Counter-Currents
Psychiatrists Invent Mental Disorders Like Lawmakers Invent Crimes
Jim Goad
1,241 words
I don’t want to frighten any of you legally-medicated speed freaks out there, but America is in the throes of an Adderall shortage. Within days or possibly nanoseconds, tens of millions of you will have trouble concentrating and start acting hyperactively. This is because you will no longer have the proper medication to treat your totally authentic illness that has been diagnosed using rigorous standards by the entirely trustworthy scions of psychiatry, who only have our best interests in mind and would never do anything for personal profit. These nice doctors would certainly never be the unwitting stooges of central planners who seek to keep the proles artificially placated and strung out on mind-altering substances.
Adderall is a composite of two forms of amphetamine. It doesn’t bear the wicked stigma of crystal meth, just as the word “Oxycontin” doesn’t conjure the same dread as its homeless prodigal cousin, heroin. Over 40 million prescriptions were written for Adderall last year, just as over 140 million scripts were written for legal opioids in 2020. But for all you hear about the opioid crisis, according to the National Institute of Health Care Management (NIHCM), “cocaine and methamphetamine are each now involved in more deaths than either prescription opioids or heroin.”
One of the countless ironies of being in prison was seeing the long beeline of ragged fuckups who’d been convicted of drug offenses waiting single-file at 4 PM for the nurse at the pill cart to feed them their state-mandated uppers and downers. Take the tiny paper cup with the pill in it . . . swallow the pill . . . open your mouth and show me your tongue . . . Good boy, you swallowed your meds.
Legal psychoactive drugs are much more insidious than illicit dope because they come with the imprimatur of the medical industry, which has never lied to us — not about vaccines, not about anything. Since these drugs are prescribed by a doctor, we can grind our jaws and clean all the tile grout out of the tub with a toothbrush at 4 AM secure in the knowledge that we have a legitimate medical illness that has been diagnosed using the scientific method. In no way will this cute little pill prematurely age us or lead to cardiac problems or brain damage like illegal amphetamines do.
Adderall is primarily prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), an “illness” which has no known etiology and can be legally diagnosed merely by answering– honestly or dishonestly — a series of questions. Just as clinical depression and anxiety are said to be caused by “chemical imbalances” but you aren’t required to take any blood tests to verify that you actually have an imbalance of said chemicals, ADHD is said to be a neurological problem, but you don’t need a brain scan to get a prescription for Adderall. All one needs to do to get prescribed an anti-depressant is to tell a doctor that you’ve been feeling sad, and all you need to get a prescription for Xanax is to confess to the doc that you’ve been feeling a trifle nervy lately. Likewise, all one needs to do to get a prescription for that sweet legal speed is to answer a series of questions claiming that you’ve been fidgety, have trouble concentrating, tend to tune people out when they’re talking to you, and sometimes don’t finish all your chores.
Despite the tens of millions of prescriptions written last year for Adderall, there has never been a definitive genetic or chemical cause found for ADHD. None. Some studies have shown that brain scans of people diagnosed with ADHD differ in some ways from normal brains. One study found some relatively consistent differences between normal people and those diagnosed with ADHD in levels of things such as urinary norepinephrine. But these studies were done after the test subjects’ brains had been soaked in curative amphetamines for a while, which reminded me of a recent study that suggested selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication is actually the cause of, rather than the cure for, low serotonin. To my knowledge, no one has ever been diagnosed with ADHD after their brains were scanned or their urine was tested. The tests seem to follow after the diagnosis, which seems 180 degrees ass-backward to me.
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.
Even worse, with every new revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the diagnostic threshold for ADHD gets lower and lower. It seems that with every passing year, this “disease” grows hardier and it’s increasingly easy to “catch” it.
What could possibly be dangerous about administering a drug to children that has been demonstrated to stunt their growth?
I’m endlessly flabbergasted at the specter of people who normally question authority but have no trouble believing everything the psychiatric industry declares. The unquestioning gullibility in believing that the majority of officially designated “mental illnesses” are legitimate medical disorders is astounding.
The problem with the very idea of “mental illness” is that it’s not a scientifically quantifiable thing; it’s a social construct. Just as how saying someone is a “narcissist” or a “sociopath” is merely an opinion and could never in a million lifetimes be empirically proven, saying someone has clinical depression or anxiety or hyperactivity is merely an observation, not a diagnosis, and their brains shouldn’t be pelted with mind-altering drugs based on what you suspect is going on with their neurons.
In his 2016 essay “ADHD: A Destructive Psychiatric Hoax,” Philip Hickey, Ph.D. writes:
Usually when people say or write that ADHD is “real,” they mean that this cluster of problems listed in the APA’s catalog (DSM) is a genuine, bona fide illness — just like diabetes; and that people who “have” this so-called illness must take their “medication” in the same way that diabetics must take insulin. . . . In psychiatry, the “diagnoses” are merely labels that psychiatrists assign to the loose clusters of vague problems, and have no explanatory value whatsoever. . . . The critical point being that in psychiatry, the only evidence for the “illness” is the very behavior it purports to explain. In other words: your son is distracted because he is distracted.
