The government, in court documents, also notes that a state application for a liquor license stated Mr. Neza was a U.S. citizen. False claims to citizenship can result in permanent bars from the country.

No charges have been brought against Mr. Neza, Mr. Gibson said. And the false claim to U.S. citizenship wasn't made by Mr. Neza but by someone filling out the application, Mr. Gibson said in court documents.

The Potential Political Uses of Psychiatry

Someone else has discovered the political advantages of using psychiatry, and has become a little disturbed by this. Of course, old time Soviet style psychiatry would never become prevalent in the USA, comrade.

Or would it? These folks seem to think so.



Of course, we are not particularly aligned with any political party.

The Shock Doctrine

The Huffington Post is featuring this video regarding the introduction of electroshock and other forms of shock, not just on individuals, but on cultures. This is psychiatry applied to the masses and politics.

Political threat to take new-born over fear of imaginary disease

This is an example of the the arbitrary removal of a child by government services for reasons that have nothing to do with reality. As seen in the article, the mother is well educated and well qualified. The pediatrician making the recommendation is a fruit cake misdiagnosing without having even met the mother. From this report

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of "emotional abuse", even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way.

Social services' recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.

Hexham children's services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.

Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services' request for an emergency protection order - these are usually granted - will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.

From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.

Miss Lyon, from Hexham, who is five months pregnant, is seeking a judicial review of the decision about Molly, as she calls her baby. She described it as "barbaric and draconian", and said it was "scandalous" that social services had not accepted submissions supporting her case.

"The paediatrician has never met me," she said. "He is not a psychiatrist and cannot possibly make assertions about my current or future mental health. Yet his letter was the only one considered in the case conference on August 16 which lasted just 10 minutes."

Northumberland County Council insists that two highly experienced doctors - another consultant paediatrician and a medical consultant - attended the case conference.

The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.

Critics say councils are taking more babies from parents to help them meet adoption "targets".

John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Justice for Families campaign group, said the case showed "exactly what is wrong with public family law".

He added: "There is absolutely no evidence that Fran would harm her child. However, a vague letter from a paediatrician who has never met her has been used in a decision to remove her baby at birth, while evidence from professionals treating her, that she would have no problems has been ignored."

Mr Hemming was concerned that "vague assertions" of Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy - now known as "fabricated and invented illness" - had been used to remove a number of children from parents in the North-East.

Miss Lyon came under scrutiny because she had a mental health problem when she was 16 after being physically and emotionally abused by her father and raped by a stranger.

She suffered eating disorders and self-harm but, after therapy, graduated from Edinburgh University and now works for two mental health charities, Borderline and Personality Plus.

Dr Stella Newrith, a consultant psychiatrist, who treated Miss Lyon for her childhood trauma for a year, wrote to Northumberland social services stating: "There has never been any clinical evidence to suggest that Fran would put herself or others at risk, and there is certainly no evidence to suggest that she would put a child at risk of emotional, physical or sexual harm."

Despite this support, endorsed by other psychiatrists and Miss Lyon's GP, social services based their recommendation partly on a letter from Dr Martin Ward Platt, a consultant paediatrician, who was unable to attend the meeting.

He wrote: "Even in the absence of a psychological assessment, if the professionals were concerned on the evidence available that Miss Holton (as Miss Lyon was briefly known), probably does fabricate or induce illness, there would be no option but the precautionary principle of taking the baby into foster care at birth, pending a post-natal forensic psychological assessment."

Miss Lyon said she was determined to fight the decision. "I know I can be a good mother to Molly. I just want the chance to prove it," she said.

The council said the recommendation would be subject to further assessment and review. "When making such difficult decisions, safeguarding children is our foremost priority," a spokesman said.

• A recording of social workers threatening to take a newborn into care has been removed from the YouTube website after Calderdale Council in West Yorkshire started legal action, claiming the Data Protection Act was breached.

Vanessa Brookes, 34, taped social workers telling her and her husband that they would seek to place the baby, due next month, in care, while admitting there was "no immediate risk to the child."

Putin critic tells of her mental hospital ordeal

From this Report

Larisa Arap has just emerged from a 46-day imprisonment in two Russian psychiatric hospitals. Pills were forced down her throat and she received injection after injection. She doesn't know what medications they were, or whether they will cause permanent damage.

