Papering over the cracks

by UKR columnist Dave Randle

As soon as you see the vacuous buzzwords on the wall of the meeting room at Whorlton Hall [undercover footage of patients being abused], you know the whole set-up is a fraud.

Even supposing the place was run for any of the purposes trumpeted, none of them forms part of any of the statistics by which its torture chambers, revealed by the BBC’s Panorama, are actually judged.

The private company, which acquired it and others when previous private companies were found out, takes public money, theoretically earmarked for healthcare and the not-for-profit National Health Service, and converts it into profits for its own shareholders. That profit alone is its product and only something that endangers that product is sufficient to result in remedial action.

Its victims are muzzled and automatically denied credibility and many of its staff are, at least in that environment, sub human cretins.

But to find the real why on this kind of hellish enterprise, we need to go deeper.

Why is it that the best answer we have to people in distress or unable to conform to arbitrary norms is restraint, drugging and ridicule?

The short answer is because we and our lords and masters have bought a pig in a poke and, rather than be proved wrong, we go on supporting the pig. We believe anything wearing the poke bonnet of ‘science’ regardless of what kind of head the ornament is resting on.

So far, this has enabled much of the world to be poisoned and controlled by the very people who established and ran the concentration camps of the second world war to maintain fake and poisonous ‘healthcare’ scams on a colossal scale: scams which are so close to being found out that they are now being enforced upon well individuals by their venal profiteers.

But, if the medico-pharmaceutical monopoly is a top practical joke, it has nothing on psychiatry.

Medical goings on at least have a basis in some kind of scientific data, even if those data belong in an earlier century. The science moved on, although the practice remained largely barbaric.

Psychiatry never had any science. None whatsoever, unless you count classifying, generalising about and labelling certain behaviours to no good purpose.

Its history goes back to exorcising demons and locking people who were distressed and or a nuisance up somewhere where they could be observed and ridiculed for money. For Bedlam read Whorlton Hall. Their only technology was restraint and torture. See a pattern emerging?

They soon became popular with relatives of the well-off, for whom their meaningless drivel and labels could do the service of neutering the well-off and transferring their dosh to the happy customers for a small contribution to the foundation.

Then the medical fraternity realised it had no knowledge, no speciality in mental (mind-related) matters. Psychiatry claimed some kind of knowledge about the brain – a bit like knowing how to drive a car by tripping over an exhaust manifold – and that was good enough for the pharmaceutical industry.

With a little massaging from the drug pushers a cottage industry could be turned into a mammoth combine with spurious credibility and the potential for unlimited profits. Forget dementia praecox and arachnophobia, let’s make everything a disorder! Then we can claim the same few drugs or the same many volts – modified violence and ridicule for the new technological age – are good for them.

The sickest suckers are, of course, the ones who believe any of this shit. But then, if it’s dressed up by the media and made to look real in soap operas and ‘medical dramas’ (the clue is in the classification), there is no shortage of suckers out there.

And no shortage of people and organisations ready to ride the gravy train. ‘Mental health’ is one of the biggest current buzz terms, especially among charity fund managers. Think about it. The ‘conditions’ can be made up, or selected from the ever-expanding ‘Diagnostic’ manual and some of the leavings from the monstrous profits from unscientific and often ‘off-label’ drugs will come their way.

So, if we go back to Whorlton Hall, the commercial management and the moronic staff are two sides of an empty enterprise. No wonder the staff go off their heads working in an unethical and unfocussed environment with no known purpose and no possible job satisfaction.

Like the industry they are part of, they take out their inability to help on the people they are covertly pretending to help. They can’t live with the institutional fraud. They can’t share the reality of the inmates or empathise with them, because they think they don’t know the esoteric science of ‘mental health’.

Unable to do anything about the ‘madness’ of their charges, they go mad themselves.

If we had a government in anything but name, money intended to protect and help our citizens would not be given to a private concern to make the problem go away. If it has to be run privately or otherwise the process must be rewarded for positive outcomes only. It and its staff need clearly defined statistics regularly reported and reviewed, and those statistics would be based on the person getting well, or able to live more successfully, as well as pointing up any use of restraint, physically or chemically, or any signs of deterioration or distress. Both the company and its employees should be paid on the basis of positive results over and above a basic payment for turning up.

Like the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ or wallpapering a cracked wall, psychiatry’s ‘science’ is the genius of hiding nothing. It has no technology, no understanding and no science, but it’s done very nicely out of hiding the fact.