Everyone feels a bit distracted or hyper from time to time. The eternal problem is deciding exactly when the condition gets so severe that it magically “becomes” ADHD. And since it’s a social construct, where the line gets drawn depends on the society in question. Societies that value obedience and submissiveness rather than curiosity and vigor would likely decide that many of its members “have” ADHD and therefore “require” medication.
Since boys get slapped with the ADHD diagnosis about two to four times as frequently as girls do — and more for “hyperactivity” and “impulsivity” than for an inability to concentrate — some speculate that dosing them with Adderall serves to crush the rambunctious male spirit. It’s preferable to have young boys sitting there placidly with their hands folded in their laps like the nice young little girls do. Men are diagnosed with the “illness” about 1.6 times more frequently than women are, which suggests that normal female behavior is the societal norm, whereas normal male behavior is evidence of neurological pathology — or at least a troubling level of non-conformity.
So much of this is massively subjective — which is fine if you’re evaluating poetry, but dangerously crazy if you’re talking about medicine.
If either psychiatrists or politicians actually cured the problems that plague individuals and societies, they’d quickly be out of a job. To keep themselves in business, psychiatrists invent mental disorders like lawmakers invent crimes.
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28 comments
Great article as always. This made me think of the news from about two months ago that “the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is now recommending that primary care physicians routinely screen adults under 65 without anxiety symptoms for anxiety disorders.” It doesn’t get any more transparent than that.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/anxiety-screening-what-it-is-and-why-its-now-being-recommended-for-adults
I read a good book when it came out 25 years ago about this, Manufacturing Victims, by Tana Dineen. It’s available as a free PDF put up online by the author if you want to read it:
http://tanadineen.com/writer/mvpdf.htm
I can testify to the fact that the mental health profession at all levels pushes medication as if it was the cure for the human condition.
I agree that Freud secured his lifetime supply of Peruvian marching powder by hooking a quarter of the West on its variants. Then wondering about Scientology’s doctrine of anti psychology, I find that there are probably crevices, nooks and nuances to it, but Hubbard was a Pavlovian.
And if some true head case is going to get to mental balance, the drills and structure of Skinner box conditioning is likely the only effective route that isn’t palliative. Only speculation but perhaps there is something to Dianetics after all.
My thoroughly decent fine upstanding bona fide war hero father was addicted to Valium in the 70’s when it was doled out like candy and laughed about on The Tonight Show. He eventually kicked it by himself but it was a scene right out of The Man With The Golden Arm.
I had a tooth pulled a couple months ago and, without asking, they prescribed me Percocet. Percocet? Percocet is something you would find on the Lazy Susan in the breakfast nook at Graceland. Percocet is OxyContin, i.e. “hillbilly heroin.” I took it as prescribed but at no point did I want to put on Pink Floyd. Once I took two, a dosage the bottle was fine with, because I was in pain and an hour later I wasn’t! I was legitimately high so how many people are going to respond “Gimme more o’ this?” Probably a lot. Why not?
I saw a doctor yesterday for the first time in well over a decade. The last doctor I saw wanted to attach leeches to me. I had to fill out reams and reams of questionnaires before even going and they did indeed get into things such as “Do you ever feel sad?” Isn’t this shrink jurisdiction? Why wouldn’t I -why shouldn’t I- ever “feel sad?”
I’m awake. I’m cognizant. I read The Worst Week Yet every Monday. I live in a country that’s circling the drain. Ruled by jerkweeds. How many people voted for the Shithead-In-Chief while “feeling groovy” for one reason or another? What, them worry? To turn on your TV is to be lied to, pandered to, patronized, to have your intelligence insulted, your pity solicited, your guilt in someone’s crosshairs. Often by “news channels” who want you riled up to sell Kias. Telling you more and more about some useless information supposed to fire your imagination.
And though you’re not really ill…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusADDs_3ps
Shift, no offense to you, but I find the term “Hillbilly Heroin” to be deeply offensive if it is meant to apply to LEGITIMATE medical opioids.
If you want to talk about “Hillbilly Heroin,” what is more appropriately meant is STREET FENTANYL, which is extremely powerful and is smuggled across the nearly-open borders.
When your typical Brown or Black person gets caught with a modest stash of Fent, there is enough of the uncut drug seized to kill hundreds or thousands of people, and millions in aggregate.
Oxycodone (invented in Germany in 1913) is a good drug. Yes, it is an opioid and opioids are potentially addictive. Anybody who says otherwise is a liar or not qualified to practice medicine. Contrary to popular belief, the academic literature does not say this either.
