Astrology and the Cycles of Time

Sample natal horoscopes, from “The Circle Book of Charts,” compiled by Stephen Erlewine, 1972

On Monday, November 11, the planet Mercury will pass in front of the sun, beginning at 7:35 AM EST and lasting five-and-a-half hours.  It will be visible during daylight hours throughout the Americas and seen as a small dot on the sun’s surface, with viewing through solar-filtered telescopes and binoculars recommended.*

Meanwhile, the October 28, 2019 issue of The New Yorker magazine includes an article about the resurgence of interest in astrology.  Titled “Starstruck:  Why we’re crazy for astrology,” by Christine Smallwood, the article claims that interest in this ancient discipline petered out after the 1970s but has made a comeback in recent years, especially among millennials. The current trend employs all the panache of modern technology, from pod-casts to computer apps and on-line chat rooms.  There are on-line classes.  There are zodiac-themed products like clothes and lingerie.  It has become a booming business, complete with all the glitz of modern commercialization.

The astrologers interviewed in the article highlight astrology’s ability to describe character in non-judgmental terms.  They downplay predictions, and emphasize timing.  In short, it appears that this new appreciation reaches a deeper level than I remember from the 1970s and 1980s.

Ephemeris tables of planetary positions for November and December, 2019, “The American Ephemeris for the 21st Century,” Neil F. Michelsen, 1992

I have studied astrology for over 35 years, and still keep an ephemeris (a table of planetary movements) beside my reading chair.  I still have the tape recording from my introductory horoscope reading.  I was so impressed with the astrologer’s ability to “see my soul,” that I bought the classic beginner’s guide, Isabel Hickey’s Astrology: a Cosmic Science, that day.  For several years, I was possibly obsessed and collected two full notebooks of horoscopes on everyone I met.  I joined the American Federation of Astrologers, attended conferences, hobnobbed with other astrologers, and shared the language, which sounds like a secret code to the uninitiated.

I soon learned to downplay my interest, and finally, not to mention it, because people were simply not interested, scornful, or even threatened.  But I found the astrological approach consistently provides a comprehensive framework for understanding human character.  My natal chart highlighted potentials that soon prompted me to take the science pre-requisites to enter, then attend, medical school.  I followed up with a psychiatry residency but was astonished to learn that astrology far surpassed psychiatry in its grasp of the totality of the human psyche.

Fundamentally, psychiatry—and possibly all Western medicine—focuses only on the negative, on abnormalities, disorders, or illnesses.  Astrology offers balance.

There are many ideas about whether, why, or how astrology works.  After all these years, I’m still skeptical, even though it has greatly contributed to my philosophy of life.  In the early days, I felt in touch with the ages, knowing I was studying a system that in one form or another has evolved over 6000 years (at least), in every known culture.  It corresponds to the “archetypes” that Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described.  Jung himself was a student of astrology and alchemy, for their spiritual aspects.

Fundamentally, it is based on geometry and is the parent of astronomy.  Long before we had religions or governments, we had the sun, moon, and stars.  Early man looked to the heavenly bodies for guidance and learned to predict the coming of the seasons by the gradual lengthening and shortening of days.  The moon’s cycles, too, became associated with certain kinds of earthly events.  Over time, and over cultures, the visible planets (“planet” means “wanderer”) were noted to move against a background of stars that formed patterns of constellations in a ring around the earth.  In Western astrology, some of these patterns became the twelve constellations of the zodiac.

It’s important to note that a horoscope is completely impersonal in that it is a symbolic map of of the skies as seen at a specific moment in a specific place.  That’s why an astrologer can cast a horoscope for anything, such as the time a question is asked (horary astrology), the signing of a contract, or the birth of a nation.  The natal horoscope, then, pinpoints a time and place, and an individual’s birth is an event that occurs then and there.  The individual then embodies all the potential of the moment.  As the child grows, the moment becomes personified through the individual’s experiences, choices, and reactions.

Given that we are, so far, earthbound beings, it’s understandable that astrology would take a geocentric perspective.  At birth, the individual is stamped with the cosmic pattern of that time and place.  I like to think in terms of electromagnetic frequencies, with each planet (as well as the sun and moon) having its own electromagnetic character.  As they move through time in their various cycles, and with respect to each other, the patterns change, as with a kaleidoscope, and either influence or reflect the meaning behind happenings in an individual’s life.

To understand the concept behind astrology, it’s convenient to think of a natal horoscope as a coded depiction of that person’s life drama.  The individual is the star of her own play.  In Western astrology, the planets–with the personalities of the Roman gods for which they are named–are the supporting actors; the signs are the filters or lights that they operate through; and the houses the props and stage.

As the sun, moon, and planets continue their cycles through a person’s life, they make angles (called “aspects”) to their natal positions, with each moving at its own pace.

Common questions about astrology have to do with whether it is presumed to “control” people’s lives.  My answer is a different question.  “Does the clock control your life?”  No, but it makes sense to go to the grocery store when it is open, if you want to buy food.

“Shouldn’t a life be timed from the moment of conception?” is another common question.  I respond that until birth, by whatever means, an infant is shielded from external cosmic influences by its mother’s protective vibrational field.

I once asked a fellow astrologer what she valued most about the study of astrology.  “Tolerance,” she said.  I had reached the same understanding on my own, and I still find that to be the case.  There are no “good” or “bad” moments, and each moment is unique in its opportunities and challenges.  Considering the infinite possibilities inherent under the cosmic clock that astrology reveals, the potential to deepen and bring that moment to fruition in a “meaningful” life becomes a horoscope’s greatest gift and challenge.

*For the astrologically literate, on November 11, Mercury will be retrograde and conjunct the sun at 18-19 degrees of Scorpio.  This conjunction will square my natal Mercury in Leo from 2^nd to 9^th houses, perhaps inspiring this blog post.**

**Added November 13, 2019:  Haha.  The joke’s on me.  I was doing something else when I suddenly realized the conjunction noted above occurred in Scorpio, not Sagittarius, thus squaring my natal Mercury in Leo and triggering my grand square in fixed signs.  The full moon in Taurus on the next day (November 12) was involved, too, with the moon conjunct my natal Jupiter at 19 degrees Taurus that day.   This is an embarrassing error, but is consistent with other features of my horoscope that indicate public embarrassment.  It challenges me to admit error, and apologize to anyone I might have led astray.

 

“Us” vs. “Them”

The simple concerns of life are beneath the notice of the detached overlords of “the ruling class,” who look to stock market indicators to determine economic “health.”  In their marketing campaign for the “Rah Rah Money Talks” agenda, they aggressively promote money as the solution for all evils, including (presumably) rooster sinus infections.  There’s probably a patented pill for it.

Pardon my sarcasm, or is it the natural consequence of following this irrational chain of made-for-television reasoning to its obvious (but not logical) conclusions?

It’s popular lately to blame the “them”s like “oligarchs” and “white supremacists” for all society’s ills.  The “us,” meaning everybody except me—who exists in my own “them” dimension—still are willing to play by the oligarchs’ rules of government and the stock market, and look to the government to impose ever more rules to control everybody under the pretext of controlling the other “them”s like the “white supremacists.”

I wonder if the “white supremacists”–who are identified by their fondness for military assault weapons–are derived from the oligarchical, rule-bound, framework.  This human drama must contain counter-forces, to prop up the “us” vs. “them” mass mentality.

