Until about the late 1950s, and much later in many parts of the world, mental hospitals were huge, terrifying places on the outskirts of cities, usually hidden by high walls and dense trees.
Niall, I've just watched your interview with Pascal; the very next thing I did after sending to a friend and highly recommending it was joining your substack.
You tied together Reich's work, 19th Cent Anarchist thought, my own hatred of the psychiatrist legal drug-pushers and their psychopathology (Fortunate to have kept out of their hands, which some of my friends have not been so fortunate), and Bruce E. Levine's work on Counterpunch - nevermind the insights on politics and Int Rel too! (Although I think Pascal understands Mearsheimer better, there's no doubt you captured a major flaw in his theory).
And group dynamics, of dominance based on biochemistry fx. (I've long noted that humans don't actually want to be in charge (There's responsibility that should come with that, to do it well), it's that they don't want someone OVER them that will dominate them - but the systems are set up, and our cultures reinforce, that Dominance (That sickening Roman concept) seems normalised and TINA). But there ARE alternatives - if those who COULD dominate choose not to do so. It takes 2-3 years in a small closed group, but eventually people do get used to not having a dominating hierarchy.
My own final paper was on the concept called "Democratic Pedagogy", where students themselves design and run their own schools. The graduates from such schools are less likely to see Dominance as normative; and appreciate their own power without seeking to make up for the traumatic experiences in 'normal' schooling by then attempting to dominate later throughout life.
I am SO HAPPY you are out there, and just wanted to tell you that. :)
I will be reading your articles from now on. And, time willing, your books too.
May the Universal Consciousness smile upon you, I know the Tao already does. If I didn't repeat myself. <3 <3
👍🏻 Why there is no Skip button? By the way, is the first time I see you live, why don't you start a YouTube or an odysee? It will be great to see you often!! Nowadays not everybody reads 😂 wish you are having a great day and a better weekend, thank you for your integrity and efforts to help humanity is a difficult task! 🌹💌🙂 Orli
I have every ad-blocker in existence installed. Ads drive me insane - quite topical. ;)
Every now and again google goes nutz over its ad-revenue and prevents ad-bocked from streaming, in which I case I sigh and stick to my feed on rumble until the hackers beat them again/google gives up for a while.
I see maybe 2-3 ads total a year, on every platform.
Explanation: install firefox, go to 'add-ons; search for ad-blockers, choose the highest numbers. I have the three most popular ones installed.
Presto! virtually ad-free existence.
Edit: unlike Niall I use the free versions, probably why google stamps down now and again. 10-1 they run them themselves, so income from ads, or income from the blockers... you know the games.
For insight into a psychiatrist-turned-gardener, Peter Gordon's experience with antidepressants, ultimately lead to him leaving the profession as a consequence of institutional psychiatry's lack of tolerance for diverse views. There are also a number of interviews with Gordon on You tube
Add to the comments below, that we are all enmeshed because our super funds and banks are invested in so many branches of the industry
The heavily redacted files: I've encountered that one personally. It's Censorship 101 of the psychiatry death cult -- operating exactly to plan. It was amusing recently when Dr Karen Mitchell asserted a few months ago on X that there was a reasonable percentage of high functioning narcissists and psychopaths operating in the mental health sector. Of course a multitude of earnest, morally unimpeachable clinicians piled on her to defend their honour and viciously pathologise, demonise and character assassinate her for her paranoid, unstable transgression. They pretty much proved her point. Mental health workers are more interested in defending their turf than opening their minds; they want to believe and react, not think and feel. They don't have a pluralistic, critical thinking bone in their body. That the few dissenting psychiatrists -- like this guy -- that want informed consent, transparency, honesty and accountability get gaslighted and passive aggressively smeared shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who understands the authoritarian, psychotic-level defensiveness of psychiatric guild politics.
