Bradley Manning under psychiatric treatment
Various news reports have been discussing 25-year-old former intelligence analyst Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was convicted of disclosing reams of classified information through WikiLeaks.
Apparently Manning was receiving psychiatric treatment while he was deployed in Iraq during 2009-2010.
Then when Manning was detained for nine months in the Quantico, Virginia maximum security brig he continued to receive psychiatric treatment. Reports say that Manning licked his cell bars while sleepwalking as a side effect of the drugs he was being given. A few months before Manning arrived at Quantico, another inmate of the brig had killed himself while under the same psychiatrist’s care.
After being sentenced to 35 years in prison, Manning was transferred to the prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. One expects that psychiatric treatment for Manning will be continued there. One news report we saw said that Manning had received both anti-depression and anti-anxiety drugs.
While we express no official position regarding his actions, we certainly have an official position on his psychiatric “treatment.”
According to psychiatric thinking, the “solution” for everything from the most minor to most severe personal problem is strictly limited to: 1) Diagnosing symptoms using the scientifically discredited Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; 2) Assigning a mental illness label; 3) Designating a restrictive, generally coercive and costly range of harmful treatments.
As decades of psychiatric monopoly over the world’s mental health reflects, this unilateral approach leads only to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics, continuously escalating funding demands — and away from any cures.
What do we mean by “cure?” For the individual a cure means nothing less than complete and permanent absence of any overwhelming physical or mental trauma. For the society it means the rehabilitation of the individual as a consistently honest, ethical, productive and successful member.
Psychiatry cannot and never has produced a cure. Trusted with the care for our mentally disturbed, psychiatry has failed utterly to provide any humane solutions to their plight. Psychiatrists are failed medical practitioners who have betrayed their pledge to help patients in order to legally push their own dangerous psychotropic drugs.
In a significant departure from medical diagnosis, psychiatric diagnoses are devoted to categorization of symptoms only, not the observation of actual physical disease. None of the diagnoses are supported by scientific evidence of biological disease or a mental illness of any kind.
Psychiatry would prefer to say or imply that only brain-based, mental “illnesses” can affect irrational behavior or thinking, that they need long-term, if not life-long care, and that they are incurable. These falsehoods have been so successfully disseminated throughout the mental health system and amongst the public, that countless numbers have become trapped as lifelong patients of psychiatric and psychological services. These falsehoods must be exposed.
The psychiatric profession has been gradually but steadily undermining the foundations of our culture — individual responsibility, standards of achievement, education and justice. The bottom line, stated by Dr. Thomas Szasz, is that “psychiatrists have been largely responsible for creating the problems they have ostensibly tried to solve.”
The rehabilitation of criminals is a long-forgotten dream. We build more prisons and pass even tougher laws in the belief that these will act as a deterrent. In the 1940’s, psychiatry’s leaders proclaimed their intention to infiltrate the field of the law and bring about the “re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong;” with the consequence that today, because of psychiatric influence, the justice system is failing.
For more information about how this occurred, and how psychiatry’s ideologies and actions have contributed to today’s failing criminal rehabilitation and increasing crime rate, download and read the CCHR booklet “Eroding Justice — Psychiatry’s Corruption of Law — Report and recommendations on psychiatry subverting the courts and corrective services.”