In Los Angeles, a Walmart building permit is getting a once-over. In New York, the City Council is investigating a possible land deal with the retailer’s developer in Brooklyn. A state senator in California is pushing for a formal audit of a proposed Walmart in San Diego. And in Boston and its suburbs, residents are pressuring politicians to disclose whether they took contributions from the company.

All of it in the past week.Walmart has worked hard to polish its reputation and give elected officials, community groups, and shoppers a reason to say yes to their stores. Now, the revelation of a bribery scandal involving the retailer’s Mexican subsidiary is giving critics a new reason to say no.

“Overnight, the environment has shifted in terms of Walmart’s strategy in big cities, in winning over local politicians,’’ said Dorian T. Warren, a political science professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about Walmart’s efforts to expand into Chicago and Los Angeles.

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Texas and U.S. authorities are trying to seize $20 million in properties — including a San Antonio strip mall and South Padre Island condo unit — from a former Mexican government official who is accused of buying them with embezzled money.

Hector Javier Villarreal, 41, the former treasurer of the border state of Coahuila, Mexico, is wanted on charges of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity in Bexar County, said Tom Kelley, a spokesman for the Texas Attorney General’s Office. Villarreal is also wanted in Mexico, where authorities say he falsified documents to borrow $222 million on the state’s credit, then shuffled the money to relatives in the United States.

Federal prosecutors filed lawsuits last week in San Antonio seeking forfeiture of a dozen properties — including a pharmacy, a $1.2 million home and a storage center, the San Antonio Express. Court documents say all were purchased with money embezzled from the government of Coahuila, and are owned by companies created by Lorenzo Schuessler Jr., Villarreal’s brother-in-law and a San Antonio businessman and former real estate agent.

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Tyson Foods Inc. (TSN) (TSN) was searching for a way to speed up Mexican approval to export chickens raised in that country in the mid-2000s. Company employees, Tyson later acknowledged to U.S. authorities, achieved this by paying off local officials.

The decision ended in Tyson, the largest U.S. meat processor, paying regulators $5.2 million last year. Siemens AG (SIE), Europe’s largest engineering company, made a more expensive mistake, paying $1.6 billion in fines and criminal and civil penalties in 2008 for violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in markets including Mexico.

Corruption is one of the biggest obstacles to foreign investment in Mexico, watchdogs and local attorneys say, and it has now ensnared Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) (WMT), the world’s largest retailer. The New York Times reported April 21 the company’s Mexican unit paid more than $24 million in bribes to open stores more quickly. The company says it’s aiding U.S. probes into the matter.

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The Mexican government said late Monday it sees no need to itself investigate retailer Wal-Mart de Mexico SAB amid allegations that the company paid bribes in Mexico to speed permits for new store openings.

The office of President Felipe Calderon said in a statement that, if the accusations are true, then the issue is a local matter as bribes for construction and other permits would have been paid to municipal or state officials. Nonetheless, the federal government said that it will follow the case closely and assist U.S. authorities as they look into the allegations. The president’s office also said it’s committed to promoting fair competition among businesses operating in Mexico and that it rejects all forms of corruption.

Wal-Mart de Mexico, also known as Walmex, said Saturday that it’s cooperating with an investigation by its parent company, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT -1.27% , into allegations that Walmex employees made a series of illicit payments to local government officials in Mexico prior to 2006. Executives at both the parent company and its Mexican subsidiary were informed of the allegations in 2005, according to an article published in the New York Times.

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Every now and then, the health department shows up at José Luis García’s food store in an affluent neighborhood here. Mr. García immediately reaches for his wallet.

“They first say there is some fine and then they say, ‘We can fix this another way,’ ” said Mr. García, who typically pays $50 to $100 to make the inspectors go away. It is an article of faith here that the fastest way to resolve difficulties with a health inspector, traffic police officer or nettlesome ministry functionary is to pay a sum under the table.

A baroque bureaucracy, something economists have long warned slows the potential for growth here, and low pay for public servants leads to peso-greased shortcuts for the simplest transactions. The bigger the project, experts say, the more palms that are likely to spread open.

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Allegations that U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart used bribes to speed its break-neck Mexican expansion are sparking some soul-searching in Mexico, but not the outrage that the scandal has provoked in the United States.

While Wal-Mart says it is probing the allegations and U.S. Congress members are demanding answers, Mexican authorities say they have nothing to investigate. The charges have, however, focused fresh attention on Mexico’s long-entrenched culture of bribery, a place where crowded government offices remain the working grounds of shadowy facilitators known as “gestores.” Although Mexicans are aware such payoffs occur, most would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Wal-Mart’s bribes in Mexico “are a scandal in the United States,” Luis Miguel Gonzalez, editorial director of El Economista newspaper noted in a Monday column. “Here we live in a different way. Over there, there are expressions of indignation … In Mexico authorities take more than 50 hours to react” to the first news reports that made the charges.

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The front-runner for Mexico’s presidency and lawmakers on Monday called on authorities to investigate allegations of bribery at the Mexican unit of Wal-Mart Stores Inc, though prosecutors said it may not be a federal matter.

Opposition politicians urged Mexico to launch a probe into the accusations, and Enrique Pena Nieto, the favorite to succeed conservative President Felipe Calderon, supported them. However, Mexico’s attorney general would only look into the claims against Wal-Mart de Mexico (Walmex) if asked to do so by the Ministry of Finance or Ministry of the Economy, a government official said on condition of anonymity.

Officials at the finance and economy ministries could not be reached for comment. Attorney General Marisela Morales assured Mexicans that her office would act promptly if given the case. “If it becomes a matter for us, of course we will act, and we will request whatever necessary,” Morales was quoted as saying in a report by newspaper El Universal.

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Mexico’s federal government should investigate allegations of a vast bribery campaign by top executives of Wal-Mart’s Mexican subsidiary to build stores across the country, the head of a watchdog group said Sunday.

Eduardo Bohorquez, director of Transparencia Mexicana, said international conventions obligate Mexico’s government to get involved even though only local officials have been linked to the scandal. “The laws in Mexico and the United States relating to bribery are in effect, so the practices (of legal business) should be the same in both countries,” he said.

Government officials declined on Sunday to comment on the allegations contained in a New York Times report that said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. failed to notify law enforcement after its own investigators found evidence that millions of dollars in bribes had been paid in Mexico to spur the company’s rapid expansion there.

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In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

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The Mental Health Industry and Involuntary Commitment

About 16% of the prison population is made up of people with serious mental disorders like shizophrenia and bipolar disorder who are not getting the treatment and medication they need. But even when people with severe mental disorders are diverted to a mental institutions, they often end up in an even worse state than if they been sent in prison. The state of the mental health industry globally is revolting. There is widespread corruption in mental institutions that exists mainly due to the monetary incentive created by pharmaceutical companies and for profit mental health facilities to keep patients committed (in institutions where they literally pay to be forced to stay) and addicted to Big Pharma’s current “cure-all” for as long as possible.

Any person committed of a crime or detained by police person can be diverted to a mental health facility. You don’t have to commit a crime in order to be committed in most countries. You just have to be considered a threat to yourself or others. Police can detain a person for a number of reasons. Suspicious individuals or people accused of being threats or terrorists can be arrested and detained without rights, especially in very populated places, like trains stations, stadiums and airports. In some states in the US, anyone can accuse you of being psychotic and the police can act on it by bringing you to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation on an emergency application or “section 8″ where they have the legal right to hold you for 72 hours. (In some states it’s 48 hours.) If this happens you have fewer rights than someone who is arrested.

People who are formally arrested have Miranda rights, which give them the right to remain silent and not answer questions during a police interrogation and the right to counsel, even if the person in custody doesn’t have the money for a lawyer. These rights are guaranteed by 5th and 6th amendment, which protect people from self-incrimination and give everyone the right to counsel. Ignoring the Miranda rights as an officer is unconstitutional. A person taken in for psychiatric evaluation does not have these rights, even though they are being stripped of their freedom just as those held in police custody for crimes before trial. They don’t have the right to remain silent or free counsel and if they do remain silent, doctors could use this against them by claiming that this is symptomatic of a supposed mental illness.

If a doctor makes a determination that someone admitted is psychotic, they could hold that person for up to 10 days (in most states in the US – global law on involuntary commitment varies widely) until he or she finally she has some legal rights in a court. Being ‘psychotic’ does not mean violent, even though colloquially the word is used that way. Psychosis is merely an inability to distinguish internal or external stimuli. In other words, it is a state in which someone is unaware of what is real and what is a creation of their minds. It can result in vivid hallucinations and a sense of detachment from reality, but it’s far from a crime, even though it is treated as thought it were. The intention to harm needs to be proven. If a crime hasn’t been committed by someone committed involuntarily there’s need to be substantial evidence the person will hurt himself or others. But anyone can be said to be a threat. When you finally get to court, if a judge agrees with the doctors (and they usually do) they can hold you indefinitely. Nothing could be more Orwellian, and most people aren’t even aware of this or if they are, they just foolishly think it could never happen to them.

If the court believes the doctor made a mistake you are free to go. But even in this case, you will have lost at least a month of your life or more at that point, and such an experience can be traumatic as well as finically costly. A one month stay in a psychiatric ward can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

When a person is involuntarily committed solely because of what he or she said or wrote, this is a violation of the first amendment as well, which gives people the right to free speech. What is next? Thought crimes? The “mental health” industry is a systematic way of creating uniformity in personality, obedience and perpetuating mainstream ideologies. It is a mechanism of control and it maintains the status quo.

The Rosenhan Experiment

The Rosenhan Experiment conducted in 1973 demonstrated just how easy it is to be locked away in a mental hospital without a legitimate reason. In this experiment psychologist, Dr. David Rosenhan and eight mentally healthy associates attempted to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals by arranging appointments and feigning auditory hallucinations. Six of Rosenhan’s eight associates were also medical professionals. Three were psychologists, one was a psychology graduate, one a pediatrician and another a psychiatrist.  They had no history of mental health problems.

During their initial evaluation, they pretended to hear voices saying things like “empty” and “hollow,” and they were all admitted despite faking symptoms to 12 different hospitals (at different times). After being admitted they acted normally and didn’t claim to have any more hallucinations as they planned to do, but in spite of this 7 were diagnosed with schizophrenia and one with manic depressive psychosis. They were forced to take anti-psychotics and held there against their will for weeks, some for as long as 52 days. They were only released after doctors at the hospitals believed their schizophrenia was “in remission.”

