“The South Park depiction of Mel Gibson bouncing off walls he had freshly ‘coated’ in bodily waste is not far off,” I wrote of Gibson’s previous peccadilloes.

It usually falls to liberals to fend for A-list reprobates. Left to Barbara Walters, Paris Hilton’s porn debut, in which she made narcissistic love to the camera, (i.e. herself) was elevated to a PG-rated tale of innocence betrayed. Conservatives, usually attuned to the coarsening culture, and fierce about defending cops, are airbrushing Mel Gibson in the same way (although, unlike Paris, he doesn’t need makeup).
Mel’s many conservative fans have downplayed his vulgar public conduct. He cussed cops who were being decent to him, threatened to ruin them, Russell Crowed a phone, and generally behaved like a hog high on his own power.

The latest Gibson indiscretion is covered well by Larry Auster (whose take comports with mine in “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish”. Or perhpas I’m biased because LA just echoes my thoughts (minus the aspect on the medicalization of misbehavior)?

Either way, we both have Gibson pegged. Over to Larry’s “Gibson And Conservatives”:

What a ridiculous culture we live in—and that includes the mainstream conservatives. Mel Gibson in a drunken rant that was surreptitiously recorded said a pile of extremely offensive things to his ex-mistress. But because in the midst of this geyser of verbal abuse, he used the word “nigger” once, his rant is constantly billed—by conservatives—as a “racist rant,” even though the rant overall had nothing to do with race. When it comes to race, meaning, when it comes to blacks, the mainstream conservatives are precious little Victorian ladies, ready to faint dead away at the sound of the “N” word, even when uttered in a private conversation by a man who was obviously drunk.

As for Gibson, I’ve been saying for 15 years, based on his movies, based on his appalling demeanor in TV interviews, that the man was not a conservative but a messy product of our debased contemporary culture, a point I particularly emphasized in VFR’s huge debate about his movie The Passion. Conservatives, especially paleocons, couldn’t see this about Gibson, because his Catholicism and his seven children with one wife designated him automatically as a traditionalist conservative in their minds. They didn’t see the non-conservative qualities and attitudes he was actually expressing in the public realm …

UPDATE (July 14): Even more obscene than the preoccupation with Mel and Oksana’s icky audio is the orgy that will follow the announcement of the impending engagement of the two stupidest people in Alaska. I give the marraige of twiddledumb and twiddledumber, if indeed it gets past this stage, six months. I wish them well, of course.

I agree with Gibson on the following. This Oksana Grigorieva is distinctly dumb. Any woman that looks, naturally, as pretty as she did here, yet goes and modifies herself to look like a slightly improved version of the Octamom, is a devastatingly dumb bimbo.

More bureaucracy—more salaries for more slackers—and less accountability. This is how the state deals with its ongoing infractions against the people. A commission of inquiry is planned—or in Pentagon Speak, “a broad 45-day review”—instead of tough, immediate action against every cog in the military machine which promoted, pampered and palliated the mass murderer, “Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 in the shootings at the Texas military post on Nov. 5.”

For his part, Attorney General Eric Holder promised to “work with this committee on ways in which we can prevent such a tragedy from occurring again.”

NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling has “uncovered” what was deduced from evidence already in existence a week ago in “Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program”:

“Substandard professional performance would get one purged from the private sector. It did nothing to undermine Hasan’s employment status, rank, six-figure income, and secret security clearance in the military.”

Government committees are where accountability goes to die.

Update (Nov. 20): Read the Memorandum for the Credentials Committee written about Hasan, the army’s assassin in training.

Bay Buchanan, who needs no introduction, has selected an heir and a hero. The choice says a lot about how low paleoconservatism has sunk; how traditionalists have adopted a liberal/therapeutic conception of bad character and conduct. If you do bad things, you’re not a rotter lacking in inhibitions and judgment; rather, you are sick, depressed, addicted. If anything, anyone who fails to recognize your heroism for suffering such afflictions–he (or she, in my case) is the real rotter.