Oxycontin is generic oxycodone with a proprietary (Purdue Pharma) time-release formula meant to treat longer-term pain, but it is hardly unique nor is this diabolical. Many drugs work this way ─ and all drugs do need to be prescribed properly.
Because our healthcare industry is practically completely Jewish owned and run (don’t blame me for that) and the Sacklers at Purdue are Jews, White Nationalists can hardly be reasoned with on this subject. Edgy podcasters without college degrees can be especially dumb.
The real threat of the opioid crisis is street fentanyl ─ that is the crux of the problem for White people ─ and the rest is an optics debate amongst Jews. The FDA and the DEA are at fault as well and it is by nature a very complicated issue.
I’ll leave for another day the Jewish Question itself and whether it is appropriate for Jews to control the healthcare industry, and the mass-media, and the government, and all manners of Globalism, deindustrialization, etc. Everybody needs decent healthcare and that is hugely a factor here. It is not a White Trash issue. I am a White Nationalist and I am not hard to reason with but the Grugs have largely dominated the debate in my experience.
Mr. Shift, you mentioned that the dentist gave you some Percocet for tooth extractions.
Well, most dental surgeons today will happily take a chainsaw to your face and then tell you to “suck it up, Buttercup.” So I’d say that unless the doctor gave you a prescription for a month’s supply of Percocet, you were well served.
If one is not experiencing long-term pain without health insurance, one is NOT going to get addicted by a few pain pills or even a month or two Rx.
Percocet is mostly Tylenol (acetaminophen aka paracetamol). Percocet has a tiny splash of oxycodone but it is hardly “Hillbilly Heroin.”
Vicodin is another lightweight pain medication that is mostly Tylenol. Vicodin is acetaminophen with a tiny splash of hydrocodone.
Let me just say that Heath Ledger did not overdose on Vicodin but from a hefty helping of liquid refreshment. In fact, the DEA considers Percocet and Vicodin to be fairly overdose-proof because the patient will present to the ER with acute liver failure from the Tylenol before respiratory failure from the opioid component ─ barring any ethanol overdose added to the mix.
I consider myself somewhat of an expert on this subject with a background as a historian with experience at an academic library and doing medical research.
Plus, after having been run over by a car driven by a junkie who was in no condition to walk, let alone drive, I have used all of these drugs.
Oxycodone or Oxycontin was good ─ not great. Oxymorphone (in the quick release matrix) much better, but not all that much better than basic generic morphine sulfate tablets, to be honest.
In the end, my levels of pain could only be controlled by IV morphine (best) or after leaving the hospital and long-term care facility, with fentanyl transdermal patches. These are rarely prescribed unless someone is terminally ill.
And because junkies kept figuring out ways to extract the fentanyl from fentanyl transdermal patches, the drug manufacturers (for much higher costs to the consumer) kept figuring out ways to make it harder to tamper with the patches ─ which hugely reduced their effectiveness. If I hadn’t had a good medical plan I wouldn’t have access to anything like that to begin with, and under state law I had to be urine tested at random about every 90 days. They were mainly looking for traces of cocaine or medical weed, I guess. (I never extensively tried medical weed but I was not impressed by what I did try.)
The medical industry is literally afraid to prescribe opiates now, even when they are badly needed. They will ALWAYS try to push anti-Depressants on you (especially SSRIs) because the addiction theory that is vogue does not consider that SSRIs are addictive since they take so long to work (weeks, if ever). In my experience SSRIs do not work for depression ─ and they certainly did not work for pain control. They also have a lot of weird and nasty side-effects, although overdosing is not one of them.
I consider opiates to be a miracle drug for pain control, especially morphine and fentanyl (patches). But I wish that I had never tried anti-Depressants at all.
And before anybody asks ─ NO, I have not been on any opioid or anti-Depressant medications in many years. Yesterday I stood in a long line for a Holiday event for about an hour and a half, and today I almost regret that I no longer have any pain prescriptions. There are limits to what results you can get from ibuprofen and acetaminophen.
Fortunately we do not live in the Stone Age, but because of the “opioid crisis,” it is tough to get decent healthcare, especially related to pain. The ER assumes that everybody these days is just a junkie. You can be sporting compound fractures, literally.
My solution to the opiate crisis (i.e., the spate of overdoses) is first to realize honestly that STREET FENTANYL is what is killing people. Secondly, hang drug dealers by the neck until dead with few exceptions, and Thirdly, send real junkies to concentration camps to sort their stuff out.
You mentioned Valium. This is an anti-anxiety medication that is rarely even prescribed to patients any longer, especially since SSRIs are available. I was given it once on my way to getting undressed for surgery. I could barely make it down the hall to the waiting room after the nurse gave it to me. I would guess that Valium has a high addictive potential because it did provide a euphoric state that I’ve never experienced with opioids, including IV morphine.