Rosenhan himself was forced to stay for two months; he later published the experiment titled “Being Sane in Insane Places” in Science magazine. In an interview with the BBC after the experiment, he explained that only way he could get out was to agree with the psychiatrists and “admit” he was insane and willing to change.

“I told friends, I told my family, ‘I can get out when I can get out. That’s all. I’ll be there for a couple of days and I’ll get out.’ Nobody knew I’d be there for two months … The only way out was to point out that they’re [the psychiatrists] correct. They had said I was insane, ‘I am insane; but I am getting better.’ That was an affirmation of their view of me.” 

If a patient in a mental hospital wants out because they feel they don’t belong there, doctors can say this is symptomatic of their “illness” and that they simply have not “accepted” their problem. The only way to show “improvement” is to agree with doctors on every issue and placate them like children, because they often view patients as children or worse –  like some subhuman mistake of nature. While the hospitals couldn’t identify Rosenhan and his colleagues as impostors conducting an experiment, many of the patients could. 35 patients out of 118 in the first three hospitals believed they were faking symptoms, and some of them realized they were conducting an experiment. This shows the mental patients may have had a better conception of mental disorders than the doctors did.

Rosenhan determined that the psychiatric diagnosis is subjective and that mental patients are often dehumanized due to the stigma surrounding mental disorders. He could also see the clear monetary incentive that exists for keeping sane people institutionalized. Many experiments have since been conducted with similar results, yet there has been very little reformation of mental hospitals in recent history.

People seem to forget mental institutions are still big businesses. Private psychiatric hospitals make more money the longer you stay and they decide when you leave. No other business has the ability to hold people against their will, except for private prisons, which are also widely corrupt and exploitative. People in restaurants can’t be legally chained to the floor. Yet somehow since this only affects a minority of the population behind closed doors, no one seems to notice or see the difference.

There can’t be such a thing as an involuntary hospital. It just doesn’t make sense. Hospitals are supposed to help people, so if someone is being dragged in kicking and screaming, this can’t be seen as helping. But when people who are technically psychotic commit a crime and have criminal intent, they can’t just be sent to a prison because their needs won’t be met there. If the person had no criminal intent, it would also be extremely amoral to send him or her to a prison. People with mental disorders who commit serious crimes need to be held for a certain minimum amount of time in a setting with doctors and other healthcare professionals until they see improvements, but just not in a hospital setting because the idea of an involuntary hospital doesn’t make sense as I have said. (House arrest or a community setting with doctors might make sense.) Some patients that are extremely dangerous may have to be separated from society for a period, but this could be the only punishing aspect. Forced therapy may have to be applied in cases where criminal patients don’t want to change, but this cannot be used, treated or perceived as punishment. Forced medication should also never be applied, and no one with a mental disorder should be held against their will in a “hospital,” especially if they haven’t committed a crime or if their disorder was to blame for the crime.

If a person has a psychotic episode and their mental disorder is completely to blame for the act, they should be sent elsewhere and not grouped with people with mental disorders who had criminal intent.  This distinction is not often made. Regardless of the presence or absence of criminal intent, people with mental disorders need to get help wherever they are, which is not happening right now in most cases.

What “necessitates” a psychiatric evaluation is being human. Everyone is capable of doing themselves or other harm. We’re all “potential threats.” Anyone who can pick up a knife or gun is a potential threat to others and themselves. It’s impossible to predict with 100% accuracy what a person might do to his/herself or others. There are also soldiers, police, covert officials, professional fighters and military contractors and many others who are trained to be a threat to others, as I have said, and they certainly aren’t considered crazy by the majority.

We put all of our trust in doctors, police and judges without realizing how easily they can take away our freedom just because they want to. There is no unbiased, independent agency that oversees doctors’ decisions to avoid fraud. People don’t consider the massive financial incentive that exists to keep people in prisons and mental hospitals that don’t belong there. We don’t believe they would ever abuse their power for financial gain or ideological reasons because we trust them and most people don’t end up in prison or a mental hospital, so the knowledge of the corruption and abuse of power isn’t widespread.

Psychology is such a young and changing field of research and so little is understood about mental health, mental disorders and “normality.”  Psychoanalysis was only founded about 100 years ago by Sigmund Freud and his ideas weren’t rooted in science at all. He developed many wild theories about human behavior that were based purely on his own observations and beliefs like his “Oedipus Complex” theory, which asserted that during the “phallic stage” of development that children want to kill their fathers and are attracted to their mothers (largely because he interpreted breast feeding as a sexual act.)

There have also been so many psychiatric medications that were made just years ago, which have not been thoroughly tested and that millions of people take and rely on every day. (Citalopram, the most commonly used anti-depressant was made is 1989. 24.1 million people use it in America alone. Prozac was made in 1977 and when it is taken during pregnancy it can cause major birth defects. Various lawsuits have been filed by who were not told this and who had children with birth defects as a result.) Many of these medications aren’t prescribed to improve mental health, but are rather taken to make people act “normally” and help them adhere to societal norms, which pharmaceutical companies, doctors, governments, corporate leaders and other authority figures help define to achieve their own agenda. Normality  is very subjective. What many strive to do is essentially remove strong emotion from people because they are considered abnormal by many psychiatrists. Being sad is abnormal, being mad is abnormal, even being happy is considered abnormal or interpreted as mania or some other ridiculous condition. Doctors working in mental institutions (as well as many others in positions in power) want mental patients to be emotionless drones because they are most easily controlled this way. Actors in government want the people to be complacent, mindless consumer drones that listen to what they told to do and believe what they are told to believe. Instead of addressing the root cause of their depression people are often just told to take a pill to make them feel better. This way their lives will never actually improve, but they will stay complacent in their menial lives and their menial jobs, which they shouldn’t enjoy because they simply aren’t meant to be enjoyable.

Over-medication is prevalent in mental hospitals throughout the United States. Doctors do this to keep all of their nuero-transmitters on a consistent, unchanging level to avoid erratic behavior, but they create emotionless zombies in the process, and such negligent overmedication can also lead to the development of legitimate mental disorders. A perfectly healthy, innocent person can be locked in a mental hospital and develop an actual mental disorder due to the way they are treated in the hospital.

What is considered normal and sane is just whatever is popular, and what is popular is defined by the forces that control us. Normal people support their government. They don’t question authority; they pursue mindless jobs in order to buy bigger houses, better cars and everything else corporations tell us we need. Normal people are religious and they pray to their God every night. And normal people act like the people they see in the media and in television and aspire to be them. This conception of normality encourages sameness for the benefit of the few forces that control us. But what is almost never considered is that the most common and popular beliefs are irrational and insane, and this is why the radicals who go against the majority are always marginalized and considered insane or abnormal. But these people are often the most important. And the radicals who go against the majority can be imprisoned by these doctors just for being different.

Punitive psychiatry has been countless times by dictatorships and “democracies” alike to punish and silence political dissidents and it still is to this day. Many therapists who work in psychiatric wards and state mental hospitals, as well as most political and corporate powers see selflessness as a mental disorder. If you put the interests of strangers before over your own then you must be insane. This is why self-less political dissidents were put in labor camps and mental institutions in the Soviet Union era and during many other dictatorships. It is a tool of political control but also exemplary of the collective idea that we should put ourselves first and ignore the needs of the rest of the world.

It’s impossible to know what it is like be someone who is deemed insane or what resulted in their current mental condition if you don’t ask them. We should be learning from mental patients and not the other way around. Many psychiatric doctors treat them like animals. They try to analyze humanity and feel they are above most humans without realizing they are a part of humanity. In order to analyze humanity, identity, insanity and any other human extreme you need to include yourself in your theory. You need to realize that you are a product of the very same things as anyone else. Mental patients dare question the practices and knowledge of the self-proclaimed all-knowing elites, and act in a way that is not in accordance with social expectations. This is what psychiatric doctors know about mental patients and little else. They often know nothing about what led their mental condition and they don’t try to understand. They just fill them with drugs until they start to live up to social expectations, which are to be a zombie: wake up, go to work, slave away, go back to your small apartment, go to sleep, repeat.

Most mental patients do need support and guidance, but they’re not being given it. They’re being given elitist nonsense from doctors that simply want them to conform to social expectations without actually helping them. Most psychiatric doctors who work in wards or state facilities don’t pursue their line of work because they want to help people struggling with mental disorders. They just want to profit from them. Usually the nurses care more than the doctors do mainly because there’s not much pay in nursing. (And they have no financial incentive to keep anyone institutionalized who doesn’t need to be.) Doctors, however, get larger paychecks the longer someone stays and they often receive huge pay-outs from large pharmaceutical companies for endorsing as well as over-prescribing their garbage. They also lie about their effects. Big pharmaceutical reps often visit hospitals and cozy up to doctors in order to push whatever they’re selling, much like drug dealers, and many doctors buy them. These kinds of doctors are most prevalent in underfunded mental institutions. Outside of the twisted structure of these institutions, there are a number of well-intentioned, effective, compassionate therapists who don’t just work for the money, but they seem to be few and far between.

I would argue that republicanism and religiosity are greater mental disorders than the so called disorders many hospitalized for. Republicanism is a social disorder because its core ideological principles are narcissistic, selfish and bigoted. Republican ideology boils to pure self-interest. It makes life a zero-sum equation. And people who pray literally believe a being in the sky can hear their thoughts and grant them wishes. If someone were to tell you this is what they believed without explaining that they are religious you would probably believe that person is disturbed based on that description. Mental hospitals often encourage religion, which in my opinion is extremely counterproductive. What is considered socially and ideologically normal in the world should be seen as largely abnormal or illogical, but a concrete conception normality of normality is cemented into our heads from a young age by the forces that truly control us the world.

Defining Normality and Insanity 

As I have said, what is normal is whatever is popular, and insanity is just whatever isn’t popular, and certain trends aren’t always popular for good or rational reasons. Slavery was popular and therefore normal in many countries at a point in time, and questioning it was considered insane by some. For this reason and others, insanity can’t be defined objectively. Insanity could be defined as irrationality, but this is also subjective and not largely agreed upon. Most of the world is religious, even though religion is largely irrational because it’s based on myth.