This conceptual hangover conservatives share with liberals. Both factions are in the habit of deflecting from what mediates behavior: personality, probity, values, character or lack thereof. If someone goes off the rails, members of both these divisions will refuse to recognize a character flaw; they seldom make the individual the locus of control. More so than in politics, the reasons for the demise of conservatism and its convergence with liberalism ought to be sought in the adoption of this therapeutic conception of behavior—of wrongdoing, morality, and character.

In a tract that could have been written by Oprah Winfrey, Ms. Buchanan dissolves into a puddle of praise and apologetics for a young man who drank habitually, and, in a deluge of liquor “bumped into a black woman, called her a ‘nigger,’ and struck her in the head with an open hand.” Like all good politicians (or actors), Marcus Epstein quickly got religion on AA, “radically changed his life. … swore off drinking and started attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He started treating the bipolar depression that had gone undiagnosed until that run-in with the law.” (Convenient timing)

Declares Ms. Buchanan: “Marcus Epstein is one of the bravest young people I have ever known.”

Wow! How many youngsters does Ms. Buchanan know? I suggest a visit to one of the country’s VA hospitals. Or to a military cemetery, where, engraved on tombstones Ms. Buchanan may discover a more traditional narrative of heroism.

Character, grit, a bit of a stiffer upper lip in the face of adversity; forget about it! “[A]fter this incident … I came to fully appreciate his finest qualities,” writes Ms. Buchanan. My sentiments exactly.

Ms. Buchanan, there are other traditionalists around with “exceptional minds, and a remarkable talent for writing,” who endured a lifetime of adversity. Some even hail from outside the American cocoon—from lands where real existential issues are confronted daily. Update III (June 16): As un-heroic and boring as it may seem, paleoconservatives such as Brother Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, Robert Stove and Thomas Fleming have never rolled around in the streets soused, swearing and smacking innocents (let alone women) on the head. In fact, whatever the reader may think of their opinions, these men are gentlemen; they embody grace under the tyranny of political correctness. A movement that produces such personalities should not elevate lesser men (or women).

You can tell a movement by its heroes.

As my Afrikaner male friends would say in an expression of disgust, “Sis, man” (Especially with reference to striking a woman.)

Update I: To be clear: My case rests not on the ins-and-outs of the legal spat and its merits, but on the character of the individual, and on the manner in which conservatives have taken to the therapeutic idiom like ducks to water—or like liberals (no need to insult the ducks).

Many of the people I know have held more radical views than Epstein for twice or thrice as long, but have never clashed with the law—not because they revere or even respect it; au contraire, but because of a conservative view of how you conduct yourself. Call it good, old-fashioned discipline.

The idea that you blame your failings on the Other Side or on a substance is … quintessentially liberal.

The left defends its “heroes”; we defend ours. Sadly, we do so based on the same, shared, faulty premise. That’s where we go wrong. The left was always wrong.

Update II: I’m all for forgiveness; but not the instant clemency Christianity offers these days. No sooner has someone offended than he is swept up in a wave of love. I’m not a Christian, so I have no clue as to whether Christian expiation was supposed to be a Federal Express easy ride.

A Jew can’t expect to get to the Pearly Gates if he does bad things. In Judaism, your actions determine your fate on earth and in the hereafter (the first being far more important than the last).

I don’t wish this debate to take on a theological bent; so don’t pursue this except in the narrow sense.

Doing the obligatory stuff to extricate yourself from a legal bind, including going into rehab—this does not count as atonement. Thus, it is wrong for Ms. Buchanan to get huffy over Epstein being dropped from law school, subsequent to the episode, as I understand it. A paleo mother Hen, as she is to Epstein, should accept that adversity will be character-building for her errant protege.

Tonight, I’ll be reconnecting with a Canadian friend from the past: Terry O’Neill, one of the former editors of the ground-breaking BC Report, who now hosts a show: Roadkill Radio.

The BC Report—it morphed into a later, but not paler, version, The Report—was one of the best paleoconservative news and commentary magazines I have read. Moreover, it lacked the weird, anti-Israel element afflicting The American Conservative. So, in that respect, it presented a more coherent defense of the West—with a big emphasis on West Canada.