Anyway, after my last surgery, which was meant for pain control, I had no problem quitting opioids for long-term pain management. I realize that everybody is different, and I was lucky in that I did have good health insurance.
But the bottom line is that I did not like the idea of being vulnerable to the medical system if the SHTF. The system treats you like a junkie by default, especially if you are an aging Boomer like me ─ and you can’t even get a prescription for something as mild as Ambien these days if you ever have trouble sleeping. That is not progress.
I agree with Mr. Goad’s points about Adderall and the overall gist of the article.
As far as Depression, I was told when I had questions about Prozac or any other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and whether this was really going to work was to try it and see, and that the question of this being an organic medical issue or not would need to actually involve brain biopsies and a lot of other research to get to the bottom of Depression itself. There seemed to be a lot of undeserved confidence that this was something that would really be solved by expensive Serotonin reuptake inhibition drugs.
Depression is a very weird mental disease in that it is impossible for anyone who has not felt it to really understand anything about it. Is it an organic mental disease or caused by something very real like just having been hit by a car? To say that this involves the Human Condition is a bit abstruse and not particularly helpful. We certainly don’t “pray away” broken bones.
These are difficult questions to answer but I do not believe that the “goodness” of Nature or God holds the answers. All disease is not going to be cured with refreshing enemas, vegan diets, whole-grain goodness, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, or the Gideon Bible in every room.
It was little more than a century ago that physicians did not even have High School Diplomas. Their families were just wealthy enough that they could afford to send Junior to a decent Medical School ─ where the curricula was basically cutting up cadavers to learn anatomy, and watching antiseptic surgeries in an operating theater.
Even when the 1918 Influenza was raging, most country doctors, for example, had minimal knowledge of microbiology ─ and it had only just been proven that typhus fever was spread by body lice.
🙂
Lots of good info. I didn’t make up “hillbilly heroin.” It is offensive. I used it to make a point about the strength of Percocet, not to malign hillbillies. Thanks for your considerable knowledge about this stuff.
Thanks. 🙂
“If you want to talk about “Hillbilly Heroin,” what is more appropriately meant is STREET FENTANYL”
All the top references to “hillbilly heroin” on the internet refer to oxycodone and not fentanyl.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21932751/
https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/heroin-addiction/hillbilly-heroin/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/25/usa.julianborger
https://www.drugfreeworld.org/drugfacts/painkillers/oxycontin-the-hillbilly-heroin.html
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/black-beauties-gorilla-pills-footballs-and-hillbilly-heroin-some
etc.
SCOTT wrote:
“If you want to talk about “Hillbilly Heroin,” what is more appropriately meant is STREET FENTANYL”
JIM GOAD wrote:
“All the top references to ‘hillbilly heroin’ on the internet refer to oxycodone and not fentanyl.”
Exactly ─ and that is the crux of a huge problem, since if we define the “opioid crisis” as overdoses or OD deaths, it is overwhelmingly street fentanyl (i.e., in the 90 percent ballpark).
So the narrative is framed as hillbillies or maybe big pharma, or maybe Epstein and the Sacklers, and not open-border policies and simple smuggling.
I am not accusing you of inventing the “Hillbilly Heroin” trope, but it does frame the debate in vague and inappropriate ways.
I am not a sympathizer for either Junkies or Jews in the least, but to say that drugs are the fault of White Trash and their irrepressible copper kettles and backwoods kitchens is certainly wrong.
People condemn pharmacies for having “excess inventory” in the safe when we saw the result of just-in-time supply chain philosophies recently with shortages of basic things like toilet paper and rubbing alcohol. You almost had to buy TP for the bunghole on the black market in Arizona during the year of Covid.
And kneejerk responses are exactly why you have to present your passport and Blutabzeichen at the drug counter at the Wally World if you want to buy some cold tablets or drain opener.
A more sober way to frame the narrative with Oxycontin is that Purdue Pharma overmarketed their product ─ generic oxycodone + time-release proprietary matrix = Oxycontin.
So the Jews made some money with an old German (1913) pain drug within a new and patentable time-release matrix, and then the FDA gave it approval in the 1990s in doses much larger than they should have.
There should definitely be some large civil and probably criminal penalties as a result.
But this is not a unique story. In the 1950s, West German Chemie Grünenthal and the UK distillery Dewars marketed some looted Nazi chemical research and fast-tracked the drug Thalidomide to the market. It was safer than most prescription drugs of the day, but it was completely inappropriate to treat for morning sickness because at certain weeks of gestation it caused massive birth defects. OOPS!
Fortunately the FDA actually did NOT approve Thalidomide in the United States other than some rare off-market drug trials. However, it was a different story in the rest of the Anglosphere and Europe.
Contrary to popular belief, the academic literature never said that Oxycontin or any other opioids were non-addictive, or even safer than other drugs like morphine sulfate or MS-Contin. There are no peer-reviewed studies that show this.
