June 16, 2015
Dear Chairman Upton, and
Members of the Committee:
You
held a public hearing today, concerning H.R. 2646, the “Helping Families in
Mental Health Crisis Act”. My concerns with
that bill center on two facts which cannot be honestly disputed: 1) mental
health treatment is only effective in inverse
ratio to the amount of coercion it must employ; and 2) it is the flagrant,
unreasonable medicalization of human
problems in thinking, feeling or behaving that has dramatically increased
stigma and disability.
In
short, psychiatric drugs and shock work poorly for any purpose of improving
human behavior or the human condition; and forced
drugs and shock work so poorly that they are a horrific human rights abuse. Despite persistent blind faith or “hopium”
from such quarters as the National Institute on Mental Health, the verdicts of
real science admit no future prospect for peace and happiness from psychiatric
fine-tuning of individuals’ brains.
Perhaps
one clear, ironic sign of utter desperation among proponents of continued
psychiatric coercion and ascendant legal authority was a statement by Dr. Jeffrey
Lieberman, in his testimony before the Committee today….
Dr.
Lieberman makes a habit of glorious prognostications about advances in “brain
science”. But the truth, which his peers
at the APA and NIMH are consistently admitting these days, is that after a
century of fully funded research, neither schizophrenia nor any other
psychiatric “diagnosis” is any better understood or validated than it was in
the days of Benjamin Rush! Medical
science has nothing to do with
psychiatry, and it quite possibly never will.
Dr.
Lieberman simply must scapegoat
someone or something, to divert public attention from the truth. Enter, “stigma” caused by a bogeyman, the
“Anti-Psychiatry Movement” or the Church of Scientology.
I
have been a full-time practicing attorney working exclusively in the mental
health field for almost fourteen years.
I spend all of my professional time with mental patients (often violent
psychotics) and their service providers, including many very well-intended and
competent psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, therapists, criminal court
judges and state hospital administrators.
I
am also a life-long Scientologist, as are my wife of forty years and our three
adult children. If such a thing as “a
virulent Anti-Psychiatry Movement” exists, and if as Dr. Lieberman suggests, such
a movement can be blamed for the stigma of mental illness, then you may call me
before your committee, because I should
surely have to answer for that personally!
Jeffrey
Lieberman’s assessment of the situation is disingenuous or flat-out
mistaken. And I beg your pardon, I have
never been motivated in my work by financial designs. I know many Scientologists. They don’t pay me, or have any prospect of
financial gain from opposition to psychiatry.
Quite the opposite, I assure you.
Publicly questioning such a social orthodoxy as the medical mental
health model (however destructive and pernicious it may eventually be seen to
be in the judgment of history) brings only expense, inconvenience and knee-jerk
reproach from one’s own community.
Please
consider the details of H.R. 2646 very carefully with a skeptical eye. Listen to the perspectives of some people who
are not so wedded to the current, rotten psychiatric establishment, people who
do not deviously offer up mythical scapegoats and excuses for a hundred years
of failure.
And
please try not to buy into Lieberman’s slander against my religion.
Yours very truly,
S. Randolph Kretchmar
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