Citizens Commission on Human Rights St. Louis

The Year of the Brain

President Obama announced The BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) on April 2, 2013. The White House wanted to spend $100 million taxpayer dollars in 2014 on brain research.

We had little faith that $100 million would be used for developing anything but more abusive psychiatric drugs or more torturous devices such as Vagus Nerve Stimulation or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

The problem is that the biological brain drug model based on bogus mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) prevents governments from funding real medical solutions for people experiencing difficulty.

Despite the billions of government and pharmaceutical company funding in support of psychiatry’s brain chemical imbalance theory, this psychiatric “disease” model has been thoroughly debunked. The whole theory was invented to push drugs for profit.

The Brain of the Year

But it’s not just a matter of psychiatric drugs. The entire psychiatric and psychological industries are oriented on the brain. They have a number of names for it: neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, neurocomputation, neurological psychology, neurological psychiatry — it all just means that psychiatry and psychology, in another attempt to make their pseudosciences seem more scientific, have joined up with the legitimate neuroscience field, in another attempt to blame it all on the brain. You might as well just blame it on the Bossa Nova.

One research paper claims that perception is often biased, selective, and malleable, and it all happens in the brain with neural activity.

Granted, the brain does play a role in perception. The brain might even be fooled by a trompe l’oeil, a visual illusion. But if you buy in to the cry that “it’s all brain” then you have abandoned your humanity, and your spirit, in favor of chemistry; you have bought into the reductio ad absurdum argument that there is no objective reality, it’s all in your brain.

Of course, once the psychopharmaceutical industry gives all its attention to the brain, then the brain is miraculously transformed into the seat of consciousness, and altering consciousness with drugs becomes commonplace. And we get the disastrous psychedelic psychiatric movement, where magic mushrooms will lead you to a better life.

Apparently enough time has passed that the public has forgotten what happened when psychedelics gained notoriety in the 1960s, when LSD pushed by psychiatrists spread into society as a recreational drug and started destroying lives with induced psychosis.

Brain Dead

Knowing nothing about the underlying causes of serious mental disturbance, psychiatry still sears the brain with electroshock, tears it with psychosurgery and deadens it with dangerous drugs.

Next time you are told that a psychiatric condition is due to a biochemical imbalance in the brain, ask if you can see the lab test results. There won’t be any.

The true resolution of many mental difficulties begins, not with a checklist of symptoms, but with ensuring that a competent, non-psychiatric health care professional completes a thorough physical examination.

If It’s Not The Brain, What Is It?

Rather than get all metaphysical, let’s just observe that for many questions, there is not just one answer. That’s a particularly relevant observation for psychiatric, brain and drug based research — the search for the One Thing that answers “Why did this happen?” This attitude only leads to a list of things, a list of symptoms, say, in the DSM.

Using the DSM, a psychiatrist need only label the patient with a single “mental disorder”, prescribe a drug and bill the patient’s insurance. The psychiatrist with the DSM in hand can try various diagnostic labels on the patient as if they were different sizes of apparel until he finds one that either fits the patient’s symptoms or comes close enough to allow him to bill the patient’s insurance. It’s the One Answer, you see, to all the patient’s problems. At least, it’s the only one needed to submit an insurance claim.

But the question, “Why is the patient behaving this way?” does not have just one answer; it can have many, many answers.

Let’s give an example, the classic Country Blues one.
Question: “Why do I feel so blue?”
Answer: My dog ran away. My wife left me. My husband left me. (We’re not sexist here.) My truck died. I’m broke. I’m broken hearted. I’ve been betrayed. No one really cares. No one ever listens to me. I did you wrong and now you’re gone.

You see, there’s more than one answer, and it isn’t “you’re depressed and need to take an antidepressant.”

It wasn’t the brain, you see. It was the dog, the wife, and the truck. It all piled on until the stress of it overwhelmed. You get the idea.

So what is the resolution of mental trauma? Well, each answer would have it’s own resolution. Get another dog, get another wife, get another truck, listen to others so they listen to you. Whatever it takes. You get the idea, again. An antidepressant makes the feeling go away, for a time (it makes ALL feelings go away, the good and the bad); but the dog is still gone, the wife is still gone, and the truck is still broken. And you can be sure your psychiatrist isn’t listening to you, except to hear for which DSM symptom he can prescribe a drug and bill your insurance.

So of course one’s perception can be biased, selective and malleable. It isn’t, however, the brain. It’s Life. Get Over It!