Today, acting in self-destructive or destructive ways is often considered insane because it is irrational to harm other people without reason. But as I have said, there are plenty of people with their reasons and many socially acceptable and rewarded forms of violence (self-defense being the most moral one) that aren’t considered insane, and the sloppy distinction made between the two forms of violence (acceptable and unacceptable) was made by societal norms and popular beliefs, not by rational thinking or any well conceived moral principles. One could also act in ways deemed insane by society just to be perceived as insane, but have a perfectly “healthy” brain, which further confuses the definition of insanity. You feign insanity, but you can’t feign cancer, (not to a doctor anyway) which calls into question the validity of its diagnosis.

Defining normality is difficult because popular behaviors and trends are constantly changing. One might argue there is no such thing as normal or abnormal human behavior because of this. How can you sit normally, walk normally, or talk normally? Every behavior is technically natural because we are a part of nature. Neurological activity causes all actions, and given the right stimulus any behavior is possible (short of human flight). Many separate their conception of themselves from the physical processes that cause our thoughts and actions, but they shouldn’t because it alienates people with certain personalities. “Insanity” becomes some ambiguous, murky, scary thing that infects people like an illness. But any behavior deemed insane has a neurological basis; It can be understood and explained.

Surely an extremely broad range of behaviors could be considered normal by most, but anything can be perceived as an abnormal from some perspective as well. It all depends on the person interpreting the behavior. Maybe your posture is too rigid or too slouched or maybe you speak too loudly or too softly. Maybe you are too energetic or too lethargic (catatonia) or too tense or too relaxed. These contrasting behaviors can be used by psychiatrists to diagnosis patients with mental disorders and justify their institutionalization. Even social anxiety, something everyone at some point deals with, is considered a mental disorder by the current Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM-IV-TR) of mental disorders. Up until the 1970s the WHO and the APA even considered homosexuality a psychiatric disorder. The DSM and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) will define any difference as an illness.

There is an infinitely broad range of possible human behaviors. You could call “normal behavior” the average of all of human behavior or the most common behaviors. But normal behavior isn’t always beneficial to society as a whole and common behaviors aren’t always common for a good reason. As I have said slavery was a common and accepted practice, so “normality” or average human behavior shouldn’t be considered positive or negative without a good reason. Normal or common human behavior right now isn’t positive. If it was, the world we live in wouldn’t be so terrible and full of suffering. The most common behaviors are constantly changing for different reasons, good and bad. But they’re not some ideal to be copied.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is a good definition, but it is incomplete. People can do this because they are uniformed and don’t understand the physical laws that create consistency or because they have physical brain damage or because they have symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, and this doesn’t mean that they’re insane. A more complete definition might be that insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different outcome while having the information to know that the outcome will be the same. If a person becomes disconnected from the real world due to an inability to distinguish external and internal stimuli, this may occur. This is the technical definition of psychosis.

The word sane derives from the Latin word Sanus, which means “healthy.” Insanity therefore means unhealthy or, more specifically, it refers to poor health of the mind. But it can be difficult to define mental health. If a person suffers brain damage then you can make a fairly accurate, scientific assessment of the person’s mental health. But when the mental issues a person has are less tangible, it is much more difficult to make an objective assessment of their mental health. Insanity is an outdated term not largely used by doctors anymore. But when a person with a mental disorder commits a crime they are often sent to institutions  “for the criminally insane.” Insanity is still a legitimate legal term. If a person is deemed “insane” by a court it this will have an enormous impact on the person’s sentence and overall fate. (Competency to stand trial can also be affected by learning disorders and mental handicaps.) The words “psychotic” and “psychosis” have replaced insanity in most medical contexts and these words are often used synonymously with schizophrenia. But while this word has a concrete meaning (inability to distinguish external and internal stimuli), it often used by doctors to describe a wide range of behaviors that they deem unwanted, but are not technically psychotic.

Psychosis is derived from the Greek word “psyche” (ψυχή) and “osis” (-ωσις). Psyche means mind or soul and “osis” means an abnormal condition, so psychosis literally means an abnormal condition of the mind. Psychosis is often used as a negative term, but an abnormal condition of the mind can be positive or negative. Everyone has unique nuero-chemistry; what is normal for one person could be abnormal for another, and what is healthy for one could be unhealthy for another. A healthy mind could be considered a happy mind or a mind that doesn’t malfunction by correctly discerning what is real and what isn’t. But one could also be very happy and very disconnected from reality or be very sad without being at all psychotic or delusional. Extremely elated mood is sometimes considered a symptom of psychosis itself, as is the opposite. Since there is so much we have yet to learn about our world, very different interpretations of reality could also be considered equally valid in a sense, which further confuses the issue. Psychosis can also be easily feigned and if a person has real hallucinations this doesn’t mean they are incapable of acting rationally or peacefully.

Psychosis, as stated, is often used to describe behaviors that are not a result of the inability to distinguish external and internal stimuli. Psychosis is very much a subjective term used most often to describe behavior that is contrary to social constructs and expectations. If extremely nihilistic or destructive behavior was considered normal in a society then a peaceful, self-less person would be considered psychotic by that society. Doctors also claim psychosis can be induced by a wide range of unrelated maladies (and natural processes like menstruation and childbirth) but women aren’t being institutionalized for getting their periods (thankfully). Many personality disorders are said to produce psychosis, as are certain drugs. Psychosis and schizophrenia are in practice terms used to describe unusual, unexpected and unpredictable perceived behaviors that most doctors deem necessary to control with neuroleptics. But a person who experiences brain malfunctions could consider them positive changes, and mental states that are often identified as psychosis by doctors (like certain states of intoxication) are considered desirable by some, so psychosis should not have a strictly positive or negative connotation. True psychosis is usually caused by spontaneous activity in the brain, and it should only be used to describe this condition.

The purpose of the brain is to collect information from external stimuli, process it coherently and produce a meaningful response. However, sometimes spontaneous activity in the primary sensory areas of the brain that can be triggered by a host of different things, can be misinterpreted by secondary sensory areas of the brain as information from external stimuli, which means the mind will sense things that don’t physically exist. These are called hallucinations and they can affect any of the five senses. They are not caused exclusively by mental disorders or drugs. If the brain lacks provocation from external stimuli (sensory deprivation) it can lose contact with the real world as the brain is overwhelmed by spontaneous activity. Hallucinations or a loss of conception of reality can also be induced by drugs as stated, some of which increase spontaneous cortical activity to the point at which real information gathered from external stimuli in the real world is “drowned out.” But hallucinations aren’t always considered psychotic. If a person has sensory hallucinations but is able recognize that they are caused by internal stimuli and not external stimuli and thus not part of external world, the person wouldn’t be considered psychotic. Therefore, a person who hallucinates due to a psychedelic drug and is able to attribute the cause of the hallucinations to the drug would not be considered psychotic, even though many doctors claim hallucinogenic drugs always cause psychosis. Another word is needed to describe a condition in which a person is uncertain whether the stimuli sensed is internal or external. (Maybe “quasi-psychotic.”) Surely, a person could still act rationally with some uncertainty about the source of sensory activity, so again, psychosis shouldn’t be synonymous with madness or irrationality.

As stated, psychosis is largely used by doctors to brand unwelcome or unwanted behaviors, even when these behaviors are desired by the patient. The word psychosis was synonymous with madness or insanity up until the definition was divided to describe bipolar disorder and schizophrenia separately because it was realized that the word had too broad of a definition and that that patients deemed psychotic were very different. But splitting the definition of psychosis to describe two different disorders doesn’t make sense because it just creates two different labels for behavior that doctors can’t explain or distinguish. The diagnoses are often mixed up.

The Insanity Defense and the Mental Health Defense

25 states in the U.S. use the McNaughten Rule, which states that a person can use the insanity defense if “at the time of committing the act, he was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.” This isn’t the technical definition of psychosis, but psychosis can cause such a state of mind. However, anyone could argue they didn’t or don’t have the capacity to know right from wrong. And the “insanity defense” sounds primitive. It’s a legitimate legal term, but not a real medical term. Insanity is a very subjective concept and calling someone insane is demeaning to those who may be suffering from debilitating mental disorders. It would be more fitting to call it the “psychosis defense.” Incompetence to stand trail is different, but commonly mistaken with the insanity defense. If a person is an unable to understand the criminal proceedings, the role of lawyer, jury and judge and how to make a defense, they are considered incompetent to stand trial. This can due to a mental deficit like down syndrome or age and can result in the patient’s transfer to a mental institution until the person is competent to stand trial (though this is subjective) or in some cases, the person is acquitted. (Children under a certain age can’t be held criminally responsible since it is assumed they don’t know enough about what is right and wrong.)

A person can only be found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) if a jury decides that the person was severely delusional or psychotic at the time of the crime. However, it is extremely difficult to actually  determine when a person is psychotic and even more difficult to make that determination about an individual’s previous acts no one witnessed. Psychosis can occur if a person has a mental disorder with psychotic features like psychotic schizophrenia or it can be the result of a benign natural process. Psychosis is a natural part of life. Every one experiences it many times in their life time. Every time you close your eyes you will become technically psychotic. (Sensory deprivation increases internal stimuli and can make it difficult to distinguish them from external stimuli.) Psychosis can also occur because of menstruation or  childbirth, and it also be induced by the use of certain drugs that increase or alter spontaneous brain activity. Psychosis and insanity are often used synonymously, but they shouldn’t be. Psychosis can be very easily faked. You just have to pretend you are seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there.

People with too much spontaneous sensory activity are entirely capable of acting rationally and independently as long as they they are capable of distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not and not becoming psychotic. (This shouldn’t even always be considered a mental deficit.) And even psychotic people can just be talked down and grounded to reality simply by talking to them most of the time.

Most people who commit violent acts are not psychotic. They know what they are doing. They are in control of their motor functions and they have the intent to harm. Most act out of anger, and there are acceptable forms of violence in the world that are committed by soldiers and police who can be just as violent and angry as the people who kill without government approval.

The desire to be violent or even kill isn’t a desire exclusive to “crazy” people. Most people have considered killing another person or at least being violent. The only thing that separates those who just think about it and those who actually do it is a difference in the severity of the experiences that led to those emotions. Pain collects. Those who have only known suffering, disappointment, betrayal and so forth are more prone to inflict the same onto others, especially if they believe other people are responsible for their situation.

Millions are slaughtered by government sanctioned wars and thousands are killed by police every year. Some people join the military just because they want to kill or control people. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are psychotic or have mental disorders, just as not all serial killers are psychotic. Many just have intense anger. But soldiers aren’t put in mental hospitals or prisons like serial killers are, even though what they do is often no different. It is merely perceived differently. Soldiers are often considered heroes, whereas those who kill without government approval, no matter what the rationale for their actions, are often looked down upon as society’s villains.