The above is a convoluted way of suggesting that the system itself makes the counter-system necessary.  It strikes me that historically, the world’s most despotic rulers had the backing of a loyal military.  The world’s richest people did not fight the wars themselves, but profited mightily from them.   Who benefits from US wars—or any war or military intervention—now?  Certainly the ravages of war are visited on those on whose turf the battles are waged, the civilians, their families and the fighters and families, too.  The spoilers may rest with their ill-gotten gains but live in fear of the “them”s who have not been eliminated or disempowered and are looking for revenge.

That’s why despots are deservedly paranoid and depend on the loyalty of a strong military and purchased friendship.  They need presumed adversaries like mass murderers and drug lords to justify their ever tighter grip on the society that will not be completely controlled by rules.

If I went into psychiatry to set people free, I have been disappointed, in the short term.  I have seen close up how frightened individuals are of the implications of freedom, which begins with freedom of thought.  To define “freedom” of thought possibly begins with saying what it is not.  It is not merely rebellion, reaction to the status quo, to conventional beliefs or rules.  It does start with conscious examination of those conventions and determining whether they serve the greater whole.

What’s the “greater whole”?  For me that includes the “us” and the “them,” as well as the hitherto unacknowledged non-human life forms on the planet.  To recognize we are all counterparts enmeshed in this drama we call life means having the mental flexibility to imagine oneself in the place of the “them”s and trying to understand what motivates their activity.  There’s obviously a place for the oligarchs and the mass shooters, or they wouldn’t exist.  If we don’t like it, we need to free our thought from conventional beliefs and search for new ways to reform.  Delegated power is fickle and must be recognized as such.  When you delegate power, you will always be disappointed.

Freedom of thought means claiming responsibility for it but also having tolerance for others’ thought, even encouraging it, because it provides a larger area of understanding and perspective.  The push for homogeneity, unity, conformity—what is considered “normal” and socially acceptable—is ultimately deadening, like the mechanization of robots, which act according to pre-set agendas.

Nature does not follow man’s dictates, as we are learning.  Rather than “conquer” nature, as Francis Bacon and subsequent mechanists desired, we have the ability—but so far not the inspiration—to submit to nature’s desire to teach us freedom within the context of our environment.

 

 

Laws Cause Crime

The government thrives on crisis.  If it doesn’t have one, it will create one, in order to justify wasting more money and grabbing more power.  The “opioid crisis” is a case in point.  To suggest this is a manufactured crisis invites challenge, because I am a lone voice against a deluge of government, media, institutional, industry, and public claimants who insist the “crisis” is real and in need of drastic counter-crisis interventions.

As I recently trudged the forty hours of propaganda training necessary to renew my medical license, I noted a new requirement by the state of Georgia to undergo three hours of training in opioids.  In studying the materials, I also learned about Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs), which are “state-operated databases that collect data on dispensed medications.  They periodically send reports to law enforcement, regulators, and licensing agencies, as part of an effort to control diversion of medication by prescribers, pharmacies, and organized criminals.”

Let’s be clear, here.  The histrionic references to the “opioid epidemic,” this “public health emergency,” and its fatalities usually involve heroin, which is increasingly adulterated with fentanyl.  Heroin is absolutely illegal in the US, so no doctor can prescribe it.  Fentanyl is used in surgery and exists as a patch, and is not injectable.  Most fentanyl is obtained illegally, and some sources say it is coming from China.

So the database to track prescribers and users of controlled substances sounds more like a government control strategy than any genuine attempt to protect users from overdoses.

Meanwhile, as I stewed over the “gotcha game” of putting doctors in the firing line of this artificial crisis—damned if you do and damned if you don’t–I received a notice requiring me to show up in court for federal jury duty.  Unlike jury duty for local court (which I did a month ago), there is a dress code for the feds.  Women must wear a dress or pants suit.  So I hauled out my one dress—a fall dress—and washed most of the musty smell out of it.  Already I was plotting ways to get myself disqualified without going to jail.

I have long protested the almost rabid encroachment of the federal government on individuals, most vividly embodied in drug laws.  I retired over the virtual mandate to prescribe, with psychiatrists marginalized into “medication managers,” and psychotherapy turfed to less expensive psychologists and social workers.

Meanwhile, drug laws as part of the patriarchal government control and revenue machine has a long history.

Wars have been fought over opiates.   Although their medicinal powers have been known for at least 6000 years, in the Middle East, Roman, and Greek civilizations, and Asia, the practice of smoking opium was brought to China in the 1600s by European traders.  By 1729, there was so much addiction that China outlawed it because it made opium smokers unfit for work or the military.  However, the British used slaves in India to grow the opium poppy and to smuggle the drug into China.  Presumably, the Chinese were willing to buy the opium with gold, and gold was leaving the country.  This led to the Opium Wars, which the British won, and through the Treaty of Nanjing and subsequent ones, forced China open to trade with the Western World.

My Goodman and Gillman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics claims that “opioids have been the mainstay of pain treatment for thousands of years, and remain so today.” Opiates and opioids are highly addictive, and tolerance to their euphoric effects builds faster than to physical effects, such as respiratory depression.  This can lead to fatal overdoses, as the user takes more and more drug to reach euphoric levels.  When combined with other drugs that depress the respiratory center, like benzodiazepines (such as Valium, Ativan, or Xanax), or alcohol, the risk for fatal overdose is magnified.

The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 put the federal government in control of every aspect of the opiate and coca supply-and-distribution chain, as well as insuring taxing power over them.  There are strong arguments that it was a racial discrimination tool.  It was claimed that cocaine was improving Southern blacks’ gun marksmanship and causing them to rape white women.  Chinese immigrants were seducing white women with opium.  Later, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was used to control the Mexican immigrants who had used marijuana as part of their culture for centuries.  US citizens, who had used “cannabis” in their tonics, did not know it was the same substance as the Mexicans’ “marihuana.”

Fast forward to 1970, when the Controlled Substances Act (Richard Nixon), instituted a schedule for approved substances.  Both heroin and marijuana were assigned to Schedule I status: no medical benefit and absolutely illegal.

The Drug Enforcement Administration was created as a sub-agency under the Department of Justice on July 1, 1973 to enforce the Controlled Substances Act, among other things.

The “War on Drugs,” begun by President Nixon in 1971, was vigorously pursued by President Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981.  For-profit prisons began emerging after 1980 to accommodate the massive incarcerations that resulted.  Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 dramatically increased the number of incarcerations and length of sentences for drug-related convictions.  As of 2008, 90.7 percent of federal prisoners were incarcerated for non-violent offenses.  At present, the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, 724/100,000 people, compared with Russia in second place, with 581/100,000 doing time in prisons, jails, on probation or parole.  The US has 25% of the entire world’s incarcerated population, with black men comprising almost half.

Laws cause crime, according to me, and drug laws are especially guilty of creating the criminal element that is filling the prisons.  So last week, when the federal judge read the indictments against the young, black, male defendant, who was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana, I knew I could not be impartial.  The judge listed all the members of the federal prosecution team, the local narcotics squad, and the members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation team who had participated in this gang bang (my take) on this one guy and his lone, white, female attorney.  When the judge asked if anyone had any issues with the federal government, my hand shot up.

I was handed the microphone, stated my name, and said I retired over drug laws.  The judge asked if I could consider the facts of the case as they applied to the laws.  I said the laws themselves are criminal, and, to my mind, the federal government is on trial, here.  It is guilty of practicing medicine, and the defendant is innocent. (That’s how I remember it, anyway.)