Talking of guild politics, if you haven't seen this, it sets it out in detail:
Whitaker R, Cosgrove L (2015). Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Thanks. I've heard of that book and I've been meaning to read it for a while but haven't got round to it. This may be the nudge I need to check it out. I've read Anatomy of an Epidemic by Whitaker, that was eye opening.
What are the mental health professions? That's easy: a theatrical safe space for infantile neurotics to act out their sordid issues and domination fantasies.
In fingering governments, drug companies and psychiatry as an institution you're letting a lot of people off the hook.
There's the media, who thrive equally on lurid tales of dangerous lunatics who must be controlled with coercive 'therapies' and the tragic mentally ill who need ever greater access to the treatments recommended by the usual go-to media-friendly experts. Of course the latter also often have to have their right to refuse medical treatment taken away 'to protect them from themselves'.
There's Health bureaucracies who enhance their own budgets and power by calling for endlessly 'improved access' to the same old failed treatments.
There's regulatory bodies who go through expensive legal charades under the pretence of protecting the rights of patients only to almost invariably agree with the justifications offered by psychiatrists for continuing their abuse.
There's mental health NGOs - usually funded by drug companies, governments or both - who earnestly call for ineffective 'reforms' while carefully avoiding taking stands that may offend the authorities invested in maintaining the status quo.
Maybe it's all of us, Niall, including patients. For internalising the stigma, fear and scapegoating directed towards the mad, averting our eyes from their suffering and persecution, absolving ourselves of responsibility for helping them reintegrate into our communities and leaving it to self-interested 'experts' to tell us what's what and take care of the problem for us.
It is indeed a very long list. In 2023-24, the Qld MHRT spent over $19million administering justice to the mentally afflicted. And what changed? Absolutely nothing. A singularly expensive rubber stamp, the money should be spent on public housing for the people coming before them. But the worst racket of all are the private hospitals, they bleed the "mental health" budget white.
Yeah, a great band, especially the songs touched by Jarboe. Her backing vocals in "Killing for Company" remind me of Anita Lane's "A Prison in the Desert".
Thank you Dr McLaren 👏🏻🙂🌹🏆really enjoy your views and research, sadly the medical system has to dissappear as it is now too much abuse, torture and harm, it seems medical professionals cannot longer be analytical, in best scenarios, others love their bank accounts, others don't care for their own fellows, and others are cowards.. I will share your post in our humble telegram channel and I will try to cross through our humble substack, even if a few people read it hopefully it will spread! Thank you for your honesty and integrity 👏🏻🙂🌹🏆💌 I will love meeting you in person! We are in other lands, at least I meet your soul! 💖You are the hope that others like you maybe out there!
I read recently that 20 percent of US women are taking antidepressants. 20 percent! Are that many American women really clinically depressed and in need of chemical refreshment? Hardly. Women tend to be a lot more open and responsible about physical and emotional health than men and, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies being narcissistic predators and parasites that they are, they know a good market when they see one.
There really isn't much difference between the medieval church demonizing idiosyncratic or assertive women as witches, burning them at the stake or drowning them, and rebellious housewives in the fifties getting lobotomized and returned to their grateful husbands, or girls and women with alleged "borderline personality disorder" being polypharmed on some bogus psychotropic cocktail.
It's simply state suppression of passion, depth, and individuality. Privileged male hyperrational nerds have always been terrified of emotion and spontaneity. But it's not a purely misogynistic phenomenon: male artists, dissenters, activists and gay men have been targeted and brutalised by psychiatry too, not just because of some perceived normative deviance, but because their temperament departs from the officially approved emotionally shutdown, compartmentalised, stoical psychological constipation aspired to by any self-respecting, red-blooded, thoughtless and conformist drone.
The absurdity of antipsychotics is they are profoundly anti therapeutic. For affective disorders (for which I took them) they are not a mood stabiliser they are a mood annihilator. They "work" by disabling the brain, by emotionally and cognitively shutting you down. If you're profoundly numb you're docile, compliant, you don't care. It's the ultimate nihilistic void. Stupefied, infantilised, detached, oblivious. That was 20-25mg of Olanzapine.
