Accurate and enjoyable to read as well. Before the grand scale hoax of COVID-19, I used to trust GPs' advice. Not anymore. My health was ruined by unnecessary use of antidepressants, statins, and proton pump inhibitors. [https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/heresy]
Your story is absolutely jaw-dropping! Before the scamdemic, I was on the verge of enrolling into a PhD program. The response of the academy to convid turned me off that idea completely. I doubt I could ever find a supervisor who would support me to pursue my interests.
Sadly, I think you are right (re not being able to find a supervisor to support you to pursue your interests). But woah, would I ever love to read your thesis!
Thank you for sharing your story. I think using Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism to examine COVID policies is hugely relevant and important. I'm sorry (though not surprised) to hear your work wasn't supported. Where I live some housing commission apartment blocks (government supported housing) were locked down during COVID with no notice to the residents! It was announced via a press conference by the Premier starting immediately! Police turned up and kept everyone in. Never would have happened to a high socio-economic group apartment block.
The following totally blew my mind, I had no idea! "To put it bluntly, the "mental health movement" was, from its inception, a tool of globalists... which explicitly aimed to transform the way that ordinary people viewed themselves and their world, was a key plank of the globalist project". Wow!
And this was brilliant: "What is the chief project of the 21st century mental health movement? Judging by its preoccupations, it is to infantilise, to atomise, to pathologise the normal and normalise the pathological, and to feminise."
Once again, it all comes back to disempowerment and trust the experts. People rush to mental health professionals with problems and friends and families are too scared to say anything or offer counsel because it might be the wrong thing and "I'm no expert". Witness how after every disaster of some sort, there's an outcry of "I don't know how to talk to my kids about this!" and we need to rush experts in from everywhere to help. (Most recently the Bondi junction stabbings).
It reminds me of The Quarterly Essay "Lifeboat - Disability, Humanity and the NDIS" by Micheline. She relates anecdotes of people with disabilities seeking assistance in public being met with "Where's your carer?", rather than immediately receiving help. One perverse outcome of the NDIS.
The other issue is the resultant trivialising and marginalising of people with severe mental conditions. Eleanor de Jong makes this point in "Nobody I’ve been locked up with in a psychiatric hospital felt ‘proud’ of their illness" Eleanor de Jong" (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/19/nobody-ive-ever-been-locked-up-with-in-a-psychiatric-hospital-felt-proud-of-their-illnesses) For example "We certainly never called our illnesses or symptoms “superpowers”. If we had, no doubt our anti-psychotics would have been increased or our courtyard privileges quashed" and "The pointy end of mental illness is not photogenic or particularly quotable. It’s desperate and it’s sad, and all people want is to get off the ward and live a normal life". (Many parallels with the "neurodivergent movement" here too).
Not to mention that despite all this "awareness raising" , "studies from around the globe have found plateaux or increases in stigma against those with severe mental illnesses, especially illnesses with psychotic features" (de Jong).
I really detest "awareness raising" of physical and mental health conditions. I mean, it makes no sense for everyone to develop awareness of every health and medical condition under the sun ... for some time I've thought focusing on compassion would be much better. Meet anyone suffering and struggling with compassion. You don't need to have detailed awareness of whatever their condition or challenge is, you just need compassion and to genuinely listen.
I've been bitching about the 'expertification of everything' for years. When personal trainers first became a 'thing', I was flummoxed. Why do people need someone to tell them how many push-ups to do? Then life coaches became a 'thing', then parenting coaches, relationship and dating coaches, pet parenting coaches.... I guess it's symptomatic of the atomisation of society. People used to ask their parents for advice, or an older friend, or even the village priest. But now these mere mortals aren't seen as sufficiently expert.
Those anecdotes of people with disabilities being asked where their carer is, are deeply disturbing. Once again, we're being inculcated with the notion that we are not qualified to help a disabled person cross the street, or even worse, it's not our responsibility because they 'should' have a carer with them.