Terry had remembered that back in 2000-2001, I had argued forcefully against the disease model of addiction. Now, in 2009, some Johnnie-come-latelies have added their voices to a debate my good friends Drs. Stanton Peele and Thomas Szasz began and settled, to all intents and purposes.

The topic tonight: “Addiction: disease or choice?”
The time: 8:45 Pacific.

Terry’s co-host is Kari Simpson. Tune in (And do forgive me if I’m a rusty on the topic; it’s been some time since we in the US have had the luxury of dealing with a minor issue such as addiction and the Diseasing of America.)

“Changeling,” directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie, is a welcome surprise. I’ve never thought much of Jolie as an actress; she emotes on stage more than she does as an activist. But she may be maturing into a good performer. Jolie captures the character and the period extremely well and doesn’t overact, or introduce “You Go Girl” elements into this period piece (Los Angeles circa 1928). In short, Jolie is very good as a fragile, single mother who goes up against the profession that has always operated hand-in-glove with the state: psychiatry in all its corrupt permutations.

I am hoping to reproduce for you, on Barely a Blog, a piece BAB A-Lister Thomas Szasz wrote about the film.

Update: As promised:

The Therapeutic State
Psychiatry: The Shame of Medicine
by Thomas Szasz

The practice of medicine rests on cooperation and the ethical-legal premise that treatment is justified by the patient’s consent, not his illness. In contrast, the practice of psychiatry rests on coercion and the ethical-legal premise that treatment is justified by the mental illness attributed to the patient and must be “provided” regardless of whether the patient consents or not. How do physicians, medical ethicists, and the legal system reconcile the routine use of involuntary psychiatric interventions with the basic moral rule of medicine, “Primum non nocere,” a Latin phrase meaning “First do no harm”?

The answer is: by the medicalization of conflict as disease, and coercion as treatment. Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), one of founders of modern neuropathology, observed, “The medical treatment of [mental] patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom.” Today, it is psychiatric heresy to note, much less emphasize, that psychiatry-as-coercion is an arm of the punitive apparatus of the state. Absent the coercive promise and power of mental health laws, psychiatry as we know it would disappear.
Ever since its beginning approximately 300 years ago, psychiatry’s basic function has been the restraint and punishment of troublesome individuals justified as hospitalization and medical care. For two centuries, all psychiatry was involuntary psychiatry. A little more than 100 years ago individuals began to seek psychiatric help for their own problems. As a result, the psychiatrist became a full-fledged double agent and psychiatry a trap. The film “Changeling”–written by J. Michael Straczynski and directed by Clint Eastwood–is a current example.

The story, set in Los Angeles in 1928, is said to be the “true story” of a woman, Christine Collins, whose son, Walter, is kidnapped. The police are corrupt, and little effort is made to find Walter. Months pass. To repair its damaged image, the police decide to stage a reunion between an abandoned youngster pretending to be Walter and his mother, played by Angelina Jolie. Unsurprisingly, she realizes that the fake Walter is not her son. After confronting the police and city authorities, she is vilified as an unfit mother, branded delusional, and incarcerated in a “psychopathic ward,” where she is subjected to the brutalities of sadistic psychiatrists and nurses, and watches fellow victims being punished by electric shock treatment–ten years before its invention. So much for the truth of the story.

Clueless about the true nature of the psychiatric terrorization to which the Jolie character is subjected, film critic Kirk Honeycutt praises Clint Eastwood who “again brilliantly portrays the struggle of the outsider against a fraudulent system. . . . ‘Changeling’ brushes away the romantic notion of a more innocent time to reveal a Los Angeles circa 1928 awash in corruption and steeped in a culture that treats women as hysterical and unreliable beings when they challenge male wisdom.’”

The Jolie character does not simply challenge “male wisdom.” Instead, her actions illustrate the insight of the Hungarian proverb, “It is dangerous to be wrong but fatal to be right.” The psychiatrist as brutal agent of the state enters the story only after the mother proves–by securing the testimony of her son’s teacher and dentist–that “Walter” is an impostor. The psychiatrically incarcerated individual’s greatest crime–for which psychiatrists cannot forgive her–is that she is innocent of lawbreaking and objects to being deprived of liberty.

