The debate continues to rage about whether smartphones and their attendant social media are addictive, or even whether they are good or bad for you and your children.
This quote from the November 2021 edition of Reason magazine puts the debate more into perspective:
“In 1936, the government of St. Louis, Missouri, tried to ban car radios because a ‘determined movement’ had become convinced that the radio distracted drivers and caused car accidents. The car radio was widely feared by newspapers, which were competitors and had every incentive to sensationalize the product’s dangers.”
We’re not going to come down on one side or the other, it isn’t our fight; but we can certainly remark on the psychiatric connection.
The psychiatric Connection
Psychiatry assumes any so-called addiction is a medical disease. This is patently false; any such media addiction, real or imagined, is an educational or moral failing. It cannot be usefully addressed with drugs or other harmful psychiatric treatments.
Other forms of addiction currently promoted for treatment by psychiatry and psychology are gaming, substance abuse, gambling, and other impulse control issues such as pyromania, kleptomania and promiscuity. Yes, physical addiction may occur with substance abuse; but there are valid non-psychiatric programs for that.
So what are these various behaviors if they are not mental illnesses? They’re called lapses in education, ethics and morals, and when treated as such there is hope that they can be corrected. Unfortunately, calling them “mental illness” and treating them with psychotropic drugs precludes any possibility of finding out the true root causes and effectively addressing those.
The entirety of psychological and psychiatric addiction programs are founded on the tacit assumptions that mental health “experts” know all about the mind and mental phenomena, know a better way of life, a better value system and how to improve lives beyond the understanding and capability of everyone else in society.
The reality is that these mental health programs are designed to control people towards specific ideological objectives at the expense of the person’s sanity and well-being. Do we really want to institutionalize mandatory psychiatric counseling and screening, which is where all this is heading?
We think the whole thing comes back to what the late Professor Thomas Szasz, co-founder of Citizens Commission on Human Rights, originally had to say about this:
• “The term ‘mental illness’ refers to the undesirable thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of persons. Classifying thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying the whale as a fish.”
• “If we recognize that ‘mental illness’ is a metaphor for disapproved thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we are compelled to recognize as well that the primary function of Psychiatry is to control thought, mood, and behavior.”
These so-called mental disorders are just what psychiatry and psychology have inappropriately labeled as “undesirable behavior.”
The Reason article proposes a reasonable solution: “…can anything be done to combat some of the actual problems with tech addiction? Yes, but the answer isn’t easy or flashy: It’s for parents to exercise greater responsibility, talk to their kids about how much they rely on their phones, and set reasonable limits on screen time.”
What You Can Do
We’d like to encourage our readers to help us fund our efforts to bring sanity to the world of mental health care. The psychs haven’t backed off; they are busy exaggerating any mental health concerns raised by the Covid outbreak, and of course why you should see a psychiatrist and take some harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs.
Click here to send us some love.
“‘Insanity’ isn’t an illness. It’s an injury. When more injuries called ‘treatments’ are piled on top of it, it becomes very hard to treat just because the person is now desperately injured. He hurts.“
— L. Ron Hubbard, 12/15/1968