“At least she’s honest,” the judge said.  At that point all the lawyers agreed that I would not be a good juror.  I was dismissed and did not get arrested on the way out.

Now, we have the ongoing “opioid crisis,” a new twist on an old theme, once again designed to control through fiat and insider collusion, people’s rights to self-governance.  The institutional powers-that-be have ganged up to push misleading propaganda on the public.  First, the officially prescribed “cure” for this crisis is more money, and more government and institutional control, specifically for “medication-assisted treatment.”

The misrepresentation in reporting shows in its superficiality, with slants calculated to confuse the facts.  First, in reporting numbers of fatal overdoses, heroin is included with other opioids, including prescription pain medications.  Heroin exists in its own category, because no doctor can prescribe it, so there is no legal way to obtain it.  Doctors are being targeted for over-prescribing opioid pain killers, so there’s the push to put more controls on prescribing MDs.

Another flaw in the reported statistics is that “overdoses” are not broken down to determine how many drugs may have contributed to the death.  Accidental overdoses of all medications are increasing, primarily because people are taking too many different medications—not all psychotropics– with cumulative side effects, including respiratory depression.

“Medication-assisted treatment,” is—no matter what they claim—substituting one pill for another, and yet another plank in the pill-pushing platform of the “health-care industry.”  The three drugs approved for treating “opioid use disorder” by the FDA include methadone (an opioid agonist) and buprenorphine (an opioid agonist-antagonist) —both opioids themselves—and naltrexone (an opioid antagonist). Now, “providers” need special licenses and special training to prescribe buprenorphine.

The psychiatric establishment is pushing for more funding for more “addiction specialists” and more legislation to curb this dangerous trend.    FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is pushing for more funding for more treatment and insurance coverage.  They brag about how all the professional and government organizations have joined in “partnership” with drug companies to find ever more effective strategies for treatment.

Never mind that an internet search leads to addicts who extol the highs they experience from buprenorphine.  Addicts are happy with methadone, too, and can fairly easily switch dependencies, especially if they add other drugs.  The high from buprenorphine isn’t as good as with heroin, they claim, but it can be enhanced with benzos like Valium.  The withdrawal is easier than with heroin, but it lasts longer.  Nausea and vomiting are problems.

Never mind that most substance abuse treatment is notoriously ineffective, with most studies following patients for a year or less.  The mainstay of treatment since 1935 has been the non-pharmacological approach of Alcoholics Anonymous and its spin-offs, like Narcotics Anonymous (NA) and Cocaine Anonymous (CA).

So where’s the crisis? It is claimed Prohibition gave rise to organized crime, because the best way to raise the price of anything is to put controls on it.  Do laws cause crime?  With all the lawyers practicing medicine in Congress and in the Supreme Court, I have to wonder if they do.

 

 

 

 

Who’s Crazy Now?

 

“The Scream,” Edvard Munch

 

The following story has been rejected by both Analog and Asimov’s science fiction and fantasy magazines, so I’ve reverted to my most reliable publisher, myself, to give a wider audience a chance to reject it, too.  I think it’s amusing and somewhat reflective of my philosophy of life, such as it is.  If there is a target of the satire, it would be The System as it exists today, one that creates mental illness by feeding it through an interconnected web of perverse incentives.

 

 

I am a visitor from a different future.  They label me schizophrenic, not the paranoid type.  My official diagnosis in 21^st century mythology, is “disorganized schizophrenia.”  In the past, this form was known as “hebephrenic,” from the Greek, meaning “youthful mind.”  In real life, it means I laugh a lot, for no apparent reason.

I have been hospitalized, this time, because I went to the emergency room on a cold rainy night and told them I wanted to kill myself.  Everyone in the ER knows me.  They ask my name anyway.  This time I say “Gunga Din.”

They write “Charlie Appleton” on their clipboards.  If they already know, why do they ask?  I play along.  I practice my postures in the hall. The ballerina pose.  The dog pose.  The boxer pose.  It makes them smile.  I talk back to my voices and laugh at their jokes.

When I laugh too loudly, they usually give me a shot of haloperidol, an anti-psychotic.  This makes my body slow but my feet restless, so I dance to music played by my friends in our shared future, music only I can hear.

If I’m lucky, they give me another shot, this time of lorazepam, a benzodiazepine and addictive relaxant, but on days Nurse Bully Bozo (not his real name) works, he substitutes diphenhydramine, a sinus and allergy medicine, for the lorazepam.  He gives himself the feel-good shot in the medical supply room.

I know this because I see it in his aura.  Where I come from, we all read auras, only we call these “energy fields.”  They are as visible to everyone as the clothes they wear. It’s impossible to keep a secret, so no one tries.  We could see through clothes, too, if we wanted, but nobody bothers. The clothes are more attractive than the flesh.

I’ve attempted to explain all this to the hospital staff, but there are no words in any Earth speech to describe unimaginable concepts, like alternate futures.  They write on their clipboards that I’m “delusional.”  It helps them sleep better at night.

When I threatened to tell Nurse Bully Bozo’s supervisor that he was giving himself the feel-good stuff, he hit me, then told everyone I’d run into a door.  I tried to tell them the gash on my temple came from his ring, but no one believed me. He has an evil-looking ring with spikes on it, but he hid it after the incident.  When I started screaming that the ring was in his pocket, they strapped me to a table for a full day to keep me safe.

I’ve quit telling people I see their secrets.  I merely laugh when the psychiatrist’s deceased mother carps at him during his interviews with me.  She is too, too funny.  She wanted him to be a surgeon, instead of a psychiatrist. She nags him and gives him no peace. “Psychiatrists aren’t real doctors,” she says.  “I knew you would never amount to anything.  Just like your good-for-nothing father.”

I almost feel sorry for him, having a mother like that.  No wonder he became a psychiatrist.  The more she harasses him, the angrier he gets.  His face gets red, his jaw sets, his knuckles holding his pen turn white, and his hand begins to quiver.  I know he can hear her, but he pretends otherwise.  I’m supposed to be the crazy one, in this past Earth I’m visiting.

“Where did I go wrong?” Dr. Gunn’s mama moans, winking at me.  I try hard not to laugh–he thinks I’m laughing at him and ups the dose of my medications.

“Do you still feel like killing yourself?” he asks.

“I’m already dead,” I reply, and laugh again.  Now his deceased father has joined his mother in his energy field, and they are arguing.  They are blaming each other for the fact that their son is a loser.  “He wouldn’t be an alcoholic if you weren’t,” his mother says.

“He might have a family by now if you hadn’t soured him on women.”

They are bickering so much that I have a hard time hearing his next question.

“Do you hear voices?”  Dr. Gunn asks.

“Everyone hears voices,” I say.  “Voices, choices, they make noises,” I chant, trying to drown out Dr. Gunn’s parents.  “I hear your voice right now.”  I dare not tell him what else I’m hearing.  His mother is mad with him because he blew his inheritance on a floozy, who ran off with his best friend.  His father holds a grudge for the time Dr. Gunn had him arrested for slugging his mother.

I hate seeing secrets nobody else sees.  If they only knew what a burden it is, to carry all that baggage.  At least Dr. Gunn is trying.  He understands how widespread these secrets are.  He knows his upbringing was pretty normal, in this past Earth’s time.

“Please, stop,” I tell his parents.  I cover my ears.  Dr. Gunn thinks these are my voices.  He’s so used to hearing his parents bicker that he doesn’t even notice anymore.  It runs in the background, like machine noise, but it drives him to drink after work.