Psychiatric coercion is medicalized terrorism. So-called critics of psychiatry–who often fail or refuse to distinguish coerced from contractual psychiatry–are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this disturbing truth. As a result, the more things change in psychiatry, the more they remain the same, as the following conveniently forgotten example illustrates.

On May 21, 1839, Elizabeth Parsons Ware (1816-1897) married the Reverend Theophilus Packard. The couple and their six children resided in Kankakee County, Illinois. After years of marriage, Mrs. Packard began to question her husband’s religious and pro-slavery beliefs and express opinions contrary to his. In 1860 Mr. Packard decided that his wife was insane and proceeded to have her committed. She learned of this decision on June 18, 1860, when the county sheriff arrived at the Packard home to take her into custody. The law at the time stated that married women “may be entered or detained in the hospital [the Jacksonville State Insane Asylum] at the request of the husband of the woman or the guardian . . . without the evidence of insanity required in other cases.”

Mrs. Packard spent the next three years in the Asylum. In 1863, due largely to pressure from her children who wished her released, the doctors declared her incurable and released her. Mrs. Packard stayed close to her children, retained their support, founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society, and published several books, including Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1864) and The Prisoners’ Hidden Life, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868).

The Beginning, Not the End
Little did Mrs. Packard realize that she was living at the beginning, not the end, of the Psychiatric Inquisition. Today, “inquiry” into the minds of unwanted others is a pseudoscientific racket supported by the therapeutic state. Millions of school children, old people in nursing homes, and persons detained in prisons are persecuted with psychiatric diagnoses and punished with psychiatric treatments. Nor is that all. Untold numbers of Americans are now psychiatric parolees, sentenced by judges–playing doctors–to submit to psychiatric treatment as so-called outpatients, or face incarceration and forced treatment as inpatients.

The subtext of films such as “Changeling” is always subtle psychiatric propaganda seeking to make people believe they are witnessing past “psychiatric abuses.” The truth is that every new psychiatric policy or practice labeled an “advance” is a step toward making psychiatric deception and brutalization more legal and more difficult for the victim to resist. As I write this column, I learn from an “antipsychiatry” website that a man named Ray Sandford is being subjected to court-ordered outpatient electroshock treatment.
“Each and every Wednesday, early in the morning, staff shows up at Ray’s sheltered living home called Victory House in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, adjacent to Minneapolis. Staff escorts Ray the 15 miles to Mercy Hospital. There, Ray is given another of his weekly electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments, also known as electroshock. All against his will. On an outpatient basis. And it’s been going on for months.”

As the forced psychiatric treatment of competent adults living in their own homes becomes the “standard of medical practice,” the failure to provide such betrayal and brutality becomes medical malpractice. In a democracy people are said to get the kind of government they deserve. In a pharmacracy they get the kind of psychiatry they deserve.

Thomas Szasz (tszasz@aol.com) is professor of psychiatry emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. His latest books, both from Syracuse University Press, are The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays and Psychiatry, The Science of Lies.

On the occasion of Pope Benedict being forced to publicly capitulate to the sexual abuse industry, I’m reposting a BAB post titled “Sex, God & Greed.”

Ever wonder why the epidemic of allegations that has almost bankrupted the Catholic Church has not caught on in the UK and Europe? I venture that this is because the pop-psychology that undergirds the lion share of the allegation, and the attendant class-action law suits that ensued, is American through-and-through.

The repressed memory mythology is an American invention. As I reminded readers in my “Defense of Hierarchy & the Catholic Church,” “this victim movement has done a great deal more than try and bankrupt the Church.”

‘SEX, GOD & GREED’

In 2003, Daniel Lyons, in Forbes, hashed out all there is to say about the sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. It’s worth revisiting this exceptional exposé, now that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, lamentably, has decided to capitulate, rather than fight a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Writes Lyons:

“….The focal point of this tort battle is the Catholic Church. The Church’s legal problems are worse even than most people realize: $1 billion in damages already paid out for the victims of pedophile priests, indications that the total will approach $5 billion before the crisis is over… The lawyers are lobbying states to lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse cases, letting them dredge up complaints that date back decades. Last year California, responding to the outcry over the rash of priest cases, suspended its statute of limitations on child sex abuse crimes for one year, opening the way for a deluge of new claims. A dozen other states are being pushed to loosen their laws.”

