No, Mr. President

February 17, 2015

The mental health care system ruins lives.  I was not quite 18 when I sought counseling and then hospitalization for help with family issues; it was all my idea to try to get the help, and mostly what happened was that I got traumatized by hospitalizations, brainwashed by therapists, and screwed up on psychiatric medications.  That was just the beginning of it; my parents, who were not very nice to their children when they didn't feel like it and who had control issues, never again felt that they had to treat me like a person.  

I was a good student all the way through grade school.  I graduated from high school a month before I turned 17.  I had friends.  I did sports and plays, sang in the school chorus, and was probably one of the last people who anyone with whom I graduated thought was destined for a life of menial labor, constant disappointment, and misery.

The mental health care system did all of that to me.  They force you to do what they want.  They call all of your resistance to being labelled as sick just another sign of your illness; then, when they've broken you, they have nothing but contempt for your dependence.  Nobody in your life respects you.  It is a living death.

That living death is being distributed to children of toddler age.  There are millions of children who don't know what it feels like not to be on drugs.  They're diagnosed with mental illnesses that they don't have before they're even able to talk, and they're treated like second class citizens all their lives.  That is all happening so that the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment which the pharmaceutical industry has bribed and lied to can make money.

There are good counselors and psychiatrists in the world; there are fewer of them all the time, because the system always was corrupted and the overdiagnosing and overmedicating of millions of people labels those people forever.  Healthy people get told that there are things wrong with them that aren't.  People who are having problems don't get help figuring out and dealing with their problems; they get told that they're sick, and than they have to deal with that in addition to the problems they already had.

Do you not believe me?  Do you think you know all there is to know about civil rights and oppression in the United States?  Why don't you read "To Be a Mental Patient," by Rae Unzicker?

Copyright L. Kochman, February 17, 2015 @ 8:33 a.m.