C.E.P.T.A.
The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.
HAS
FAILED US.
by Kenneth Eckersley
A C.E.P.T.A. Investigation and Report
For many decades
the medical profession has recognised and treated various allergic reactions to
the touch, the taste, the smell and / or the ingestion of a wide range of
substances.
Over the years, nuts, eggs, dairy produce, cats, dogs, animal
fur, new mown grass, warm tar, tobacco-smoke, alcohol, sugar, shell-fish, fresh
paint, chemicals, drugs and numerous other everyday substances have been
identified as “triggering” asthma, hay-fever, bronchitis, eczema, dermatitis,
re-occurring stomach problems and streaming eyes, as well as migraine
headaches, coughing, sneezing, vomiting, diarrhoea, acne and other physical
ailments.
Today, because of the growing incidence and recognition of
allergies, it is being increasingly suggested that we need to know more about
them and their causes. So let’s start by examining a typical progression
in the diagnosis of allergies.
The first indication is generally when a person manifests an
undesirable, unusual and unexplained physical reaction. As examples, the
individual feels breathless, or breaks out in a rash, has bouts of sneezing,
vomits, has a headache or other pain, feels dizzy or faint, passes out, or even
has more than one symptom occurring at the same time – all for no apparent
reason - because other people present are not similarly affected.
If this later becomes recognised as occurring regularly and,
because others are not similarly affected, is suspected to be an allergic
reaction to some substance in his or her environment, a search is then
undertaken to discover the exact factor or re-stimulator in the surroundings
which is triggering the particular symptom or reaction.
Observation, examination and testing is normally expected to
eventually discover that a specific factor or factors in the sufferer’s
environment is responsible. e.g. in the presence of dogs Bill has
breathing problems or, (another example) the smell or taste of boiled milk
makes Mary break out in a rash.
Steps are then taken to keep the subject patient away from
dogs or boiled milk or whatever has proved to be the ‘trigger’.
Alternatively medical attempts are made using medicines or drugs to reduce the
sensitivity of the subject, or to reduce the impact of the triggering factor on
the subject.
Questions might be asked as to why Bill should be affected
by dogs in this way when neither his brother nor his sister have the same
problem. And similar questions might be asked as to why Mary should be so
affected by milk, when no one else in the family or amongst her friends is
similarly distressed.
In fact, if the problem was ‘dogs’ or ‘milk’, then one might
expect dogs and milk to have the same effect on everybody. But they
don’t. So is the problem ‘Bill’ and ‘Mary’? Or is it as a result of
something which has earlier happened to Bill involving dogs, and also as a
result of something which has earlier happened to Mary involving milk?
In the
medical profession anything from ten to fifty percent of medical conditions are
considered to be ‘psychosomatic diseases’, i.e. illnesses caused by or
originating in the mind or psyche - rather than as the result of a direct or
immediate effect upon the organism of present infection, contagion, germs,
viruses, impacts, injury or other physical causes.
In fact, according to the authoritative and highly respected
‘Black’s Medical Dictionary’: “Psychosomatic diseases are illnesses
resulting from the effects of excessive or repressed emotions upon bodily
function or structure. They affect vast numbers of patients who are not
out of their minds and yet do not have any organic disease to account for their
illness.”
And in this dictionary definition we have what might well
also be a rather accurate description of an allergic reaction. But the
trouble is that as soon as the term “psychosomatic” applies to a
particular disease sector, the average physician regrettably tends to leave
investigation and treatment of it to psychiatry.
Which unfortunately means that the whole field of
psychosomatic disease and investigation of many allergies is left to the most
confused and ineffective branch of medicine. Clear signs of this confusion appear in the
introduction to psychiatrist Angelina Gibbs’ book "Understanding Mental
Health" where she asks: "What is mental illness?".
Which she goes on to answer with: "This is the first of
many questions on mental health which cannot be answered conclusively."
"Theories abound" she writes, and in the chapter "What causes
mental illness?" she tells us that "Usually only a partial answer can
be given because not enough is yet known about the causes of mental illness
. . . .". i.e. about illnesses of the mind.
If one doubts the confusion which exists in psychiatry, one
has only to consider the definitions of “mind” and "psychiatry" as
given in the "Dictionary of the Mind, Brain & Behaviour"
by Dr Chris Evans, the well known psychologist, writer, lecturer and
broadcaster:
MIND:
“The
sum total of psychological processes, conscious or unconscious.” (‘Psych’ = ‘mind or spirit’ and
‘ology’ = ‘study or knowledge of’.) However, after reporting earlier
historical mental designations the definition of ‘mind’ goes on with: “Whilst
few psychologists think of mind as a spiritual entity separable from the brain
and body, most now accept that the richness and reality of mental life cannot
be denied, and that a place must be found for the word “mind” in comprehensive
theories of human behaviour.”
