Lobotomizing the Human Race.

Proposed revisions to the diagnostic “bible” of mental health disorders - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Edition V (DSM-V) - in 2013, may classify grieving/bereavement, shyness and defiance as mental illness. In other words, the pathologization of conditions which used to be considered in the normal spectrum of human behavior occurs every time a revised or new DSM is released.

Don't be fooled. DSM is big business. Increasing the number of disorders gives psychiatrists greater latitude in prescribing even more drugs, thereby increasing the bottom line for Big Pharma. The bottom line is they want us running to our ever-increasing medicine cabinet every single time we feel something...anything. Can you say, zombie? Because that's obviously what our rulers desire in the long run.


Coalition for DSM-5 Reform

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The Murderer Shall Surely Be Put to Death Unless He's Rich and Powerful.

Texas has executed 19 people already in 2009, nearly half of the 39 executions in the US this year, and has executed 442 people since 1982, many of which are surrounded in controversy, especially Todd Willingham, the innocent man executed by Texas in 2004.

Khristian Oliver is the next man to face Texas sanctioned execution on November 5. He was found guilty of or a murder committed during a burglary in 1999. However, when deciding on whether Oliver should be put to death or life in prison, jurors read from scripture and this is what they read aloud:

"The murderer shall surely be put to death" and "The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer."

Another juror highlighted passages which she showed to a fellow juror: "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, the murderer shall surely be put to death."

One juror said, "the Bible is truth from page 1 to the last page" and that "if civil law and biblical law were in conflict, the latter should prevail." 80% of the jury had "brought scripture into the deliberation".

A US federal appeals court acknowledged last year that the jurors' use of the Bible amounted to an "external influence" prohibited under the US Constitution, but nonetheless upheld the death sentence anyway.

If this man, who was sentenced to death by scripture, were a man of influence, power, status or wealth, that the federal appeals court would not have upheld the death sentence. In fact, he almost certainly would not have been sentenced to death in the first place.

Murder is defined as the unlawful killing of one human by another, especially under conditions characterized by deliberation premeditated malice. Premeditated is the operative word here and there is nothing more premeditated or deliberate than state sanctioned execution. Remove the word "unlawful" from the definition of murder and the death penalty would be the ultimate embodiment of murder.

However, just because something is "lawful" doesn't make it right or good. Laws are often created in the interests of the ruling class or elite, therefore the word "unlawful" means very little when you consider the mechanisms of power, and that the law itself that often becomes nothing more than a weapon wielded to maintain power and the kind of social order most beneficial to the ruling elite.

Double Tragedies: Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty For People with Severe Mental Illness

Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) is an international, non- governmental organization of family members of victims of criminal murder, terrorist killings, state executions, extrajudicial assassinations, and “disappearances” working to oppose the death penalty from a human rights perspective.

The blog of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights.

About 500 people attended the 10th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty on October 24, 2009 at the Texas Capitol in Austin, Texas.

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How America’s Failure to Treat the Mentally Ill Endangers its Citizens.

Beginning in the 1950s, in the U.S., hundreds of thousands of patients with severe psychiatric disorders (Schizophrenia, and Bipolar Disorder). were discharged from public mental hospitals, under the banner of deinstitutionalization.

Despite good intentions, the emptying of psychiatric hospitals over the last five decades has become one of the biggest social disasters in recent history. It lead to an increase in suicide, homelessness, victimization of the mentally ill, and acts of violence brought on by a small sub-group of the severely mentally ill, chiefly because of neglect. Once released, as sick as they were, they received no treatment, no proper care, ultimately left to fend for themselves.

The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Mentally Ill Endangers its Citizens. By: Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, outlines the tragic consequences of deinstitutionalization and alerts Americans to the real need for reform.

Dr. Torrey is donating the royalties for the book sales to the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), which he founded. The TAC is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating barriers to the timely and effective treatment of severe mental illnesses. They promotes laws, policies, and practices for the delivery of psychiatric care and supports the development of innovative treatments for and research into the causes of severe and persistent psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder."

“As for me, you know that I shouldn’t precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can’t very well get out of it,” -- Vincent Van Gogh wrote from a psychiatric hospital in 1889. Less than a year later, he committed suicide.

On June 4, Georgia executed Curtis Osborne. Osborne's defense lawyer at trial was racially biased against him and failed to do the most basic investigation that might have saved his client's life. The attorney repeatedly referred to Osborne with a racial epithet, saying, "that little n____r deserves the chair." At the time of the murder that sent Osborne to death row, he was suffering from mental problems and his family had a history of mental illness going back for 3 generations. However, Osborne's attorney failed to raise this issue. His story is recounted in a video prepared by his defense attorneys.

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Why Does Our Government Overwhelm the Overwhelmed?

Jefferson Parish president, Aaron Broussard, openly wept during a television interview in which he declared, "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial," after the Katrina debacle, when more red tape was added for the victims of this terrible disaster.

Hurricane Katrina illuminated the issue of how often unnecessary procedures and red tape keep most of the poor or "almost poor" in America permanent members of the underclass. Government programs impose more hurdles on people, most of whom can barely keep their heads above water as it is. Instead of throwing the drowning person a life preserver or rope, he is handed a complicated instruction manual on how to save himself.

It seems as if the Bush Administration's mission is to not only ensure the permanency of this country's underclass but to increase its membership exponentially.