Even a soldier who kills hundreds in a war fought for oil, revenge, or petty ideological differences is often still considered a hero. But why should he be considered anything other than a hired killer working to fufill the government’s interests? Governments can commit mass murder for revenge or money and enjoy complete immunity. But governments don’t have the moral authority to decide who lives and dies or to decide which murders are moral or to even use force of any kind without there being a clear threat and no other alternative. It is contradictory for a government to reward soldiers while punishing people whose actions may have been more justified. This black and white moral distinction between government approved violence and violence without government approval is not logical, because most of the time wars are unjustified and police often use excessive force, (they could also use other means than force to prevent crime like, say, words – a novel concept. Crime is also a problem caused by the very power structures that deem it necessary to use force to “prevent” it. No one should have the ability to decide who lives and dies, especially not powerful institutions controlled by the powerful, elite, egocentric few.

Most people aren’t put in prison or mental institutions to prevent crimes or societal harm, and prison most often has the opposite effect. It makes people more dangerous and willing to commit crimes. It called the retributive or punitive justice system because retribution through punishment is its primary goal. But if someone goes outside the law for their own retribution they are perceived the same as all the other criminals in prison. Prisons and mental institutions are supposed to reformatory and helpful, but an institution, especially a hospital, can’t be punishing and helpful at the same time. It just doesn’t make sense. Very few people are changed in a positive way by prison because prisons are vile, disgusting places, and the current model of psychiatric care is far more punishing than helpful.

Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and Anti-psychotics

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are extremely vague, over-diagnosed disorders. From 1994-2004, the number of children diagnosed with bipolar people increased by 4000 percent. There are no medical tests for these disorders, (aside from behavioral tests, which are subjective). Only one single doctor is needed to make the diagnosis, which is based on the person’s perceived behavior and what they tell the doctor, and this diagnosis will affect those given it for the rest of their lives. Doctors have the power to label anyone as bipolar, schizophrenic or psychotic. Because schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can produce so many different symptoms, it is likely that they are not discrete disorders but are rather several disorders or just sets of behaviors like most mental disorders. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are just easy ways to brand behavior that isn’t “normal.” That is not to say that people who have symptoms of these disorders don’t suffer and couldn’t benefit from treatment, but it’s the kind of treatment that is the problem. The treatment is to create uniformity at any cost. The same is true of most mental disorders. What constitutes a mental disorder is anything contrary to social expectations.

Mania, a symptom of bipolar disorder, is another condition that is sought to be fixed by doctors. Bipolar people can certainly suffer during episodes of mania or even become “psychotic,” but mania isn’t always negative because it can increase a person’s creativity and productivity and even feel euphoric.  Mania is just another example of the APA’s branding and stigmatizing of uncommon behavior that they seek to control.

The “schizophrenia spectrum” also has an absurd number of sub-groups.  The sub-groups are schizophrenia, schizotypal personality disorder, schizophreniform disorder, delusional disorder, brief psychotic disorder,  substance-induced psychotic disorder, latent schizophrenia, borderline schizophrenia, latent schizophrenic reactions, pre-psychotic schizophrenia, prodromal schizophrenia, pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia, pseudopsychopathic schizophrenia and psychotic and catatonic states with an unknown cause. Schizophrenia is clearly not a discrete disorder, which should be obvious if you consider its roots (or the ludicrous range of subgroups for the disorder). In some contexts schizophrenia still is used synonymously with “insanity”, which can be used to describe a range of behaviors an be triggered by a myriad of different things. Many of the schizophrenic disorders share the same symptoms and the names are completely arbitrary. An infinite number of degrees of severity for each symptom can exist, and unspecified psychotic disorder is extremely vague and is often used when doctors have no other way to describe the symptoms and/or when the doctor just wants to keep the patient institutionalized or pathologized.

The fact is mental disorders are not diseases. Every human mind is unique, and behaviors can change as easily as people change. Schizophrenia is really the catchall term used for people doctors can’t otherwise label, but schizophrenics couldn’t be more different. The one main similarity they share is that are troubled people who need guidance, but their “condition” can result from a wide range of things. Sometimes, people can just break down after years of trauma and abuse, and this is a problem that can’t be completely solved by any pill. They’re problems that need to be discussed with doctors, people close to the individual and ideally with people who have had mental disorders and overcame them.

Anti-psychotics are used to “treat” schizophrenia, and they mostly bind to the dopamine receptors and interrupt signaling resulting in reduced production of dopamine. People with schizophrenia are prescribed these drugs because the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia speculates that schizophrenia is caused by an excess of dopamine due to signaling malfunction triggered by environmental and genetic factors. (Dopamine re-uptake inhibitors like cocaine, meth and crack have essentially have the opposite effect. They bind to dopamine receptors and increase dopamine in the synapse, which produces effects that can resemble the “positive symptoms” of schizophrenia. Doctors call it “cocaine psychosis” and “methamphetamine psychosis”. But these drugs ultimately decrease dopamine levels when addiction sets in due to reduced signaling and loss of sensitivity to dopamine.) Some dopamine re-uptake inhibitors therefore may actually have a positive longterm effect on schizophrenics for this reason if long-term dopamine reduction is what they need, but this is very speculative. This may be why so many schizophrenics try to self-medicate with these drugs, but it’s likely they’re not thinking about the long term effects when they take them.)

Most anti-psychotics have high affinity for the D2 subtype receptor, which is one of the five subtypes of dopamine receptors, but many can also bind to other dopamine subtypes, serotonin receptors, and other receptors, which produces a host of side effects. They often turn “schizophrenics” into emotionless zombies and can cause many separate mental disorders like tardive dyskinesia, which is a disorder that produces involuntary movement or twitching. Most of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (avolition, flat affect, lack of speech) seem to be caused by the dopamine antagonists used to “treat” it, and there are many other side effects to anti-psychotics, which are far from minor. These include lowering life expectancy, weight gain, loss of motor control, decrease in white blood cell count, involuntary twisting of the limbs (tardive dystonia) tardive psychosis (psychosis induced by the over-perscription of anti-psychotics), tardive dysphrenia, nueroleptic dysphoria and neuroleptic malignant syndrome. Because monoamine antagonists like neuroleptics disrupt neuronal activity, their chronic use can also lead to nueronal death, irreversible abnormalities in brain function, and large decreases in brain volume, and death in some cases.

Many doctors believe that schizophrenia is a neuro-degenerative disorder, but this is probably not the case. People diagnosed with schizophrenia most likely only have decreases in brain volume because most schizophrenics take anti-psychotics, and these reduce brain volume. This seems to be the case in most studies. In 2010 doctors Joanna Moncrieff and Jonathan Leo analyzed data from multiple studies on the subject and found that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in every study who had never taken anti-psychotics showed “no major differences in global cerebral, grey-matter, ventricular, or CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) volumes,” whereas patients with chronic use of anti-psychotics “showed a greater reduction in whole-brain, cortical or grey-matter volumes, or a greater increase in CSF or ventricular volumes, compared with controls” in 14 of the 26 MRI studies. (Joanna Moncrieff, Jonathan Leo - Psychological Medicine, 2010)

No single organic cause has been found for schizophrenia. The life-time occurrence of substance abuse is 50% among people diagnosed with the disorder, so substance abuse could be a contributed factor, but again it may instead be just a common coping mechanism. Most of the symptoms can be experienced by anyone and although schizophrenia is a set of symptoms, having just one can be enough for a doctor to label a patient as schizophrenic. Avolition (inability to experience pleasure), blunted affect (reduced emotional response), catatonia (motionlessness or excess motor activity), and “facial grimacing” can be symptoms of depression or brought on by a wide variety of drugs. And the symptoms of delusions and hallucinations (psychosis) associated with schizophrenia don’t have to be present in a patient to be diagnosed with the disorder.

The positive, negative and cognitive symptoms schizophrenia produces are almost identical to those produced by certain drugs (mostly dopamine re-uptake inhibitors and dopamine antagonists) and people with schizophrenia are sometimes “mistaken for people who are high on drugs.” – Arthur Schoenstadt. Hallucinations and delusions, thought disorders and movement disorders can all be caused by drugs, as can flat affect, avolition and poor executive functioning, so it seems likely that many drug addicts/users who don’t have schizophrenia have been incorrectly labeled as schizophrenic by doctors. Stimulant addicts in particular are probably very often wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia because as I have said, most stimulants like meth, coke and crack inhibit the re-uptake of dopamine. So-called cocaine and amphethamine psychoses are considered separate mental “illnesses,” but they are hardly ever diagnosed.

Schizophrenics are still widely over-prescribed dopamine antagonists because when they are administered they become easier to control and subdue. Dopamine antagonists block the binding of endogenous agonist dopamine to dopamine receptors inhibiting the signal produced by the agonist. This may have a temporary anti-psychotic or tranquilizing effect, but over time the body may become overly sensitive to dopamine to compensate for the dulling effect of anti-psychotics. This can lead to the malady of the aforementioned side-effects, which are often mistaken for symptoms of schizophrenia itself and treated by doctors with more anti-psychotics, worsening the disorder.

Some researchers claim that marijuana use can cause schizophrenia mainy because many schizophrenics use it, but there is absolutely no relationship between marijuana and schizophrenia. Marijuana has almost no affect on dopamine system. It affects mostly cannabinoid receptors, and those with schizophrenia probably use it as a coping mechanism as they do other drugs.  But to claim marijuana causes their condition is conflating correlation with causation. Most schizophrenics also smoke cigarettes, which have a greater effect on dopamine, although almost no one has made the claim that tobacco leads to schizophrenia. (Most schizophrenics actually find tobacco helps their symptoms.) The only reason “journalists” generally  try to draw a link between marijuana and schizophrenia is because of their ideologies or politics and because they want less people to use it. Marijuana can increase the disorganization of thoughts, which is a cognitive symptom of schizophrenia, but this is the only way its related and could be compared. Dr. Lester Grinspoon, Harvard Professor and psychiatrist who treated schizophrenic patients for 40 years, has said the supposed link between schizophrenia and marijuana is absurd. “If you just take the fact that…the frequency of schizophrenia is about 1% world-round…you would expect with a drug used as often as it is that there would be a little [increase] but it doesn’t change a bit. It hasn’t changed. In fact, you can find as much information showing that marijuana is useful for schizophrenia than you can [claiming] it is harmful.” This is accurate. The number of cannabis users over the 20th century has risen exponentially to about 220 million now, yet there are only about 25 million people with schizophrenia worldwide.

