I ran into an acquaintance the other day on the street. I don't know him well. I first met him when I sat next to him at a Commonwealth Club event. Since then I have seen him on the street a few times and a couple of times as I was sitting at an outside cafe.
I have known he suffers from some kind of psychosis. He has been pretty upfront about it. I think he is on some kind of disability payments.
I once gave him a copy of my book "The Fed Flunks." I inscribed it along the lines: stay focused and go get'em. He must have turned around and sold it right away. After I gave it to him, I noticed that an Oakland used bookstore listed on Amazon a copy of my book, with the description, "Includes a very nice inspirational inscription from the author."
When I saw him this time, he told me that he had been locked up for three months in a mental institution.
He said, "I wanted to shoot myself." He then pointed with his finger to his head and said: "But I didn't have a gun." He then laughed.
He then told me, "They don't do any talk therapy anymore. They just give you a bunch of drugs and feed you."
He seemed at peace with himself while we talked. If he was taking any meds now, it wasn't noticeable the way you can spot it on some people.
Since I have known him, he has always seemed to be just hanging out. He knows all the underground anarchist lefty groups in San Francisco and Oakland and he is a good source for bringing me up to date on what they are up to. This time, we talked about a couple of groups and what they are up to and then I wished him luck and we both went on our way in different directions.
Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.
I've got to say. Robert, you have a very interesting life and I enjoy when you share bits of it with your readers. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteMental Health care is more precarious then most know. The aggregate build up of food, environment and technical degradation to the processes of a healthy balanced state of mind and body is mote severe than ever and it is a directed objective with an aim to control masses more than ever before. I see some people joke about it and its chilling.
ReplyDeletePeople evolved to hunt and gather, not for Facebook, corn oil, and teletubbies. I dont know for sure if mental helath is worse than in our "natural" environment, but I would be incredibly surprised if not.
DeleteEven for people with money to spend... there's just not that much out there. A therapist can make a lot more money hitting softballs with neurotic wealthy people than they can building the long-term relationships needed to help heal people who have been devastated by decades of trauma.
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ReplyDeleteHe then told me, "They don't do any talk therapy anymore. They just give you a bunch of drugs and feed you."
is a fascinating quote. And it validates both what I read and what I have personally witnessed. With two family members that have suffered from anxiety, depression and even psychosis, the go-to treatment is drugs, as if they are merely treating a bacterial infection.
The only whisper of truth to these methods is that nutritional deficiencies can contribute to mental illness; whereas a healthy diet + activity is correlated with not having those problems. But per the great psychiatrist scholars such as Szaz, Breggin and their progeny, social interaction and therapy are the best cures for helping a person cope and emerge from psychosis and other mental health problems.
Interestingly, in random articles written when no one is looking, the NY Times has reported on various occasions that rank and file psychiatrist researchers and practitioners are finding that the best medicine for schizophrenia and related disorders is therapy, not drugs. If the establishment censors were paying attention, these sorts of things could not leak out, lest the people start making connections. But fortunately they are not infallible nor monolithic, so occasionally we get real insight.
The elephant in the room is trauma. All those broken people on the streets have horror stories. Severe early childhood sexual abuse is the easiest way to create schizophrenia. You can't drug away the trauma. It has to be treated with therapy.
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