State to Decide Who is a “Dangerously Unstable” Person

Recall the establishment of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in April 2002 and its “recommendations” issued in July, 2003. Bush’s commission found that “despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed” and the way to address this so-called problem was to screen “consumers of all ages,” especially preschool children, for mental problems, or what mental health “professionals” and drug company executives consider mental problems. “Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders.” According to the commission, schools are in a “key position” to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.

The commission commended the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) as a “model” medication treatment plan that “illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes,” in other words, more people on expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, the sort of drugs that worked so well in Cho Seung-Hui’s case. It should be noted, as well, that the “Texas project started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas, and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas. The project was funded by a Robert Wood Johnson grant—and by several drug companies.” Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, “revealed that key officials with influence over the medication plan in his state received money and perks from drug companies with a stake in the medication algorithm,” reports BMJ, a medical journal. For his effort, Jones was fired.

Now we have Bush directing “federal officials to conduct a national inquiry into how to prevent violence by dangerously unstable people” in the wake of Virginia Tech, according to CBN News. Of course, in a free society, there are few ways to prevent “dangerously unstable people” from going postal, especially if they are law-abiding beforehand. No doubt we will see yet another commission recommending the widespread use of so-called antidepressants, never mind these SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) are reported to cause “anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania … in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric,” according to David Healy and David Menkes from Cardiff University, and Andrew Herxheimer from the UK Cochrane Centre. In other words, in certain individuals, presumably such as Cho, SSRI drugs act as a catalyst for violence, both “self-directed” (i.e., suicide) and outward toward the community. Apparently, Bush and the pharms want to make sure every Cho in the country goes postal. It is a small price to pay for record pharm industry profits.

“President Bush has directed three cabinet secretaries to huddle with educators, mental health experts and government officials across the nation to recommend ways to avoid a repeat of Monday’s shooting rampage at Virginia Tech,” reports the Washington Post. “The review—to be headed by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings—comes as educational institutions debate how to deal with early warning signs that a student may be dangerous to himself and others.”

Here we have a gaggle of bureaucrats, including one who specializes in legalizing torture, directing “mental health experts and government officials across the nation,” in other words figuring out how get the government even more involved in the lives of ordinary people who, after all, might have another Cho or any number of Chos in their midst. Leavitt will “summarize what they learn and report back to me with recommendations about how we can help to avoid such tragedies,” Bush said. Asked how long the review will take, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: “Not long. This is a new tasking by the president, and so a lot of the details are still being worked out. Secretary Leavitt said he plans to get started quickly.” Translation: expect “recommendations,” similar to those reached by the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, to drug the population at large, that is after mandatory “screening.” It should be noted that Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat, has empanelled a gaggle of “experts” of his own, including former Ministry of Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge.

According to Universal Health, “people with chronic mental illness or with exacerbations of symptoms could be guided directly into supervised and therapeutic settings…. Nurses learn early on that just because a patient says ‘no’ to care, doesn’t mean that it goes unquestioned. When ‘no’ isn’t based on rational decision making, or when cognition and judgement are suspect, we have clear and ethical processes to use to determine substituted judgment.”

In other words, “mental health” experts, in league with government bureaucrats, will decide who is mentally ill. “There is, of course, a balance to be struck between civil liberties and treating the mentally ill,” writes Rich Lowry for the Salt Lake Tribune. “But that balance is now badly off-kilter. Cho Seung-Hui was basically abandoned to his private mental hell at Virginia Tech. While he hatched his lunatic and hateful plot, everyone tried to ignore the scary guy in class behind the sunglasses.” It was Cho’s “poetry” and “plays” that supposedly provided the tip-off to his insanity.

“Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing—including a short story called ‘Cain Rose Up’ and the novel RAGE—would have raised red flags, and I’m certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them,” writes the novelist Stephen King. “For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do.”

Of course, in an era when “a balance” is “to be struck between civil liberties and treating the mentally ill,” there will be no tolerance for such “excretory” channels for violence. Is it possible, if now just coming up as a writer, Stephen King would be “guided directly into supervised and therapeutic setting” and force-fed massive quantities of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors? “On the whole, I don’t think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent,” King concludes.

Is it possible “Bush’s New Freedom Initiative, which recommends mental health screening for all Americans, could ultimately be used to institute ‘political psychiatry’ in this country”? muses blogger Mack White. “This practice is not without precedent, the most notorious examples being the Soviet Union and present-day China. Also, it is a fact that political psychiatry has been recommended by at least one psychiatrist working for the CIA. In 1974, MK-ULTRA scientist Dr. Jose Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry at Yale Medical School, stated in testimony to Congress: ‘We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.’”

In our brave new era, surgical mutilation is no longer required.

Instead, our government, working with the pharm industry and psychiatric “experts,” can “guide” the officially designated paranoids, be they deluded writers or political activists, into “supervised and therapeutic settings” where massive doses of Paxil will be administered.