“Stop what?” the doctor asks me.

I try to distract Dr. Gunn from his parents’ argument.  When he’s angry or hung over, he takes it out on me, the staff, and whoever is closest.  At the moment, I’m the closest, and I’ve already had enough feel-bad drugs to knock me bonkers.

“Stop de wop de boppedy bop,” I say, getting up, twirling and chanting.  Dr. Gunn’s parents stop yelling at each other and watch me.  They start to smile, so I whirl faster, then invite his mother to dance with me.  When I slip up and call her by name, Dr. G freaks out and calls security.  They haul me to a padded cell, my favorite place in the hospital.  They watch through a thick, plexi-glass window as my movements slow, and I fall down.  I drift off into my alternate future, where my friends laugh and applaud.

We gather around the instrument panel that monitors my past Earth body and discuss the effects of feel-bad psych meds on it.  We analyze the past Earth energy field and how it affects the hospital staff.  We pass the Spirits around and congratulate each other on having made the right choice in the Earth-split.

My best buddy, Henry, winces as he scrutinizes the scanning monitor and looks admiringly at me.

“They sure walloped you this time,” Henry says.

“This assignment is harder than you let on,” I reply.  “Those people are crazy.”

“That’s why you’re there.  They are suicidal, determined to annihilate the Earth and everything on it, to prove their prophets right.”

“I know, I know.  I’m supposed to prepare them for the coming Earth-split, when probable futures split off like sparks from a cherry bomb.  Different people ride into different futures, depending on their beliefs.”

“They believe in evil,” says Henry.  “At least some of them do.”

“So do I, after what Nurse Bully Bozo did to me.”

“It didn’t hurt.  You have evolved beyond pain,”

At the moment, Henry is beginning to look like Dr. Gunn, only uglier.  He sees my thought and smiles.

“You don’t feel my pain,” I reply, almost smiling, but not quite.  I have a slight crush on one of the other nurses, Nurse Bleeding Heart (not her real name).  She claims to feel my pain.  Her breasts graze my arm as she changes the bandages on my temple.  The cut, which required three stitches, isn’t healing as quickly as they want.  I gouge at the stitches when I get the chance, claiming they are worms eating through my brain.  No one has noticed I only do that on Nurse Bleeding Heart’s shift.

“I don’t feel your pleasure, either, Lover Boy,” Henry says.  “So quit whining and pass the Spirits.”  I give up the bottle, reluctantly.  It’s a great antidote for the anti-psychotic.  It allows me to communicate with my future home and future friends when I’m operating in the Earth past before the split.

We turn away from the instrument panel and sit down to a lively dinner.  I eat like I’m starving, because I am.  That past Earth food is more poisonous than the drugs, so I’ve been refusing it.  White bread.  Soda pop.  Baloney.  Limp lettuce.  Bottled dressing.  Ugh.  We discuss my work assignment for the next day.  Rather, the others talk while I eat.

In the future Earth I inhabit—when I’m not on assignment to the past—everything is free, and money doesn’t exist.  People work because they like it.  They gravitate to areas of special interest or ability naturally and slip into their niches, like so many jigsaw pieces in a puzzle.  Each is unique but integral to the whole.  There is no competition and no overlap.

My future friends voted unanimously to place me in this assignment.  I was the most evolved, they said.  I was normal enough to pass for crazy.  If I couldn’t bring the alternate future to the past, no one could.  The integrity of the Earth split depended on me.

I look suspiciously at them.  I decide they tricked me, set me up, and are having a whale of a time at my expense.  Henry sees my thought and grins.

“You are the most evolved, you know,” he says now.  “I couldn’t do what you’re doing.”

“I agree.  You’re not smart enough to play dumb.”  I know Henry has doubts about his intelligence, but I’m lonely on this assignment.

“I could use some help,” I say now.  Henry passes the Spirits back to me.  I take the bottle.

“Thanks for the uplifting Spirits,” I say, “but I’m talking about companionship.  When I’m strapped down, or in a strait jacket, I have to do therapy on myself.  ‘It really is them,’ I say.  ‘It really is them.’”

“We know,” Henry replies.  “We hear you.  We’re there for you, just not physically.”

“Don’t I know it.”  By now, the past body is waking up and I know time is short.  I must return soon, lest they decide I’m catatonic and use shock therapy to jolt me into consciousness.

“You nag all day long, all of you at the same time.  It’s enough to drive a past person crazy.  There’s so much static in my brain I’m surprised other people don’t hear it.

“They do hear it, but they pretend not to.  You push the envelope on crazy, so that they feel normal.”

I look skeptical, so Henry continues.  “We’re all very grateful to you, you know.  If you weren’t there then, we wouldn’t be here now.”

 

 

Autism and Measles

Folk art, Telluride, Colorado, 2003

I read a little about Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in the March, 2019 issue of Psychiatric Annals.  The prevalence has risen dramatically in the last decade, now at one in fifty-nine children.  However, it’s not clear how these statistics were obtained.  Broadened diagnostic criteria, diagnosis by hearsay, and other factors may be involved.

Autism used to be lumped with “childhood schizophrenia” but no longer is.  It lacks the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia but has features of social withdrawal, repetitive behavior, communication and socialization problems, and resistance to change.  The article had some history about how the diagnosis came to be and the idea that “mother blame” became popular in the 1950s and 1960s.  I thought that wasn’t fair, because if close others contribute to the problem, the whole family dynamic should be considered as well as the larger role of society.

I also wondered about the cultural expectation for children to conform to socialization models dictated by the schools.  Anyone who doesn’t fit the excessively structured militaristic regimentation of grades, classes, sitting at desks, and listening for hours of every day, is considered abnormal, autistic, hyperactive, or given other labels applied to those who fall outside the bell curve.

Schizophrenics I’ve encountered have trouble dealing with society’s hypocrisy, and I wonder if autistic children retreat inward to escape a world that makes no sense.

Meanwhile, I caught part of an interview on NPR about the measles outbreak, which let me know a judge has blocked the Rockland County, New York ban on un-vaccinated children entering public places.  This “public health emergency” consists of hundreds of cases–465 in 19 states as of April 4, says the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)–but not one death or any real complications.  The CDC spokesperson on the radio informed us that before the MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccine was developed, millions of people got measles, and there were hundreds of deaths.  She mentioned complications like meningitis.  Further research revealed the Rockland County outbreak started with a traveler returning from Israel, which is also experiencing a spate of measles. The CDC says outbreaks in the US are primarily among un-vaccinated  people in orthodox Jewish communities.

I was glad that New York state Judge Rolf Thorsen postponed the ban—which I consider a gigantic government power grab to force medical treatment on people—at least until a hearing on April 19.  Even the mentally ill have more rights to refuse medications than parents of children in today’s drug-crazed world.

Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has issued “an emergency health order necessary to curtail the large measles outbreak in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community” of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, according to the New York Times. Mayor de Blasio has targeted those living in several zip codes for vaccinations and threatens a $1000 fine for non-compliance. This has generated a heated backlash, in advance of a lawsuit, with an affidavit circulating to the effect that the mandate is in “clear violation of the Nuremburg Code which forbids forcing medical procedures on anyone without their fully informed consent.”

Government officials and the CDC lament the “misinformation” being spread by the anti-vaxers, who are “falsely warning that [vaccines] cause autism and lead to other health problems,” says the New York Times.  Now, “City officials say countering the anti-vaccine movement is a priority.”

