Free Republic

The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator. Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal. The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men. As...

“In the days of the Malleus, if the physician could find no evidence of natural illness, he was expected to find evidence of witchcraft: today, if he cannot diagnose organic illness, he is expected to diagnose mental illness.” (1) The Malleus Maleficarum was a 15th century text which instructed Inquisitors on the proper method of identifying, trying and burning witches. Though it was many years ago that renowned psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) used the example of the Malleus to comment on the diagnostic practices of his fellow physicians, it seems he might have been on to something as today psychiatrists...

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses.” But according to prominent psychiatrist and academic Thomas Szasz MD (1920-2012) “…this is a worthless and misleading definition.” “Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social, and ethical problems in living.” (1) Szasz write that “…the notion of a person ‘having a mental illness’ is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization—namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of...

The past 2 decades have witnessed an alarming increase in the number of Americans diagnosed with mental illness. Is modern psychiatry reaping an immense profit by impulsively—perhaps even deliberately–conflating mental illness with a growing, public aversion to the demands of personal responsibility? In the summer of 2011, The New York Review of Books published two lengthy articles by Marcia Angell, MD—Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. In these articles, Angell reviewed three books which take a critical look at psychiatry and its relationship with the...

Suicide. It remains a topic few health professionals want to discuss openly with their patients. It remains a topic avoided even by many mental health professionals. Policy makers see it as a black hole without an obvious solution. And now grim new statistics confirm a disturbing trend — more people are taking their own lives than ever before in the U.S. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released statistics yesterday showing that 33,687 people died in motor vehicle accidents, while nearly 5,000 more — 38,364 — died by suicide. Middle-aged Americans are making up the biggest leap in...

A proposed law introduced in the California State legislature would allow public school children to use bathrooms designated for members of the opposite sex, if that students' "gender identity" differed from the students biological sex. Assembly Bill 1266, introduced by Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who represents a section of the city of San Francisco would: "...require that a pupil be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil's record." While the bill does not specifically mention...

Patients who believe in God may experience better short-term treatment outcomes for psychiatric illness, according to a new study. Individuals who described themselves as having strong faith reported having a better overall response to treatment, said David Rosmarin, a clinician and instructor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "We found that patients who had higher levels of belief in God had better treatment outcomes — better well-being, less depression and less anxiety," Rosmarin told LiveScience.

Although fewer than 6 percent of American adults will have a severe mental illness in a given year, according to a 2005 study, many more—more than a quarter each year—will have some diagnosable mental disorder. That’s a lot of people. Almost 50 percent of Americans (46.4 percent to be exact) will have a diagnosable mental illness in their lifetimes, based on the previous edition, the DSM-IV. And the new manual will likely make it even "easier" to get a diagnosis. If we think of having a diagnosable mental illness as being under a tent, the tent seems pretty big. Huge,...

An off-duty officer opened fire this morning, killing her husband and 1-year-old son in an apparent murder-suicide in Brooklyn this morning, sources said. Police and EMS responded to a 911 call of a man shot inside of a building at East 56th Street and Farragut Road about 8:30 a.m., the FDNY said.

Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Email Comments More . Susan Stewart collects fresh human placentas, takes them home and steams them with lemon, ginger and cayenne pepper. Once cooked, she puts the organs in a dehydrator overnight then grinds them and measures the powder out into gel capsules. The service – the Calgary single mother makes a living at this – costs about $200. Within a day, she presents new moms with their placentas in pill form – an average human placenta yields about 150 capsules – with promises of renewed energy, better lactation and no post-partum depression. They keep indefinitely. Placenta-eating...

Excerpts of some of the emails Nancy Lanza sent to a friend, touching on her family's history and her feelings on kids and weapons. It ran in the family.

ick Warren’s son has taken his own life. Matthew Warren, 27, had struggled with mental illness before his death. Evangelist Greg Laurie posted an e-mail the Saddleback Church pastor sent to this staff: “Only those closest knew that he (Matthew) struggled from birth with mental illness, dark holes of depression, and even suicidal thoughts. In spite of America’s best doctors, meds, counselors, and prayers for healing, the torture of mental illness never subsided. Today, after a fun evening together with Kay and me, in a momentary wave of despair at his home, he took his life.” Click here to read...

