Ever since I began psychiatric therapy 45 years ago, I was told - both in words and in deeds - that psychiatry was going to help me find "real" cures, as opposed to the mere "crutches" and "copouts" that evil "drugs" could afford me. This sounded plausible enough at the time since my elders - both in words and in deeds - had been telling me from grade school that "drugs" were "dope" and "junk" and that they "were not the answer" to anything.
It took me a lifetime to realize that I had been sold a bill of goods.
Psychiatry has no cures for me, nor should it. I do not need a cure for sadness. No one does. Sadness is part of the human condition and should not be eradicated from life.
The search for cures has always been bad science, based as it is on the search for chemical causes of incredibly complex psychosocial behavior with roots in all sorts of beliefs, upbringing, genetics, and societal assumptions. But the search for cures is even worse philosophy: a philosophy that tells us that it's wrong to use drugs that "merely" cheer one up. This is not some ineluctable truth toward which all rational minds necessarily converge; it's rather a Christian Science prejudice about what constitutes what philosophers would call "the good life."
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason why depression lives on today in America as a so-called crisis: not because people are more depressed than ever but because we have outlawed all the ways in which folks in freer times could have found to "take the edge off" of modern life. Why? Because of some unacknowledged puritanical assumption that it is wrong merely to cheer oneself up, except perhaps by numbing one's brain with alcohol. Other than that, the sufferer is directed to the evergrowing self-help section in the library, which becomes enormous in the age of a Drug War when all the obvious help has been outlawed.
If the coca leaf were legal in America, there would be no depression "crisis." The long-lived Peruvian Indians chewed it daily for millennia and had no existential angst of which historians are aware.
In fact, any drug or therapy that "takes the edge off" is NECESSARILY useful in fighting depression, since relaxation - and, crucially, the anticipation of that relaxation - is known (even by materialists these days) to contribute to overall health and happiness. Let's repeat that: Any drug or therapy that "takes the edge off" is NECESSARILY useful in fighting depression. It doesn't matter how much hot air politicians have expended in damning the drugs in question to hell.
But modern materialist psychology is blind to this once obvious truth. In fact, the naivete of modern psychologists is breathtaking in the age of the Drug War1.
Consider the following sample case and how they would respond to it.
John is an actor with a young family and bills to pay. He's doing great and winning accolades, but he is torn by self-doubt and finds himself purposefully sabotaging his work. This may be a puzzling concept for psychologists, that John would act in ways to sabotage his own career, but it's common sense to the hoi polloi: we know it as "choking." It's that last minute urge to frustrate oneself in the attempt to make a strike when bowling, that last minute doubt on the part of the punt kicker in which, at some level, he's telling himself that he's not the kind of person that makes the perfect punt. As Poe tells us in the Imp of the Perverse, the moment one has such a thought, they are lost. The moment one thinks consciously about what should be a subconscious act, the game is up: the masochistic death cycle has begun. In Poe's case, that might mean that the story narrator intentionally rats on himself to law enforcement; in the athlete's case, it means that the punt kicker intentionally kicks the ball ever so slightly to the right or the left of the usual target.
What is psychiatry's answer to this commonplace psychological phenomenon that we call choking,? Do they provide medications like coca that will help the afflicted individual rise above those impulses, drown them out with positive momentum, and thereby achieve vocational victories in life that will, over time, result in a virtuous circle of achievement, culminating in self-belief?
Oh, no. That protocol is far too obvious. The psychiatrist did not go to school for 8+ years to advocate common sense treatments. He or she will advocate counseling and the right Big Pharma 23 med to "REALLY" cure the "REAL" problems that the bowler or the punter has. Nine will get you ten that the psychiatrist will prescribe meds, which in some superstitious way are thought to "REALLY" cure problems - but he may also suggest a lifetime of counseling for the sufferer, so that, by the time the "patient" is on his deathbed, he may have at least some inkling as to why he is sabotaging himself (which the psych has failed to realize is a universal impulse of humankind, and not some oddball pathology to be treated like some rare board-certified illness).
Of course, this all comes a little late in the day for John, our actor, who has long since had to mortgage his family home, get out of the acting business and settle for a substandard salary as an assistant manager at a chain restaurant. The good thing is, his insurance pays for 80% of his weekly visits to the psychiatrists - those same psychiatrists who have been (ahem) "helping" John for the last 40 years.
Had Robin Williams encountered such treatment in his teens, he would not have been Robin Williams. He may have been a good unhappy consumer, taking SSRIs every morning, but he would not have been Robin Williams, especially as those pills are increasingly known to DECREASE what made Robin Robin: namely spontaneity.
Of course, prohibition and the Drug War work together to make safe use of outlawed substances as difficult and threat-laden as possible, not to mention socially frowned upon. This is why many stars first achieve success using drugs, profiting from that virtuous circle mentioned above, and then badmouth those same drugs in later life to print a trendy book according to the familiar narrative: Great star uses drugs in his youth, only to find out that he could have been just as good - nay, even better - had he been stone-cold sober."
Talk about ingratitude.
But then we're taught to be ashamed of all drug use in America, even if it's safe and rational.
Well, as someone who is just finally coming out of the fog of Drug Warrior assumptions at the end of his life, I call foul. I personally say "Long live crutches! Let's hear it for junk and dope! Let's hear it for treating the symptoms! Let's hear it for establishing virtuous circles! Let's stop curing things that do not need curing, and let's start giving the common sense help that we have denied for ages based on our unspoken puritanical and scientistic assumptions."
The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.
UNESCO celebrates the healing practices of the Kallawaya people of South America. What hypocrisy! UNESCO supports a drug war that makes some of those practices illegal!
Using the billions now spent on caging users, we could end the whole phenomena of both physical and psychological addiction by using "drugs to fight drugs." But drug warriors do not want to end addiction, they want to keep using it as an excuse to ban drugs.
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is a defeatest lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
71% of the depressed have relapses after getting off their meds. Doctors blame this on depression, but increasing evidence suggests that these people are having withdrawal problems.
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.
Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.
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