"I don't feel very well, but I have a fighting spirit," Mrs Arap said yesterday, adding that sometimes she was so drugged she could barely walk or speak

She was forcibly interned, not for health reasons, but over her association with the opposition group led by former chess star Garry Kasparov, the United Civil Front. Her arrest stemmed from the publication of an article entitled "Madhouse," exposing the ghoulish practices of a Russian psychiatric hospital in the Murmansk edition of his organisation's newspaper, Dissenters' March.

She was interned in the very hospital she had written about. "We're ready to take this to court, although the medics have made it clear that we'll lose," she said.

Russian activists say her ordeal confirms what they've argued for years: punitive psychiatry did not end with the Soviet Union. Now, critics suggest, if someone has a grudge - a husband, a business partner, even a psychiatrist - it isn't difficult to get them confined to a padded room.

In recent years, Mrs Arap had been looking after the child of her daughter, Taisiya, in her home town of Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle. Problems first arose in 2003, when she uncovered corruption in her local housing association, as she reported in "Madhouse." She was then attacked in her building, mystery callers threatened to murder her, and finally she was warned by the FSB, the KGB's successor, to keep quiet. She didn't.

Taken to a mental ward, Mrs Arap noted that many of its occupants seemed perfectly sane. "I was surprised that among them were lots of normal people," she wrote in "Madhouse". "But how they [staff] communicated with them: They shouted, they beat them up, they put them on drips, after which people became like zombies, they raped them, carried them off in the night and returned them in the morning, tormented."

One woman was threatened with the removal of organs, Mrs Arap said. Children were told that if they didn't give massages to medics they'd receive electro-shock therapy.

Mrs Arap was freed, but on 5 July, she was restrained at a clinic after stopping for documentation needed to obtain a drivers' license. Her doctor asked if she had written "Madhouse," and when she confirmed, police escorted her to a Murmansk mental hospital.

Taisiya said that when she was first arrested, Mrs Arap was beaten, and went on a 5-day hunger strike in protest, consuming nothing but water and smoking cigarettes.

It was only on 18 July that a court sanctioned her hospitalisation; until then, she had been detained illegally. Mrs Arap was moved to a hospital near Apatity, 180 miles from Murmansk, "without her agreement or the agreement of her relatives," Taisiya said.

It was "a closed hospital from which people rarely return. ... No positive feelings arise in this hospital. It's a psychological hospital for the difficult, the dangerous, the abandoned."

Mrs Arap was eventually released when a commission, initiated by Russia's human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, said there was no reason for her to be hospitalised.

She is due in court today to protest her treatment, and the United Civil Front plans to prosecute everyone involved, although a representative admitted the group has little chance of winning.

"We were never told anything concrete about why she was locked up," Taisiya said. "The most frightening thing of all is that the law gives a lot of power to psychiatrists and doctors to do what they want."

The menticide of Jose Padilla

An insightful commentary from the Majikthise Weblog. We are interested in what this also says about the quality of men who would do such a thing. The destruction of a human mind seems to be part and parcel a consequence of the psychiatric package of techniques.

Democracy Now! has a fascinating interview with a psychiatrist who interviewed suspected terrorist Jose Padilla for over 22 hours in an attempt to determine whether he was fit to stand trial after more than 3 years of solitary confinement.

In 1951, psychiatrist Joost Meerloo coined the term "menticide" to describe the kind of systematic psychological violence that the Chinese inflicted upon American POWs during the Korean War. The basic techniques haven't changed much since then. Over the years, these tactics have been embraced by a variety of cults and coercive "treatment" programs in the United States and abroad.

Today, the US government insists that mind-killing is an essential part of their endless war on terrorism. For details, see Jane Mayer's excellent New Yorker piece, The Black Sites.

Dr. Angela Hagerty concluded that Padilla was not fit to stand trial. Amongst other things, she observed that the 36-year-old American was furious at his own lawyers for making the government's job harder:

Also he had developed, actually, a third thing. He had developed really a tremendous identification with the goals and interests of the government. I really considered a diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome. For example, at one point in the proceedings, his attorneys had, you know,done well at cross-examining an FBI agent, and instead of feeling happy about it like all the other defendants I’ve seen over the years, he was actually very angry with them. He was very angry that the civil proceedings were “unfair to the commander-in-chief,” quote/unquote. And in fact, one of the things that happened that disturbed me particularly was when he saw his mother. He wanted her to contact President Bush to help him, help him out of his dilemma. He expected that the government might help him, if he was “good,” quote/unquote. [Democracy Now!]