“’There is an absolute explosion of sexual abuse litigation, and there will continue to be. This is going to be a huge business,’ MacLeish, age 50, says. A Boston-based partner of the Miami law firm of GREENBERG TRAURIG (2002 billings: $465 million)…”

Lyons and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal are the only writers I know of to have pointed out how many of these class-action claims are, if not bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories. (See my “Repressed Memory Ruse”):

The repressed memory hoax “…relies on a controversial theory that has split the world of psychology into bitterly opposing camps for more than a decade: the notion that people can wipe out memories of severe trauma, then recover these repressed memories years later… Richard McNally, a Harvard psychology professor…. thinks recovered memories of trauma are questionable. He has conducted numerous studies on memory, particularly with sexual abuse victims. He says people don’t forget a trauma like anal rape. They might forget something like being fondled as a child, but that’s because the fondling was not traumatic, he argues. ‘It might be disgusting, upsetting—but not terrifying, not traumatic.’”

“McNally’s take on this subject has set off a hometown feud with Daniel Brown, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who is a leading proponent of recovered memory. The two archrivals have never met, engaging instead in a ‘battle of the books.’
In 1998, when Brown won an award for his 786-page tome, Memory, Trauma Treatment & the Law, McNally wrote a scathing review that criticized Brown’s methodology. In March of this year McNally published his own book, Remembering Trauma, in which he bashes repressed-memory theory and criticizes Brown’s work yet again.”

Update (April 20): To the extent that there was sexual abuse in the Church—and it was never as rampant as the $2 billion-worth of lawsuits suggests—it was mostly homosexually oriented. So sanctioning marriage would not have mitigated the abuse of small boys. I can’t imagine, moreover, that by sanctioning marriage, our reader recommends that the Catholic Church bless gay marriage.

All in all, lowering moral standards in response to a moral crisis is surely not a very elevated solution. The church, therefore, need not change its tradition of celibacy.

I don’t know much about this young actor; I’m not sure there is that much to know. To “mature” women like myself, he epitomized the new feminized male, low on testosterone and anemic to look at. (In “The Patriot,” I only had eyes for Mel.) Unmanly and hence unattractive. Young women nowadays, as I’ve observed, seem to like the type.

“Whenever I venture out, I encounter this not-so-new breed of man. Typically, he’ll have a few spoilt, cranky kids in tow, and a papoose strapped to a sunken chest. He’ll be laboring to make the outing to Trader Joe’s a ‘learning experience’ for the brats—one that every other store patron is forced to endure. This generic guy oozes psychological correctness and zero manliness. He’s not necessarily effeminate, mind you. Rather, he’s safely androgynous, and most certainly not guy-like in the traditional sense. As personalities go, he and the wife are indistinguishable.”

Poor Heath had been separated from his live-in lover. Perhaps she dismissed him because he failed to check the percentage of trans fats when out shopping. I’m just speculating.

As sad as the death of any harmless-enough young person is, I’m afraid I was not wowed by his performance in “Brokeback Mountain,” a film I was forced to view—well, let’s just say “circumstances combined to render me a captive audience.” I wrote:

“Heath Ledger as Ennis (an unfortunate name) Del Mar tried to emulate Marlon Brando’s potato-in-the-cheek mumbling in ‘The Godfather.’ A bad idea then—and now. The ‘love scene’ between the two men was akin to a bear fight. And as sensuous (contrast it with the artful and achingly sad scene in ‘Midnight Express’). The only sympathetic and authentic character was Alma Del Mar, the betrayed wife (portrayed by Michelle Williams), and her castaway kids.”

As for prescription drugs, which Heath took to put him to sleep and allay anxiety: A daily glass or two of red wine, and a jog will cure most neuroses. Even if take medication at a time in your life when they’re needed—they often act as a placebo—be sure to wean yourself off these kidney and liver killers. If you can’t sleep, read until you fall asleep. It has worked for me since the age of six, although, admittedly, I am bad sleeper, and go to bed at 2:30am.