(But how can one have any study of the mind without a word
for “mind”? And psychology’s supposed definition unfortunately leaves us
wondering if there is such a thing as ‘mind’? If so what is it?
What does it do? How does it work? For whom does it do its
work? Where and when does it do it? And why? All factors
vitally relevant to a scientific study of the mind and mental health.)
PSYCHIATRY:
“The
branch of medicine which deals with mental disorders their origins, diagnosis,
treatment and prevention.”
(‘Mental’ = ‘of or pertaining to the mind’, ‘concerned with
or about the mind’.) (After devoting several paragraphs to what is
described as ‘the confusions between the terms of psychiatry, psychology and
psychoanalysis’, and to the history of psychiatry and the more recent
bio-chemical view of the brain / mind, the definition concludes as follows:)
“The trouble with psychiatry today is that it is
still without a working theory, not just of the mind but also the disturbed
mind. Even a definition of mental illness is not easy to come by, so
perhaps it is not surprising that to this date psychiatric methods have
inevitably been of a hit or miss variety."
And this “hit or miss variety” of medicine is that branch to
which the other branches of medicine have delegated the whole field of
non-organic, mental and psychosomatic medicine. i.e. likely up to 50% of
all human health problems ! ! !
But, as we
have just learned from the horse’s mouth - the trouble with modern
psychiatry is that it is still without a working theory of the mind.
Which is too much like saying: “My son’s a judge, but he has
a difficult job because there is no agreed upon theory of what constitutes the
law.”!
An astute doctor might rationalise that the dog (which
playfully chased Bill down the field at five years of age and, after he had
fallen in the grass, licked his face whilst he was lying crying, frightened,
hurt and winded from running) ‘might’ have something to do with Bill’s
asthma and pronounce his problem as being a psychosomatic allergic reaction to
dogs.
Or a similarly astute doctor might note that when Mary had
measles at four years, her grandma – believing that boiled milk was a good
old-fashioned measles cure – had insisted on tearfully force-feeding it to her
for a whole week saying each time: “Now stop crying”. Resulting in a later
aversion to that beverage which would – ‘oddly enough’ - make her break out
into a rash not unlike measles.
But now we have another very interesting observation. Namely that, whilst
physicians identify allergies in relation to the so-called ‘lower’ senses –
i.e. the taste, touch and / or smell of a given substance – one seldom if ever
hears of a person being allergic to the colour or shape of something, or
allergic to the sound of something or to a word, statement, tone of voice or
noise, etc. Yet these involve the two ‘higher’ senses of sight and
hearing, and one would expect that allergies via these two vital senses would
thus have far more impingement upon a person’s life than allergies concerned
only with the lower senses.
After
all, we regard someone with poor or totally absent hearing or sight as very
seriously disabled, but merely sympathise with a person who has a distorted or
absent sense of taste, touch or smell which we consider as less of a handicap.
So . . . . are there also allergies to sights and sounds
and, if so, how should we recognise / categorise them?
We earlier started by examining the typical diagnostic
progress of an allergy and the business of relating its incidence directly to the
reoccurring presence of some physical ‘trigger’ in the subject’s environment,
e.g. nuts, eggs, dairy produce, cats, dogs, new mown grass, chemicals, etc.
But if the trigger were a sight or a sound, are we able to
know? Transient
perception available to the subject at the time is not there for a later
researcher to examine.
Could it be an action of some sort? Could it be a word
or phrase? When the stage hypnotist tells his subject that “whenever I
touch my tie, you will take off your jacket” - the subject does so. And
when the hypnotist tells his subject “whenever I say “its hot in here”
you will put your jacket back on” - the subject does so. Therefore it
could be an action, and it could be a word or a phrase.
In fact the mechanism which the hypnotist uses is very like
that which takes place in the mind when an allergic reaction crops up.
Some painful, threatening, enforced and unwanted incident in
the subject’s earlier life tells him that dogs are dangerous and frightening
and that they leave you breathless and crying, and that when dog’s are around
you have to get away from them but that because you survived in a breathless
and tearful state last time that’s probably a safe state to be in this time.
Not dis-similar to the hypnotist saying: “Whenever there’s a
dog present you will get out of breath and your eyes will water” – and the
subject does this. And rather similar to the hypnotist saying: “Whenever
I say “now stop crying” you’ll break out in a measles-like rash” – and
the subject does.