Talk about not being fit to participate in your own defense...

Padilla was charged with conspiring to murder people overseas and providing material support to terrorists abroad. The government publicly accused Padilla of participating in a "dirty bomb" plot, but that wasn't what they charged him with. After nearly four years of "enhanced" interrogation, they still didn't have enough evidence to lay charges in the bomb plot? What does that say about the effectiveness of their methods?

By destroying Padilla, the government cheated us all out of justice. If Padilla had gotten the speedy trial that he was entitled to as an American citizen, he might have been legitimately convicted. Instead, the government tortured an American citizen and undercut the legitimacy of their prosecution. 

Labelled mad for daring to criticise the Kremlin

From the Daily Telegraph

Naked and with her hands and feet bound to the corners of a metal bed covered by a rubber incontinence sheet, Larisa Arap eyed with quiet defiance the doctors who wanted to declare her mad.

It was a futile gesture. The men in white coats standing over her were bitter adversaries.

Enraged by the allegations that she had levelled against them, they also knew that, as an open Kremlin critic, the state would do little to help her.

A needle sank into her arm. Over the coming weeks, as the treatment took its effect, Mrs Arap would become everything the doctors declared her to be: her head lolled to one side, her tongue hung out of her mouth and her face went slack.

"When she was brought out she was covered in bruises," said Taisia, her daughter. "She couldn't stand, could hardly speak and was drifting in and out of consciousness."

The practice of "punitive psychiatry", perfected by Nikita Khrushchev in the aftermath of Stalin's Great Terror as a more palatable way of dealing with political dissidents, was once thought to have been buried with the Soviet Union.

But Mrs Arap's ordeal has raised fears among Russia's browbeaten human rights community that the Kremlin is preparing to incarcerate a new generation of dissidents in asylums.

Mrs Arap was by no means a high-profile critic of President Vladimir Putin. But in Murmansk, a drab city inside the Arctic Circle where she was seized by police, she had begun to be noticed.

At a rally in the city in June, she delivered as a member of the United Civil Front - the opposition party of Garry Kasparov, ex-chess champion - a powerful denunciation of Mr Putin's crackdown on dissenters.

Such unorthodox views are enough to get anyone labelled an eccentric in Russia these days. But the state psychiatrists holding her insist she has a history of mental instability, pointing out that she sought counselling for stress and insomnia in 2004.

Because she is forbidden from seeing anyone apart from her immediate family - who were also threatened with enforced treatment after they demanded visiting rights - it is impossible to judge Mrs Arap's state of mind.

Under Russian law, a patient can only be sectioned if they are a danger to society or to themselves. Colleagues say Mrs Arap is neither.

However, she was angry. Earlier this summer, she wrote a newspaper article that infuriated the medical establishment in Murmansk.

Detailing a pattern of systematic abuse at the clinic where she is being held, she alleged that children were subjected to electric shocks against their will.

She also wrote of several cases of sane individuals being held against their will at the behest of powerful opponents: a businesswoman sectioned by rivals intent on seizing her financial interests, a witness to a murder and a mother whose daughter was raped at a school where the well-connected headmaster wanted to avoid scandal.

"There are two reasons for what has happened to Larisa," said Yelena Vasilieva, Mr Kasparov's party chief in Murmansk.

"The doctors are concerned with the defence of their honour. Secondly they want to discredit the United Civil Front. They are using her as a political weapon in the struggle against the opposition."

Mrs Arap's allegations come as no surprise to those who have followed psychiatry in Russia in recent years.

In 2001, the law was quietly changed to remove the rights of sectioned patients to seek an independent assessment.

The Daily Telegraph has learnt of dozens of incidents that suggest that Russia's psychiatric system is rapidly becoming as unsavoury as it was in Soviet times.

Andrei Fedorovich was held in a clinic for 43 days last autumn after his neighbours, who had powerful connections in the Moscow police force, reported him as mad in an attempt to seize his apartment.