I don’t know much about this young actor; I’m not sure there is that much to know. To “mature” women like myself, he epitomized the new feminized male; low on testosterone and anemic to look at. (In “The Patriot,” I only had eyes for Mel.) Unmanly and hence unattractive. Young women nowadays, as I’ve observed, seem to like the type:

“Whenever I venture out, I encounter this not-so-new breed of man. Typically, he’ll have a few spoilt, cranky kids in tow, and a papoose strapped to a sunken chest. He’ll be laboring to make the outing to Trader Joe’s a ‘learning experience’ for the brats—one that every other store patron is forced to endure. This generic guy oozes psychological correctness and zero manliness. He’s not necessarily effeminate, mind you. Rather, he’s safely androgynous, and most certainly not guy-like in the traditional sense. As personalities go, he and the wife are indistinguishable.”

Poor Heath had been separated from his live-in lover. Perhaps she dismissed him because he failed to check the percentage of trans fats when out shopping. I’m just speculating.

As sad as the death of any harmless-enough young person is, I’m afraid I was not wowed by his performance in “Brokeback Mountain,” a film I was forced to view—well, let’s just say “circumstances combined to render me a captive audience.” I wrote:
“Heath Ledger as Ennis (an unfortunate name) Del Mar tried to emulate Marlon Brando’s potato-in-the-cheek mumbling in ‘The Godfather.’ A bad idea then—and now. The ‘love scene’ between the two men was akin to a bear fight. And as sensuous (contrast it with the artful and achingly sad scene in ‘Midnight Express’). The only sympathetic and authentic character was Alma Del Mar, the betrayed wife (portrayed by Michelle Williams), and her castaway kids.”

As for prescription drugs, which Ledger took to put him to sleep and allay anxiety: A daily glass or two of red wine, and a jog will cure most neuroses. The first is easy, the last, not so easy. Even if medication is taken at a time in one’s life when it’s needed (it often acts as a placebo), be sure to wean yourself off these kidney and liver killers. If you can’t sleep, read until you fall asleep. This has worked for me since the tender age of six, although, admittedly, I am bad sleeper and go to bed at 2:30 am.

In 2003, Daniel Lyons, in Forbes, hashed out all there is to say about the sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. It’s worth revisiting this exceptional exposé, now that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, lamentably, has decided to capitulate, rather than fight a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Writes Lyons:

“….The focal point of this tort battle is the Catholic Church. The Church’s legal problems are worse even than most people realize: $1 billion in damages already paid out for the victims of pedophile priests, indications that the total will approach $5 billion before the crisis is over… The lawyers are lobbying states to lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse cases, letting them dredge up complaints that date back decades. Last year California, responding to the outcry over the rash of priest cases, suspended its statute of limitations on child sex abuse crimes for one year, opening the way for a deluge of new claims. A dozen other states are being pushed to loosen their laws.”

“’There is an absolute explosion of sexual abuse litigation, and there will continue to be. This is going to be a huge business,’ MacLeish, age 50, says. A Boston-based partner of the Miami law firm of GREENBERG TRAURIG (2002 billings: $465 million)…”

Lyons and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal are the only writers I know of to have pointed out how many of these class-action claims are, if not bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories. (See my “Repressed Memory Ruse”):

The repressed memory hoax “…. relies on a controversial theory that has split the world of psychology into bitterly opposing camps for more than a decade: the notion that people can wipe out memories of severe trauma, then recover these repressed memories years later…
Richard McNally, a Harvard psychology professor…. thinks recovered memories of trauma are questionable. He has conducted numerous studies on memory, particularly with sexual abuse victims. He says people don’t forget a trauma like anal rape. They might forget something like being fondled as a child, but that’s because the fondling was not traumatic, he argues. ‘It might be disgusting, upsetting—but not terrifying, not traumatic.’”