A
person becomes capable of being hypnotised under a variety of conditions. There can be a hypnotist
present practising his trade. Or a person can be under the influence of
one of the drugs listed as a “hypnotic” in the British National
Formulary. Or a person can be tired, poorly from some germ or virus,
feeling dizzy from travel or sea-sickness, fainting from hunger, fatigue or
lack of sleep, slightly or seriously physically injured, drunk, affected by
food poisoning, fully or partly unconscious or generally under the weather,
etc., etc.
Drugs and other chemicals which can make you susceptible to
verbal and visual suggestions or commands are too numerous to list here, but
include: the main ranges of sedatives and sleeping pills, tranquillisers, the
benzodiazepines, methadone, Subutex, many pain killers, nearly all street drugs
(especially heroin and cannabis), alcohol, solvents and even the so-called
‘uppers’ in their hangover stage after their initial stimulative effect has worn
off.
We’ve all heard the hypnotist say that he is going to put
his subject into a ‘nice sleep’ and that when the subject ‘wakes up’ he will
feel wide awake and refreshed and will forget all that has happened between
‘sleeping’ and ‘waking’. And so the hypnotist’s subject really does not
remember what happened to him!
Likewise,
Bill and Mary do not recall their dog and milk and “now stop crying”
incidents.
Like other researchers, if you think about this, you will
recognise that the reason the hypnotist can create these effects is because –
knowingly or unknowingly – he is using an existing natural mechanism of the
human mind. The same mechanism which accounts for psychosomatic illnesses
including allergies.
In the same way that the body is a self protecting and
healing mechanism, so also is the human mind. But before we look into its
self protection mechanisms and how they can affect our lives, we need to look
more closely at what the mind is and does, etc. Much more closely than
psychiatry has managed to do.
This is of course psychiatry’s first and most
fundamental failure.
Its self-confessed failure to discover the true nature of the healthy mind and
its operation. Pretending instead to be able to deal with so-called
‘mental illnesses’, i.e. symptoms assumed to arise in the minds of the
‘mentally ill’.
In fact psychiatry is so far away from a scientific
understanding of the mind that it actually confuses it with the brain, which of
course is merely a flesh and blood extension of the nervous system, a fact
which can be verified in any butcher’s shop. (Somewhat like confusing
‘software’ with computer ‘hardware’.)
The mind is demonstrably i) an analytical mechanism
which, using recognition, comparison and differentiation, poses, observes and
resolves problems to accomplish survival of the whole human organism,
plus ii) a reactive mechanism which works on a totally
stimulus response basis restricted to identification without analysis to
accomplish the survival of the body alone. (The ultra-fast motion
of removing one’s hand from a red hot stove without calculating its temperature
is stimulus response). Both parts of the mind do their ‘thinking’ with
mental image pictures of actual experience and the analytical part also uses
mental image pictures of imaginable experience to postulate future
survival. (For a full and accurate description of the human mind see:
“Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health” by L. Ron Hubbard – 1951.)
Between the analytical and the reactive minds
ALL the experiences of the human organism are recorded, with the analytical
mind operating at, and recording, those times when the organism is awake and in
good condition, and with the reactive mind operating at, and recording,
those times when the body is experiencing actual physical pain, impact, injury,
loss or fear, or, times when the reactive mind is reminded by its environment
of earlier physical pain, etc.
At such reactive (i.e. unreasoning) times, the analytical
mind is fully or partially shut down, creating the condition of full or partial
unconsciousness.
Unconsciousness
is thus a full or partial loss of analytical control of the organism
leading to full or partial reactive control of the organism.
The organism’s perceptions of its current environment are
(subject to normal working of the organs of perception) all essentially
recorded in date and time order in three-dimensional animated colour picture
form along with sound, taste, touch, smell and action, and any conclusions and
speculations made at the time.
These records of perceptions, etc., are made in the
analytical mind when that mind is in operational control of the organism, but
are made in the reactive mind when the analytical mind is in a state of
unconsciousness. As a result, the analytical mind is basically unaware of
the content of the reactive mind, and the recordings in the reactive mind are
therefore un-analysed.
Stimulus response mechanisms in animals were first explored
by the Russian veterinarian Pavlov who confined his best known studies to what
was essentially the reactive minds of dogs. These same minds he then
mistakenly also attributed to human beings, completely missing the fact that
humans normally operate analytically, displaying reactive conduct only when the
body is under physical or reactive attack.
The hailing by many of Pavlov as the father of
psychiatry was that profession’s second major failure, as it has permitted the generation
of the idea that man is a stimulus response zombie-like organism which can be
controlled in the same way that Pavlov controlled, motivated and manipulated
his dogs.