On the topic of stigma, there's a large body of evidence that when mental illness (either the 'real' ones like psychosis, or the pseudo-mental illnesses like depression) is framed as a biological condition, those suffering from it are subject to greater stigmatisation than if their condition is explained as a reaction to adverse life circumstances. Most people can comprehend that severe trauma, neglect, abuse etc can make people act crazy, and this explanation is far more likely to evoke compassion.
Totally agree with everything you wrote. Heaven forbid asking someone you've known your whole life, from your own community and is older than you for advice or to talk things over with them.... better to pay a complete stranger for that!
Though sadly, as you mention, with the atomisation of society many people don't have any community. COVID lockdowns likely destroyed more as well.
Another wonderful article! Kudos to encouraging your children during their struggles versus pandering to the challenges of maturing.
An interesting study done recently had one cohort write in a weekly gratitude journal, another cohort wrote about their weekly struggles and the third just wrote about what happened to them on a weekly basis for 12 weeks. I bet you can’t guess which group at the end of the 12 weeks was more emotionally content and happy with their lives. It makes me wonder if the constant attention on social media to the negative drama in people’s lives isn’t adding to the quest to use emotional instability as a crutch. Plus we have a pharmaceutical industry ready to prance on each and every victim with their dangerous SSRIs and other depression drugs.
Three years ago, in the height of the pandemic, I had two sisters come in as patients. They were 6 and 10 at the time and they were both out on Zoloft. I don’t have kind words to write about the MD who wrote the script or the parents that would allow this weapon to be used on children.
"It makes me wonder if the constant attention on social media to the negative drama in people’s lives isn’t adding to the quest to use emotional instability as a crutch." Yes, 100%!!! My daughter has actually told me that she notices how much worse she feels, the more time she spends on social media. She's far from being alone in this.
I wonder how that doctor who prescribed an SSRI to CHILDREN justified this action? Do they actually believe that they're helping, are they utterly brainwashed, or are they psychopaths?
I had a friend who, decades ago when facebook first came out, went on. But then realised she just felt worse when using it so got off and never looked back! Kudos to her!
I remember when her daughter finished primary school and was entering high school, they (the parents) had no intention of getting her a mobile phone. But the school counseled the parents against this - saying she would be socially isolated if she didn't have one because EVERYONE else would have one. Oh, why don't we just hand out cigarettes at the school gate??!
I remember when a friend first told me that I needed to get on Facebook so she could refer her Facebook friends to my business page. She explained that Facebook was just like looking over the fence to see what your neighbours were up to. I didn't want to be rude so I didn't say what I was thinking: "Why in the bloody hell would I want to do that????"
Totally agree with your argument that "emotional instability" is an identity unto itself. It's all part of the general inversion; the least noble shall be the most valorised.
I truly cannot comprehend what is happening in healthcare in the United States. It is a painful experience to see the litany of drugs my patients are on and feel helpless to discuss an alternative to the Pharma narrative they receive from their doctors. I am grateful for the educational content you share to give fundamentals that can help me counter some of the lies my patients have been spoon fed.
The normalisation of the expression of all and every emotion in any context as per the video above no doubt has many contributing causes... but I suspect one of them is the idea that suppressing your emotions is bad for you... (in many ways including will lead to autoimmune diseases, can give you cancer etc etc) .... it seems like such a common thread in Western pop psychology. Gabor Mate is big on this idea. I'm interested in where this idea originated...(Freud springs to mind but I'm aware that "big ideas" are seldom the result of one individual...)
In practical terms, how to self-regulate without suppressing emotions?
[ Speculation on other contributing factors... the excessive valorisation of the individual, dissolving of the distinction between public and private realms... ]
Re the normalisation of the expression of emotions, I blame the Baby Boomers for this!!!! (Or, to be more fair to them, the master manipulators at Tavistock and the CIA who cooked up the whole 60s revolution - the drugs, loosened sexual mores, the music, the infusion of eastern mysticism...)
If anything, I would guess that Gabor Mate's ideas have done more harm than good. Most of my clients who have cancer, are convinced that they developed it because they have 'toxic' thinking or dysfunctional emotional expression, or 'stress'. There is bugger all evidence for any of this; a couple of studies have even found that women subjected to chronic stress were LESS likely to develop breast cancer.
