This Is Your Brain On W
2005
I got a very disturbing e-mail the other day. And I’m not talking about the one to enlarge the penis I don’t even have OR the one from Ben telling me he hurt his back and therefore can’t re-caulk my shower stall for yet another week. It was worse, even worse, than either of those.

It was a link to an article about good old W, up to his nasty little tricks again. This time, he’s taken his sinister plots against the American public to new heights.

In even newer and more profound ways, he wants to mess with our heads. It seems that W has plans to screen all public school children under the age of 18, plus pregnant women, for mental health defects.

mindfreedom.org

As many many articles on the web agree, W should be ashamed for concocting such a scheme. Essentially he’s putting dollars right into the pockets of the mega-uber-huge drug companies at the expense of our kids (and pregnant women?! Yikes!!) Also, it’s just another step on the ladder to completely dismantling personal freedom in this country. But beyond that, another little alarm went off in my brain, reminding me of a curious book I read some time ago. It had to do with psychiatry and a guy named Hitler.

“Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler” [Dr. Thomas Roder, Vokler Kubillus, & Anthony Burwell; Freedom Publishing 1995] traces the roots of modern psychiatry from Europe, particularly Germany, to present day America.

amazon.com

It begins with Malthus. He was the first guy to figure out that over-population will lead to starvation, war and similar human extremes. (No kidding, Malthus.) When his philosophy was mated with Social Darwinism, the result was Eugenics, which sounds like it’s about teaching kids to wash after going potty.

Hardly. Eugenics regarded any society as a body. And nasty things like the mentally retarded or mentally ill, the physically handicapped and everyone of inferior genetic stock were considered to be...well...germs. Everybody knows what we do with germs. Eugenics swept through universities here and in Europe like the Botox doc at a Botox brunch. It was all the rage in the early part of the last century. Teddy Roosevelt was a big fan and so was John D. Rockefeller who gave oodles of cash to the guys studying Eugenics in Germany. Hitler was another big fan and used Eugenic theory to push the laws through the Bundestaad, which justified sterilization, euthanasia and genocide. Psychiatrists and the infamous T-4 program, not the SS or the Gestapo, decided which schizophrenic kids were taken for rides in mobile gas chambers.

The general mindset of these “proponents of mental hygiene” was that in the interest of bettering the genetic stock of the entire population, individuals were judged against a human template of uniformity. Those who were judged to be significantly “different”; psychologically, hormonally, emotionally, or physically; would be “corrected”. At that time, it meant they were either given lobotomies, electro-shock treatment, or drugs, or were institutionalized, sterilized, or killed.

Before, during, and after WWII, many German psychiatrists involved in the T-4 program escaped prosecution with the help of the US Military and the CIA who wanted to keep the German brains out of Soviet hands. Many came right here to the US where they headed programs at top universities. Others went to work for the American military. All but four of “Hitler’s psychiatrists” escaped the Nuremberg trials for their crimes. They were to continue their research and impose their influence in the U.S., Western Europe and even Germany. After all, the first International Congress on Mental Health was held in Washington D.C. in 1930 and keynoted by Ernst Rudin who was one of the primary architects of the Reich’s racial policies.

I’m not saying that there is some secret conspiracy among modern psychiatrists and W to carry out the work of the Eugenicists. It seems W’s motives are probably more pure – just money grubbing for his friends at the big drug companies. But what guidelines for “normalcy” are our children going to be judged against in W’s hypothetical new national mental health regime? Is it right that in this present day in America we, and specifically our children, should be judged against a template of “mental hygiene” that the Nazis had some part in hand crafting?

Over a year ago, Time Magazine published an article that said according to a drug trade group called PhRMA, “up to 10% of American kids may suffer from some mental illness. Perhaps twice that many have exhibited some symptoms of depression. Up to a million others may suffer from . . . bipolar disorder . . . and ADHD rates are exploding too. According to a Mayo Clinic study, children between 5 and 19 have at least a 7.5% chance of being found to have ADHD, which amounts to nearly 5 million kids. Other children are receiving diagnoses and medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder, social-anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, pathological impulsiveness, sleeplessness, phobias, and more.”

time.com

With this many American kids being diagnosed as abnormal and in need of drug treatment, just think of all the mentally “different” kids that W can nab if he performs psychiatric evaluations on every kid in the nation. I’m not one to say some kids don’t need serious treatment. But just maybe some of those kids who will be “flattened” by W’s drugs are or were destined to be geniuses of one nature or another -- leaders, revolutionary thinkers, writers, artists, whatever. I’d be willing to bet Van Gogh, Melville, Hemingway, Einstein, and the Wright Brothers were the types that gave parents and teachers a run for their money. They were different, they were talented, they did things differently than everyone else, and now we are all better for it.

W should hop on-line and cruise some of the support groups that kids on psychiatric drugs write in to. Here are a few excerpts I found from a blog for kids on Ritalin:

“I gain: rational thought, anger management, productivity, calm, the ability to act normal. I lose: poetry. Worth it? I don’t know. But it will help me graduate from college. After that . . . we’ll see.”

“I’ve said it before . . . and I’ll say it again . . . I have almost no memories between 4th and 7th grade, and that is the same time I was on Ritalin. I blame the drug.”

“Gotta get back/ Find a way back/ To the me I was . . ./ Screw the Lies/ The so-called dream/ They dig your soul out/ And leave you stuffing cash into the hole/ It’s got me searching for my soul”.

A bimbopolitics reader writes to me: “I would like to know what we would find out about the president if he had to undergo mental illness diagnosis. I also think most people in the country are mentally ill from having to deal with his administration.”

Good point, I say. And another thing. I’m in my 9th month of pregnancy. Stay away from my brain, W, and stay away from the brains of my babies. We’re all different and we like it that way.



Tell me what you think at jacooz@bimbopolitics.com
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