I don't recommend it. And morbid obesity and pre-diabetes on the cusp of full diabetes. Urinary and bowel incontinence. Yeah, a bundle of laughs. Against medical advice I tapered off that garbage (I belong to that subset of patients for whom withdrawing is much worse and more protracted than getting off heroin), restored my physical and mental health, and haven't looked back. Because that's the other thing "mental health clinicians" won't tell you about antipsychotics: they destroy your mental health. Apart from the autistic level of self-absorption they create, the insulated alienation, you can't process your thoughts and emotions the way regular people do, you can't make sense of your existence. Unprocessed emotion festers and amplifies in the dark, destabilizing you further. And it's well known that obesity and physical ill health causes depression.
I would say a lot of the so-called "negative symptoms" experienced by people with schizophrenia are actually drug effects.
It's so ironic that psychiatrists implore their patients to quit alcohol and recreational drug abuse when from what I've experienced and observed psychotropic drugs are worse, much worse.
I don't advocate the use of any intoxicating substance: alcohol, recreational drugs, or psychotropic drugs. However, unless you are a hardcore physically dependent alcohol or drug addict, most recreational use of mind altering substances tends to be sporadic. Even when used intensively for periods there tends to be sojourns of little or no use. Psychotropic drugs though tend to be used every day and put the brain in a steady state of intoxication, 24/7. The brain simply doesn't get a chance to recover, there is no neuroplasticity. The result is addiction and neurological damage. I say addiction, not "physical dependence," the term psychiatrists prefer to throw around, because for most psychotropic drugs there is tolerance and withdrawal. That's stone cold addiction.
Even though individuals and patient groups have been saying for decades that for some patients withdrawal is severe, debilitating, and protracted -- sometimes lasting several years -- the majority of the psychiatric establishment have routinely dismissed these claims and averred their withdrawal symptoms are actually their mental illness returning. Solution: more drugs of course, often at a higher dose, frequently leading to a prescription cascade. Protracted, also known as Post Acute Withdrawal, is real, thoroughly documented and attested to, and for some so agonising and interminable it results in suicide.
If I look at troubled people I've known over the years, those that have chosen to self-medicate with recreational substances, and those that went down to psychiatric drugging route, the self-medicators are far more lucid and much less damaged. They're all harmed and compromised one way or another of course, but psychotropic drugs have an unmatched ability to physically debilitate, steal someone's soul and burn them out.
Thanks for giving your story, I think it's very important to hear people who have been on the receiving end of psychiatry. Important to recall that the great bulk of psychiatrists don't actually know anything about the effects, direct and side, of their drugs. They have all been told the drugs are "specific to the disease, like insulin to diabetes," and they believe it. Insulin has no side effects itself, apart from excessive insulin, so, without thinking on it, they automatically believe this is true of psychotropics, and quickly get angry when anybody says otherwise. That is a measure of intellectual insecurity, not of being correct.
As for addiction, they resolutely resist that word because only bad drugs are addictive. Some will say "People don't take ever-bigger doses of our drugs like they need to with opiates, so ours aren't addictive." The drug with the award "most addictive drug of all" is tobacco. People will adjust their dose to suit themselves (20/day, 45/day, whatever) and stay on that for life. Once they reach their steady state, they don't change for years until they start to go down before dying.
It is now clear that is not tobacco that kills is the chemicals the industry has add it.. The theory addiction to nicotina does not work any longer, understanding is in our daily vegetables 😂 the addiction and harm is to the processed tobacco
Niall, I've just watched your interview with Pascal; the very next thing I did after sending to a friend and highly recommending it was joining your substack.