“McNally’s take on this subject has set off a hometown feud with Daniel Brown, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who is a leading proponent of recovered memory. The two archrivals have never met, engaging instead in a ‘battle of the books.’
In 1998, when Brown won an award for his 786-page tome, Memory, Trauma Treatment & the Law, McNally wrote a scathing review that criticized Brown’s methodology. In March of this year McNally published his own book, Remembering Trauma, in which he bashes repressed-memory theory and criticizes Brown’s work yet again.

By Leonard Roy Frank

Thank you, Ilana Mercer, for performing a valuable public service by publishing Thomas Szasz’s extraordinary essay, “Coercion as Cure“! For 50 years now Dr. Szasz has courageously challenged the ideology and practice of coercive psychiatry. In the revised edition (1974) of his landmark work “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1961), he stated some of the major principles underlying his critique. They are worth repeating here:
-”Disease or illness can affect only the body; hence, there can be no mental illness.
-’Mental illness’ is a metaphor. Minds can be ‘ sick’ only in the sense that jokes are ‘sick’ or economics are ‘ sick.’
-Psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels, phrased to resemble medical diagnoses and applied to persons whose behavior annoys or offends others….
-If there is no mental illness there can be no hospitalization, treatment, or cure for it….
The introduction of psychiatric considerations into the administration of the criminal law — for example, the insanity plea and verdict, diagnoses of mental incompetence to stand trial, and so forth — corrupt the law and victimize the subject on whose behalf they are ostensibly employed….
There is no medical, moral, or legal justification for involuntary psychiatric interventions. They are crimes against humanity.”
That the psychiatric profession and society at large have mostly ignored Dr. Szasz’s critique helps explain the deplorable state of the current “mental health system.” More and more people are being labeled with psychiatric “diseases” as more and more diagnoses are being conjured up. Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), the “father of modern psychiatry,” had only four categories of what was then called “insanity,” but in 1952 the American Psychiatric Association described about 106 “mental illness” categories in its “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,” and its 4th edition published in 1994 had 374 such categories.
As was true on a smaller scale in Pinel’s time, psychiatric violence, coercion and deception are today standard operating procedures: e.g., “mental patients” who refuse psychiatry’s powerful drugs, called “medications,” are held down and forcibly injected. These drugs, especially in large doses, are frightening in their effect but the bottom line is that sooner or later they make the individual feel mentally, emotionally and physically wasted. Moreover, the longer the drugs are taken, the more likely they are to cause permanent brain damage and other, sometimes life-threatening and life-shortening, medical problems. And even when consented to, the consent is likely to be fraudulent because psychiatrists seldom supply accurate and full information about the risks involved in taking these drugs.
In addition to the many millions of adults being subjected to this kind of abuse, psychiatrists and other physicians, in a practice almost unheard of a generation ago, are “prescribing” a variety of psychiatric drugs to an estimated 5-10 million children and adolescents. The drugs will cause many of these youngsters to become habitual psychiatric- and street-drug users and eventually “chronic mental patients.”
There has also been a resurgence in the use of electroshock (electroconvulsive treatment, ECT). Since 1940 more than 6 million people in this country alone have undergone this brainwashing, brain-damaging, and memory-destroying procedure. Even today, more than 100,000 Americans are being electroshocked every year.
Coercive psychiatry may be defined as the use of psychiatric methods by means of outright force and intimidation or in the absence of genuine informed consent to “treat” non-existent “diseases,” diseases for which there are no proven physical markers.
There is no way to calculate the amount of suffering coercive psychiatry has caused and continues to cause those individuals directly affected. Nor is there any way to assess the degree to which coercive psychiatry has undermined and continues to undermine the values and moral standing of every society in which it operates.
In “The Second Sin” (1973), Dr. Szasz anticipated the coming of “the Therapeutic State” in which “the principal requirement for the position of Big Brother may be an M.D. degree.” In such a state, the prevailing creed of “therapeutism” will justify “proclaiming undying love for those we hate, and inflicting merciless punishment on them in the name of treating them for diseases whose principal symptoms are their refusal to submit to our domination.”
Two questions need to be asked: 1) How close are we to “the Therapeutic State” which would necessarily result in the loss of our freedom, and 2) What are we, the people, going to do to prevent its establishment?

—Leonard Roy Frank, Editor, The Random House Webster’s Quotationary