Saturday, August 17, 2019

Red-Flag Laws and Mental Health as a Tool of Political Suppression


Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose communist goals. (From the 45 goals of the communist party)

America is at an interesting place. The Republicans and Democrats, with co-operation from a so-called Republican president, are standing together in their calls for gun control. Despite Donald Trump calling for red-flag laws, expanded background checks and stating on live television his belief that guns should be confiscated first, and due process afforded second, many of his supporters seem convinced he is playing a game of four-dimensional chess. As unlikely as that is, it could be possible. Although, playing games with the constitution as if its a negotiating tool is completely unacceptable. The fact that President Trump is negotiating at all with a political party that has accused him viciously of Russian collusion and being a white supremacist, while also calling his supporters Nazi’s is disturbing to say the least and should be questioned. What is even more disturbing is his insistence that mental health be used as a catalyst for implementing red-flag laws.

The idea of confiscating firearms from people who are suffering from mental illness, at first glance, has merit. Nobody wants “crazy” people getting their hands on a gun and going on a shooting spree. It is also a convenient way for the masses to brush away the consequences of red-flag laws. If it doesn’t affect them, they will happily keep their heads down to not draw attention to themselves. Leventri Beria stated in the Russian textbook on Psychopolitics[1] that being labeled insane is so thoroughly feared in capitalist countries that no one, for fear of being labeled themselves, takes the time to thoroughly investigate it.

Mental health has long been used as a repressive tool to silence political opposition. Especially in communist countries. In the Soviet Union people who disagreed with the ideals of the state were labeled insane and incarcerated against their will. According to The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law[2] a study investigating psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union was conducted in 1989. The study determined that many people incarcerated against their will for being mentally unstable were imprisoned for possessing ideological beliefs that went against the ideals of the communist state and that they in fact, did not suffer from any mental disorder. This is important to consider as the FBI has recently released a report[3] stating that conspiracy theorists and those questioning the mainstream media should be considered possible threats to national security. Furthermore, The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law also states that mental health diagnoses are contestable in many cases because of the differences in culturally accepted practices concerning psychiatric treatment.

Most important, whether the dissident individuals subjected to psychiatric confinement are (or are not) mentally ill is often contestable, especially when culturally embedded features of psychopathology are taken into account. The mental health of dissidents could be contested, even if diagnoses were grounded in a single internationally recognized system of classification, but the problem is all the more complicated when psychiatrists in different societies are trained to understand normality and psychopathology in different ways.[4]

In the United States the Diagnostic Statistical Manual lists of over three-hundred-eighty different mental disorders.[5] Most of these have been added in the past fifty years as the original publication of the DSM in 1952 only listed one-hundred-twelve. What is the common psychopathology used to identify mental illness in the United States? It depends on the diagnoses. For ADHD, for example, a child can be diagnosed as having a mental disorder simply for displaying an inability to sit still for long periods of time.[6] Operational Defiance Disorder can be diagnosed in a child who throws temper tantrums and blames their mistakes on others.[7] According to WebMD the cause of Operational Defiance Disorder is unknow but it is believed “that a combination of biological, genetic, and environmental factors may contribute to the condition.(WebMD) This is another way of saying they simply do not know why people behave the way they do.

Chemical imbalances in the brain have long been the go-to excuse for diagnosing a person as mentally ill. The prescribing of psychiatric drugs is marketed under the false perception that the drug works to balance the chemicals in the brain. In many cases, a five-minute visit with a psychiatrist will result in the diagnoses of a chemical imbalance and a prescription to go with it based on nothing more than the five-minute conversation. There is no evidence that such chemical imbalances exist.[8] In fact, there is substantial evidence which suggests the use of the drugs being prescribed is more responsible for mental illness than the alleged chemical imbalances they are meant to treat.

Prozac and other SSRI antidepressants block the reuptake of serotonin. In order to cope with this hindrance of normal function, the brain tones down its whole serotonergic system. Neurons both release less serotonin and down-regulate (or decrease) their number of serotonin receptors. The density of serotonin receptors in the brain may decrease by 50% or more. As part of this adaptation process, Hyman noted, there are also changes in intracellular signaling pathways and gene expression. After a few weeks, Hyman concluded, the patient's brain is functioning in a manner that is "qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state."[9]

This is important to understand because drugs are being hailed as the new frontier in mental wellbeing. It is also common knowledge that many of the recent mass shootings we have witnessed, which are giving rise to the issue of red-flag laws, have been committed by people taking psychiatric medications.[10] This is evidence that is largely being ignored by those pushing the issue of mental health treatment as a means of stopping mass shootings.