'She is remembered as a profligate shrew who drove her husband to drink before going insane, but according to a new book, that is not an accurate portrait of Zelda Fitzgerald. In fact, it's a 'persistent, damning mischaracterisation that needs undoing' says author, Therese Anne Fowler, who argues that not only was the spoiled wife of Great Gatsby author, F. Scott Fitzgerald sane, she was also devoted to her husband. Fowler, who began Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald wondering whether she really wanted to spend a year in the company of a 'hyperactive madwoman', says she soon discovered that...

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Sometimes, a First Family remains a first family -- a mirror of our times -- even after the president leaves office. So it is with the Clintons. This week, the United States Supreme Court will hear two landmark cases about marriage equality. One is a challenge to California's Proposition 8, a law passed in 2008 that bans same-sex marriage in the country's most populous state. The other is about a federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents all legally married gay and lesbian couples from receiving the more than 1,000 federal rights, benefits and obligations that come from...

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, issued some words of advice for fellow GOPers: Get in the 21st century with same-sex-marriage issues. “We do have a platform, and we adhere to that platform,” Mr. Priebus said in a USA Today video. “But it doesn’t mean that we divide and subtract people from our party” who favor gay marriage. “I don’t believe we need to act like Old Testament heretics,” he said in the USA Today video. Rather, Republicans “have to strike a balance between principle and grace and respect.” His statements come as the U.S. Supreme Court is...

Jenna Wolfe, NBC's "Today" weekend anchor, came out as a lesbian on the air this morning. She also announced she is pregnant: Today" weekend anchor Jenna Wolfe revealed some major news on Wednesday's program. "I'm actually pregnant," she said. "I'm quite pregnant, actually." Wolfe is expecting a baby with her longtime partner Stephanie Gosk, an NBC News correspondent. … The Wednesday announcement coincides with a People magazine spread with more details. "I don’t want to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is," Wolfe told People. Wolfe will...

The term “gender identity disorder” has been eliminated from the new edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s official guide to classifying mental illnesses, known as the DSM-5. Whereas previously a man who “self-identified” as a woman (or vice versa) could have been classified as mentally ill, now the DSM-5 uses the term “gender dysphoria,” which means it is only a mental illness if you’re troubled by this self-identification. Elated activists in the “LGBT” community had lobbied the APA for the change for years. And this month in Massachusetts, students, parents and teachers are reacting with concern to a recent policy...

As Senate Democrats push ahead with a proposed ban on assault weapons and other gun-control legislation, Republicans are still trying to draw attention to what they see as the bigger issue -- keeping the mentally ill from owning firearms. A proposal on the issue was introduced this month by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who on Thursday again expressed his interest in getting the measure passed. “I believe that the best way to interrupt the shooter is to have a mental health system that actually records and enters into the database people...

With the Christopher Dorner case, the role of prescription psychotropic drugs in mass killings has again come to the forefront. Numerous articles have approached the role of so-called "psych meds" in causing depraved and indifferent violent behavior, but one in particular deserves attention because it highlights the fact that among psychiatric professionals there is no coherent understanding of what needs to be done after we take people off of drugs that are prescribed for their psychiatric illnesses. The article -- Jon Rappoport's "Is Christopher Dorner Another Psychiatric Killer?" -- makes a number of important points about the former Los Angeles...

THE grieving process is in danger of being branded a medical condition if a mourner feels sad for more than two weeks and consults a GP, according to an international authority on death and dying. At present, mourners can feel sad for two months before being told they have a mental disorder, says Professor Dale Larson. Decades ago, a diagnosis could be made after a year.In a keynote address at an Australian Psychological Society conference in Melbourne on Saturday, Prof Larson will express his anger about the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic manual, DSM 5, which is used in many...