There is a lot of HYPE, or what I call academic-article buzz and hearsay that requires a pretty careful study of the evidence to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, but that is not what most people think it means when they Google Oxycontin.
Some conspiracy theories in our circles are arguing that Polio was fake because Joos like Salk and Sabin developed vaccines ─ but other than a problem with the earlier Sabin live-polio dose, the “sugar cube” has nearly eradicated the disease worldwide. I don’t remember the disease, but my parents and my Registered Nurse grandmother, definitely do.
Take the 5G cellphone controversy. Lolberts are making some extraordinary claims. This is 1) non-ionizing radiation and 2) it is present in extremely minute doses ─ and reasonable people like myself would therefore not expect this to be an epidemiological problem. (I do have a background in RF technology.)
The academic research has NOT found any health hazards from this weak but now-ubiquitous Radio Frequency radiation. So you could say that 5G is SAFE, but the fact is that the question really has not been studied very much either.
Just to be clear, I don’t care if the (((Sacklers))) pay billions of dollars in fines and lawsuits, or even if they get strung up from the lampposts, as long as we can still talk about the real issues involved ─ including ─ the economy, universal healthcare, pain management, the Jewish Question itself, and so on.
If I had not personally had a pretty good health plan and intensive short-term care insurance from the University when the Junkie ran me over at full speed in the crosswalk, I would be dead. Full Stop. Most people in the USA just do not have what health insurance I had.
And I don’t come from a privileged background, either. My Dad retired as an Aerospace and Nuclear engineer. It allowed him to raise five kids without my Mom having to work. His was the first generation with a college degree. He was from West-slope Colorado where in the early 20th century Communists and fellow-travelers like Agnes Smedley and Dalton Trumbo hailed, and Redneck ranchers and LDS pioneer stock try to keep the rich Libtards and Beaner migrant wrokers at bay. (West-slope Colorado is Congresswoman Boebert’s district, and she is now being blamed by AOC for not being a fellow gun-grabber since there was another East-slope Colorado mass-shooting recently.)
Instead of going to the Colorado School of Mines, my Dad and Uncle were inspired by Sputnik to go to Brigham Young and Utah State to become rocket and nuclear engineers and develop the Minuteman ICBM and later Apollo program. So our family moved around a lot from atomic test site to rocket proving grounds before settling in Idaho where my Mom was from, and they have a national reactor laboratory in the middle of the Arco desert. My Dad was the guy they went to when Thiokol had to redesign their solid-rocket-booster engines after they blew up on the Space Shuttle in 1986.
We all came from a long line of miners and pioneer stock. My Mom’s grandfather had Welsh miner ancestry, and he died from blood poisoning after getting his finger smashed by an ore wagon while building the American Falls Dam in Idaho. The doctor wanted to remove his arm but he wouldn’t let them do it (and he died). It was a little like in the Dalton Trumbo book where the World War I Army doctors are inclined to treat gangrene in a soldier’s toe “conservatively” by taking off the patient’s leg at the hip. It was easier for the Army surgeon to save face by sawing off the patient’s face.
Anyway, the Hipsters think that they have summed up the opiate issue with the idea that it is the straight drugs like alcohol and prescription pills that are the real problem. Hail the ‘shrooms and the weed.
The indefatigable Zoomers, whose bodies are wearing out as fast as ours did, think that the problem is just those fucking Boomers ─ as if we were the One Percent in charge of everything and had any say in whether the medical research money should have been spent on AIDS and boner pills.
Then the White Nationalists think that the opioid crisis is just the Jews trying to Genocide us like they always do ─ even though there is zero proof that they are targeting Rednecks or Christians primarily, or that the overdoses are caused by Oxycontin specifically instead of Fent. (Purdue Pharma has deeper pockets than does Pedro or Jacquavious.)
After Covid I did quite a bit of road tripping in the West, and in Colorado where weed has been legal for some time now, the elderly lady at the Safeway checkout was so high that she could barely ring up my stuff. And at the Burger King the Internet went out for a few minutes when there was a high-mountain electrical storm, and I had to teach the Zoomer at the cash register how to count change. It didn’t help that he was stoned either. He said that he came to the high-country to raft the rivers in the Summer and to ski the slopes in the Winter.
I told him that my ancestor came to Colorado as an orphaned teenager to work in the gold mines after his Dad starved to death in a Yankee PoW camp in Illinois, and after his Mom died of consumption working in an Arkansas cotton mill.
I can appreciate the plight of the Boomer in the Appalachian pain clinic after his benefits have run out from the mill closing a decade or two earlier. At least the Pajeet doctor is willing to write a pain script for a month or two on the Visa card. Then what ─ selling paint brushes in Taos or handling snakes?