The question of regulating one's own emotions is a tricky one. Ideally, children have an attuned parent who can co-regulate i.e. respond calmly to their emotional outbursts and model the process of working through one's emotions by finding a healthy outlet for them (e.g. vigorous exercise, artwork, or listening to music) and then helping them understand why they had those emotions in the first place, and how to solve the problem that the emotion pointed to. But of course, many children don't have an emotionally attuned parent or any other kind of care-giver! I have found EFT to be the most powerful tool for helping people work through their emotions, starting with the raw physicality of them, and then digging into the cognitive layer.
So is public health all bad? Has it done anything good? Smoking initiatives are often held up as one of their greatest successes. Clean water and proper sewerage systems - these are good initiatives of public health?
'Public health' has gone through multiple iterations, as I discussed in https://empowertotalhealth.com.au/covid-19-and-philanthrocapitalisms-war-on-public-health-part-1/. Although there was always an element of paternalism to it, I would say the 19th century public health movement was the high tide mark. Social reformers who pushed for improvements to housing standards, provision of clean water and sewage, food hygiene etc, were genuinely distressed by the conditions endured by the urban poor (graphically detailed in 'Dissolving Illusions'). I'm sure there were selfish motives as well; even if you lived in the up-market part of town, when the wind was blowing the wrong way, the slum stench would still reach your nostrils!
I don't think it's any coincidence that the high tide mark of public health coincided with the peak of the British Empire. A rich, powerful, confident nation invests heavily in grand public works, and is embarrassed by poverty and squalor on its own shores. The leadership of a nation in decline is afraid of its own people, seeing them as threats to its tenuous rule rather than assets to be invested in (and exploited for nation-building projects, including war).
Thanks Robyn for taking us down the rabbit hole of ‘mental health/illness.’ I don’t recall who it was, but he was a psychiatrist who refuted the whole concept of mental illness. The DSM(now version 5) is the bible of mental illness and lists all the many ways you can be f’d up in the head. He said all that stuff was made up as there are no tests to diagnose any mental disorder, just opinions.
Speaking of tests, I always scored high on the tests used to determine psychopathy. Sure, you can look at personality traits and put them on a spectrum and see where a person lands, but that is just a part of who the person is. I have low empathy. Sorry, but that’s just the way I am, maybe due to early life trauma, but it doesn’t mean I’m an asshole. Well, maybe I am. You mentioned loneliness; I prefer solitude but I’m not lonely. I like being with family but don’t particularly like being around others, particularly crowds.
It seems to me that ‘mental illness’ is a construct to explain why people act differently, respond to experiences in various ways. I raised two sons a year apart in age. Their environment growing up couldn’t have been more similar, but they are totally different people. They are definitely brothers but not alike.
Bottom line, I think genetics, environment, nutrition and drugs are what makes people who they are, for good or bad.
Thomas Szasz wrote 'The Myth of Mental lllness' way back in 1961. He argued that unwanted behaviour is diagnosed as 'mental illness', and that this harms patients by absolving them of responsibility for their conduct.
More recently, James Davies' book 'Cracked' took a deep dive into the history of the DSM, exposing it as an almost entirely fraudulent undertaking.
In personality terms, you sound like you're low in agreeableness and extraversion, which basically means you have very low tolerance for small talk and bullshit! I see these are being normal variations in human personality, which are all part of the adaptativeness of our species. You might enjoy reading Robert Plomin's book 'Blueprint', which describes the role that heritability (largely, but not entirely a function of genes) plays in shaping human personality. Plomin conducted research on identical twins, separated at birth and raised in different households. His work demonstrates pretty conclusively that heritable factors outweigh environment in terms of shaping personality. I certainly see that in my two kids. Like your sons, they simply could not be more different from each other, even though they were raised in the same environment.
Great article Robyn and so relevant for the current times. It would take a long time to turn the mental health industry Titanic around, I think it will end up on a big reef at some stage.
I strongly suspect that it is being steered very intentionally toward that big reef, with a large segment of the population on board, and completely oblivious of the danger they're in.
