Cogitations on BRAIN
The BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative, a project President Obama discussed in his most recent State of the Union address, was formally announced April 2 at the White House.
The White House would like to spend $100 million taxpayer dollars in 2014 to find new ways to treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
They’re talking about things such as molecular-scale probes that can sense and record the activity of neural networks; examining how thoughts, emotions, actions, and memories are represented in the brain; and exploring how the brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves information.
Given that brain researchers to date have been unable to recognize the pivotal role of psychiatric drugs in PTSD, for example, we have little faith that another $100 million will be used for developing anything but more abusive psychiatric drugs or more torturous devices such as Vagus Nerve Stimulation or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
The cornerstone of psychiatry’s disease model today is the theory that a brain-based, chemical imbalance causes mental illness. Despite the billions of pharmaceutical company funding in support of the chemical imbalance theory, this psychiatric “disease” model is thoroughly debunked. The whole theory was invented to push drugs.
For example, the “brain scans” that have been pawned off as evidence that schizophrenia or depression are brain diseases, have been disproven as valid research. Most have not been done on drug naive patients, meaning someone who has not been on psychiatric drugs such as antipsychotic drugs, documented to cause brain atrophy (shrinkage). Other brain scans have shown the brains of smaller children to show smaller brains in comparison to larger/older children and then claimed children with ADHD have smaller brains. None have been conclusively proven to verify mental disorders as abnormalities of the brain. If there were such verifiable brain scans, or in fact any medical/scientific test that could show a physical/medical abnormality for any psychiatric disorder, the public would be getting such tests prior to being administered psychiatric drugs.
The larger problem is that the biological drug model based on bogus mental disorders prevents governments from funding real medical solutions for people experiencing difficulty. There is a great deal of evidence that medical conditions can manifest as psychiatric symptoms, and that there are non-harmful medical treatments that do not receive government funding because the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars on advertising and lobbying efforts, and on wasteful things like this BRAIN initiative.
A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2010 claimed to be able to detect “brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk” in infants just a few weeks old. We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study: there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or brain abnormality to start with. There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one. So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the “associated with schizophrenia risk” amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads) — it means nothing.
There is a concerted push in the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries for the global implementation of a new mental health paradigm called “preventative mental health” — pre-diagnosing and pre-drugging children before they show any “signs” of a mental disorder. In other words, if we wait to administer drugs to them it may be too late.
This is the BRAIN initiative in action. Desperately seeking justifications for more drugs earlier in life.
This is your
BRAIN on psychiatric drugs.
Please express your outrage to your government representatives.