However such zombie-like response can only be achieved if
an individual is kept in a continuing reactive state by the application of
hypnosis, drugs, physical discomfort and threats to survival. It
is therefore interesting that Britain’s most prolific pushers of pharmaceutical
prescription drugs are psychiatrists, and that their marketing activities have
largely involved the hypnotic drug categories and the creation of lifetime
addiction via so-called ‘habit management’ based on methadone, Subutex and
other powerfully addictive drugs - all with painful side-effects and / or
acutely uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms.
As the reader may well by now have recognised, the allergies
of sight and sound mirror those conditions loosely defined as ‘mental
illnesses’. It is a mental not a physical aberration when an individual
will remove his jacket because someone else touches his tie. It is
equally a psychosomatic aberration or condition when an individual will go into
an asthma attack because a dog is present, or break out in a rash because
someone says “now stop crying” and / or offers milk.
None of
the so-called technology of psychiatry has ever consistently produced results
which benefited the patient. Narcotic shock ‘therapy’, Pre-Frontal
Lobotomy, E.C.T. (Electric Shock ‘therapy’), leucotomy and Sleep Therapy, etc.,
have over the years contributed more to bringing psychiatry into disrepute than
they have to the restoration of sanity and a normal life to its patients.
There has
always been a close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and
medicine in general. However, just over half a century ago, with street
drugs beginning to make their presence felt beyond the actual users, and with
governments desperate for solutions to the growing ‘drugs problem’, the
increasing ‘guidance’ or direction by the “big pharmas” of the psychiatric
sector started to become more marked, so that today it is unquestionably true
that a symbiotic relationship has been reached and that psychiatry is now the
pharmaceutical industry’s prescription drugs marketing arm.
This came just in time to give psychiatry a new lease of
life based on a deliberate escalation of the prescribing of pharmaceutical
drugs to mental health patients and drug addicts. The psychiatrists made
their contribution to the burgeoning psycho-pharmaceutical relationship by
quickly “discovering” (without benefit of scientific or clinical research) more
and more “mental conditions” (from a few dozen to over 370 in less than a
decade) all of which, interestingly and fortunately for pharmacology, ‘proved
treatable’ with pharmaceutical drugs.
In fact it is the pharmaceutical industry, plus its
expanding range of potent prescription drugs (many of which are unsafe), which
today keeps psychiatry in business, whilst in return the American Psychiatric Association
invents more and more ‘mental conditions’ for which the pharmaceutical industry
can develop treatments based on more and more drugs.
And here we have another of psychiatry’s major
failures.
Instead of developing a true science of the mind and instead of inappropriately
applying research on dogs to human beings, psychiatry has grabbed at the chance
to be partnered with the wealth, power and influence of pharmacology and the
international chemical industry.
This month (September 2005) this unholy alliance is featured
on the front page of The Times newspaper under the banner headline:
“DRUG FIRMS FACE TRIAL OVER
£100M N.H.S. ‘FRAUD’”
and we learn that up to a dozen senior executives with six
British based drug companies are likely to face trial on charges of conspiring
to defraud the National Health Service of more than £100 million by rigging the
prices for some of the most commonly used drugs.
Whilst no mention has yet been made of the senior supply
procurement executives within the health service who allowed these extravagant
and unjustified price rises to be paid, it is well known that to assist the
introduction of earlier government policies implementing “Care in the
Community”, numerous senior psychiatric personnel were moved out of asylums and
mental hospitals and were found new jobs in NHS administrative posts.
There, in light of their self-proclaimed expertise in the
drugs field they have managed to take over many of the buying office jobs and
the decision making functions that go along with them. and so today are able to
work hand in glove with pharmaceutical drug suppliers.
Also just as recently, there appeared in The Daily Telegraph
an article written by Mary Wakefield, the Assistant Editor of the authoritative
and highly respected SPECTATOR Magazine.
The headline was: “FOR EVERY PILL, THEY INVENT ANOTHER
ILL”, and here’s what Mary wrote:
“It had never occurred to me, before
last week, that big pharmaceutical companies might actually be evil. I
knew they could be a bit iffy – bribing doctors, failing to mention horrible
side-effects, fudging the science – but I always imagined them to be
fundamentally well-intentioned.
On Monday I read a new book,
‘Selling Sickness’, by an American journalist called Ray Moynihan, and I am
determined never to be so naïve again. Drug companies, it turns out, are
not on our side at all. They’re misanthropic (nasty, uncharitable, even
inhuman) on an epic, Bond-villain scale. Instead of looking for ways to
defeat diseases, they spend their time trying to create them.
Instead of selling cures to the
relatively small pool of sick people, they find it more profitable to convince
healthy folk that they are unwell. It’s creepy and, in a sick way, it’s
also rather brilliant.