You tied together Reich's work, 19th Cent Anarchist thought, my own hatred of the psychiatrist legal drug-pushers and their psychopathology (Fortunate to have kept out of their hands, which some of my friends have not been so fortunate), and Bruce E. Levine's work on Counterpunch - nevermind the insights on politics and Int Rel too! (Although I think Pascal understands Mearsheimer better, there's no doubt you captured a major flaw in his theory).
And group dynamics, of dominance based on biochemistry fx. (I've long noted that humans don't actually want to be in charge (There's responsibility that should come with that, to do it well), it's that they don't want someone OVER them that will dominate them - but the systems are set up, and our cultures reinforce, that Dominance (That sickening Roman concept) seems normalised and TINA). But there ARE alternatives - if those who COULD dominate choose not to do so. It takes 2-3 years in a small closed group, but eventually people do get used to not having a dominating hierarchy.
My own final paper was on the concept called "Democratic Pedagogy", where students themselves design and run their own schools. The graduates from such schools are less likely to see Dominance as normative; and appreciate their own power without seeking to make up for the traumatic experiences in 'normal' schooling by then attempting to dominate later throughout life.
I am SO HAPPY you are out there, and just wanted to tell you that. :)
I will be reading your articles from now on. And, time willing, your books too.
May the Universal Consciousness smile upon you, I know the Tao already does. If I didn't repeat myself. <3 <3
Please can you share the link to the interview with Dr McLaren? Thanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX_71MgkJwg
Thank you,👍🏻 so many adds :( no skip button!
I have no control over that but I use an ad blocker, costs about $45 a year and saves me going mad.
👍🏻 Why there is no Skip button? By the way, is the first time I see you live, why don't you start a YouTube or an odysee? It will be great to see you often!! Nowadays not everybody reads 😂 wish you are having a great day and a better weekend, thank you for your integrity and efforts to help humanity is a difficult task! 🌹💌🙂 Orli
And what about audio books? Have you thought about it?
I have every ad-blocker in existence installed. Ads drive me insane - quite topical. ;)
Every now and again google goes nutz over its ad-revenue and prevents ad-bocked from streaming, in which I case I sigh and stick to my feed on rumble until the hackers beat them again/google gives up for a while.
I see maybe 2-3 ads total a year, on every platform.
Explanation: install firefox, go to 'add-ons; search for ad-blockers, choose the highest numbers. I have the three most popular ones installed.
Presto! virtually ad-free existence.
Edit: unlike Niall I use the free versions, probably why google stamps down now and again. 10-1 they run them themselves, so income from ads, or income from the blockers... you know the games.
Thank you for the tip 🌹I guess Dr McLaren is referring to YouTube specifically
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17692699.psychiatrist-peter-gordon-claims-royal-college-gaslighted-antidepressant-row/
For insight into a psychiatrist-turned-gardener, Peter Gordon's experience with antidepressants, ultimately lead to him leaving the profession as a consequence of institutional psychiatry's lack of tolerance for diverse views. There are also a number of interviews with Gordon on You tube
Add to the comments below, that we are all enmeshed because our super funds and banks are invested in so many branches of the industry
The heavily redacted files: I've encountered that one personally. It's Censorship 101 of the psychiatry death cult -- operating exactly to plan. It was amusing recently when Dr Karen Mitchell asserted a few months ago on X that there was a reasonable percentage of high functioning narcissists and psychopaths operating in the mental health sector. Of course a multitude of earnest, morally unimpeachable clinicians piled on her to defend their honour and viciously pathologise, demonise and character assassinate her for her paranoid, unstable transgression. They pretty much proved her point. Mental health workers are more interested in defending their turf than opening their minds; they want to believe and react, not think and feel. They don't have a pluralistic, critical thinking bone in their body. That the few dissenting psychiatrists -- like this guy -- that want informed consent, transparency, honesty and accountability get gaslighted and passive aggressively smeared shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who understands the authoritarian, psychotic-level defensiveness of psychiatric guild politics.