Anyway, this can be an emotional issue and I don’t have all the answers. I just don’t like the idea that it should be blamed on Rednecks.
🙂
Mental illness IS a disease and the Rx in 99.9% of the cases is the same:
Grow the hell up, the world ain’t your mama!
Most “mental illness” is self-inflicted by a stubborn refusal to understand and, more importantly, change the unhealthy thought processes. In other words, a refusal to grow up.
Even if we don’t all agree on the prevalence of mental illness I think we can all agree that over-medicating children is not a good thing.
Here’s where Canada is headed on the issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4gjnZinJz8
Look for the pharmaceutical industry to lobby against these kinds of laws. They don’t want their drug users dead. They want them alive and lucratively medicated.
A member of my family has bipolar disorder. Were it not for lithium, he’d either be dead or in jail.
You made the most down to earth statement in this entire thread. Most of the people commenting in this section about mental disorders not being real, obviously have never been around someone that has a serious case, they are much akeen to whites that live in gated communities that tell other white people that live in crime infested cities how they should feel about the their multicultural prisons. I am a fullbown schizo that actually needs the medication. This talk of manning up, eating right,lifting weights ,and doing exercise that gets your blood pumping and breathing heavy , and having strong meaningful relationships with other people only works as a cure for depression and anxiety it is not the cure for a real mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar. I was doing all this to a T because I thought it would “cure” my mental illness, in the end I crashed and burned severely and fucked up my life and I know several people in real life and online that this has happened to, and they all ended up needing to be put back on medication and it was the only thing that saved their life. Yes doctors like to force medications on people and in the end the people that don’t need it wont need it but the people that do need it will turn their lives around. I agree jim with about ADHD I was on adderall when I was younger and it did nothing other than making me stay awake all night so I could sneak out at night when my parents were asleep and drink all night with my friends and then be able to stay up all day the next day during school. I agree with Jim about people not trusting the government but trusting some quack psychiatrist to experiment on you with a cocktail of meds. I have always thought it was quite coincidental that almost all psychiatric medications cause sexual and reproductive problems in both males and females. In the end I know these medication are not good for me but like a patient that has cancer trying chemo I will give it a shot if it saves my life even though it has negative effects. Sorry for any grammar errors just wanted to throw my two cents out there.
Sorry to hear that. I don’t think anyone here is or meant to be unsympathetic to real mental health issues. That’s not what the article is about. I’ve certainly spent time in the company of a shrink or two, both school-ordered and court-ordered.
Thanks your a guy that’s in the know who is qualified to make such statements. My issue wasn’t really with the article. It was more or less what the comments section in these articles or videos usually devolve into. I am not trying to sound like an SJW because I am just as fed up with them as the rest of you. My brother said I would be a pariah to people on the left because I am white and a pariah to those on the right because I am a shizo. The some of the most sane things I have ever heard in my life come from you folks on the dissident right. I just finished Jim’s whiteness the original sin book. I am from Muhammad Ali’s home town and no one has ever brought up the fact to me that he ditched his slave name and picked the name muhammad ali who was actually a warlord and slave master of africans. You all say alot of though provoking sane stuff. Keep it up.
Don: I appreciate your kind statement, and wish you all the best.
Unfortunately this topic frequently degrades into black and white thinking. Mental illness is either all bullshit or all disease that the public doesn’t take the time to understand. Like most areas of medicine, there are people taking advantage of grey zones and pushing drug sales, or being dependent patients seeking treatments they don’t need. At the other end are seriously ill people who need treatment yet refuse or fall through the cracks. The topic is more Right wing than many give credit. Law and order types don’t want homeless psychotic individuals pushing people onto subway tracks. The de-institutionalization movement was very much well meaning Leftist ideals but without a well developed plan to keep such people safe in the community. Which cities have the greatest number of unhoused, unmedicated, drug addicted psychotic people wandering the streets with a greatly reduced life expectancy? Very liberal cities like San Francisco, Skid row Los Angeles, etc.
And lithium seems to be amazing stuff. All natural, non-addictive (but with risks), very effective for multiple things. It used to be in 7 up soda. Areas with more lithium naturally occurring in the water supply have fewer suicides. But pharma can’t patent a natural substance and you can’t get high off it, so it doesn’t make headlines.