Here’s a text book example of how
the disease-mongering works, courtesy of Glaxo Smith Klein. A few years
ago, GSK needed to find a new application for one of its anti-depressants,
PAXIL, in order to extend the patent. What to do? Easy – invent an
ailment for it to cure.
They found a brief mention of a
little known nervous condition – ‘Social Anxiety Disorder’ – in a psychiatric
journal somewhere, and hired a P.R. firm to turn it into a star.
The symptoms of SAD – feeling nervous,
sweaty, shy at parties – don’t amount to much more than the symptoms of being
alive, but it was marketed with a serious ad campaign and a catch phrase:
“Imagine being allergic to people.”
The PR company rounded up patients,
experts, a celebrity sufferer and then presented the SAD story to the
Press. A new disease? With a famous name? How could an editor
turn it down. The new York Times ran a long serious feature and American
Vogue followed suit. Instantly, of course, thousands of people decided
that they suffered from SAD. Doctors prescribed PAXIL, GSK thrived and
the PR company won an award for “Best PR Programme of the Year”.
All week I’ve been rooting around on
the internet, finding out about disease-mongering, and from what I can gather
it’s a growing, multi-billion dollar business across
As all hypochondriacs and pharmaceutical
companies know, you only have to read a list of unpleasant symptoms to begin to
suffer from them. It’s the reverse placebo effect. Once a big drug
company has wheedled a disease into the papers, they’ve as good as sold the
cure.”
That’s
what we learn from Mary’s revealing article, and in addition we have full
confirmation of the labelling of our local youngsters by school psychiatrists
in order to sell pharmaceutical prescription drug treatment at taxpayer expense
on the basis of invented illnesses like ADHD. The current joint campaign
of Ely Lilley the
Arising out of the ever closer relationship between much of
psychiatry and many of the pharmaceutical companies, what has Britain got today
in terms of an effective mental health science dealing with psychosomatic
illnesses and a medical service curing drug addiction?
The
answer is NOTHING!
Instead we have a profit and power orientated psycho-pharmaceutical fraternity
which, in order to expand its turnover and profit on all fronts, actively seeks
to increase the numbers of individuals needing and demanding all forms of drugs
– especially addictive prescription drugs, which create their own continuing
demand, and are paid for by the taxpayer.
For these reasons, organisations which do understand
addiction, allergies and the causes of other psychosomatic illnesses (and which
can genuinely help sufferers to overcome their problems) are side-lined and
marginalised by the massive PR and lobbying organisations employed by the psycho-pharms
to keep them in control of UK drug ‘treatment’ and mental health therapies –
interventions which cure no one, but instead ‘maintain’ individuals in
profitable addiction-driven ‘habit management’ prescription drugs for life.
From the point of view of the crime-ridden British citizen,
the families with ASBO deserving neighbours, and the milked and defrauded
British taxpayer, this is utter failure.
But to the psychiatrists this is success -
both for them and their pharmacological partners. The last thing they
want to do is to cure people and thus lose the huge profits they make out of
So, watch out for some really dirty tricks – politically,
financially, internationally and locally. Watch out for those who tell
you that mental illness and drug addiction cannot be cured – because they
can. And watch out for those who tell you that drug usage is inevitable,
that prevention training does not work and that only so-called ‘harm reduction’
drugs education intended to prepare children for a safe and responsible life with
drugs is the only way forward – because it’s not – it’s a proven way to more
and more drug disaster.
Psychiatry’s
failure to deliver cures for drug addiction and cures for mental illness affect
us all – but only if we and our politicians go on believing and
acting upon the false and misdirecting information and propaganda put out
by psycho-pharmaceutical P.R. agents and lobbyists.
The failure of psychiatry is not just 1) its near
total inability to truly help those with mental problems. Its other
failings are 2) its near total lack of real interest in beneficial results
- the benevolence of many (but not all) psychiatrists having been subjugated to
their desire for a good income based on a ‘fingers crossed’ dependence on
pharmaceutical drug prescribing and, 3)
psychiatry’s long-term attempts to rob Britain of truly effective
prevention training and real cures by sabotaging those organisations
which can deliver
effective prevention and treatment, and which are thus able to expose
psycho-pharmacological deceptions.
It
is psychiatry which is doing most to usher in the bio-chemical society and thus
condemn us all to a life as stimulus response drug controlled zombies, JUST FOR
PSYCHO-PHARMACEUTICAL POWER AND PROFIT !
© Copyright C.E.P.T.A. and E. Kenneth
Eckersley, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 & 2005. All World
Rights Reserved
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