A few therapists like Dr. David Healy, an Irish psychopharmacologist and author, have claimed that drug companies have tried to legitimize the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia in order to increase the sales of their anti-psychotics. Schizophrenia’s cause is probably more complex than drug companies would have doctors believe. It is a poorly understood mental disorder and the “quick-fix” of anti-psychotics will probably eventually be seen as malpractice, as will electroshock therapy, which is sometimes used in tandem with anti-psychotics.

Before anti-psychotics were invented lobotomies were a common “treatment” for schizophrenia. A lobotomy is a procedure in which part of the brain (usually connections to the prefrontal cortex) is destroyed by literally burning it or removing it completely.  The first lobotomy was conducted in 1935 and it was a very commonly used procedure for two decades in mostly developed, rich countries. By 1951, 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States alone. Using a lobotomy to “cure” a mental disorder is a lot like trying to fix a TV set by smashing it with a hammer. It is one of the most crude, invasive and amoral procedures to ever be used as a “treatment” for any ailment and it is still used today for schizophrenia, addiction and even minor mental disorders like depression and OCD, especially in the US and UK. The only reason lobotomies were and are supported by doctors is because they make patients easier to control just like anti-psychotics. They turn patients into brain-dead shells of their former selves. In 1948, Norbert Weiner, a famous author and professor at MIT said, “[P]refrontal lobotomy… has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier.” The most frightening aspect of lobotomies is that patients may never know how they were affected by them. They might feel okay despite being drastically different, less intelligent and/or suffering a host of other side-effects.

Although there is no scientific test for schizophrenia, many people with schizophrenia have been shown to have greater spontaneous activity in the left hemisphere of their brains while people with bipolar disorder seem to have greater activity in the right hemisphere of their brains. Superstitious people who believe in the paranormal and/or have strong religious beliefs (magical thinking) usually have greater spontaneous activation in the right hemisphere of their brain, as do creative people. The right hemisphere may favor making more “loose” connections, as opposed to the left hemisphere which makes more focused, mathematical connections. (Diego Pizzagalli et al.) Both areas of the brain have their purpose as does magical thinking, (artists and writers for example could benefit from such activity) but if a person isn’t grounded by a strong scientific perception of reality, it seems that too much spontaneous activity in either hemisphere of the brain could evolve into mental disorder or personally unwanted behaviors.

It is odd that most mental institutions encourage religion even though magical thinking is considered a symptom of mental illness. Usually religious beliefs are only considered magical thinking if the pateint has very extreme, egocentric views (e.g. that they are religious prophets or Gods themselves) but why shouldn’t all religious beliefs be considered magical thinking? Since most religious beliefs are not supported by science, they are just myths (unsubstantiated stories), and I can’t imagine filling the heads of mental patients with more myths and fears is constructive. While it is sometimes well-intentioned, it is largely used as another tool to create uniformity.

Redefining Mental “Illness”

The mental health industry pathologizes not only normal human differences, but also normal human emotions. Would a person who always experiences consistent emotions and never acts irrationally or “against the grain” be the picture of sanity? It seems that such a person who constantly tries to adhere to social norms would be far more mentally unhealthy than someone who has mood swings and acts contrary to social expectations because the world is not always sensible or rational; To perceive it as though it was would be irrational. Differences in animals is what causes evolution; they adapt to extremes. But we have left it up to doctors, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies to determine which differences are beneficial (natural behaviors are just current behaviors) and thus we have left it up to them to determine in what direction our society and our minds are headed. They direct the course of evolution, selecting “natural” behaviors and weeding out the extremes.

In my opinion, a person who is a picture of sanity would be in tune the irrationality, the harshness, the unexpected and the unknowns in life, but generally such people tend to act more abnormally because most people just accept what they see and hear and they don’t question. This makes them more stable and their behaviors more consistent, but when there are less human extremes and more consistency in personality and identity, then fewer people and societies will be as stimulated to change and improve.

The categorical approach to mental disorders was first introduced when mental institutions realized they couldn’t just call every patient “insane” and they noticed differences between them. But the categorical approach is both primitive and counterproductive. Defining a mental disorder is difficult because, as I have said, a  doctor can feel a patient is unhealthy while the person believes he or she is fine. Mental disorders are not like illnesses that affect other parts of the body like viral infections or cancer, which can be physically seen and treated often using the same medications. Bodily Ilnesses can’t be treated with cognitive behavioral therapy or by “thinking them away.” They are identified and diagnosed using scientific means, but mental disorders are not. A perfectly healthy, “sane” individual can fake the symptoms of any mental disorder and be admitted for life. But one cannot “fake” high cholesterol or cancer. There is no refuting the existence of a bodily disease because there are scientific tests for them. A blood test can determine if you have cancer, but few scientific tests exist for mental disorders. People don’t get spinal taps to determine which nuero-transmitters are too abundant or scarce or which receptors are malfunctioning and an extreme result wouldn’t guarantee a diagnosis. Doctors can’t know exactly what’s wrong (if anything) without talking to the patient extensively. Doctors most often make very subjective diagnoses based on the percieved behavior of the patient and on their biased beliefs, which have been shaped by mentoring doctors’ observations before them who taught what they know from their own experience.

A diagnosis of a mental disorder is just a way to describe a group of symptoms. But these symptoms have a myriad of causes and they shouldn’t always be treated in the same ways or treated at all in some cases. Doctors can’t view psychiatry as a way to “fix” minds. If a person’s brain is malfunctioning and this interferes with their quality of life this should be considered a mental disorder. But diagnosing a person with a mental disorder in order to describe a vague and broad set of observed behaviors and symptoms belittles the complexity of the human mind and oversimplifies that peson. Psychiatry should only be seen as a way to create health, as opposed to an approach to cure an illness because mental disorders are not illnesses.

Mental disorders are sets of cognitive and physical behaviors – not illnesses. However, this doesn’t mean they’re always voluntary. Some are hard to control, some easy to control, and some impossible to control. They are behaviors in the sense that they don’t infect people. Someone diagnosed with schizophrenia isn’t “sick” with schizophrenia. You can inject someone with HIV, but you can’t inject someone with schizophrenia, and years of emotional trauma are rarely the cause of bodily diseases, whereas mental disorders are most often brought on by trauma.  Most behaviors that are symptomatic of mental disorders do not have a single organic cause. They are much more fluid and complicated than bodily illnesses.  Most people can be treated with good talk therapy alone, whereas bodily illnesses usually require a physical substance to kill the disease. To think that any substance on earth would work for everyone diagnosed with a certain mental disorder is incredibly naive and foolish. Therapy in conjunction with a very heavily tested, safe and effective drug is often a good treatment approach.

Most of the categories of mental disorders have subtypes called “not otherwise specified,” used when a person does not fit the disorder’s exact criteria. This demonstrates the need for a more fluid conception of mental health and disorders. People can’t be labeled and put into categories because people are all so different, so when doctors haven’t come up with a name for a set of behaviors and symptoms they tag the person as “not otherwise specified.” This too is an oversimplification and it often used to pathologize and/or institutionalize people with nothing more than abnormal personality traits who don’t need medicine or hospitalization.

Even if a person has a malfunctioning brain that negatively affects their quality of life, such a condition can still be very productive. Creative geniuses may have “schizoid” personalities that make their everyday functioning difficult, but their avoidance of social interaction and potential external criticism may help them create brilliant works. While their lifestyle may be perceived as unhealthy and not very enjoyable, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily something that has to be “fixed.” Strange people aren’t always sick people. Positive and negative outliers are the most important people that exist because they can teach us the most about what makes people, “good” and “bad,” “strange” and “normal”; they can be a product of positive or negative social constructs and therefore help to change them by being physical examples. Positive and negative habits, behaviors, lifestyles and personal traits, both unwanted and wanted, are too often grouped together and labeled as a distinct mental illnesses when they shouldn’t be. Just about everything is made abnormal by psychiatry.

Schizoid Personality Disorder is one of the many examples of the arbitrary, and unnecessary labels the mental health industry gives to certain lifestyles, behaviors and traits. A schizoid person is just a person who is socially withdrawn, overly sensitive, and introspective. These are simply normal human qualities. They are traits only a minority of people have, but this doesn’t mean they are necessarily detrimental. As Dr. Nancy McWilliams wrote, “One reason schizoid people are pathologized is because they are comparatively rare. People in majorities tend to assume that their own psychology is normative and to equate difference with inferiority”. (Mcwilliams Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Second Edition: Understanding Personality. (The Guilford Press, 2011), 196.

People can be diagnosed as “schizoid” without determining whether or not they prefer this lifestyle, which doesn’t make any sense. Having an active social life may be more healthy and enjoyable for most, but a person can also have many friends and still feel very alone. There is too much focus on observed behavior as I have said. And short periods of isolation can be very beneficial for most people. If a person is constantly stimulated by other people they have no time to reflect and look inside themselves and develop a very unique identity. People are also all at different stages of development: Some need their alone time more than others and some need or thrive from constant interaction, so one lifestyle or another can’t always be seen as healthy or unhealthy. Lifestyles and behaviors also constantly change. One day a person may feel like a introverted hermit and the next feel like a convivial extrovert. Mental health is simply different for everyone. People shouldn’t be given stigmatized or pejorative labels for traits. Identity is dynamic and mental disorders are too especially since most are not lifelong.

One of the symptoms of many mental disorders defined by the DSM is literally “unconventional beliefs” that go against “societal norms”. Every brilliant thinker who challenged societal norms should be considered ill if unconventional beliefs are symptomatic of a mental disorder. Einstein or Copernicus could be perceived as having been “ill.” Unconventional beliefs are what change conventional beliefs. Without them, society would never change. As Karl Marx has “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” and this only keeps the ruling class in power and maintains the status quo. To believe that society will head in the right direction by conforming to the societal norms is foolish. The forces that control us define what’s normal. We don’t.

A mental disorder also can’t be diagnosed simply with observable behavior. The person’s feelings, thoughts, identity, beliefs, conscious and subconscious, need to be taken into account. There is also too much focus on the diagnosis rather than the reason for the diagnosis. Diagnoses of mental disorders stigmatize certain behaviors. They make those who are diagnosed overly aware of them, but patients and doctors shouldn’t look at the behaviors as the problem. They should see what led to the unwanted behaviors as the problem and until that is addressed, people will just try to mask their symptoms or tone them down without getting to the heart of the real problem.

