Psychology Today Blogger Channels Psikhushka

Conservative Hideout 2.0 ^ | 3-9-10 | Matt

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One of the many abuses of human rights in the Soviet Union was the use of psychiatric treatment for people that did nothing more than disagree with the state and communist party. Diagnosed with “Sluggishly Progressing Schizophrenia,” dissidents were subjected to forced treatments, that, when exposed to the world, caused universal condemnation.

Here is a description of the “treatment” of dissidents.

"In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they are considered a form of torture.

The official Soviet psychiatry allegedly abused the diagnosis of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia (вялотекущая шизофрения), a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person’s social behavior, with no trace of other traits: “most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,” according to the Moscow Serbsky Institute professors (a quote [4] from Vladimir Bukovsky’s archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as the infamous Danil Luntz, who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov as “no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps” [4] .

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as mentally ill were sent either to regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed particularly dangerous, to special ones, run directly by the MVD. The treatment included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, electromagnetic torture, radiation torture, entrapment, servitude, a range of drugs (such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctures.

At least 365 sane people were treated for “politically defined madness” in the Soviet Union, and there were surely hundreds more [4] ."

Note the emphasized section. People that were concerned with truth and justice were determined to be mentally ill. How many Americans, therefore, would be diagnosed with “Sluggishly Progressing Schizophrenia?”

Yesterday, Newsbusters discussed a post from Michael Bader, a blogger for Psychology Today.

"And now we have a Marxist blogger for Psychology Today who proposes that Tea Party participants suffer from a mental disorder.

These tea-party folks seem to most liberals-well, to most of us who live in the “reality community,” or, as I like to call it, “reality”-like crazy f—ers.

Bader doesn’t hide his outright hate for the tea party folks:

I hate these folks but I also understand them. And, well, uh, I also empathize with them. They share the same psychology as the paranoid patients I treat every day. The only difference is that the paranoid beliefs of the tea-party movement are political while those in my consulting room are of a more personal nature.

So it’s all just a mental disorder, just like what the Soviet dissidents suffered from. Bader then proposes to “understand” the tea partiers…so as to fight them:

I have come to have empathy for the tea-party’ers, even as I despise their influence and work hard to defeat their ideology. It’s crucial that progressives do likewise because if we don’t understand the ways that decent, god-fearing, and victimized people can come to espouse such a dangerous ideology, we won’t be able to fight them effectively."

So then, there must be a fight against freedom? Liberty is insanity? Small government is a delusion? Pointing out what the POTUS says and does is psychosis? To the left, of course it is. Truth is irrelevant, and the ends justify the means.

"The person who claims that Michael Bader is a Marxist is…Michael Bader as you can read in his biography:

I was always a lefty. My father was the only liberal in a family and community of racist republicans. My older brother went to U.C. Santa Barbara in 1967 and gave an adoring younger brother regular reports from “the front.’ And I went to Berkeley from 1970 to 1976. ‘Nuff said.

At first, politics for me was all about the New Left, Marxism, and political economy. I was “out-there,” active in various extremist groups, and fully engaged at the same time with the counter-culture. Eventually, with the decline of the New Left, I gave up being active in the public political world and chose a profession—psychology. I never gave up my sentiments or beliefs, but couldn’t figure out how to blend them with my work, since I don’t believe that good therapy should have a political agenda in any way."

OK then. Note the similarities between the Soviet model of using psychiatry, and what this guy is talking about? No, I’m not suggesting that the nice young men in the clean white coats are coming to take us away, but the ideological frame work is in place for such a thing.

This is a man whose ideology clearly taints his professional work. His hatred for all ideas of individual liberty provide the actual danger here. It’s thinking like this that leads to the loss of civil liberties, and eventually, the same torture that was perpetuated by the Soviet State. No, I’m not stating that Mr. Bader is going to start his own “Psikhushka,” and torture people that he disagrees with, but his tone is one that I have heard from the left-one that reserves the right to discount, degrade, and mislabel those who endorse the ideas of individual freedom and limited government.

Again, I’m struck by the irony that the forces of “tolerance and diversity” are so eager to define anyone who disagrees with them as “paranoid”, or is it “Sluggishly Progressing Schizophrenia?”

[dru_04]

keep fighting for justice. We need to nip pt posters like that in the bud.

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Thanks!