In the long term I can only see that Western countries will end up as failed states as greater and greater proportions of the population get sucked into the medical-industrial complex and subject to iatrogenic harm which then only compounds... Frankly, and unfortunately, probably not that far away. Sigh.
Actually, no doubt I got this idea from Toby Rogers who has made this point in relation to autism. (I've read some of his substack articles, but not his PhD thesis which is on the political economy of autism). That the rapidly increasing rate of autism is going to "break" Western economies and thereby societies (https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/20198).
Sad to say I share your views. We are living through the end of the West. The only question is, will it be a rapid end or a long, slow decline, with some remnants managing to hold on to Western values.
Thanks for the link to Toby's thesis. That's going to come in very handy!
Yes I agree, western societies seem to be imploding. As with the mental health disaster, increasing autism rates, iatrogenic harm, increasing infertility, etc are further warning signs of the impending doom. It appears the globalists are engineering the destruction of societies and cultures that pose most risk to their schemes for total dominance. I wonder when they will pass the global hegemon baton to the BRICS alliance, and also if they would prefer to have a WW3 first.
It does seem to me that we're witnessing a back-room skirmish as the competing factions of the predator class duke it out to see who gets to rule the world. I'm worried that the zionist entity is determined to kick off WWIII in the Middle East. As with WWI and WWII, they intend to draw the US in, and at that point, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
It's horrible, isn't it? We're watching this unfold, and pointing and shouting at it to try to get the 'normies' to wake up, but they just can't see or hear it.
We can shout as much as we like, but few seem to have ears. A few days ago a woman on the Woolworths checkout was quite excited to tell me she has decided to join the army reserves to assist with the scary Russian problem. She is anti-vax and seemed quite perplexed when I asked if vaccination is mandatory in the reserves.
Accurate and enjoyable to read as well. Before the grand scale hoax of COVID-19, I used to trust GPs' advice. Not anymore. My health was ruined by unnecessary use of antidepressants, statins, and proton pump inhibitors. [https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/heresy]
Your story is absolutely jaw-dropping! Before the scamdemic, I was on the verge of enrolling into a PhD program. The response of the academy to convid turned me off that idea completely. I doubt I could ever find a supervisor who would support me to pursue my interests.
Sadly, I think you are right (re not being able to find a supervisor to support you to pursue your interests). But woah, would I ever love to read your thesis!
Thank you for sharing your story. I think using Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism to examine COVID policies is hugely relevant and important. I'm sorry (though not surprised) to hear your work wasn't supported. Where I live some housing commission apartment blocks (government supported housing) were locked down during COVID with no notice to the residents! It was announced via a press conference by the Premier starting immediately! Police turned up and kept everyone in. Never would have happened to a high socio-economic group apartment block.
Ooooh!, so much good stuff here Robyn as always!
The following totally blew my mind, I had no idea! "To put it bluntly, the "mental health movement" was, from its inception, a tool of globalists... which explicitly aimed to transform the way that ordinary people viewed themselves and their world, was a key plank of the globalist project". Wow!
And this was brilliant: "What is the chief project of the 21st century mental health movement? Judging by its preoccupations, it is to infantilise, to atomise, to pathologise the normal and normalise the pathological, and to feminise."
Once again, it all comes back to disempowerment and trust the experts. People rush to mental health professionals with problems and friends and families are too scared to say anything or offer counsel because it might be the wrong thing and "I'm no expert". Witness how after every disaster of some sort, there's an outcry of "I don't know how to talk to my kids about this!" and we need to rush experts in from everywhere to help. (Most recently the Bondi junction stabbings).
It reminds me of The Quarterly Essay "Lifeboat - Disability, Humanity and the NDIS" by Micheline. She relates anecdotes of people with disabilities seeking assistance in public being met with "Where's your carer?", rather than immediately receiving help. One perverse outcome of the NDIS.
The other issue is the resultant trivialising and marginalising of people with severe mental conditions. Eleanor de Jong makes this point in "Nobody I’ve been locked up with in a psychiatric hospital felt ‘proud’ of their illness" Eleanor de Jong" (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/19/nobody-ive-ever-been-locked-up-with-in-a-psychiatric-hospital-felt-proud-of-their-illnesses) For example "We certainly never called our illnesses or symptoms “superpowers”. If we had, no doubt our anti-psychotics would have been increased or our courtyard privileges quashed" and "The pointy end of mental illness is not photogenic or particularly quotable. It’s desperate and it’s sad, and all people want is to get off the ward and live a normal life". (Many parallels with the "neurodivergent movement" here too).