The spectrum approach to mental disorders attempts to explain a broader variety behaviors and symptoms that can overlap. Because people with bipolar disorder, for example, are very different, a spectrum is used to describe more traits as bipolar. People with mental disorders need to be recognized as unique and individual, but coming up with names for more “subgroups” is a waste of time. You could say each person is their own sub group. Symptoms of a mental disorder should be recorded and treated on a case by case basis, based on what the individual wants and symptoms should not always be branded as distinct or concrete mental disorders. They can change because people change. There doesn’t need to be a name for every type of perceived flaw, abnormality, socially unacceptable trait or unwanted behavior.

Aside from the categorical approach to mental disorders and the mental health industry’s pathologizing of normal human differences, another problem with the industry lies in its psychoanalytic approach. The problem with the psychoanalytic approach is analogous to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Just as the equipment that measures the position of a particle changes its position, doctors change the outcome (the patient’s resultant behavior) by observing it, which often leads to paranoid delusions and can be used to validate pre-existing delusions, and ostensibly symptoms worsen across the board as a result. Patients need to feel they’re under no pressure, which is impossible seeing as they’re kept there by force, constantly observed, and allowed almost no personal space.

Psychoanalysis is also flawed because it is not often approached as a natural conversation, but more like an interview or an interrogation at a court room. It is accusatory and demeaning and conducted by examining and usually condemning perceived behaviors and thoughts. Micheal Focault, a notable critic of  psychiatry and mental insititutions argued that the asylum is “not a free realm of observation, diagnosis, and therapeutics; it is a juridical space where one is accused, judged, and condemned.” Usually a person’s highlights and best attributes aren’t explored and the psychiatrist says nothing about their own lives, which is incredibly important in order to establish trust and a beneficial therapist-patient relationship.

When patients have delusions, doctors usually provoke them by asking questions that make them expand on their delusions.  They provoke them to be more irrational and delusional, instead of asking why they believe in what they do and trying to help them adopt a more scientific perspective. They often just expand on patients’ negative aspects and therapists often make patients incriminate themselves by admitting to violent or sexual thoughts or urges they have. This information is sometimes used against them in court, instead of being used to help control or curb negative urges or thoughts.

Mental hospitals also feel it’s necessary (for legal liability) to monitor and record all of their patients. The job of therapists is to get in their heads by using in depth psychoanalysis, so it’s not surprising some patients believe doctors have literally “entered their heads” with recording equipment or some other delusion or that their thoughts are being “broadcast.” Paranoid delusions and many symptoms of mental disorders are often created by mental institutions because patients have every reason to be paranoid. If a person has paranoid delusions, they can branded as “paranoid schizophrenics” and institutionalized. But doctors define what constitutes paranoia and which fears are irrational or rational. If patient are institutionalized against their will, they have every reason to be paranoid or afraid. If they feel they’re in danger, they’re not paranoid; they’re right. Mental institutions are not safe places. Patients are not just in danger from the staff, but also other patients. Their actions are also carefully monitored, they are fed drugs against their will (or threatened with confinement for not taking medication) and they are in danger as inmates are in prison.

Another common symptom of mental disorders is delusions of grandeur, which can also be brought on by mental hospitals and doctors, and it’s often a hypocritical diagnosis. Psychiatrists often have delusions of grandeur. They analyze humanity as if they’re “model human beings” who know what behaviors and ideologies are ideal when the reality is their lifestyles and behaviors represent a microcosm of society. Most therapists are straight, narrow minded, wealthy, well-educated people who live in developed countries. They don’t go to school to learn about different ideologies or cultures or people they wouldn’t otherwise wouldn’t talk to outside of an office setting. This makes it difficult for them to understand people who have lived extremely different lives. How could a happy, rich, Harvard graduate with no major problems ever understand or relate to an institutionalized, crackhead diagnosed with schizophrenia and a history of trauma? Their lives couldn’t be more different, but doctors often say patients have delusions of grandeur if they ever insinuate that they know more about their disorder than doctors do.

Mental institutions should be incorporated into society, not separate from it. Home based therapy should be seen as one best approaches because working on issues at home while  pursuing meaningful goals is much more likely to help patients live independent, happy lives. Incarcerating a mass of people with perceived mental issues in a small place is not smart, nor is confining criminals together for the same reason. Just as criminals can band together to become better at crime, patients can reinforce each other’s negative behaviors. Mental patients should talk with other patients if they’d like, but they should be influenced and surrounded mostly by mentally healthy, happy people in order to facilitate improvement. When you have hundreds of mental patients all dealing with very different issues, there is no reason to expect improvement by grouping them together. You should only expect chaos. Similarly, when criminals are grouped  together, they can organize and become better at crime. That’s all that is achieved. It reinforces the behavior they’re trying to eradicate.

In an ideal mental institution that actually created mental health, patients would also not be carefully monitored, dehumanized and they would be allowed more personal space. They would be stimulated creatively sharpening their skills, and also have the option to take classes on a range of subjects to facilitate independence. Doctors and nurses would be monitored the most by independent agencies and patient advocacy groups to prevent abuse. There would be a greater focus on the establishment of personal relationships, and doctors would actually listen to patients and try to learn from them instead of simply “correcting” them by highlighting their perceived problems. Perhaps most importantly, no patient should ever be held against their will if they have not committed a crime, (even if they are suicidal, because it is illogical to use force to prevent someone from harming themselves) and patients should have the same Miranda rights (right to free counsel, right to remain silent, etc.) that suspects of crimes have immediately when brought in involuntarily (or even voluntarily) for an evaluation. Mental institutions should also not have the ability to hold people for 10 days (or longer) without seeing a judge as many do.

Institutions for the “criminally insane” should also be referred to as “institutions for criminals with mental disorders” (or ICMDs) and they need to be reformed to help patients progress towards a functional life, regardless of whether or not that life is considered normal. “Insane” also can’t be a legitimate legal term. If a person has a mental disorder it can be difficult to determine how responsible he/she is for their actions. This is often determined by forensic psychiatrists in court, but as stated, they tend not to examine all the factors needed to actually make a determination about their accountability. How the disorder was brought on should matter in court, (genetics, external stressors, drugs, etc.) but it’s not often even mentioned in courts. If a person was physically unable to control him/herself, can’t remember the episode or was experiencing a hallucination and had no criminal intent, this should certainly be taken into account. However, if  ”insanity” is defined purely on the nature of the act and not on the intent of the individual, then too many people can be wrongly labeled as insane. People are capable of doing extremely sadistic, violent things without being considered insane.

A complete overhaul of the mental health sector is necessary. It should not be a for profit industry, (nor should the entire health industry) and psychology and therapy need to be seen and practiced with a very different, open-minded approach that allows for all different types of people to prosper and grow based on their own wants and needs. Mental disorders will decrease as a result and people will mental health will increase worldwide.

The unity that helped Mexico’s ruling conservatives end seven decades of one-party rule is cracking under the weight of infighting, scandal and defections that threaten their hopes of retaining the presidency in July.

Eleven years after President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party, or PAN, first took power, the party is battling accusations it has succumbed to corruption and vote-rigging, and betrayed its founding principles. Some prominent figures have turned their back on the party because they feel it has stooped to the cronyism and fraud it once fought to overcome, undermining the campaign of PAN presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota.

The PAN’s leadership remains united but the divisions below have put it on the defensive, and Vazquez Mota faces an uphill battle against presidential front-runner Enrique Pena Nieto of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. She trails him in polls by between 7 and 18 percentage points.

Read more…

Nine guards have confessed to helping Zetas drug gangsters escape from prison before other Zetas slaughtered 44 rival inmates, a state official said late Monday, underlining the enormous corruption inside Mexico’s overcrowded, underfunded prisons.

The top officials and as many as 18 guards at the Apodaca prison in northern Mexico had been detained under suspicion that they may have helped 30 Zetas escape during the confusion of a riot early Sunday in which 44 members of the rival Gulf cartel were bludgeoned and knifed to death. Nuevo Leon state public security spokesman Jorge Domene Zambrano said nine of the guards confessed to aiding the escape. He said it appeared the breakout happened before the deadly fight.

The massacre in this northern state was one of the worst prison killings in Mexico in at least a quarter-century and exposed another weak institution that President Felipe Calderon is relying on to fight his drug war.

Read more…

A former Mexican state governor is under increasing scrutiny in the U.S. and Mexico for alleged ties to drug cartels, a brewing scandal that could tarnish the image of Mexico’s former ruling party as it drives to regain power in this year’s presidential election.

Tomás Yarrington, a former governor of Tamaulipas state, has been named in a U.S. money-laundering case in which confidential informants for the Drug Enforcement Administration allege that the ex-governor received drug money in exchange for protecting the locally based Gulf drug cartel, according to a criminal complaint.

The case is the second in recent weeks naming Mr. Yarrington, who ran the Mexico-Texas border state between 1999 and 2004. Two weeks ago, Mexico’s attorney general’s office said it had been investigating three former Tamaulipas governors, including Mr. Yarrington, since 2009.

Read more…

The Heritage Foundation's 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, which tracks the economic viability and institutional corruption of over 170 countries, shows that the United States has fallen out of the list of free economies for the first time. Analysts warn this could herald a bleak economic future for the United States unless the trend is reversed.

The United States’ economic freedom score of 76.3 drops it to 10th place in the 2012 Index. Its score is 1.5 points lower than last year, reflecting deteriorating scores for government spending, freedom from corruption, and investment freedom. The U.S. is ranked 2nd out of three countries in the North America region, and its overall score remains well above the world and regional averages.

Declining economic freedom inevitably has a negative impact on the nation’s economic competitiveness and the standard of living.

John Berlau, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs sees a similar trend:

“We’ve already seen since the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley accounting mandates signed by Bush in 2002, a huge dropoff in foreign companies listing on our stock exchanges. Instead these firms are listing in the stock markets of Hong Kong, London, and other Sarbox-free zones. With Obama’s garganutuan mandates, such as the Dodd-Frank sham financial “reform,” American entrepreneurs may have to go overseas for venture capital and angel investors.”

By contrast, Hong Kong, which leads the Heritage Foundation’s Index, has remained largely stable throughout the recent global economic turmoil, which Heritage economists attribute to Hong Kong’s open regulatory climate and zero tolerance for corruption.

“Thanks to the crushing burden of massive overregulation and spending, we are already in a lost decade. But if we start steering the ship of state toward freedom, we can still make a course correction before the decade’s end,” Berlau says.