вялотеку́щая шизофрени́я. Sluggish schizophrenia. That’s what the soviets said you had if you were a dissident. I’m personally getting tired of being told I’m crazy. Crazy for being appalled at the state of the world. Crazy for being persecuted by the Frankenstein Worldwide Gangster Communist Transgender Playboy Computer God (I jest) Crazy for being disgusted with the violence. In the Ukraine. South of the border. And in America’s cities. Being told ‘Crime was higher in the 90s. It’s a red state murder problem. No, Soros is not undermining our safety. And that’s anti-semitic.’ From there, we springboard into linguistic games and puzzlers like ‘Albolish the police/prisons. (?) Abolish gender. (?) Safe and effective (not). Reproductive rights. (aka abortion on demand)’ There are many other left-wing platitudes and weasel words they use. I know they are mostly not actually that stupid when I hear things like this. They’re just terrified of getting canceled or something. I think. The fact is gentlemen, reality is on our side. People really are keeling over from heart attacks, drug overdoses, not to mention gunshot wounds. Things are getting bad and they’re gonna get worse. Drug cartels are cutting people’s heads off, and worse. It’s possible in the future, we will miss having the vaccinated around. It’s possible we will look back on 2022 with nostalgia. Well if my heart doesn’t fail me or we don’t get blown to pieces by the Russians ICBMs, adieu, till next time.
Attacking psychiatry seems like another pointless poison pill to stick in the cornucopia of bad ideas that the dissident right is fast becoming, and one entirely irrelevant to white nationalism. The worst excesses of “big pharma” are an entirely American phenomenon caused in turn by the worst excesses of capitalism and the liberalism it attracts. There is no opioid epidemic in Europe.
against time and for nature — what rightist would seek to cure the human condition ?
No and yes. This reminds me of jurors who demand DNA evidence for any and every case. MRI and CT brain scans diagnose tumors, massive anomalies and nasty infections but many things are not evident. Intellectual disability, autism and many cases of Alzheimer’s disease won’t be apparent on such scan while most can agree they exist. We don’t have tests for migraine headaches or even pain, which leads to abuses just as with the ADHD phenomenon.
There are abundant studies showing that having ADHD symptoms predisposes (not guarantee) a variety of worse outcomes in school, jobs, marriage, drug use, even car accidents. Though it is more sensible to call it a ‘trait’ rather than a ‘disease’. The experts shoot for something in the middle like ‘disorder’, which is still too diseased for my liking. But it might not be fair to say there are no ‘causes’ of ADHD. Various forms of autism are genetic in origin, affect brain development, and have much more ADHD than is found in the general population. Also, lead poisoning increases the risk of ADHD (and lowers real estate value in Flint, MI). As lead messes with many aspects of brain formation I doubt anyone can point to a single part that is broken to make people impaired, but understanding how the brain works is still fuzzy at best.
Many consider attention and concentration as elements of intelligence. But no parents wants to believe their kid is below average if there is the lure of a quick-fix pill or a doctor’s note that grants them extra time on an exam. And it can get muddy and uncomfortable if a school is threatening expulsion and likely no future diploma but there is hope of medicating some poor bastard even if they don’t fit neatly into a psych disorder. I don’t think either option sounds good and the details probably matter.
Is medicine helpful? The ‘effective’ drugs are pretty much slightly milder versions of meth and plenty of folks abuse them by snorting or injecting them. They increase attention, energy and make boring stuff seem more interesting (the latter not talked about so often). The crux should be long term outcomes and sadly these medications don’t have a great deal of long-term success and I’ve linked some studies that are pro and con.
They work better in the short term, which is how they are so common among college kids during finals. They were part of the German WW2 strategy and Benzedrine was probably a major element to the success the early blitzkrieg. As for the long term benefits, we all know how it worked out for Germany.
One interesting study gave amphetamines to ‘normal’ people. Their performance improved only negligibly, if at all. The kicker? Those taking the drug confidently believed that it did.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6168061/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31474129/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785407/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22884611/
2/4 of the authors in your papers cite conflicts of interests, having previous dealings with drug companies that manufacture drugs for mental illness. 1 of the 4 claims no COI. And 1 was sponsored by the Navy. (Hm.)
the last one, by Ilieva et al 2013, has this to say, on why the published literature on psychiatry (and other medical areas) is so unreproducible:
“We believe that the answer is related to a set of problems, specif-
ically low study power, flexibility in specific outcomes to be tested
and publication bias against null results, which bedevil all branches
of science, as explained in Ioannidis’s (2005) provocatively titled
article, “Why most published research findings are false.” The
impact of these problems on psychology and neuroscience
research, in the absence of any intentional malfeasance has been
discussed by Ioannidis (2011), Lehrer (2010) and Simmons et al.
(2011) among others […”
The NIH funds few clinical trials. To save money for an already cash strapped entity, NIH can bet pharmaceutical companies will scrounge up cash to get their studies done. If you don’t like the reality of it, you can vote to pay more in taxes. But this is reality. While there are ‘potential’ conflicts of interest in a company paying for a study, as economists say, the free market ultimately sorts out bullshit and no drug company stays in business for long selling placebos (unless supplements). Doctors are semi accountable to get cholesterol numbers down and be wary they can be sued if their patient kills themself. Reproducibility in science and medicine is a complex problem, but multiple independent groups finding similar things is a good sign, at least for reproducibility. In this case, different amphetamine type drugs from different companies and academics find similar things. But few had incentive or money to do long term studies, and those findings turn out to be less robust than the short term ones.