A few years ago, when the Bush Administration was pushing for somewhere between a half trillion and three quarters of a trillion dollars in new tax cuts for wealthy Americans, they were also planning to get tougher with the working poor by forcing EITC (Earned Income Tax Credits) recipients to go through a precertification process because the EITC was actually helping the working poor. The [EITC] credit is already confusing for taxpayers considering the instruction manual alone is 54 pages. Yet, the Bush Administration wanted to make it a little bit tougher for this group of Americans, some of whom work two and three jobs just to make ends meet.

Many people complain that these social programs designed to help the poor will foster dependence on the government and instead of a safety net, will become a way of life. The problem with that argument is that many of the working poor are working around the clock and still can't pay their bills; can't take their children to the doctors; and can't help their children with homework when children need help more than ever to keep up with "No Child Left Behind".

"If you give a person a fish, he eats for a day; teach him to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime," is a favorite quote of those opposed to welfare yet the way our system is set up it does the exact opposite. People in need do not get a chance to "learn to fish for a lifetime" because either they are working too many hours to find the time to locate these programs and climb through all the hoops necessary to gain entrance, or they fail to qualify because they're working.

Government bureaucracies are structured to obstruct those less fortunate from working their way out of the underclass because the people at the top want to stay on top. In order for those at the top to stay in control a certain percentage of the population must be kept busy struggling to survive. This will prevent a large number of the "underclass" from discovering what's really going on which may unite them to become a force to be reckoned.

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Mental Health Madness

How many wake-up calls do we need before mental illness is taken seriously in this country? We'll never know for sure what exactly inspired Seung-Hui Cho to shoot and kill 32 innocent students, but we can be pretty sure mental illness had something to do with it considering his background and bizarre behavior. There will always be people like Cho and we can do nothing about that but we can create an environment where people like this are less likely to cause us so much pain.

The first thing we can do is to make sure people with a history of severe mental illness cannot purchase a semi-automatic weapon capable of firing more than 170 rounds in nine minutes. Why would anyone, mentally ill or not, need a weapon like that in this country?

In addition, we can create a mental health system that treats and takes care of people with mental illness instead of one that can make those of us that are mentally healthy, mentally ill.

Former reporter, Pete Earley, of The Washington Post, and author of Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness could not get his mentally ill son help despite his psychotic behavior and finally had to lie and say his son threatened to kill him when he did not. His son was diagnosed with three types of disorders by three different doctors; Rapid Cycling Bipolar Disorder, a mood disorder, Schizophrenia, a thought disorder, or Schizoaffective Disorder, a combination of both mood and thought disorder, the final diagnosis being Rapid Cycling Bipolar Disorder.

Mr. Earley went on to discover, in his own words, "the maze of contradictions, disparities and Catch-22's that make up America's mental health system."

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Abnormal Proteins Linked to Schizophrenia Found in Body Tissue

A new study suggests biochemical changes associated with schizophrenia aren't limited to the central nervous system and that the disease could have more encompassing effects throughout the body than previously thought. The findings, scheduled for publication in the January 2007 issue of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Proteome Research, could lead to better diagnostic testing for the disease and could help explain why those afflicted with it are more prone to type II diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and other chronic health problems.

Researcher Sabine Bahn, M.D., Ph.D., and her colleagues at Cambridge University in England and the University of Cologne in Germany, detected abnormal proteins linked to schizophrenia in the liver and red blood cells of people who have the disorder. It is the first time the same altered proteins have been detected both within brain tissue as well as in non-brain tissue, according to Bahn.

In time, Bahn says, these protein "biomarkers" could be used to trace the progression of the disease throughout the body.

"If changes in the rest of the body can be observed, and if these changes reflect what is going wrong in the brain, we can use these (findings) to learn about the cellular dysfunction that causes schizophrenia and this will allow us to develop better drugs and diagnostics," Bahn says.

About 1 percent of the world's population -- including 2.4 million Americans -- has schizophrenia, a complex and puzzling mental illness that can lead to delusions, hallucinations and disordered thinking. It is one of the world's most common causes of psychosis, according to Bahn. Since it was first described more than 100 years ago, scientists have made little progress in unraveling the causes of the disease, and no definitive test is available to diagnosis it, she says.

"We desperately need a better understanding of this illness. It is, however, difficult to study the disease, as the brain can't easily be investigated. We can't take multiple biopsies from patients to look at the disease-related changes," Bahn says. "We need a new concept."

While most scientists investigating the disease believe it only affects the brain, Bahn notes that researchers have long known that people who have schizophrenia are at higher risk than the general population for a number of chronic diseases. Some evidence suggests these health problems might be somehow tied to schizophrenia, she adds, but most studies have been inconclusive. Bahn's latest discovery could help bridge this gap.

Recently, Bahn and her colleagues discovered a set of abnormal proteins in post-mortem brains of people who had schizophrenia. In this new study, they sought to detect similarly altered proteins in other organs and tissues of individuals living with the disease. After looking at thousands of proteins, they found that people with schizophrenia had 14 liver proteins and eight red blood cell proteins that were significantly altered compared to individuals who didn't have the disease. These altered proteins were strikingly like those found in the post-mortem brains.

Several of these abnormal proteins appear to promote oxidative stress and disrupt energy metabolism in cells, Bahn says. She theorizes that schizophrenia is caused, at least in part, by these two problems. In her earlier work, for instance, Bahn found evidence that schizophrenic brains might have difficulty producing or using energy properly and are more susceptible to cell-damaging free radicals than healthy brains. The new findings, she says, suggest that the same sort of energy starvation, increased free-radical damage cycle could be occurring in other tissue and, in addition to schizophrenia, possibly be contributing to the onset of other chronic diseases.

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