The Psychiatric Annals report discounted the link between MMR and ASD in one sentence.  That had been a hypothesis of Bernard Rimland, a psychologist who founded the Autism Society of America in 1965, two years after the MMR vaccine was introduced.  (The CDC says on its website that thimerosal, the mercury-containing agent implicated in the claims of autism, was removed from all childhood vaccinations in 2001, and that the flu vaccine may or may not contain it.)

What they don’t say is that a case of the measles confers lifelong immunity.  Nor do they say that some doctors claim even vaccinated people can be carriers of the disease, or that vaccinations can confuse the body such that it becomes hypersensitive or allergic to a variety of usually innocuous substances.

Why do I care?  My psychiatric confreres are wimps hypnotized by their own propaganda.  Psychiatric Annals laments physician burnout and the loss of doctors from an “economy” that turns on the doctor’s signature.  This can be alleviated, they say, by a CWO, a wellness officer, who monitors physician burnout, and by better access and reduced stigma for seeking mental help.  And we should make electronic medical records more efficient, with doctors involved in design of software.

I wrote all over that article.  As one of the burned out physicians who preferred to retire and maybe starve than be beat to death by a psychotic system, I feel especially qualified to diagnose the health scare/snare racket as “suicidal, homicidal, psychotic, and out of emotional control.”  Doctor burnout is also a public health emergency.  We are losing prescription-writing machines faster than we can replace them, and everyone who has a “right” to health care has to pay through the nose for that right.  If they are broke or broken, Congress and federal/state/local bureaucracy, our “medical providers” of first and last resort, will step in and make sure the approved insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, bureaucracies, lawyers, government lobbyists and contractors, as well as universities, get paid to make sure everyone’s rights are protected from everyone else’s rights.  With Congress and the mayor of New York practicing medicine, who needs doctors?

If You’re Crazy, You’re Normal

I read some Psychiatric News.  It is all “Rah, rah, psychiatry,” bragging about the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) affiliations with universities, the government, and even the UN.  Psychiatrists are “reaching out” to hitherto unidentified depressed women in Appalachia by using barely trained high school grads to help bring these women into treatment.  Psychiatry (the APA) is congratulating itself for recognizing the link between poverty, lack of education, and other factors everyone recognizes—as well as stigma—to normalize mental illness by diagnosing everyone.

Meanwhile, I heard a snippet in the car, on NPR, in which they were questioning the belief that genius and insanity go hand in hand.  Their conclusion was you don’t have to be crazy to be smart, but 47% of Americans have some kind of mental disorder at some point in their lives.

It occurs to me the definitions of mental disorders are so vague that no one—even and maybe especially psychiatrists—knows what they are talking about.  For instance, President Trump has been diagnosed by the media and public opinion as a narcissist, but what is a narcissist?  Is that a character definition or merely a trait, present in greater or lesser degree in all of us?

In modern parlance and for insurance purposes, the psychiatric diagnosis has come to define the person, assuming a significance far beyond its intrinsic validity.  Psychiatric diagnosis is no better or worse than any label, but it has the sociological power of judgment pronounced by the priests of the “health care industry,” the scientific voo-doo masters of potions and incantations empowered to deliver—not relief—but diagnosis and treatment.  This promises without promising and hints that failure to feel relief is the fault of the recipient, and by extension, the society that creates poverty and ignorance.

That psychiatry is aligning itself with other institutions, rather than questioning the institutional contributors to poverty and lack of education, seems misguided.

The wave of public consciousness seems to follow the institutional lead, while doubting its sincerity.  Views from outside the mental health professions, on the mental health professions, seem cynical but grudgingly accepting that there may be special knowledge perceived only by a select few.

It appears Freud has been dismissed by the public and by the psychiatric establishment, yet I admire Freud’s insights and how he described tendencies of human nature, such as projection, transference, and their counter-balances, like projective identification and counter-transference. Transitional objects, which today has relevance with regard to medications.  Freud’s stages of psychosexual development have utility, even now, even if they have not been formally incorporated in to the official DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).  Masochism and sadism.  Oral and anal fixations.

Psychiatry stands on Freud’s shoulders and kicks at his head.  Where is the interest in dreams?  Carl Jung claimed he split with Freud over the spiritual element in human nature, and more specifically, over psychic phenomena.

I believe that to recognize only material reality as valid is the claim and error of science as we know and understand it.  Still, astrophysics is largely speculative and unprovable, except in indirect or limited sways.  What do particle accelerators show about the nature of the universe?  What relevance does that have to life?

 

Masochists, Martyrs, and Victims

I’ve been going through old files of articles and clippings, trying to simplify my life.  While younger people talk about productivity and greed, I look at the yellowed and dusty results of having produced and saved too much that has nowhere to go, except the trash.  The exercise is gratifying and humbling, because I used to know and care about many more things than I do now.  There are remnants of lost causes, one of which was my career.

I re-read ‘The Masochistic Personality,” by Stuart S. Asch, a psychiatrist who claims a difference between the sexual masochist and the personality type.  The former gets his kicks by being dominated and abused by a certain type of person.  The personality type is not specifically sexual but courts disappointment or humiliation.  The term is derived from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19^th century Austrian novelist who wrote about sexual gratification from self-inflicted pain.  Some psychiatrists believe self-mutilation is also one of the traits.

The article focuses on the personality type, which has been dropped from the official list of psychiatric diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), although the term retains historical and descriptive usefulness.  Asch says masochists desperately seek approval and love.  The masochist is strongly self-critical, having introjected an abusing authority figure who approves of self-punishment for forbidden sexual or aggressive thoughts or behavior.  Masochists will abase themselves repeatedly or in ever more humiliating gestures to obtain the approval or extract guilt from the unloving, rejecting love object.  They tend to blame fate for their repeated failures.

Asch mentions animals, who apparently develop more intense bonds to an adult that inflicts pain in early life.  Indeed, in human beings, there seems to be a pattern of stronger attachment to an abusing parent.  Genetic theories have contributed.

Asch doesn’t discuss sadism, with that term ascribed to the Marquis de Sade, who wrote in the 18^th century about people who experienced sexual pleasure by inflicting pain on others.  Sigmund Freud attributed this to fear of castration, which leads the sadist to act out his fear on others.  In my view, masochists and sadists need each other, and each carries traits of the other, like two sides of a coin.  The metal that binds them together is blame.

The coin of blame buys religions, lawyers, governments, soldiers and toys. Everything from religion to law to parenting holds self-sacrifice as a noble standard, in the name of loyalty, duty, or spiritual progress.  Society at large reinforces the sado-masochistic power struggles that have become the “norm” for Western beliefs.  To falter brings guilt and, often, punishment. The ominous “they” are blamed for universal problems that “we” feed into without acknowledging “our” contributions.

I read with the distance of time and recuperation from the world of medicine.  There is such rigid judgmentalism built into the discipline that patients become guilty just by being patients.  I can already hear the screams of protest from my former “colleagues,” who are masochists for putting up with this arbitrary system of classification known as the DSM-V  and who collude with such an inhumane approach in the name of scientific objectivity.

Moreover, psychiatry as a discipline errs by not addressing the generalized ills built into the national psyche.  For psychiatrists as a group to diagnose and presume to treat the individual effects of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), for instance, without addressing the causes of PTSD—primarily war–is abhorrent.  To attempt or pretend to treat symptoms of substance abuse or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or even depression, without delving into society’s contribution to the problems is, to me, an abdication of responsibility that puts the profession to shame.