Talking of guild politics, if you haven't seen this, it sets it out in detail:
Whitaker R, Cosgrove L (2015). Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Thanks. I've heard of that book and I've been meaning to read it for a while but haven't got round to it. This may be the nudge I need to check it out. I've read Anatomy of an Epidemic by Whitaker, that was eye opening.
What are the mental health professions? That's easy: a theatrical safe space for infantile neurotics to act out their sordid issues and domination fantasies.
In fingering governments, drug companies and psychiatry as an institution you're letting a lot of people off the hook.
There's the media, who thrive equally on lurid tales of dangerous lunatics who must be controlled with coercive 'therapies' and the tragic mentally ill who need ever greater access to the treatments recommended by the usual go-to media-friendly experts. Of course the latter also often have to have their right to refuse medical treatment taken away 'to protect them from themselves'.
There's Health bureaucracies who enhance their own budgets and power by calling for endlessly 'improved access' to the same old failed treatments.
There's regulatory bodies who go through expensive legal charades under the pretence of protecting the rights of patients only to almost invariably agree with the justifications offered by psychiatrists for continuing their abuse.
There's mental health NGOs - usually funded by drug companies, governments or both - who earnestly call for ineffective 'reforms' while carefully avoiding taking stands that may offend the authorities invested in maintaining the status quo.
Maybe it's all of us, Niall, including patients. For internalising the stigma, fear and scapegoating directed towards the mad, averting our eyes from their suffering and persecution, absolving ourselves of responsibility for helping them reintegrate into our communities and leaving it to self-interested 'experts' to tell us what's what and take care of the problem for us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrH7_qAeA8U
It is indeed a very long list. In 2023-24, the Qld MHRT spent over $19million administering justice to the mentally afflicted. And what changed? Absolutely nothing. A singularly expensive rubber stamp, the money should be spent on public housing for the people coming before them. But the worst racket of all are the private hospitals, they bleed the "mental health" budget white.
Yep I'm a big fan of Swans. I like "Killing for Comfort."
Yeah, a great band, especially the songs touched by Jarboe. Her backing vocals in "Killing for Company" remind me of Anita Lane's "A Prison in the Desert".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9At6ErQ7USs
Thank you Dr McLaren 👏🏻🙂🌹🏆really enjoy your views and research, sadly the medical system has to dissappear as it is now too much abuse, torture and harm, it seems medical professionals cannot longer be analytical, in best scenarios, others love their bank accounts, others don't care for their own fellows, and others are cowards.. I will share your post in our humble telegram channel and I will try to cross through our humble substack, even if a few people read it hopefully it will spread! Thank you for your honesty and integrity 👏🏻🙂🌹🏆💌 I will love meeting you in person! We are in other lands, at least I meet your soul! 💖You are the hope that others like you maybe out there!
I read recently that 20 percent of US women are taking antidepressants. 20 percent! Are that many American women really clinically depressed and in need of chemical refreshment? Hardly. Women tend to be a lot more open and responsible about physical and emotional health than men and, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies being narcissistic predators and parasites that they are, they know a good market when they see one.
There really isn't much difference between the medieval church demonizing idiosyncratic or assertive women as witches, burning them at the stake or drowning them, and rebellious housewives in the fifties getting lobotomized and returned to their grateful husbands, or girls and women with alleged "borderline personality disorder" being polypharmed on some bogus psychotropic cocktail.
It's simply state suppression of passion, depth, and individuality. Privileged male hyperrational nerds have always been terrified of emotion and spontaneity. But it's not a purely misogynistic phenomenon: male artists, dissenters, activists and gay men have been targeted and brutalised by psychiatry too, not just because of some perceived normative deviance, but because their temperament departs from the officially approved emotionally shutdown, compartmentalised, stoical psychological constipation aspired to by any self-respecting, red-blooded, thoughtless and conformist drone.