Not to mention that despite all this "awareness raising" , "studies from around the globe have found plateaux or increases in stigma against those with severe mental illnesses, especially illnesses with psychotic features" (de Jong).
I really detest "awareness raising" of physical and mental health conditions. I mean, it makes no sense for everyone to develop awareness of every health and medical condition under the sun ... for some time I've thought focusing on compassion would be much better. Meet anyone suffering and struggling with compassion. You don't need to have detailed awareness of whatever their condition or challenge is, you just need compassion and to genuinely listen.
I've been bitching about the 'expertification of everything' for years. When personal trainers first became a 'thing', I was flummoxed. Why do people need someone to tell them how many push-ups to do? Then life coaches became a 'thing', then parenting coaches, relationship and dating coaches, pet parenting coaches.... I guess it's symptomatic of the atomisation of society. People used to ask their parents for advice, or an older friend, or even the village priest. But now these mere mortals aren't seen as sufficiently expert.
Those anecdotes of people with disabilities being asked where their carer is, are deeply disturbing. Once again, we're being inculcated with the notion that we are not qualified to help a disabled person cross the street, or even worse, it's not our responsibility because they 'should' have a carer with them.
On the topic of stigma, there's a large body of evidence that when mental illness (either the 'real' ones like psychosis, or the pseudo-mental illnesses like depression) is framed as a biological condition, those suffering from it are subject to greater stigmatisation than if their condition is explained as a reaction to adverse life circumstances. Most people can comprehend that severe trauma, neglect, abuse etc can make people act crazy, and this explanation is far more likely to evoke compassion.
Totally agree with everything you wrote. Heaven forbid asking someone you've known your whole life, from your own community and is older than you for advice or to talk things over with them.... better to pay a complete stranger for that!
Though sadly, as you mention, with the atomisation of society many people don't have any community. COVID lockdowns likely destroyed more as well.
Another wonderful article! Kudos to encouraging your children during their struggles versus pandering to the challenges of maturing.
An interesting study done recently had one cohort write in a weekly gratitude journal, another cohort wrote about their weekly struggles and the third just wrote about what happened to them on a weekly basis for 12 weeks. I bet you can’t guess which group at the end of the 12 weeks was more emotionally content and happy with their lives. It makes me wonder if the constant attention on social media to the negative drama in people’s lives isn’t adding to the quest to use emotional instability as a crutch. Plus we have a pharmaceutical industry ready to prance on each and every victim with their dangerous SSRIs and other depression drugs.
Three years ago, in the height of the pandemic, I had two sisters come in as patients. They were 6 and 10 at the time and they were both out on Zoloft. I don’t have kind words to write about the MD who wrote the script or the parents that would allow this weapon to be used on children.
"It makes me wonder if the constant attention on social media to the negative drama in people’s lives isn’t adding to the quest to use emotional instability as a crutch." Yes, 100%!!! My daughter has actually told me that she notices how much worse she feels, the more time she spends on social media. She's far from being alone in this.
I wonder how that doctor who prescribed an SSRI to CHILDREN justified this action? Do they actually believe that they're helping, are they utterly brainwashed, or are they psychopaths?
I had a friend who, decades ago when facebook first came out, went on. But then realised she just felt worse when using it so got off and never looked back! Kudos to her!
I remember when her daughter finished primary school and was entering high school, they (the parents) had no intention of getting her a mobile phone. But the school counseled the parents against this - saying she would be socially isolated if she didn't have one because EVERYONE else would have one. Oh, why don't we just hand out cigarettes at the school gate??!
(Jonathan Haidt has done heaps of work on social media and adolescence https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/ https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/)
I would argue "emotional instability" is conceptualised as identity in itself by many these days... just like all the other "identities"...
Re the doctor who prescribed SSRIs to children... it's also possible the parents demanded them.... sigh.
