"Depressant Drugs"

Would so-called "Depressant Drugs" be any more ridiculous than "Anti-Depressants"?......

Some people think they can do anything to animals.

The RSPCA don't.

Psychiatrists do.
--------------------------


"Don't conform, won't conform, can't conform??

Then we will persecute you, poison you, incarcerate you, mutilate you, electrocute you." :

This is one possible interpretation of psychiatry's message to the world.

---------------------------

REMEMBER LIVES RUINED BY PSYCHIATRY.

Manic Depression DOES NOT EXIST.

Manic Depression DOES NOT EXIST.

NOR do BISEXUAL POLAR BEARS - BIPOLARS.

Questioning "Autism"/"Asparagus Syndrome".

Questioning "Autism"/"Asparagus Syndrome".

"Autism" DOES NOT EXIST.

The Holocaust and the "mentally ill".

THE HOLOCAUST AND THE "MENTALLY ILL".

Letter to Holocaust Memorial Day. 30th November 2005. 

Dear Holocaust Memorial Day,            
                                                                                               

I was just wanting to enquire whether there are any plans to highlight the plight of the so-called "mentally ill" during the Holocaust. If I am not mistaken (and please tell me if I am) the "mentally ill" were one of the first groups of people to be systematically murdered by the Nazis.

I would be very interested in knowing more about this. I do not believe this is sufficiently acknowledged and considered. I know that this is not necessarily part of a genocide against a particular people.

However, I believe that this is definitely a part of gaining understanding of the ideology behind the Holocaust, and is an important aspect of it. I believe it has lessons for today and is a sobering reminder of the importance of how we treat those we deem to be "mentally impaired" in some way. I personally think the way that the "mentally ill" are treated today is still problematic.                                                                                           

Best wishes,

"Citizen Sofa."

--------

Reply from Holocaust Memorial Day.

Dear Mr

Thank you for raising this important issue. The answer to your question is yes.

We are currently drafting our theme paper for HMD 2007. One section says the following: Those with disabilities were excluded from all opportunity to live within society. Victims of mental illness were segregated. Some were sterilised; others were murdered. Victims of disabilities, including congenital diseases, were similarly removed as a threat to the purity of the race, which was not only seen as being pure by Aryan descent, but ideally free of congenital disease.

Over 70,000 patients of mental hospitals and disabled people were murdered as a part of the T4 euthanasia programme. In Nazi terminology, 'euthanasia' was a euphemism for the systematic killing of institutionalized mentally and physically disabled patients. Starting in October 1939, disabled children were murdered by overdoses of medication or by starvation.

This programme was then extended to adult disabled patients living in institutions and Hitler signed a secret authorization to protect participating doctors and staff from prosecution. The secret operation was code-named T4, referring to the address (Tiergartenstrasse 4) of its coordinating office in Berlin. An unknown number of victims were also sterilised.

Doctors, nurses and other professions normally associated in care-giving participated in this process. The euthanasia programme instituted the use of gas chambers and crematoria for systematic murder.

On reflection, your email raises an important point and we need to ensure that we appropriately distinguish between people who are disabled and those with mental illnesses. We are in the process of putting together a group to take responsibility for some of our community developments. I will make sure that we approach Mind or a similar organisation to be a member.

Regards,

-----------

http://www.hmd.org.uk/

www.T4holocaust.com



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My Reply to Holocaust Memorial Day.

Dear Mr.

Many thanks for your reply.

I suppose that it is right therefore to say that the "mentally ill" and disabled were the first group of people to be systematically murdered.

I think awareness of this has relevance today considering the some of the attitudes that people have towards those who suffer mental distress.

For example, "The Sun"'s treatment of Frank Bruno. I also personally think that psychiatry is basically still in a pre-scientific state, and that strictly speaking there cannot be such a thing as a specifically "mental illness".

Furthermore, I would like to draw attention to something that was not written in Germany in 1939, but published in "The Guardian" in 2005: ""On the face of it, Darwinism would suggest that the genes predisposing to schizophrenia would eventually disappear from the gene pool," said Dr Nettle."

(In "Mental illness link to art and sex," article by Ian Sample, science correspondent.

Wednesday November 30, 2005. The Guardian.)

This comment should shock anyone who reads it. When one thinks about it, it is truly astonishing.

Firstly, this comment should refer to Social Darwinism, not Darwinism, which is quite a different thing.

Thus someone is contending that if "Social Darwinism" were true then there would be no "schizophrenics".

There are still "schizophrenics" because people have simply been given that label. That is the simple truth.

Social Darwinism is here blandly accepted as science, when it is not science but was a philosophy linked to Herbert Spencer, and not Darwinian science and was also a contributor to Nazi ideology.

In my personal view, the idea that we are already in some post-Holocaust ideal world is gravely mistaken. There are still aspects of contemporary thinking and of our socio-economic system that are dehumanising and barbaric in a similar way to the Nazis' system.

This is itself related to the increase in so-called "mental illness" that we are seeing and will continue to see according to the UN.

I include some letters that I have written below.

Thanks again for your reply and I am very pleased to know that you are taking action on this question.

Yours faithfully,

-------------------------

Those designated as "mentally ill" who were murdered by the Nazis were doubly victims - victims of non-scientific psychiatry and victims of the Nazis.

It also needs to be mentioned that these people, amongst the first victims of The Holocaust, were also (non-Jewish) Germans.

To echo Goldhagen (author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners") - in a different way -

"Do not say that they were Nazis; they were Germans, Germans, Germans."