The absurdity of antipsychotics is they are profoundly anti therapeutic. For affective disorders (for which I took them) they are not a mood stabiliser they are a mood annihilator. They "work" by disabling the brain, by emotionally and cognitively shutting you down. If you're profoundly numb you're docile, compliant, you don't care. It's the ultimate nihilistic void. Stupefied, infantilised, detached, oblivious. That was 20-25mg of Olanzapine.
I don't recommend it. And morbid obesity and pre-diabetes on the cusp of full diabetes. Urinary and bowel incontinence. Yeah, a bundle of laughs. Against medical advice I tapered off that garbage (I belong to that subset of patients for whom withdrawing is much worse and more protracted than getting off heroin), restored my physical and mental health, and haven't looked back. Because that's the other thing "mental health clinicians" won't tell you about antipsychotics: they destroy your mental health. Apart from the autistic level of self-absorption they create, the insulated alienation, you can't process your thoughts and emotions the way regular people do, you can't make sense of your existence. Unprocessed emotion festers and amplifies in the dark, destabilizing you further. And it's well known that obesity and physical ill health causes depression.
I would say a lot of the so-called "negative symptoms" experienced by people with schizophrenia are actually drug effects.
It's so ironic that psychiatrists implore their patients to quit alcohol and recreational drug abuse when from what I've experienced and observed psychotropic drugs are worse, much worse.
I don't advocate the use of any intoxicating substance: alcohol, recreational drugs, or psychotropic drugs. However, unless you are a hardcore physically dependent alcohol or drug addict, most recreational use of mind altering substances tends to be sporadic. Even when used intensively for periods there tends to be sojourns of little or no use. Psychotropic drugs though tend to be used every day and put the brain in a steady state of intoxication, 24/7. The brain simply doesn't get a chance to recover, there is no neuroplasticity. The result is addiction and neurological damage. I say addiction, not "physical dependence," the term psychiatrists prefer to throw around, because for most psychotropic drugs there is tolerance and withdrawal. That's stone cold addiction.
Even though individuals and patient groups have been saying for decades that for some patients withdrawal is severe, debilitating, and protracted -- sometimes lasting several years -- the majority of the psychiatric establishment have routinely dismissed these claims and averred their withdrawal symptoms are actually their mental illness returning. Solution: more drugs of course, often at a higher dose, frequently leading to a prescription cascade. Protracted, also known as Post Acute Withdrawal, is real, thoroughly documented and attested to, and for some so agonising and interminable it results in suicide.
If I look at troubled people I've known over the years, those that have chosen to self-medicate with recreational substances, and those that went down to psychiatric drugging route, the self-medicators are far more lucid and much less damaged. They're all harmed and compromised one way or another of course, but psychotropic drugs have an unmatched ability to physically debilitate, steal someone's soul and burn them out.
Thanks for giving your story, I think it's very important to hear people who have been on the receiving end of psychiatry. Important to recall that the great bulk of psychiatrists don't actually know anything about the effects, direct and side, of their drugs. They have all been told the drugs are "specific to the disease, like insulin to diabetes," and they believe it. Insulin has no side effects itself, apart from excessive insulin, so, without thinking on it, they automatically believe this is true of psychotropics, and quickly get angry when anybody says otherwise. That is a measure of intellectual insecurity, not of being correct.
As for addiction, they resolutely resist that word because only bad drugs are addictive. Some will say "People don't take ever-bigger doses of our drugs like they need to with opiates, so ours aren't addictive." The drug with the award "most addictive drug of all" is tobacco. People will adjust their dose to suit themselves (20/day, 45/day, whatever) and stay on that for life. Once they reach their steady state, they don't change for years until they start to go down before dying.
It is now clear that is not tobacco that kills is the chemicals the industry has add it.. The theory addiction to nicotina does not work any longer, understanding is in our daily vegetables 😂 the addiction and harm is to the processed tobacco