Alexei Shuralyov tells a similar story - although this time his antagonists came from the FSB, the feared domestic spy agency that employed his wife.

Such stories are common. But increasingly the same fate is befalling those who oppose the authorities in Russia's regions.

After fighting a lone battle to expose judicial, police and local government corruption in the city of Cheboksary, Albert Imendayev was hauled into an asylum the day before he was to register as a candidate in local elections in 2005.

In the same city the previous year, Igor Molyakov was sectioned after psychiatrists ruled (and a judge agreed) that his repeated letters detailing local corruption reflected an outlook so sombre it constituted a "mental disorder".

"Once again psychiatrists see stubbornness in an individual as a sign of psychosis," said Lyubov Vinogradova, the executive director of the Independent Psychiatrists' Association. "If a person goes to court against a state institution or writes letters of complaint he is treated as a social danger and is in danger of incarceration."

In a country where anyone with a history of mental deficiency is ostracised, the victims of abusive psychiatry must live with the stigma for the rest of their lives.

But until Mrs Arap's case, it was generally believed that "punitive psychiatry" was not meted out on the orders of the Kremlin itself.

With a presidential election due next March, when Mr Putin hopes to shoehorn a handpicked successor into the Kremlin, fears are now mounting that her ordeal has been a "test case" - the first of many to come.

"Everything is ready for a wide scale political abuse of psychiatry," said Mrs Vinogradova.

Criminals can use Psychiatry as a weapon

From the periodical Russia Today - a look at how psychiatry can get out of control.

Mentally ill or mentally healthy - it's up to a psychiatrist to determine, and a patient's life often depends on this decision. Almost half of all mental health patients in Russia are being mis-diagnosed, according to a human rights organisation.

Inna and her fourteen-year-old daughter Nastia say they were victims of a false diagnosis.

Inna couldn't sleep for several days because of stress she had experienced after a car accident. She says she took some medicine to help her fall asleep, and during the night her daughter drank the water with the medicine - by accident. The mother and daughter both got poisoned, and called an ambulance. Both woke up in psychiatric hospitals – Inna charged with attempted murder.

On the basis of a psychiatric examination, a court has now decided Inna needs to be put into a psychiatric clinic. The two are currently in hiding.

Valery has a different story. He is a 53-year-old engineer, and he has spent the last years of his life fighting for his apartment. He says criminals wanted it, so they decided to get rid of him by locking him up in a psychiatric ward. They found a psychiatrist who would help out by saying Valery was ill and needed to be put into a hospital. Additional testing later proved that Valery was quite healthy.

He is now trying to prove he was a crime victim. He wants those responsible punished. And his life's goal has become warning innocent citizens about these kinds of crimes.

The Civil Commission on Human Rights operating in Russia says, according to research, almost half of the patients who are told they have a psychiatric illness actually have a regular physical sickness, and don't need psychiatric help.

Mikhail Vinogradov - a prominent Russian criminologist and psychiatrist - says the reason for abuse in psychiatry is that doctors are human too: "Among them, there are very good doctors and there are bad doctors. But there are definitely less bad ones. And naturally, there are criminals among them, like in every social sphere - among priests, policemen, bureaucrats. They are all human," he says.

The expert says what happened to Inna was an attempt of suicide and murder.

"To simply fall asleep, you would take one or two of the pills that she took. The only reason you would take more, is to kill yourself. The doctors did the right thing by taking both Inna and her daughter to a clinic. The mother in this case was trying to kill herself and to take her daughter with her. This is an absolutely obvious case in psychiatric study. The only question is - was she acting under affect or is she psychologically ill?" doctor Vinogradov asks.

And he says getting someone's property by putting them in a psychiatric clinic nowadays happens very often.

"Valery's case is very typical. These stories take place often, when people want to get someone else's living space, there are sometimes fraudulent psychiatrists assisting in the crime," he says.

According to the psychiatrist's statistics, about 67% of Russia's population is either undergoing or needs some form of psychiatric treatment. Among these, 19% are chronically ill. Doctor Vinogradov says the statistics are similar in Europe.[...]

Psychiatrists set to use mental health law to detain terrorist suspects

Political psychiatry, the use of psychiatry for political ends, has taken another step forward with the impulse to use psychiatrist as an excuse to detain people as terrorists. As seen in this blog entry

Psychiatrists are set to increasingly use mental health law to detain terrorists suspects, prompting fears that psychiatry will be directly involved in the abuse of civil rights.

