WHAT HAVE WE BECOME?

In today's American society, we form about 5% of the world's population yet 80% of drugs used for persons given the diagnosis of ADHD are prescribed in the US. Recently, it was reported that the psychiatrist Biederman was reported to have withheld information about his receiving vast amounts of financial incentives from pharmaceutical companies. This same Biederman has promoted the diagnosis of bipolar and it was his work that the psychiatrist for Rebecca Riley relied upon. Rebecca Riley died from the massive drug cocktail she received. She was only 4 years old. There has been increases in the use of untested anti-psychotic drugs in children. These drugs can cause diabetes, tradive dyskinesia, and even lactating breasts in males. Persons are rarely given informed consent and most are unaware of these dangers. Psychiatry has become one of the most greedy and dangerous forces in our culture. It is being looked upon as a new religion and a means to address the human condition. Yet, it ignores the human condition, it ignores person's experience. We have come to the point of pathologizing much of human experience. There has recently been suggested that compulsive shopping and internet addiction are now 'diseases' in need of drug treatment. Psychiatry has become a money making machine geared at social control. American society is becoming a drugged society, a numb society. As a result, America is plummeting within the world scene. Americans are becoming less motivated, less driven, apt to believe the lies told to them, led to believe that there is something wrong within their brains rather than seeing our society as disordered. There has become an apathy, an acceptance of this disordered society as 'the way things are'. Persons are giving away their freedoms, expecting that the State will protect them or that psychiatry's 'technologies" (drugs) will make able to cope with the societal trends. Rather, it is forcing them into compliance to a system needing radical change. People are being made into victims, taught to feel helpless. As Noam Chomsky states, "All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." We have become a society which shuns individual responsibility. The rich become richer and ride the backs of the poor, yet the poor have accepted their slavery and become apathetic. There is no critical thinking, no questioning of the way things are. Rather than question, there is ready acceptance of what the 'experts' tell us. Some of the disadvantaged see no way to survive but to accept the fact of slavery. It has become profitable for schools, families, foster parents, and others to have a child labeled and drugged. It is a means to keep everyone in their place. Make the child sit down and shut up, so they may be 'educated'. But what has education become? Critical thinking is not part of our current education system, rather it is based on a rote system of once again keeping people in their place and having them continue to keep the machine operating. People are being treated as machines, without thoughts and feelings, merely dispensible objects that are really but a conglommerate of chemical processes, nothing more. We spend billions to intervene in the affairs of other nations and with the guise that this is for our own good, that we are being 'protected'. But if we were to use our own definitions of terrorism to apply to our own policies and actions, we would find that our governmental policies may be some of the worst terrorism of all. But let's play semantics- when we kill, it is war, when they kill, it is terrorism. Change the language and we can deny responsibility and make it 'justifiable.'
When do we decide to wake up? When do we decide to no longer be controlled? When do we decide that we must again think critically? When do we decide to be human again?

-Dan L. Edmunds, Ed.D.
www.humanepsychiatry.info