What does this have to do with masochism?  Maybe nothing, except that by taking such a narrow view, the institution of medicine begs to be punished, as though it knows it’s wrong but will continue unchecked until something or someone puts a stop to it.

The victim role is the hardest to give up.  It’s easy to blame someone else when things don’t work out.  The masochist holds grudges and denies his role in his own trajectory.  He will find or create a controlling sadist to manage his life for him.  Power struggles ensue, with each blaming the other when things go wrong. Unfortunately, healthier choices are overlooked in this struggle, one that erodes self-respect and mutual trust.

Drug use going up?  Suicide rates rising?  All manner of psychiatric and physical illnesses swelling like a pregnancy?  Violence increasing?  Fear and anger seeking catalysts to ignite them into something cataclysmic and definitive?  Look for someone and possibly many people or groups to blame.

A retrospective analysis of “The Masochistic Personality” reveals more about psychiatry’s limitations than its strengths in understanding human nature.  Perhaps psychiatry’s move from early, descriptive interpretations to the codified DSM, its increasing reliance on medications, technology, and “scientific,” measurable results, under the pretext of objectivity, renders it less human and compassionate, and thus less relevant to real life.

From the beginning of my studies, I noted the preoccupation with pathology.  What a difference from astrology, which shows the dynamic interplay of strengths, weaknesses, and how perception often determines the difference.  Oriental belief in qi gives a similar picture of dynamic patterns, with a concentration on health maintenance.

In contrast, the Western love affair with trouble, under the guise of reason, logic, sequential, and binary thinking, that shows in its approach to medicine, is like putting blinders on to see only a narrow range of information and to deny everything outside the limited field.

No one else attempts to diagnose society at large, but I see unsettling correlations between Freud’s anal stage of psychosexual development and the current sado-masochistic world we live in.  Have Americans been unable to mature beyond the “terrible twos,” the age at which Freud claimed toddlers learn sphincter control and appropriate use of power?  Successful negotiation of this stage leads to good boundaries, healthy respect for self and others, and the ability to tolerate a degree of frustration. Shame and doubt mark those who fail at this task.  They are prone to power struggles with internal and external authority figures throughout life.

A culture carries its own karma.  I don’t understand the blame game.  I don’t blame anyone or anything for what we have created, because blame only perpetuates the problem, at the expense of solving the problem.  Not to avoid the problem but to understand that anyone could have created it, and everyone can learn from it – this is the challenge.

 

 

Drugs, Drugs, and More Drugs

The pharmaceutical industry in the United States has hoodwinked the public into believing its snake oils are worth the money you pay.  The government, “health care industry,” and insurance companies are happy to comply, and maybe some of them even believe their hype.

This does not stop them from jacking up the prices of necessary medications, like insulin for diabetes.  According to the New York Times, Martin Shkreli set a new record for Wall Street greed when he acquired the rights to Daraprim, a life-saving anti-parasitic drug, in 2015 and hiked the price from $13.50 to $750 a pill overnight.

The NYT says the Trump administration “went ballistic” when Pfizer increased prices a few weeks ago.  This has deterred Pfizer, along with Merck, Roche, and Novartis from raising prices, for now.

But not to worry, if you have stock in a pharmaceutical company, because the FDA and its sympathizers are on your side.  Only worry if your insurance company doesn’t cover the cost of your medications.

You might profit from buying stock in the companies whose drugs the FDA, the “health care industry,” and the insurance companies are pushing, such as the over-the-counter naloxone that is one of four medications promoted for “opioid use disorder.”  In terms of reputation, this “opioid crisis” has spread far and wide, to the highest government offices, academia, psychiatry, newspapers, magazines, television, the internet, the courts, and dinner-table talk.  Its funding has been greatly enhanced by the promoters of public disinformation, yet relevant facts are few.  All the stories have the monotonous flavor of canned worms, opened, sampled and regurgitated for yet another meal.

We are told about opioid-related deaths, the evil drug company that promoted its opioid drug as non-addictive, the lazy or greedy doctors who over-prescribe narcotics, and the glories of “medication-assisted treatment,” or MAT.  Somehow, heroin comes up in all these stories, yet most people should know heroin is nowhere legal in the United States, not even by prescription.  We are rarely told that this magical MAT consists of four drugs, two of which are opiates themselves, or that the federal government has added special training and licensing requirements for administration of its approved protocol. We are not told that “treatment” does not mean “cure.”  No, “cure” would imply eventual freedom from all drugs, a notion that doesn’t serve Wall Street profits.

So let me give you one example of how this scam works.  I hesitate to call it a “conspiracy” (wink, wink), because of the paranoia such a word implies.  I’d rather call it a “consortium” of interrelated interests, all of which stand to profit by exaggerating the problem and presenting expensive but ineffective solutions.

We are told opioid-related deaths have skyrocketed this century, and Oxycontin (oxycodone) is the precipitating culprit.  OxyContin is produced by Purdue Pharma, which indeed does have a shady background.  In 1952, three brothers—Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer Sackler–all psychiatrists from Queens, New York, purchased Purdue Frederick Company.  Arthur was reputed to be brilliant in psychiatric research and pharmaceutical advertising.  Working for Roche, he found enough uses for Valium (diazepam) to make it the first drug to hit the $100 million mark in revenue.  He also “positioned” Librium (chlordiazepoxide) for Roche.  Valium and Librium are members of the “benzodiazepine” class of drugs, a class that includes Xanax (alprazolam), Ativan (lorazepam), Klonopin (clonazepam), and others.  Alternatively, oxycodone is a semi-synthetic opioid from thebaine, an opioid alkaloid in the Persian poppy.  It was developed in 1919 in Germany.

In December, 1995 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Purdue’s OxyContin (oxycodone), to treat pain.  It hit the market in 1996. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of drugs was approved by the FDA in 1997.  Purdue marketed the drug to doctors and the public as a non-addictive treatment for pain.  It reached $45 million in sales the first year, and $1.1 billion by 2000.  By 2000, it was becoming evident that OxyContin was, indeed, addictive, but the FDA still approved a larger, 160-milligram pill for those with high tolerance.

In 2007, in US vs. Purdue Frederick Company, Inc., Purdue pleaded guilty to intent to mislead doctors and patients about the addictive properties of OxyContin.  It paid $600 million in fines, among the largest settlements for pharmaceutical companies in US history.

By 2010, revenues had hit $3.1 billion, or 30 percent of the painkiller market.  Purdue remains a privately held company, in the hands of the Sackler descendants.  It is being served with multiple lawsuits from different states for its role in contributing to the “opioid epidemic.”  According to The Week, Kentucky is one of the worst-hit states.  It has filed twelve claims against Purdue, for false advertising, Medicaid fraud, unjust enrichment, and punitive damages, among others.  The Week also says there was a four-fold increase in prescription painkillers supplied to pharmacies and MD offices between 1999 and 2010.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reported in 2017 that the US constitutes 80 percent of opioid pill production but has only five percent of the world’s population.  It claims the pharmaceutical companies made false claims of an “epidemic of pain,” in the 1990s, and the federal agencies went along.  Pharmaceutical lobbyists got Congress to loosen restraints, and doctors were often reprimanded for not supplying enough.  “Regulators became facilitators,” as the FDA approved one opioid pill after another.