Shortly after her move from New Hampshire to Newtown in 1998, Nancy Lanza had good news about her troubled son. "Adam is doing well here, and seems to be enjoying the new school," Lanza wrote to a friend back in Kingston, N.H., in a Feb. 9, 1999, email. But Adam, 6, then diagnosed with a condition that made it difficult for him to manage and respond to sights, touch and smell, eventually struggled in the first grade at his new school — Sandy Hook Elementary. His mother would respond, touching off a 10-year educational shuffle with moves in and out...

Toxoplasma is a common 'cat parasite', and has previously been in the spotlight owing to its observed effect on risk-taking and other human behaviours. To some extent, it has also been associated with mental illness. A study led by researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden now demonstrates for the first time how the parasite enters the brain to influence its host. "We believe that this knowledge may be important for the further understanding of complex interactions in some major public health issues, that modern science still hasn't been able to explain fully," says Antonio Barragan, researcher at the Center for...

There's been a gulf between the Christopher Dorner that friends called "friendly" and "positive," and the Christopher Dorner who this week became a real-life Rambo who went on a rampage targeting law enforcement. But now information emerging in court documents and interviews paints a more complex picture of Dorner and his emotional struggles. Ex-girlfriend Ariana Williams told ABC 7 that she was initially attracted to Dorner, who was outgoing and friendly. But she became troubled by his paranoia. Williams told he had guns all over her house: "He'd be in the bed and there'd be one by the bed. There'd...

One afternoon in May, 1990, Robert Kosilek murdered his wife, Cheryl. Brutally. He strangled her with piano wire, virtually decapitating her, and left her body in a mall parking lot in a suburb of Boston. Since his conviction, Kosilek, now 64, has been serving a life sentence at Norfolk, a high-security prison for men. For years Kosilek has been a member of the "sisters," a particularly violent, sexually deviant subset of the prison population. But in 1993, Kosilek decided to do a complete makeover, changing his name to Michelle, letting his hair grow long, and dressing as a woman in...

Young Republicans in Iowa are still split on the institution of marriage being extended to gay people. But there is a growing consensus among college-aged GOPers that in order to win elections, the party's focus should be elsewhere. Gay and lesbian campus groups and College Republicans haven't exactly been friendly to one another over the years, in Iowa or the rest of the country. But there are signs that with this coming generation the trend could be changing, and for the Republican Party that could be critical. "As a young Republican, I see where the party’s coming from with the...

I’ve been living the life of a married man for 20 years. I have a successful career and three children. All this time, however, I have battled gender dysphoria and the deep sadness that comes from living a lie. From the earliest age, I’ve been unhappy being male. I believed I would find happiness only once I was true to myself. I recently had my self-diagnosis confirmed, and I’m initiating a transition to living as the real me. There is a cost involved: pain to my family and stress on my career. Ethically, is it right to be “true to...

We know you're out there, cat lovers, but how much do you REALLY love your cat? Have you ever actually tasted your feline? Meet Lisa, who loves her kitty so much that she eats the fur. The 43-year-old Michigan woman, featured in the upcoming season of TLC's "My Strange Addiction," snacks on a smidge of cat hair every two hours and has downed more than 3,200 hairballs over the past 15 years. She doesn't cough them up cat-style, either: She swallows them. The fur gourmand explains that she eats fur off the floor and furniture, but that "the best ones...

A Parker County 17-year-old wrote in a confession released Thursday that the horror movie remake of "Halloween" gave him the idea to kill his mother and sister. Jake Evans is on trial for the Oct. 3 slayings of his 15-year-old sister, Mallory, and mother, Jami in their upscale Aledo home. The confession was introduced as evidence. In a four-page written confession to police hours after his arrest, Evans said he had watched the remake of "Halloween" three times earlier that week. The 2007 Rob Zombie film is about a 10-year-old boy who murders several people and kills a number of...

