With considerable misgivings, I have decided that, due to advancing age and ongoing deterioration in my health, I am no longer able to write posts or respond to comments.
From my personal perspective, I deeply regret having to make this decision. I’ve been writing posts for the last 13 years, and during that time I’ve made no secret of my opposition to psychiatric principles and practice. Having to quit the field at this stage leaves me with a profound sense of incompleteness. There is still so much work to be done, to which my only contribution will be cheering from the sidelines.
Although the anti-psychiatry movement has made a great deal of progress over the past fifty years, the psychiatric hoax is not only surviving, but is the dominant lens through which the great majority of people view personal distress and suffering. This is not due to any great psychiatric achievements or insights. Rather, it reflects psychiatry’s persistent use of deception and PR tactics to promote their guild interests at the expense of their customers.
The war against psychiatry – and I make no apologies for describing it in such terms – needs to be fought on three main fronts. Firstly, we need to promote tried and true methods of dealing with distress that do not entail spurious medicalization, damaging “treatments”, and routine disempowerment of individuals who seek help. Secondly, we need to continue vigorous critiquing of the psychiatric hoax wherever and whenever it surfaces. When we ignore these spurious and pernicious accounts, we do a grave disservice to those countless individuals who have been victimized by the hoax, and who find validation in our protests. And these are the people who will finally bury psychiatry in the morass of its own inane, arrogant, self-righteous disease-mongering. Thirdly, we need to use every opportunity to educate various stakeholders, especially government officials – local, state, and federal – concerning psychiatry’s spurious medicalization of virtually every problem of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
And, of course, our primary objective must remain the exclusion of psychiatry from non-medical problems, and supplanting it with the kinds of natural social supports that have carried the human race successfully through thousands of years of wars, plagues, famines, corrupt politicians, natural disasters, and unscrupulous profiteers.
I very much appreciate the unstinting support and encouragement I have received from my readers over the years. I also appreciate the level of commitment and courage that you have demonstrated, and continue to demonstrate, in the struggle against psychiatric corruption and tyranny.
I will leave my posts up on Behaviorism and Mental Health as long as they continue to attract readers, but, as I mentioned earlier, I will no longer be able to respond to comments.