And a recent Congressional Budget Office report warns that the current budget track of governmental spending and growth could seriously impact the nation’s long-term economic viability.

Mexico has improved, but needs to give greater priority to the criminal enforcement of bribery and ensure that its criminal law enforcement authorities have all the resources and expertise they need to seriously investigate all allegations, according to a new OECD report. The OECD Working Group on Bribery has just completed a review of Mexico’s enforcement of the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions and related instruments.

The Working Group also recommends that Mexico:

• Take action on pending legislation to further combat corruption, in particular amend and enforce its law on corporate liability for foreign bribery;
• Expand its law on confiscation of the bribe and its proceeds and ensure that confiscation is routinely applied in practice;
• Continue to improve the level and speed of its responsiveness to mutual legal assistance requests involving foreign bribery-related cases;
• Clarify explicitly that bribes to foreign public officials are not deductible for tax purposes;
• Enact legislation to protect whistleblowers in the public and private sectors; and
• Amend its legislation to clarify that external auditors must report crimes discovered during audits to law enforcement authorities, and that auditors who report are protected from reprisals.

Read More…

El Ejército acusó a un capitán, cuatro tenientes y dos sargentos de haber proporcionado información al cártel de los Beltrán Leyva para evitar los operativos militares en Morelos e incluso, ayudar a los narcos a establecer pistas clandestinas en la entidad.

Los militares pertenecían al Tercer Regimiento Blindado de Reconocimiento en Morelos y cobraban de mil a 18 mil dólares al mes a un emisario del extinto Mario Pineda, “El MP”, y Sergio Villarreal, “El Grande”, a cambio de anticipar información operativa en mensajes telefónicos por escrito o correos electrónicos.

De acuerdo con la acusación, en poder de Grupo Reforma, los militares obtuvieron el nombre del marino que encabezó el operativo de la Armada donde murió el capo Arturo Beltrán Leyva, “El Barbas”, el 16 de diciembre de 2009 en Cuernavaca, y supuestamente se la entregaron a los traficantes.

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A mounting corruption scandal related to illegal casinos is damaging President Felipe Calderón’s conservative party, whose fight against organized crime has long been a central aim.

The scandal stems from an attack on a Monterrey casino in late August by alleged members of the Zetas drug cartel, who set a gasoline-fueled fire that killed 52 casino visitors, including a pregnant woman. On Thursday, Mexico’s army said it had captured the alleged mastermind of the attack, Carlos Alberto Oliva, nicknamed “The Frog.” Mr. Oliva is seen as the No. 3 leader of the Zetas, who have terrorized much of Mexico through murder, extortions and kidnappings.

“This is a very important blow against the Zetas,” Nuevo Leon Lt. Gov. Javier Treviño said in an interview. In the last two years, Nuevo Leon and its capital Monterrey have become a battleground between the Zetas and their former employers, the Gulf Cartel.

Read More…

Here’s how Roemer announced his plans for this week on Twitter:

I am concerned and outraged, as are many, at Wall Street greed. I will be joining Occupy Wall Street NYC Tuesday to see it firsthand. #ows

My decision to join Occupy Wall Street is to put an end to #OWS bashing by fellow GOP candidates. I want to hear the stories of protestors.

It’s about time Americans rose up against institutional corruption. I want to stand by them. Wall Street must be held accountable. #ows #p2

I’m a Harvard economist and biz school grad. I have never seen our economy or political system this broken or corrupt. Enough is enough. #p2

There’s a part of me that wants to reject this idea. That we (companies) should all be Apple, and “get it” – but let’s face it, it’s not in everyone’s business model right now to sustain innovative thinking, but increasingly critical to our success.

Today they had Lawrence Lessig in to talk about the distorting effects of lobbyists on innovation.   Here’s a link to one of his talks. It’s provoking stuff. In person btw, I found him to be very even handed and thoughtful – he does think in gray, not black & white.

I should like this man (Senator Joe. I obviously like Steve a lot), but I don’t. I blame the system, government-wise. I think our Founders got the idea that people just can’t help it to a pretty strong degree.

Update: The Duke Cunningham thing and the Wall St. bailout pretty much sealed my cynicism deal. I don’t believe the Duke came into Congress like he left it.

Former President Zedillo participated in the panel

As drug violence spirals out of control in Mexico, a commission led by three former Latin American heads of state blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point.

“The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war,” said former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in a conference call with reporters from Rio de Janeiro. “We have to move from this approach to another one.”

The commission, headed by Mr. Cardoso and former presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and César Gaviria of Colombia, says Latin American governments as well as the U.S. must break what they say is a policy “taboo” and re-examine U.S.-inspired antidrugs efforts. The panel recommends that governments consider measures including decriminalizing the use of marijuana.

Read more…

To point to underhand institutional conduct is never enough. Fact in plenty may still be not enough – especially when an institution under question does its best to make it appear that those who question it have malign intent, and have no notable evidence. Or when that organization attempts to bury evidence of statements by its founder that, all unwittingly, militate against both it and him. See:

The Quiet Weeding Out Of Sathya Sai Baba’s Embarrassing Statements

Sathya Sai Baba and Absurdity – Revealed in His Officials’ Documents

However, when a research effort involves an august institution like the BBC, those institutions which have been covering up are shaken, and only then can sometimes become more accountable, as has been the case of UNESCO’s ‘missing’ Media Advisory. In this case, it was UNESCO which was forced to become accountable. Neither the Indian government nor the international Sathya Sai Organization have been so, all along. The BBC has described Sathya Sai Baba as ‘The Secret Swami’. See:

The BBC’s ‘The Secret Swami’ – A Revision

BBC’s ‘The Secret Swami’ and British Press Praise

BBC Hidden Camera in ‘Secret Swami’. Ethical?

Earlier that year (2004), the producer of the one-hour television documentary, Eamon Hardy, noted in my hearing that the Sathya Sai Baba saga raised very real questions as to India’s maturity as a democracy. As it turned out, the BBC exposure of the unhealthy Indian Government-Sathya Sai Organization-UNESCO Director nexus was not able to be referred to in ‘The Secret Swami’. It was all too late. However, any intrepid investigator can approach the BBC and UNESCO, quite apart from reading this article fine tooth-comb in hand.

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In September 2000, after months of intense effort by former Sai Baba followers from several countries, UNESCO and its joint sponsor the University of Flinders, South Australia, withdrew sponsorship of a large international education conference on human values under Sai Baba’s aegis at Puttaparthi. After the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ian Chubb, appointed a senior Staff member to investigate, delegates from Flinders University Institute of International Education were required to cancel. UNESCO’s Media Advisory stated:

“The Organisation is deeply concerned about widely reported allegations of sexual abuse involving youths and children that have been leveled at the leader of the movement in question, Sathya Sai Baba.”

UNESCO’s Advisory Had a Number of Concerns

The advisory also said that:

“Certain decisions were taken by the Institute of Sathya Sai Education without consultation, such as plans to hold some of the sessions at the Ashram of the Sathya Sai movement in Puttaparthi, and the inclusion of some speakers in the conference programme without their previous consent. Furthermore, the Organization is deeply concerned about widely reported allegations of sexual abuse involving youths and children that have been levelled at the leader of the movement in question, Sathya Sai Baba.””

Subheaders For This Article 

UNESCO and University of Flinders (South Australia) Withdraw From Big Sai Baba Conference

Sathya Sai Baba’s Officials Simulate UNESCO Involvement

UNESCO Complains to Press Trust of India

UN’s Dr Leonarda Jekantaite. Witting Sai Baba Tool Or a Babe-in-the-woods?

UNESCO Directors Scuttle Own Senior Officials

Indian Government-Puttaparthi Line: Sai Baba’s and India’s Interests are Synonymous

Top Sai Baba Aide Opens Mouth. Cat Jumps Out

UNESCO Directors Capitulate to India and Sai Baba

Will the Internet Wayback Archive Go Missing Too?

BBC Exposes Two Heads of UNESCO and Their Staff

BBC Catches UNESCO Heads and Staff In Falsehood

Sathya Sai Baba’s Officials Simulate UNESCO Involvement

Indulal Shah, then head of the Sathya Sai Organization, maintained the fiction of UNESCO involvement. Yet UNESCO had already fully informed him of its cancellation many days before the release of the Media Advisory on September 15, 200. In his inaugural conference address, Shah said:

“Let me share with you that U.S. magazine Week has chosen to give respect to the UNESCO conference held in Prasanthi Nilayam highlighting the message of Bhagawan on ‘Values for All”.  (Source: ‘Materials of the 7th World Conference of the Sai Organization’, 20.11.2000).

That is to say, Shah in front of over 900 conferencees spoke of “the UNESCO conference” – when there was no UNESCO involvement! Indeed, Shah and other organisers had spent several previous days dealing with the crisis of UNESCO’s cancellation, the Indian media situation, and so on.

UNESCO Complains to Press Trust of India

When the Times of India printed an alarmingly small portion of the Media Advisory, the world body lodged an objection to the Press Trust of India, It may be mentioned that the Times of India has long been a stronghold of Sai Baba devotees and supporters, including a board director P.N. Bhagwati, Sathya Sai Central Trust member and former Chief Justice of India, more recently with the United Nations.  PTI then forced the Times of India to publish the Media Advisory in full.

UN’s Dr Leonarda Jekantaite. Witting Sai Baba Tool Or a Babe-in-the-woods?

The same fiction of UNESCO participation was also preserved by the appearance on the dais by a high profile UNESCO diplomat, Dr Leonarda Jekantaite. Despite UNESCO’s withdrawal from the conference, Sai Baba’s official organ, Sanathana Sarathi (Volume 43, October 2000, page 317) reported:

“Dr Leonarda Jekantaite, Secretary General of UNESCO (Lithuania) presented the Keynote Address.”

 There are two issues here. First, that the official organ of Sai Baba’s Central Trust – distributed worldwide – AND the conference organizers maintained the fiction of UNESCO participation. Second, that Dr Jekantaite still not only attended but gave the keynote speech at the conference, despite the withdrawal of the body she ostensibly represented. A colleague of mine, Robert Priddy, previously head of the Sathya Sai Organization in Norway and retired lecturer in Philosophy and Social Science at the University of Oslo, corresponded with Dr Jekantaite on this matter. Very lamely, she excused herself by saying that she attended in a personal capacity. This line would seriously obscure the fact that the conference presenters portrayed Dr Jekantaite to the conferencees as the UNESCO representative. Was she was being incredibly naïve, being an unwitting propagandist tool in the conference organizers’ hands? Or was she actually prepared to be a witting tool in the hands of Sai Baba’s demonstrably dishonest organizers like Indulal Shah in allowing her presence to suggest UNESCO’s presence at the conference? Was she in fact a Sai Baba devotee? Was there anything all that “personal” about her reasons for staying on at the conference? A simple, natural, truthful response in her email to one who had long taught in one of the world’s foremost universities could have clarified much.