Anyone else feel like it really is a tide that is turning these days? The American College of Nurse Midwives issued a statement in support of working towards quality, competent care for trans and gender non-conforming people. Woo-hoo! ~ Radical Doula Miriam Zoila Pérez, January 17, excited over a recent statement issued by ACNM that “addresses the need for education about transgender issues in midwifery education.” The statement explains: HIV infection within the gender variant community is 4 times the rate of the general population; rates of drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, and depression and suicide attempts are also higher....

A FEW years ago, I awoke at 2:30 a.m. to more than a “rapping, rapping at my chamber door.” It was a full-force pounding of a body trying to break into my little house in Washington, D.C. It was the sound and scenario that, as a single woman living alone, I feared more than spiders in the house. ....I considered buying a gun. The threat of violence rattles you like that. What rolled round my head after that dark morning was: what if I hadn’t heard the noise, what if it’s different next time? While I held that chair with...

<p>THE widow of a victim of the US theatre massacre is suing a psychiatrist for neglect, for failing to have the alleged shooter arrested despite him having "fantasised about killing a lot of people."</p> <p>The lawsuit, also citing the University of Colorado, alleges that Dr Lynne Fenton advised campus police about her concern regarding James Holmes, after he told her about the fantasy in June last year.</p>

The United States houses more human beings in prisons than any other country, both in terms of actual numbers and in relation to population size. The U.S. prison population began to grow dramatically in the 1970s. Professor Daniel D’Amico examines the data behind the alarming increase in the number of prisoners in the United States and finds that much of the growth in the last 40 years has been driven by the war on drugs. From 1980 to 1990, the total U.S. prison population more than doubled. In that same time, the proportion of people in prison for nonviolent drug...

Since I first began working as a medical expert in product liability cases way back in the early 1990s, I’ve spent innumerable hours culling the sealed data contained within the files of companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. Among other things, I long ago found evidence that Paxil and Prozac cause suicidality in adults. These discoveries then led to settlements in product liability suits brought against the two companies brought by surviving family members. I’ve also communicated my conclusions in books like Talking Back to Prozac and the Antidepressant Fact Book and in scientific articles but the primary data until...

[snip] (Standard Gravure shooting) First known shooting with ties to Prozac. Joseph Wesbecker kills 12, injures 9. Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public. Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself....

A high school teacher in South Carolina is under investigation and has been placed on long-term administrative leave after he allegedly threw an American flag on the floor and stomped on it in front of his students. Scott Compton, an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, S.C., reprised the unpatriotic deed in three classes over the course of one day, reports local NBC affiliate WIS. One parent, Michael Copeland, said he heard his teenage daughter discussing the incident and asked her to tell him the whole story. “He drew a couple of symbols, like one of them was...

The Cuomo administration is preparing to shove thousands of mentally ill New Yorkers out of supervised settings — where they can be forced to take their medication — into far less restrictive, far more dangerous “community housing.” Albany, under pressure from the Obama administration, recently ordered psychiatric facilities not to place any discharged patients in adult homes, where staff can ensure they take their meds. Instead, they’ll be placed in “community housing,” without full-time supervision. This is part of the state’s plan to essentially empty adult homes into community-based “supportive” apartments, leaving up to 6,000 people — including those with...

CBS) Advocates of medical marijuana say pot has all sorts of health benefits. Maybe so, but a new study from Australia suggests that smoking pot can drive some people crazy - or at least make them go crazy sooner than they would have if they had never picked up the pipe. The study, published online in "Archives of General Psychiatry," shows that potheads develop severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia about 2.7 years earlier than people who don't use marijuana.

There is a drumbeat of demand for a new federal assault-weapons ban to prevent more tragedies like the one that happened in Connecticut. If we had not tried the experiment, you could honestly wonder if it would do any good. But the policy has been tried and found wanting. In 1999, the National Institute of Justice published a study by criminologists Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper, “Impacts of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: 1994–96.� It examined the effects of the federal assault-weapons ban in its first two years of operation and found no statistically significant reduction in murder rates. “The...