How does this relate to heroin, a known street drug, one might ask.  It’s a good question, for which there are no easy answers.  The idea that prescription painkiller pills are “gateway” drugs to heroin use has been mentioned.  One source notes that heroin is less expensive on the street than OxyContin, which can cost $1/milligram, or $80 for an 80-mg pill.  A more significant problem with heroin, we are told, is that it is increasingly laced with fentanyl, another opiate that is up to 5000 times stronger than heroin.  Synthetic fentanyl is being smuggled in from China.  Heroin is coming from Mexico, some say.  Fact is, there are few facts available in this gigantic obfuscation of facts that characterizes sensationalism.

So we don’t exactly know how prescription pain-killers are related to heroin/fentanyl deaths.

Death from opioids usually comes from respiratory depression.  In other words, people who overdose pass out and stop breathing.  Many other drugs cause respiratory depression, too, and a mixture can have cumulative effects.  It is common for people with chronic pain to take both a narcotic (opioid) and a muscle relaxant/sedative of the benzodiazepine class mentioned above.  The benzodiazepines also cause respiratory depression, as does alcohol.   Too, it’s not clear how many of these opioid-related deaths are complicated by other substances.  One psychiatric journal mentioned that a third of opioid deaths were complicated by benzodiazepines.  It’s probably safe to say that hard-core street addicts could be taking many drugs at any given time.

But our “medication-assisted treatment” bypasses all these inconvenient details.  It does include a drug, naloxone, which reverses the effects of opioids and can save lives in a primary opioid emergency.  It has been around over 45 years and is well known in emergency rooms for its life-saving effects.  Since this crisis began, police and ambulance drivers have had to use it on numerous occasions.  Now, the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, MD, MPH, has encouraged over-the-counter preparations of naloxone for those with opioid use disorder and their loved ones.  FDA head Scott Gottlieb is also advocating expanded access to treatment, Medicaid funding, and other systemic changes to pay for the problem.

Manufacturers of OTC naloxone have jumped to increase prices accordingly.  Narcan intranasal (Adapt Pharma Inc.) retails for $135/dose, more than double its price a few years ago.  Kaleo’s Evzio auto-injector now retails for $4,500, more than 6.5 times its $690 average price in 2014.

What’s not clear about this scenario is how a passed-out opioid over-doser who has stopped breathing will be able to administer the naloxone.  Irreversible brain damage occurs mere minutes after a person stops breathing.  The life-saving medication requires someone alert, quick to recognize the problem, and to administer the antidote.

With all the calls for funding, research, and treatment, no one is admitting that substance use treatment is notoriously ineffective.  FDA head Gottlieb and others are begrudgingly accepting the idea that cure may not be practical, and long-term maintenance must be considered.  So the magic bullet, the aforementioned MAT, or “medication-assisted treatment,” is not a cure.  It is designed to convert illegal opioid use to legal opioid use for perhaps a lifetime.  Of course this will require funding for treatment, for the treating facilities, support staff, the researchers, and for the prescriptions.

Who benefits from this crisis?  Well, the National Institute of Health has earmarked $1.1 billion to develop “scientific solutions,” backed by a $1.3 trillion omnibus package passed by Congress, according to Psychiatric News.

US President Donald Trump has declared the “opioid crisis” a public health emergency.  We have the White House Opioid Commission looking for ways to fund and treat the problem, including such issues as insurance coverage.  It recommends funding for no less than eight professional organizations.

The four approved medications in MAT are naloxone, mentioned above, naltrexone, and opioids buprenorphine and methadone, in case you want to buy stock in the companies.  Insurance company stock will most likely benefit, too.

The common denominator in this “emergency” is the use of more drugs to treat the drug problem in the drug-crazed culture we have created.

How Do You Define Crazy?

What is “addiction”?  What causes it?  There’s a lot of attention given, lately, to various forms of “addiction,” but definitions of it and its clues about its causes are rare.  The American Psychiatric Association (APA), the primary lobbying organization for the professional mental disorder labelers, claims it is a “brain disease” that is “complex” and characterized by “compulsive substance use despite harmful consequences.”  The official platform, published on line, says there are a number of effective treatments, and that people can recover.

The APA also asserts there are “changes in brain wiring” as a result of addiction, and that “brain imaging studies show alterations in judgment, decision making, learning, memory, and behavioral control.”

The psychiatric establishment, including the National Institute for Drug Abuse, states brain changes in the brain stem, cerebral cortex and limbic system cause addiction.

So that’s our answer, in a nutshell.  Satisfied?

I’m not.  In fact, it’s embarrassing to admit I’m associated with such pretenders, because this propaganda campaign is nothing more than pandering to a group of people who probably know more about addiction than the “experts” do.  First, “addiction” per se is not listed among the growing list of “mental disorders” in the latest bible of psychiatric diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, version V.  (DSM-V).  We have “substance use disorder,” and specific diagnoses related to the type of substance (mis)used, such as “opiate use disorder.”  We do have “internet addiction,” a new, DSM-V, excuse to seek funding for treatment.  But my rant here is not about addiction or the “opioid epidemic,” or even the marketing blitz that characterizes modern strategy for creating and perpetuating insanity.  It’s about terminology and the ocean of irrelevance that is pawned off as information to an under-informed, misinformed, and gullible public.

I first heard the term “brain disease” from members of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a lobbying group that prides itself on its family-associated organization, lobbying efforts for “mental health parity,” and its disassociation from mental health professionals.  NAMI has especially wanted to “de-stigmatize” mental illness by insisting it’s a “brain disease,” caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain, thus equivalent to physical diseases, even though there is little physical evidence for such conditions.

The psychiatric establishment, assisted by the pharmaceutical companies, the government, and to some extent, the insurance companies, has jumped on this opportunity to legitimize (and fund) research and treatment for a variety of mental disorders, and the list keeps growing.  Since the first DSM was published in 1952, the number of official mental disorders has steadily expanded, apparently to accommodate the tide of new medications flooding the market.  Homosexuality, formerly listed, has been expunged since 1987, but we have added problems you didn’t know were disorders, such as ‘social anxiety,” “adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,” and “hypoactive sexual desire disorder.”  Insomnia is now an official psychiatric disorder, maybe thanks to the efforts of researchers and pharmaceutical companies that want to study and profit from it.

Lately, we are told the national suicide rate has gone up.  Army suicides are up, and there’s a question about whether some of the opioid-related deaths were intentional suicides.  We have the controversy over what used to be called “physician-assisted suicide,” which is no longer a politically or socially correct term, because it stigmatizes those who get a physician to help them die.  This is now called “medical aid in dying.”  Who remembers when Jack Kevorkian, a pathologist, went to prison in 1999 for helping patients die, convicted of second-degree murder?

Psychiatric terminology is tossed around with the same carelessness of standard epithets but carries the unsubstantiated veneer of insider knowledge.  Who hasn’t heard the president called a “narcissist?”  Look in the DSM-V to find out that “narcissistic personality disorder” could probably fit many people, depending on how one interprets the list of vague criteria, such as grandiosity or lack of empathy.  There are no “brain imaging studies” that prove it, and there’s no treatment.

To say the APA is misrepresenting itself, psychiatry, the mentally ill, and is flooding the public with irrelevance seems like a drastic claim, but here are the “facts.”  In its bid to align itself with “medical science,” such as it is, psychiatry likes to talk about “evidence-based” findings, but the evidence for most of its claims is based on subjective screening tools, such as Beck’s or Hamilton’s Depression scales, which depend on the patient or observer to assess symptoms or signs believed to contribute to clinical depression.