-----------------------------------

http://www.t4holocaust.com/

It should be noted that the technique of gassing people in the back of vans was first used on the mentally ill and disabled.

A "holocaust" is a term for any great slaughter;
a "GENOCIDE" - and there have been many in human history - is about the mass murder of a particular group of humans.

Web link to wiki article on genocide: GENOCIDE

-------------------------

Letter to The Guardian.

Dear Sir,

Re: "On the face of it, Darwinism would suggest that the genes predisposing to schizophrenia would eventually disappear from the gene pool", said Dr Nettle.

(In "Mental illness link to art and sex", Ian Sample, science correspondent. Wednesday, November 30, 2005. The Guardian.)

This comment is accepted as "scientific" fair comment in 2005.

It should shock anyone who reads it.

Amazingly, it was not written in Nazi Germany but in England in 2005.

The comment should refer to "Social Darwinism" not Darwinism.

"Social Darwinism" was part of Nazi ideology. I thought we defeated the Nazis in 1945.

I do not expect their views to be peddled in England in 2005 by The Guardian of all people.

This comment is in my view both utter nonsense and morally wrong.

So-called "schizophrenics" are as capable as anyone of having children and have as much right to.

Besides, the real reason so-called "schizophrenia" does not "disappear" is that powerful people continue to give powerless people this label.

There are no genes predisposing to "schizophrenia" because it does not exist.

A condition has been invented and then people are trying to find evidence for it. This is philosophically and scientifically absurd.

Well I've always thought that capitalism is almost as bad as fascism anyway. After all capitalism can entail a belief in Social Darwinism, competition, survival of the fittest - all things believed in by the Nazis - all in my view morally unacceptable and unsustainable.

All the best.


-----------------------------

Another ranting letter to The Guardian.

Dear Sir,

The "research" reported upon in today's paper regarding "mental illness" and creativity is evidence of how far psychology as a science has to go.

There is quite simply no such thing as "schizophrenia". There is no test for it, and no definition of it. It is just a descriptive catch-all label.

"Though "schizophrenia" is only a concept and a methodological convenience, most psychiatrists treat schizophrenia as if it were a well-defined illness"
(Eia Assen, 1986).

It is nothing of the kind. It quite simply does not exist as a distinct illness of any kind.

To talk of a "mental illness" is apart from anything else a logical and semantic error. The notion of a person having a "mental illness" is scientifically false. It rationalises the popular belief that so-called "psychiatric conditions" are basically similar to bodily diseases, and that people suffering mental distress have no power.

This "research" also overlooks the fact that all humans are by nature creative. There is no point in trying to overcome the collosal problem that we face with mental distress, until we have the correct scientific approach to this phenomenon. In some respects we are still "in the Middle Ages" scientifically when it comes to clinical psychology and psychiatry.

Psychiatry is still pre-scientific.
The U.S. American William James - a "founding father" of modern psychology -  said "psychology is not a science, it is the hope of a science."
We still need such humility.

Your faithfully,

------------

And another!

Dear Sir,

Re: "On the face of it, Darwinism would suggest that the genes predisposing to schizophrenia would eventually disappear from the gene pool," said Dr Nettle.

"Mental illness link to art and sex", Ian Sample, science correspondent.

Wednesday November 30, 2005. The Guardian.

Biological Darwinism would not suggest this, since there are no genes predisposing to "schizophrenia" because it does not exist.
Social Darwinism, in complete error, may suggest that "schizophrenia" could "die out."

Darwin did not popularise the phrase "survival of the fittest", though he did use it.

I have read that the phrase may have been coined by Spenser.

It was indeed popularised and applied to human social relations by Herbert Spencer.

Social Darwinism is clearly wrong. The supposedly socially "fittest" members of the human species do not always prosper and survive. And it's time this was taken on board.

For example, the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust clearly did not perish because their Nazi executioners were socially "fitter" than them in some way.

Social Darwinism is rampantly widespread in our culture and needs to be challenged in my view. Not least because it is profoundly mistaken.

I am disgusted by the parlous state of our culture that comments like this pass for intelligent analysis when they are obviously nonsense, and fascist nonsense at that!

Yours faithfully,

------

"Psychology is not a science, it is the hope of a science," the American philosopher William James, one of the "founding fathers" of modern psychology.

(One implication of this is that in Psychology as in any "social or human science" it is we ourselves that we are studying - hence we should be wary of what we definitively conclude.)

If only some people had the same humility about our knowledge of the mind today I think the world might be a saner - as in healthier - place, and we would make more progress.

There is no such thing as mental illness.

------------------------

A manifesto:

www.szasz.com/manifesto.html

Links:

www.szasz.com/

======================================================

Interesting link about so-called "mental illness":

http://www.idiom.com/~drjohn/review.html

=====================================================

Remember lives ruined by psychiatry !

=====================================================

[Note on the term "The Holocaust".

Conventionally it means the genocide against the Jews by the Nazis.

As does the Hebrew term "Shoah" - a possibly unique incidence of Genocide - which gave birth - sadly - to the term in 1948.

I personally think that the term "The Holocaust" should also refer to all the systematic murder perpetrated by the Nazis.

"Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis' systematic murder of millions of people in other groups." 
Wikipedia.
]

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The Mass Murder that "Psychiatry" intrinsically represents continues all over the world. Until it is ended as a so-called Medicial Discipline.

This mass murder continues.

An innocent mass murder is still a mass murder.