Mental-health experts are wrong. Untreated, the seriously mentally ill are prone to violence. While virtually the entire nation unites around the reasonable proposition that people with serious mental illnesses should not own assault weapons, one group takes umbrage: mental-health experts. In the wake of incidents such as the one at Newtown, the experts immediately issue press releases claiming that people with mental illness are no more violent than others, leading to the conclusion that people with serious mental illness should not be the target of gun-control efforts.How can the chasm be so wide? Who is right? The public that believes...

Since removing constitutional rights is all the rage now, I have to ask: when does dislocation from reality become severe enough to justify involuntary commitment? A good study case is NYC's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently uttered a real gem on his weekly radio show. Writes Politicker.com:

The recent post "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" by a woman who posts at anarchistsoccermom and animatedly advertises herself wearing an "I love Che" t-shirt is as slick a piece of exploitative propaganda as anything we've seen in the last four years. Soon after the essay went viral mom blogger Liza Long appeared on CNN and the Today show calling for a national conversation on mental illness. After the Newtown massacre the self-described author, musician, Classicist and single mother of four felt compelled to share her own story. Long's written account of life with an out of control child focuses...

The Sandy Hook gunman worshiped the devil and had an online page dedicated to Satan, a former classmate revealed, as his childhood barber recalls Adam Lanza never spoke and would stare at the floor every time he had his hair cut. Lanza's worshiping page had the word 'Devil' written in red, Gothic-style letters against a black background, Trevor L. Todd told The National Enquirer, something which he said was 'weird' and 'gave him the chills'. The FBI are trying to piece together his smashed up hard drive to see if his online footprint will reveal any motive for the killing,...

I pull up in front of our town's little savings bank branch, drop out of the door and when my boots hit the pavement reach under my shirt and the remove the Smith & Wesson Model 28 .357 which I then put under the seat before locking the truck. "What are you doing Grandpa?" my granddaughter asks walking around from the other door. "Here's a word of advice cupcake. It's never a good idea to walk into a bank with a gun." I don't always carry it. It's a big piece of iron but it's the same gun I carried...

“From what I've been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed," Flashman told FoxNews.com. "Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.” A senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation confirmed that Lanza's anger at his mother over plans for “his future mental health treatment” is being looked at as a possible motive for the deadly shooting. Flashman was told...

Everyone I know is very disturbed about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, wondering why or how someone could do such a thing. Anyone in their right mind wouldn't dream of committing such a terrible act of violence. I read an article the day after that really brought to light something that might be at the root of this unspeakable evil. It is mental illness, in one form or another. I Am Adam Lanza's Mother tells the story of a mother faced with what Adam Lanza's real mother may have failed to deal with. Here is how Liza Long begins...

Psychiatrist James Knoll told CNN’s Headline News today that Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, was acting in a “ritualistic” way during the horrific events. Knoll, who does research at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, said in a recent report that killers like Lanza see themselves as “pseudocommandos … driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment, in addition to having a paranoid character. He plans out the offense ritualistically, and comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons.” The report continues: “[The pseudocommando] most often kills in public during the...

President Obama said the federal government has to do something meaningful to prevent future shootings, like the recent massacre of 26 children and adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.  Here is what the federal government can do to prevent violence related to mental illness:1. Start demonstration projects of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (e.g. Kendra’s Law in New York, Laura’s Law in California) throughout the country. AOT allows courts to order individuals with mental illness to stay in treatment as a condition of living in the community. It is only applicable to the most seriously ill who have a history of violence, incarceration, or...

A few things you won’t hear about from the saturation coverage of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre:Mass shootings are no more common than they have been in past decades, despite the impression given by the media.In fact, the high point for mass killings in the U.S. was 1929, according to criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections.Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of this century.The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.Until the...

In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness. Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants. “I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises. “They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.” “They told...