I remember when a friend first told me that I needed to get on Facebook so she could refer her Facebook friends to my business page. She explained that Facebook was just like looking over the fence to see what your neighbours were up to. I didn't want to be rude so I didn't say what I was thinking: "Why in the bloody hell would I want to do that????"
Totally agree with your argument that "emotional instability" is an identity unto itself. It's all part of the general inversion; the least noble shall be the most valorised.
I truly cannot comprehend what is happening in healthcare in the United States. It is a painful experience to see the litany of drugs my patients are on and feel helpless to discuss an alternative to the Pharma narrative they receive from their doctors. I am grateful for the educational content you share to give fundamentals that can help me counter some of the lies my patients have been spoon fed.
The normalisation of the expression of all and every emotion in any context as per the video above no doubt has many contributing causes... but I suspect one of them is the idea that suppressing your emotions is bad for you... (in many ways including will lead to autoimmune diseases, can give you cancer etc etc) .... it seems like such a common thread in Western pop psychology. Gabor Mate is big on this idea. I'm interested in where this idea originated...(Freud springs to mind but I'm aware that "big ideas" are seldom the result of one individual...)
In practical terms, how to self-regulate without suppressing emotions?
[ Speculation on other contributing factors... the excessive valorisation of the individual, dissolving of the distinction between public and private realms... ]
Re the normalisation of the expression of emotions, I blame the Baby Boomers for this!!!! (Or, to be more fair to them, the master manipulators at Tavistock and the CIA who cooked up the whole 60s revolution - the drugs, loosened sexual mores, the music, the infusion of eastern mysticism...)
If anything, I would guess that Gabor Mate's ideas have done more harm than good. Most of my clients who have cancer, are convinced that they developed it because they have 'toxic' thinking or dysfunctional emotional expression, or 'stress'. There is bugger all evidence for any of this; a couple of studies have even found that women subjected to chronic stress were LESS likely to develop breast cancer.
The question of regulating one's own emotions is a tricky one. Ideally, children have an attuned parent who can co-regulate i.e. respond calmly to their emotional outbursts and model the process of working through one's emotions by finding a healthy outlet for them (e.g. vigorous exercise, artwork, or listening to music) and then helping them understand why they had those emotions in the first place, and how to solve the problem that the emotion pointed to. But of course, many children don't have an emotionally attuned parent or any other kind of care-giver! I have found EFT to be the most powerful tool for helping people work through their emotions, starting with the raw physicality of them, and then digging into the cognitive layer.
Wonderfully succinct , sounds and full of your usual COMMONSENSE!
Thank you for one of your best articles.
Christine Landale
Thanks Christine, that's really made my day! I must say, I'm relieved to have found a readership who still hang on to THEIR commonsense.
So is public health all bad? Has it done anything good? Smoking initiatives are often held up as one of their greatest successes. Clean water and proper sewerage systems - these are good initiatives of public health?
'Public health' has gone through multiple iterations, as I discussed in https://empowertotalhealth.com.au/covid-19-and-philanthrocapitalisms-war-on-public-health-part-1/. Although there was always an element of paternalism to it, I would say the 19th century public health movement was the high tide mark. Social reformers who pushed for improvements to housing standards, provision of clean water and sewage, food hygiene etc, were genuinely distressed by the conditions endured by the urban poor (graphically detailed in 'Dissolving Illusions'). I'm sure there were selfish motives as well; even if you lived in the up-market part of town, when the wind was blowing the wrong way, the slum stench would still reach your nostrils!
I don't think it's any coincidence that the high tide mark of public health coincided with the peak of the British Empire. A rich, powerful, confident nation invests heavily in grand public works, and is embarrassed by poverty and squalor on its own shores. The leadership of a nation in decline is afraid of its own people, seeing them as threats to its tenuous rule rather than assets to be invested in (and exploited for nation-building projects, including war).
Thanks for all that. Makes a lot of sense. Look forward to reading your article that you linked to.