In the essay Theory, Practice and Method: Toward a Heuristic Research Methodology for Professional Writing, found in Central Works in Technical Communication, Patricia Sullivan and Dan Porter state that the work of social science should not be “uncritically accepted” as gospel.[11] They also state that practice in social science is almost always done through the basis of rhetorical theory. This means an implicit bias toward the theory being promoted. Mental health and psychology in general are based on the notion that man is an animal and that there is no universal morality. This leaves man, and the state as the ultimate authority of what constitutes morally acceptable behavior. The American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law stated that the diagnoses of mental health were largely due to the understanding of what constituted psychopathology in a particular culture. To the communists, there is no god, and man is devoid of a soul. Therefore, a belief in religion, freedom or anything that deviated from the idea that the state should be the ultimate authority was viewed as mental illness. Psychiatry was used a tool of suppression. The pushing of red-flag laws, while reasonably seeming to be an honest effort to keep guns away from dangerous people, are in fact a dangerous road to go down potentially turning the United States into a country that also uses psychiatry to silence dissent.

Any man who cannot be persuaded into communist rationale is, of course, to be regarded as somewhat less than sane, and we are, therefore completely justified in our use of the techniques of insanity upon the non-Communist.[12]

This principle was demonstrated in the study cited by The American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law when it was observed that many people deemed mentally ill and imprisoned, were not suffering from any known mental disorder and were imprisoned due to an ideological and political misalignment between the state and its citizens.

Dr. Dennis Petrocelli, a clinical psychiatrist, writes in his article Raising Red Flags[13] that the idea of confiscating guns based on the premise that someone may commit a violent crime is not based on any provable medical science. There is no evidence, according to Petrocelli, that any medical doctor or psychiatrist has, or can, successfully predict an individual’s future behavior. This is based on the premise that many laws involving involuntary commitment based on behavior are limited to a 24 to 72-hour observation period. Red-flag laws state that guns should be confiscated because it is believed that a person may pose a threat to others in the “near future.” Near future is an undefinable term. Furthermore, The Crime Prevention Research Center[14] stated that psychiatrists and other mental health specialists routinely miss the signs that may, according to the government, indicate someone poses a danger to themselves or others. Their research shows that many of the recent mass shooters we have witnessed have been in the care of psychiatrists and determined to not pose a threat to society.

Finally, Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz in his book, The Myth of Mental Illness[15] states that psychiatry, as a profession, fell into the habit of classifying behaviors that were misunderstood as mental illness simply because it is in man's nature to classify things. He says that if we fail to take into account the rules made in classification systems, which according to him do not occur naturally and are always made by men, we run the risk of mistaking our own systems for naturally occurring events. He also states that psychiatry as a profession had a need to appear as a legitimate medical practice and thus, developed many of their theories based on their own preconceived ideas and assumptions about the nature of mental wellbeing. Many of these theories are again, based on the absence of a god and absolute morality.

President Trump is insistent upon using mental health as a tool to identify and prevent potentially dangerous people from owning firearms. The Democrat party has long been accusing conservatives and anyone else opposed to their ideology as being racists, white nationalists and Nazi’s. Clearly, these laws will be used, if not now, in the future to target political opponents. This is a reasonable assumption to make as the Democrat party appears to be advocating for the complete restructuring of our society into a communist state. It has been demonstrated throughout this article that communists have used mental health laws and psychiatry as a means of suppression against those who fail to align themselves with state ideals. This leaves one question remaining. If Donald Trump is about freedom and supporting the second amendment why would he be calling for laws that his political opponents would surely use to target his biggest supporters?



[9] Hymen, S, E. & Nester, E, J. (1996) Initiation and action: A paradigm for understanding psychotropic drug action. American journal of psychiatry. (153) 2 p. 161.
[11]      (11) Sullivan, P. & Porter, J. (2004) On theory practice and method: Toward a heuristic research methodology for professional writing. Retrieved from Central works in technical communication by Johnson-Eilola, J. & Selber, S. A. Oxford University Press. New York

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