“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
– George Orwell, 1984.
As if food manufacturers poisoning us with artificial ingredients isn’t enough, we have the medical establishment to contend with. I’ve written before about harmful prescription drugs, and will continue to do so, but today let’s look at a different perspective on the matter…
Let me begin by discussing marijuana. Marijuana is still largely illegal. Why?
Because ‘they’ say so.
Marijuana is no more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, and it’s certainly less harmful (many say even beneficial!), but cigarettes and alcohol are legal. Why?
Because ‘they’ say so.
Why, in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, did Big Brother demand that 2+2= 5?
Because he said so.
And just like some Orwellian nightmare, ‘they’ try to erase history. For example, the simple condition of heartburn used to be exactly that: a spot of indigestion from eating the wrong foods. But Big Brother erased that history, and we’re supposed to forget that heartburn ever existed. Instead it was decreed to be ‘acid reflux disease’.
And that means a drug can be sold to combat this ‘disease’. Why?
Because ‘they’ said so.
The truth is too sinister for many to stomach. Of course, the truth about why marijuana is illegal has nothing to do with it being a so-called ‘gateway drug’, but rather because the government cannot effectively generate tax revenues from it because it’s easily created in a black market. Cigarettes and alcohol are also gateway drugs in my opinion, but they’re legal because they can be regulated to generate money.
It’s all about money. And nothing wrong with making a profit AS LONG as it’s not based on a LIE that harms people. Many people could medically benefit from marijuana, but they are denied it in the name of dishonest profit. Worse still, it’s branded an illegal contraband, a street drug, right up there with crack.
Here’s the point:
It’s all about The Power of Definition.
Once a government decrees something, updates the history books, and bastardizes the dictionary it becomes ‘fact’ that the bleating masses slop out at dinner parties.
Want to sell even more drugs? There’s an even sneakier way than coming up with new ‘diseases’…
Just tweak the definitions of diseases, specifically, lower the threshold at which a person is considered to have a disease.
An example of this crafty practice was highlighted recently as the psychiatrists’ diagnostic bible was updated to widen the net about who has a mental illness. The more people that have a mental illness, the more money psychiatrists make and the more drugs that get sold.
This from the BBC:
“Critics say the rulebook turns normal behavior, like grief or childhood temper tantrums, into mental illness. There are new categories including binge eating disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (previously known as childhood bipolar disorder) and hoarding disorder.”
Professor Peter Kinderman, head of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, stated:
“[This] will lower many diagnostic thresholds and increase the number of people in the general population seen as having a mental illness.” He said “normal grief” would now be classed as a major depressive disorder and childhood temper tantrums would be a symptom of disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.” Also: “A wide range of unfortunate human behaviours, the subject of many new year’s resolutions, will become mental illnesses – excessive eating will become ‘binge eating disorder’, and the category of ‘behavioural addictions’ will widen significantly to include such ‘disorders’ as ‘internet addiction’ and ‘sex addiction’.”
Dr. Thomas Insel said, “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or Aids, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.
“In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever.”
In response to this, Dr. David Kupfer, defending the move, said:
“The changes to the manual will help clinicians more precisely identify mental disorders and improve diagnosis while maintaining the continuity of care.
“We expect these changes to help clinicians better serve patients and to deepen our understanding of these disorders based on new research.”
Or how about you stop looking for problems that aren’t undue problems as part of the human condition?
Can you believe that “Internet addiction” is one of the new ‘conditions’ that they’ve concocted? Hey, you’d better stop reading this now- who knows what the threshold is for using the Internet is before they deem you to be psychotic and deserving of a drug…
Something is an addiction where it’s having a control over your habits, where you’re dependent on it.
So they’re saying people aren’t dependent on the Internet? That it doesn’t shape their day? What the…?
Many people experience a profound and long-lasting grieving process following the death of a loved one. Many soldiers returning from conflict suffer from trauma. Many of us are shy and anxious in social situations or unmotivated and pessimistic if we’re unemployed or dislike our jobs.
For a few of us, our experiences of abuse or failure lead us to feel that life is not worth living. We need to recognize these human truths and we need to offer help. But we should not regard these human experiences as symptoms of a mental illness.
Psychiatric diagnoses are not only scientifically invalid, they are harmful too. The language of illness implies that the roots of such emotional distress lie in abnormalities in our brain and biology, usually known as “chemical imbalances”. This leads us to be blind to the social and psychological causes of distress. More importantly, we tend to prescribe medical solutions – anti-depressants and anti-psychotic medication – despite significant side effects and poor evidence of their effectiveness.
Whatever your ‘condition’ is, consider who said you had it and what they have to gain by your diagnosis.