As disappointing as stimulants can be, at least there is some impetus that they should be ‘performance enhancing’. One really can’t say that about medical marijuana or benzodiazepines (and opioids, if not already obvious enough). With more and more Americans tranquilizing themselves into decreased productivity, China will get its revenge for the Opium Wars (an amazing history you should all read). As for me, hands off my coffee and tea.
There’s a slightly unrealistic view of medicine being presented here. Doctors don’t routinely do brain scans to diagnose stuff. In 99% of cases it would be a waste of time.
There are quite a number of conditions that defy a definitive genetic or chemical cause.
It’s not like having an X-Ray or blood test, but I’m not sure I agree that mental illness is not scientifically quantifiable as a blanket statement.
There are of course fuzzy boundaries here for most people.
It comes down to what is causing a serious problem for a person on a day to day basis. Not ‘I had a bad day’, ‘I had bad thought once’, ‘I felt a bit hyper once’.
Still, there are big issues with these – often Jewish, definitions of mental health issues and new ones appearing all the time and the subsequent ‘treatments’. (Perhaps it would be better if they just got to the point and marketed their drugs for antisemitism and to turn men into trannies .)
At the same time there are people who have real functional problems operating in the world we live in.
Many of us would argue the modern world (also rather Jewish) is a major problem which I don’t exactly disagree with, but people still have to operate in it for the time being and some people do really struggle. So there is a context, albeit sometimes a flawed one.
But the idea of children, who are themselves not able to know they have a problem, just being normal children much of time – so it comes down to parents’, teachers’ and doctors’ observations, getting ADHD drugs seems very shaky to me.
But is there some racial breakdown for this ? Who’s getting the drugs for ADHD ? Is it whites or highly disruptive and violent negroes?
Generally though, dishing these drugs out like candy is entirely an American thing to do with how corrupt the US’s medical system is. In Europe it’s much harder to get many of the drugs mentioned prescribed, with the exception of SSRIs.
Belief ? It’s probably not so much they believe the psychiatric industry, but they just assume it’s a part of MURICA, so it’s good. God has blessed America in a special way to have endless loony cults, a thriving pharmaceutical industry with Jews setting the rules, big macs, George Floyd and MLK statues, neon signs of cowboys and other stuff.
“They hate our freedoms.”
Mr. Goad,
Interesting article. I wonder if you, or any of the other readers or commenters, are familiar with Thomas Szasz, a Hungarian psychiatrist who wrote one book called “The Myth of Mental Illness” and at least one more called “The Manufacture of Madness”. I believe he wrote a lot more stuff as well. Although Hungarian, he practiced psychiatry in the US for most of his career. I think maybe he worked in Connecticut but I think more probably somewhere on the Atlantic coast in New England. He died a few years ago. If anybody has any comments on Jim’s article and Thomas Szasz, I would be interested in reading them.
Thank you for the article.
There are huge grey zones in psychiatry in which personality quirks grade into so-called ‘disorders’, ‘illnesses’ or even ‘diseases’. Plenty of people are helped to ‘function in the real world’ by dopamine-antagonists which suppress creativity of mind as well as the ‘delusional’ thoughts and ‘hallucinations’ which sometimes accompany this valued atttibute. No doubt other ‘patients’ do not feel themselves better off but are nevertheless less bother to those around them. The absence of confirmatory testing, as Mr Goad points out, means a huge amount relies on the probity and skill of the shrink making the decision to forcibly treat or detain someone, viz Mr James Forrestal and his strange neck-tied defenestration in Bethesda. At least in the antipodes two separate medical opinions, one of which has to be from a trained psychiatrist, are required to deprive a person of liberty but this is clearly not fool-proof.
In my experience of people who have received the diagnosis of ADHD, they are restless, energetic and whilst distractable have a great capacity for physical and inter-personal work. Prior to the advent of prolonged compulsory schooling and the demise of outdoor agricultural and craft work as the main mode of employment these attributes would have been a boon to their possessors and their communities, so I very much agree that a lot of these so-called disorders are socially constructed.
The late RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist, would have had some stuff to say about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2t50unJkA&ab_channel=MomentumPictures
And if you need more demonisation of white people, we are now horror film fodder; the women in this are white supremacists. Directed by a minority, of course, Beth de Araújo. She said in an interview:
“The inspiration for Soft & Quiet, de Araújo says, “came from my greatest fears and my nightmares, especially as Asian-American hate crimes increased over 2020. My mom is Chinese-American, my dad is from Brazil, and I was born in San Francisco.”
https://www.fangoria.com/original/soft-quiet-writerdirector-beth-de-ara%C3%BAjo-wants-to-get-under-your-skin/
Funny how it was black people doing the attacking, not white people. Still, any chance a racist gets to piss on white people, eh?
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