The government has set up a VIP “stalker” squad to identify and detain terrorists and other individuals who pose a threat to prominent people, such as the Prime Minister, the cabinet and the Royal Family.

The unit, staffed by psychiatrists as well as police, could have extra powers to detain suspects using mental health law.

Critics say a mental health bill going through parliament includes a wider definition of mental disorder. They fear it will mean people - including terrorist suspects - may be detained on grounds of their cultural, political or religious beliefs.

The new London-based unit, called the fixated threat assessment centre (FTAC) and set up last year, uses the police to identify suspects.

Liberty, the human rights organisation, said the unit represented a threat to civil liberties.

Its policy director, Gareth Crossman, told newspapers: “This blurs the line between medical decisions and police actions.

"If you are going to allow doctors to take people’s liberty away, they have to be independent. That credibility is undermined when the doctors are part of the same team as the police.”

In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said: “The fixated threat assessment centre is a joint initiative between the Metropolitan Police, Home Office and Department of Health. Its role is to assess, manage and reduce risks and threats from fixated individuals, against people in public life, particularly protected VIPs.”

The Mail on Sunday reported that FTAC's senior forensic psychiatrist is David James. He has made a study of attacks on British and European politicians by people diagnosed with pathological fixations.

Also on the staff is Robert Halsey, a consultant forensic clinical psychologist who specialises in risk assessment.

At least one terror suspect - allegedly linked to the 7/7 bomb plot and a suicide bombing in Israel - has already been held under the Mental Health Act.

The government has always argued its mental health bill is a suitable balance between patient rights and public safety.

But Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley told the Mail that classing someone as mentally ill on the grounds of their religious beliefs is "a very worrying scenario"

He said: "The Government is trying to bring in a wider definition of mental disorder and is resisting exclusions which ensure that people cannot be treated as mentally disordered on the grounds of their cultural, political or religious beliefs.

"When you hear they are also setting up something like this police unit, it raises questions about quite what their intentions are.

"The use of mental health powers of detention should be confined to the purposes of treatment. But the Government wants to be able to detain someone who is mentally disordered even when the treatment would have no benefit.

"Combined with the idea that someone could be classed as mentally ill on the grounds of their religious beliefs, it is a very worrying scenario."

Psychiatry as Politics

As seen Here

As the thesis of this blog states: psychiatry is politics.

I'd like to offer an idea for consideration.

The reason there's so much give and take about whether Cho was ill or not, and whether he was culpable or not, has to do with what psychiatry actually is: the pressure valve of society.

Our society does not have a good mechanism for dealing with poverty, frustration, and anger. I'm not judging it, I'm not a left wing nut, I'm simply stating a fact; ours is not a custodial society, and it does little to "take care of" (different than help) these people.

So it has psychiatry, it fosters psychiatry, and it creates a psychiatric model in which these SOCIAL ills can be contained.

The inner city mom who smokes daily marijuana to unwind, with three kids who are disruptive, chaotic in school, etc-- society has really nothing to offer her. But it can't let her fester, because eventually there will be a full scale revolution. So it funnels her and her kids and everyone else like her into psychiatry.

Whether she "actually" has "mental illness" or not is besides the point. Without the infrastructure of psychiatry, hers would be an exclusively social problem with no solution. But with the infrastructure of society, her problem is no longer a social problem, and no longer the purview of the government (or fellow man, etc)--it is a medical problem.

Consider that one of the fastest ways for this woman to get welfare-- and ultimately social security-- is for her to go through psychiatry.

So, too, the angry, the violent, the frustrated...

Hence, discussions about whether mental illness reduces culpability are red herrings. It's about reducing culpability, it's about reducing society's obligation to deal with it.

Society is basically saying this (I'll quote myself):

...if they're poor or unintelligent, we will never be able to alter their chaotic environment, increase their insight or improve their judgment. However, such massive societal failure can not be confronted head on; we must leave them with the illusion that behavior is not entirely under volitional control; that their circumstances are independent of their will; that their inability to progress, and our inability to help them isn't their (or our) fault; that all men are not created equal. Because without the buffer psychiatry offers, they will demand communism.