UNESCO Directors Scuttle Own Senior Officials

Another point that needs more attention – because, being a ‘hot’ topic, allegations of sexual abuse can tend to obscure other issues – was UNESCO’s dissatisfaction that conference organizers had maintained that the conference was to be held separately from Sai Baba’s ashram. Those who attack the Media Advisory (and many other issues about Sai Baba and his often heavily unaccountable organization well-documented by former devotee and other critics and some of the world’s leading media) need to be truthful about this. Nor did the UNESCO director and deputy director honor the earlier hard work of some of its most senior officials involved in the investigations and approvals that lead to the framing of the advisory. In repudiating the advisory these two officials were, in effect, repudiating their own officials, like Zhou Nanzhao, then head of UNESCO-ACEID in Thailand.

It is known that at the conference the UNESCO withdrawal was NOT mentioned! Clearly – highly typical of Sai Baba’s managers – major ‘stage management’ was going on.

Indian Government-Puttaparthi Line: Sai Baba’s and India’s Interests are Synonymous

Sai Baba critics who deal with senior government officials both in India and other countries have repeatedly found that Sai Baba’s propagandists have succeeded in creating the image that what affects Sai Baba affects all of India. One of the top British Foreign Officials told former Labor MP for Putney Tony Colman that where Sai Baba was concerned the Blair government did not want to ‘rock the boat’ with India. Mr Colman and (separately) some fifty other parliamentarians from various Parties, who at first had signed a Petition to raise the Sai Baba matter in the House of Commons, were asked by the Whips and others, to back off. Considerable trade deals, like the one billion plus sale by Britain to India of Hawk fighters were mentioned. Particularly active in efforts not to rock any ‘boats’ were Labor Friends of India, Conservative Parliamentary Friends of India, and the Indo-British Parliamentary Group. In one case, a leading international lawyer (who will speak to media of best repute) reported that he was told by senior London Metropolitan Police (who were far from happy about it) that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office had sent an instruction that the police were not further to pursue investigation related to Sai Baba, because the matter was an ‘international’ one.

Top Sai Baba Aide Opens Mouth. Cat Jumps Out

Little knowing that his triumphant revelations on an official Puttaparthi website would later come back to haunt him, Dr G. Venkataraman, Sai Baba’s deputy world head, who also leads the attempt to bring round-the-clock satellite Sai Baba radio to every corner of the globe, let quite a big ‘cat’ out of the bag in an offical Puttaparthi website. Hitherto, Sai Baba’s organization has been noted for its glacial silence in the face of the many and serious worldwide allegations (which are far from being solely about sexual molestation of boys and young men) against its founder. But what seemed such a triumph was clearly too much to hold back.

 Vol_02/05March01/03_Spiritual_Blossoms/ 02_Reflection/reflection.htm

But the ‘cat’ was soon to scratch. Venkataraman states:

“Both the Foreign Minister and this diplomat were terribly upset that nothing had been done this far”

Indian Diplomat Writes to UNESCO Head

India’s UNESCO representative (though he does not name her, this was Mrs Neelam Sabharwal, since named India’s Ambassador to Cyprus) then wrote, according to G. Venkataraman, to UNESCO’s Deputy Director General, Koïchiro Matsuura, saying that:

“the “Government of India considers Sri Sathya Sai Baba and his movement a national asset and takes strong exception to UNESCO press release, which spreads wholly unfounded and unsubstantiated allegation  against Sri Sathya Sai Baba. I would therefore request you to take immediate steps to remove the objectionable press advisory from the UNESCO website. I would also appreciate an expression of regret for the damage caused to one of India’s revered public figures, without first verifying the facts and any consultation with Indian authorities.”

UNESCO Directors Capitulate to India and Sai Baba

Dr. Venkataraman quotes what he claims to be the letter of reply to India’s UNESCO representative by UNESCO’s Deputy Director General:

“I do appreciate this concern and wish to inform you that following your personal intervention, the media advisory in question was immediately withdrawn from the archives of the UNESCO’s web site for education.

“I should also like to take this opportunity to say how much the Organisation regrets this unfortunate incident and to reiterate to you, on behalf of the Director General, that the Organisation attaches the greatest importance to the varied forms of fruitful collaboration that we have enjoyed with your country for many years.

“I hope this letter will set your mind at rest and dispel any misunderstanding.”

Venkataraman’s account (which the BBC later showed to be correct) was that he succeeded in getting (now former Prime Minister) A.B. Vajpayee’s Foreign Minister, Yaswant Sinha, and a former Indian Ambassador to France at this time now at UNESCO, to get the head of UNESCO to suppress the Media Advisory from its official website.

Will the Internet Wayback Archive Go Missing T00?

Fortunately, the document had been cached on the ‘Internet wayback machine’ and is now found at Click Here

One would not have been surprised if, given the power they wield in many high places, Sai Baba’s people had tried to obtain the removal of this document. One may guess, given their known track record for using high-profile devotees to threaten institutions with litigation, that the continued existence of this file in the Internet archive owes more to the integrity of the company operating this remarkable service than it does to the probity of Sai Baba’s top officials. (We shall report widely on the Internet should that document go missing too). Perhaps they accepted as a fait accompli that, in any case, the document has been widely copied to the Internet. Or else that the document – should anyone try to dispute the accuracy of the copies of it on former devotee and other websites – is in any case obtainable from the written archives of UNESCO.

Intimate Nexus Between the Indian Government and Sai Baba

Like a surprise gift to the rest of the world, here was G. Venkataraman’s proud revelation of a Puttaparthi-Indian government ploy to withdraw the Media Advisory. It was provided to David Savill, Assistant Producer of the BBC’s ‘The Secret Swami”. Given that the screening date fast approached, the intensive, months-long work on this documentary were to be shortly concluded. Nonetheless, David Savill wrote and spoke by phone to UNESCO (Paris). He saw that UNESCO was in cover-up mode (a mode observed by all media, academic and other investigators who have attempted to probe The Sathya Sai Organization).

It was clear that Venkataraman was absolutely right. The UNESCO head, via his Deputy Director, had obliged  India in this matter.

For the many survivors of Sai Baba around the world, this felt like a setback.  It had been exhausting work Some of it was terribly sensitive, because of varying responses of survivors of sexual and other abuses. It was often hard to revisit what had been for them the most shocking betrayal. 

In passing, I may add that obtaining coherent accounts from abuse victims is one of the most difficult of assignments. Survivors, not to mention their families, can make honest mistakes about dates, times, etc., and need experienced, highly competent professional counselers to debrief them. The profoundly dishonest internet proxy for Sathya Sai Baba forces conveniently ignore such facts. Over many months of carefully documented submissions, proof of credentials, etc., (an effort also pursued with the University of Flinders), organized former Sathya Sai Baba followers from many countries had gone to great pains to submit hard evidence (most of it too sensitive to be released to this day, except to bona fide institutions) against Sai Baba and senior leaders to the world body.

BBC Exposes Two Heads of UNESCO and Their Staff

Early in 2004, UNESCO spokespersons told media and other enquirers that the Advisory did not now reflect its views. David Savill reports that only after his strenuous questioning of a senior UNESCO spokesperson, did she, Sue Williams, finally agree in writing to Mr Savill that currently “UNESCO does not regret issuing the media release of September 15 2000.” Here was a backflip! The BBC had enforced from Mrs Williams an extraordinary admission. She directly contradicted what senior UNESCO officials had told a number of enquirers both by phone and email. One  example was an email to the West Australian newspaper’s Education Correspondent Susan Hewitt on February 5, 2004. By phone – at the same time – a senior UNESCO official told Garth Wynne, the Principal of Church of Christ Grammar School, Perth, Western Australia (who acted in the Sai Baba matter on behalf of  the then Anglican Archbishop of Australia, Dr Peter Carnley) that the Advisory had simply been “routinely purged”.

BBC Catches UNESCO Heads and Staff In Falsehood

The Deputy Director General’s statement about the Advisory being “immediately withdrawn” contradicts a number of statements emerging from other officials like Isabel le Fournis and the late Elke Salas Rossenbach. They gave out the ‘routine purge’ fabrication. After my repeated attempts, and repeated evasions by UNESCO (Paris) officials, to obtain the facts, Sue Williams emailed me, May 13, 2004, stating:

“the media advisory dealing with this issue resulted from a routine operation to purge and update the site.”

That this account is false is readily shown in UNESCO’s stance appeasing India’s then Foreign Minister that the media advisory “does not now reflect UNESCO’s position”.

Having sensed serious UNESCO contradiction and evasion – particularly in the light of the Venkataraman material – the BBC first tactically held back and then, once the spins span thick and fast, released the whole Venkataraman piece to the UNESCO official, Sue Williams, whose immediate boss was the Deputy Director General.  After repeated pressure from the BBC via phone and email, Ms Williams wrote to the BBC:

“UNESCO does not regret issuing the media release of September 15 2000″.

The acrobatics were quite something to watch!Furthermore, BBC staff spoke to India’s then Permanent Representative to UNESCO, Mrs Neelam Sabharwal, (since named India’s Ambassador to Cyprus). She greeted them with the blank statement that “Sai Baba is a respected Godman” and no, she didn’t know why UNESCO had issued a media advisory and that it had been withdrawn. It is a pity for her that Dr G. Venkataraman’s account so gravely, though unintentionally, questions her veracity.

Whether it is more holy to bow to India or to bow to the BBC might also provoke an interesting discussion. Perhaps, in contorting fashion, UNESCO has tried to bow to them both.

The Public Petition

Information on the Public Petition for Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

About the Petition For Official Investigation Into Sathya Sai Baba Cult

(Note: You may prefer to proceed straight to the Petition):

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization  

There is a Spanish version available:  

PETICIÓN PÚBLICA PARA INVESTIGACIONES OFICIALES DE SATHYA SAI BABA Y SU ORGANIZACIÓN A NIVEL MUNDIAL)

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