Tag Archives: psychology

BAT-ISHT CRAZY

This first appeared on The Final Straw

I’m nuts. Totally bonkers.

I just found out last month. And, quite frankly, I was relieved. Up until the mental health people brought my file for my review and I saw the diagnosis, I thought everything I was seeing in the world was really happening… And I mistakenly thought I had a good grasp of what it all meant.

Turns out, I’m just a fruitloop. I can sleep much better now. It’s not the WORLD that’s gone mad, it’s just ME. I’m as mad as an 18th century glue sniffer in a hat factory. The mental health professionals of the Ohio Department of Retribution and Correction said so. So, I can stop worrying about the state of our world and the evil designs of the privileged few, the reign of terror we all face under a global tech-surveillance police state. I can better spend my time skipping naked around my cell or sculpting busts of dead presidents out of piles of my own harvested boogers. In fact, that’s probably what’s expected of me. Continue reading →

Another Open Letter to the Delusional Hierarch Mental Health Worker… Blah, Blah, Blah

“The more completely the place of confinement eliminates sensory stimuli, the more deeply will the [subject] be affected. Results produced after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell may be duplicated in hours or days… An early effect of such an environment is anxiety… [Captors] can benefit from the subject’s anxiety… The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in on itself… in /the simple torture situation/ the contest is one between the individual and /his tormentor/…”
–/The KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual/, from the Central Intelligence Agency

Dear Mental Health Therapist(?),
In early October, I sent you a kite communication with a lengthy “Open Letter” that was also posted at seanswain.org. I looked forward to your response but still haven’t received it. Also, since the open letter’s publication, you have stopped calling me out of the cell block to speak with me, and during rounds you say, “Mental health rounds, how are you doing?,” but by the time I respond, you are already down the range, out of earshot.
If I didn’t know better, I would almost think you are trying to avoid me. Continue reading →

SHRINKS AND TORTURE

The social sciences suck. I was watching Democracy Now this morning and saw a news blurb that the American Psychological Association has been linked in some way to U.S. torture practices. Some leaked memos implicate the American Psychological Association in collusion with waterboarding an forms of torture. I guess if we see the social sciences– psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and so on –as benevolent paradigms of study and practice, sciences designed to help people and cure them of mental illness, then I suppose we’d all be shocked and bewildered that prestigious institutions of those sciences are dabbling in torture.

But the social sciences are NOT benevolent paradigms designed to help people. Consider: when cops and courts impose social norms on you, you’re a criminal. When priests and rabbis impose social norms on you, they call you a sinner. When SHRINKS impose social norms on you, they call you “mentally ill.” The shrinkhood is a tool of the established order, and a powerful one. When cops put a label on you, you can still get past that because you’ve done your time and people change. When priests and rabbis label you that’s just some superstitious hokum. But when the thought-police shrinkhood labels you, you’re NUTS. The social sciences have the illusion of being “scientific” and “objective” when they brand you for life. But their criteria for branding you is far from scientific. Continue reading →