Also, the APA’s claim that “brain imaging studies” have identified specific areas of malfunction related to various mental disorders, is simply not true, but they keep trying, and the “psychiatric industry” is hot to obtain more funding for more research into the various potentialities of such tools as functional MRI and PET scans.

It is true that people under the influence of certain drugs and alcohol show more or less activity in certain brain areas, and autopsies of those with significant alcoholism, for instance, have brain changes consistent with long-term damage.

A great deal has been made over neurotransmitters, in order to justify the “chemical imbalance” hypothesis.  The class of antidepressants termed “serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitors” or “SSRIs”, led by the introduction of Prozac (fluoxetine) in 1989, quickly followed by copycats Zoloft (sertraline), Paxil (paroxetine), and others, spawned a new wave of psychiatric drugs that targeted specific brain chemicals (neurotransmitters).  Do they work?  There is increasing evidence that they don’t work for long, especially in children, and they may do more harm than good.  Approval by the FDA of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in 1997 may have contributed to the upsurge in use of psychiatric as well as a host of other medications, and to the misperception that there’s a pill for every ill.

The “opioid epidemic,” deserves particular note, because it has been deemed by the Powers-That-Be as a “public health crisis,” deserving of broad-scale funding, research, special treatment protocols, legislation, and lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies deemed most responsible for creating the problem.

Here, the psychiatric establishment–along with the government and media–has gone out of its way to misrepresent and inflate the problem, as well as its preferred solution, which is to hook people forever on different opiates.  The Need-To-Be-Needed crowd indirectly admits it has no cure, yet, but more funding will provide for better access to “care,” and for more research, such that maybe someday we will know enough to cut people loose from their psychiatric problems.

 

 

 

 

 

Symbols and Psychiatry

Corn snake, kco051316

Ten years ago this month, I had just retired my medical and DEA licenses, in search of better ways to inspire people regarding the mind and its potential.  A long-time student of symbolism, I write daily in my journal and regularly include references to astrology, mythology, religion, dreams, and other symbolic languages.  These universal concepts fall loosely into Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s idea of a “collective unconscious” and of “archetypes.”  As most people probably know, Jung was a protege of Sigmund Freud, father of modern psychiatry, whose The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, rocked the scientific world and initiated the field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

The following excerpts from my November, 2007 diary show how I play around with symbolism to help develop a deeper appreciation for everyday life.

ON PREDICTIONS AND FREE WILL

Tuesday, November 20, 2007 – I believe if the student fails, the teacher fails more, because the teacher is paid to teach.  The student (ideally), pays to learn.  This is why I’ve never believed in tenure and probably why I don’t believe in marriage or other chains on the future.  As an astrologer, I don’t believe in predictions either, but astrologers as a group would disown me for saying this.  They thrive on making predictions, and people expect them to do it, but no one can say that predictions are consistent with free will.

You have to be a free thinker to understand how limiting predictions are.

This moment, as I sit in my recliner on this beautiful sunny day, overlooking vast expanses of marsh and blue sky, I have access to all time, depending on my focus.  It can come as dream, memory, fantasy, association, feeling, impression, dimly or readily perceived.  A book once read is forever a part of my experience, because I have invested the personal effort to make it so.  A book once written is part of everyone’s experience, whether direct or indirect, as knowledge brought through on the verbal place is “thicker” and more physical than the more ethereal realm of imagination.  How can I know before I read a book how it will change my life?

PENELOPE AND UNDOING

Thursday, November 22, 2007 – I’m approaching my multiple goals in piecemeal fashion.  When everything seems to be at beginning stages, as now, or beyond my capabilities, I feel frustrated and at odds with myself.  Re-doing things makes me feel like Penelope, Odysseus’ wife in The Odyssey of Homer, who undid her father-in-law’s shroud every evening to avoid having to marry any of the moochers who invaded her home as soon as Odysseus stayed gone too long.

I used to think Penelope was a sap, but undoing is a matter of perception, and if you enjoy the weaving and undoing for its own sake, it is no longer a waste of time.  Here we have the clash of the results-oriented and the process-oriented approach.  Also apparent is the stated vs. actual purpose.  Penelope stated she wanted a shroud.  She actually wanted to stall for time, so the actual purpose was met.

She lived in a time when women were possessions, and we have that subversive belief still, although no one admits it.  Marriage is a testament to the people-ownership concept.  While presumably it’s a mutual ownership, no one expects men to be as faithful as women, although this is a generalization and less true than in the past.  In the great sexual shuffling of today, men and women seem equally unfaithful.

Probably few perceive the ownership attitude as clearly as I, the target of so many who want to own by any means available.  Insurance companies, government, bankers, stockbrokers, businessmen, acquaintances, friends, family, partners–all want an advantage and will look for or create excuses to cross the line of equality, move in and take over.

Am I bitter and cynical?  Yes.  I don’t like feeling this way, knowing it only hurts me to have this attitude.  Like it or not, I am a herald, of sorts, meaning I search restlessly for higher and more comfortable ground, especially mentally.  Those who would control will seek first to control the mind.

I can’t control my own mind, nor do I want to.  I like its free ranging ability and thrive on the little lessons obtained from every facet of my life.

How would I know about undoing if I did not live it, feel the emotions associated, know the practice from mythology and the term from psychiatry?

Unraveling a sweater – which I’ve already done once with this one because I didn’t like the stitch – brings many facets into play.

How would someone else handle it?  Who knows?  Most people would not attempt to knit a sweater at all, I suspect, and this is my contention with “most people.”

Nor will “most people” appreciate the value of the process as a means of showing how to solve problems, because this is my real purpose.  Rather than start over, I can adapt mid-sweater and potentially turn a mistake into a success.

SNAKES IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Monday, November 26, 2007 – I’ve retired my medical license to become a New Age Profit . . . er . . . Prophet, for the Spirit of Capitalism.

I cut my fangs on Telluride politics and other stories from the Serpents of the Modern Caduceus.  What if there were two serpents in the Garden of Eden, and they ran the interlopers out, better to rest in peace without getting trampled?  Then they can bask in the sun of the Garden, eating of their favorite fruit, the apples from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Now that Adam and Even have departed in search of something better, the wise snakes may rest assured the tree won’t be cut down to build a house, to hold squealing brats who like to torture snakes for fun.  Minimal risk of getting eaten for supper or skinned for belts and purses.  Why, now that God has expelled these demons from Heaven, the snakes are ecstatic.

Unfortunately, the Garden of Eden isn’t quite as lively as when the humans were around.  They provided entertainment, if only by making God mad.  We snakes can make God mad without even trying.  All we had to do was show him how dumb his latest invention was, and he threw them out and has been moping around ever since, feeling guilty about over-reacting.  Now, look at the mess man has made of his lives.

All we said was “Wise up.”  We didn’t say do it the hard way.  No.  That was Adam’s choice, to do it the hard way.

We snakes wise up the easy way.  When our skins get too small, we shed them and slither on out to greater dimensions of girth and wisdom.

Yes, snakes are hated and feared, because we are so smart.  We see life from the ground up, and we know where our support and strength lie.  Our raw intelligence knows its own turf and doesn’t seek to intrude on that of others.  Snakes don’t go looking for trouble, unless it’s entertaining trouble that enhances our wisdom and gets a potential threat redirected into other dimensions, like hell on earth.