Thanks Robyn for taking us down the rabbit hole of ‘mental health/illness.’ I don’t recall who it was, but he was a psychiatrist who refuted the whole concept of mental illness. The DSM(now version 5) is the bible of mental illness and lists all the many ways you can be f’d up in the head. He said all that stuff was made up as there are no tests to diagnose any mental disorder, just opinions.
Speaking of tests, I always scored high on the tests used to determine psychopathy. Sure, you can look at personality traits and put them on a spectrum and see where a person lands, but that is just a part of who the person is. I have low empathy. Sorry, but that’s just the way I am, maybe due to early life trauma, but it doesn’t mean I’m an asshole. Well, maybe I am. You mentioned loneliness; I prefer solitude but I’m not lonely. I like being with family but don’t particularly like being around others, particularly crowds.
It seems to me that ‘mental illness’ is a construct to explain why people act differently, respond to experiences in various ways. I raised two sons a year apart in age. Their environment growing up couldn’t have been more similar, but they are totally different people. They are definitely brothers but not alike.
Bottom line, I think genetics, environment, nutrition and drugs are what makes people who they are, for good or bad.
Thomas Szasz wrote 'The Myth of Mental lllness' way back in 1961. He argued that unwanted behaviour is diagnosed as 'mental illness', and that this harms patients by absolving them of responsibility for their conduct.
More recently, James Davies' book 'Cracked' took a deep dive into the history of the DSM, exposing it as an almost entirely fraudulent undertaking.
In personality terms, you sound like you're low in agreeableness and extraversion, which basically means you have very low tolerance for small talk and bullshit! I see these are being normal variations in human personality, which are all part of the adaptativeness of our species. You might enjoy reading Robert Plomin's book 'Blueprint', which describes the role that heritability (largely, but not entirely a function of genes) plays in shaping human personality. Plomin conducted research on identical twins, separated at birth and raised in different households. His work demonstrates pretty conclusively that heritable factors outweigh environment in terms of shaping personality. I certainly see that in my two kids. Like your sons, they simply could not be more different from each other, even though they were raised in the same environment.
Great article Robyn and so relevant for the current times. It would take a long time to turn the mental health industry Titanic around, I think it will end up on a big reef at some stage.
I strongly suspect that it is being steered very intentionally toward that big reef, with a large segment of the population on board, and completely oblivious of the danger they're in.
Agreed, it certainly appears that way.
In the long term I can only see that Western countries will end up as failed states as greater and greater proportions of the population get sucked into the medical-industrial complex and subject to iatrogenic harm which then only compounds... Frankly, and unfortunately, probably not that far away. Sigh.
Actually, no doubt I got this idea from Toby Rogers who has made this point in relation to autism. (I've read some of his substack articles, but not his PhD thesis which is on the political economy of autism). That the rapidly increasing rate of autism is going to "break" Western economies and thereby societies (https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/20198).
Sad to say I share your views. We are living through the end of the West. The only question is, will it be a rapid end or a long, slow decline, with some remnants managing to hold on to Western values.
Thanks for the link to Toby's thesis. That's going to come in very handy!
Yes I agree, western societies seem to be imploding. As with the mental health disaster, increasing autism rates, iatrogenic harm, increasing infertility, etc are further warning signs of the impending doom. It appears the globalists are engineering the destruction of societies and cultures that pose most risk to their schemes for total dominance. I wonder when they will pass the global hegemon baton to the BRICS alliance, and also if they would prefer to have a WW3 first.
It does seem to me that we're witnessing a back-room skirmish as the competing factions of the predator class duke it out to see who gets to rule the world. I'm worried that the zionist entity is determined to kick off WWIII in the Middle East. As with WWI and WWII, they intend to draw the US in, and at that point, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
Yep, false flags and media-hype to get the peasants onboard for a 3rd crack at WW, it almost seems inevitable.
It's horrible, isn't it? We're watching this unfold, and pointing and shouting at it to try to get the 'normies' to wake up, but they just can't see or hear it.
We can shout as much as we like, but few seem to have ears. A few days ago a woman on the Woolworths checkout was quite excited to tell me she has decided to join the army reserves to assist with the scary Russian problem. She is anti-vax and seemed quite perplexed when I asked if vaccination is mandatory in the reserves.