American Psychiatry: A Far Cry from German National Socialism

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The recent breakdown of a Southern California Christian who attempted to profit from the misery of African children gave some our students food for thought. One imagined him strapped to a gurney ranting against the forces of evil as a kind physician injected him with mind altering substances. Another pictured him in a padded room wearing a straitjacket blabbering on about Satan's plan to cheat him of his pile of gold as he gladly downed brain damaging pharmaceuticals. Although our students were not happy with Jason Russell's business plan, they completely sympathized with his mental distress.

When the topic of medical treatment of mentally deranged patients comes up, some people think of physicians such as Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. An association with German scientists of the 1930's who treated their victims as laboratory animals comes to mind only to the elite few with the inside skinny on how psychiatry actually operates in the US. Those effete elitists can be easily dismissed as a lunatic fringe who could not find their way around the cranium of a rhesus monkey. They have never severed the corpus callosum of a living victim and probed for differences between hemispheres, so what do they know?

American psychiatrists are not the same as their German counterparts because of at least one essential distinction. Unlike German National Socialist scientists, American psychiatrists obtain the permission of the victim's family before they administer destructive "treatment" in the interest of scientific inquiry. That makes it all okay. A psychiatrist in our network claimed that psychiatrists treat all people equally. One could interpret this as a claim that all psychiatrists conform to egalitarian principles. On the other hand, one could interpret this to imply that psychiatrists treat all of their patients like laboratory animals.

What are your hopes and wishes for Jason Russell? Do you hope that those nice physicians will help him to eliminate enough mental capacity that he can move forward in life as a Christian entrepreneur? Or, do you hope that he survives his hospitalization without an addiction to brain damaging pharmaceuticals?

Comments

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

People seem to ascribe some kind of mystical power to pharmaceuticals. I helped a neighbor to kick his pharmaceutical habit. When his shrink found that he could function just fine without his drugs, the shrink was astounded. It contradicted everything he knew about his own faith in the pill bottle.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

Well lets see, without modern pharmaceuticals I would have been dead about now, or maybe a few months off. And those months would have been filled with increasing levels of pain and double vision until I died. My father would have been dead 20 years ago. My best friend and her daughter(My godchild) would both be dead.

But to put it strictly back to Psychiatric drugs at least three of my best friends are utterly incapable of a normal life without them, and they have tried.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I know how it goes. A friend of mine tried to kick her habit but could not. She was too addicted to live without the bottle.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

Before drugs, multiple suicide attempts, alternating states of mania and depression. Tried all kinds of treatment because they like you thought drugs were bad. Ended up with lack of anything else going on them. Result, now live a normal life.


Flip errant nonsense about "She was too addicted to live without the bottle" is complete shit. Personally I am completely against over prescription of anti-depressants. I have tried them twice and taken myself off them because my depression was situational.

But I am not arrogant and foolish enough not to see that there are people who simply cannot function without them.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Nor am I arrogant and foolish enough to assume that someone with a situational breakdown, like Jason Russell, will not be victimized by his jailers.