Psychiatry in Shambles: Ketamine and the Death of Mathew Perry
Psychiatry’s Yen for New and More Dangerous Drugs and its Concomitant Disavowal of Common Sense
By
David Gottfried
And so Mathew Perry died in his sauna. Another celebrity dies under suspicious circumstances. In a few weeks, another loon will kill a few or a couple of dozen people at a school or a shopping mall. Then, in another few weeks, another celebrity will die. Then, another loon will shoot up some small town and give it its 15 minutes of fame. The news commentators -- nothing more than gossips and yentas and fishwives who help Americans get their cheap thrills by being voyeurs of other peoples’ sorrows -- will utter useless, purposeless platitudes about the tragedy and waste of it all.
They will say a few specific things. One of the stupid commentators will say something about the need for more mental health services. That’s a very politic thing to do. Saying you are for mental health is so very au courant, is really good for a woman’s resume (sort of like Rosyln Carter feminism, strong but with a soft, magnolia voice) and is sure to get lots of votes or likes or social media followers.
The Shambles of Psychiatry
While people chant their hosanas to mental health and seeing shrinks and giving the mentally ill medications that can cause everything from senility to diabetes, they seem to forget something.
More people are seeing shrinks, and taking more meds for emotional sicknesses, than ever before, but Americans keep getting sicker:
Our suicide rate keeps going up.
The percentage of people living alone keeps going up.
The percentage of people on social security disability keeps going up.
The percentage of people who never married keeps going up.
The percentage of women, who imagine they are really men, has been skyrocketing (And the feminists told us they knew what women needed.)
The percentage of children who are not toilet trained, by age 5, keeps going up.
The percentage of children who wet the bed keeps going up.
And when airline stewards tell passengers to comply with essentially inoffensive regulations, more and more passengers go ballistic and attack the airline steward.
I submit to you that since more and more people are getting crazier and crazier, and that since this craziness seems to increase with the amount of psychiatric care the nation receives, it is high time that every aspect of psychiatry be assessed anew, everything from the conflicting theories they posit about the cause of emotional aberrations to the contradictory treatments they prescribe for those aberrations.
Why is it so hard for people to accept that a board-certified specialist who went to Harvard can err and err spectacularly. We know that medical doctors often err. Eleanor Roosevelt was killed by the excessive use of corticosteroids which masked the signs of a tubercular infection. Likewise, JFK came from a very wealthy background, and had no shortage of ivy league doctors and not one of them diagnosed his Addison’s disease – it was only diagnosed when he traveled to England and saw doctors who were, presumably, less jaded and jaundiced by the great American capitalistic rat race which turns once fine professionals into money-grubbing bastards.
Eleanor and JFK suffered physical illness. Psychiatry is infinitely more ambiguous and questionable then physical illness. When one has appendicitis, we can see and palpate and at times even smell the engorged appendix. By contrast, psychiatrists might contend that one has a super ego dominated psyche. However, no one has ever touched a super ego. Because psychiatry is so much vaguer and nebulous, we should be on guard for lots of miserable patient outcomes. 1
I suppose someone is going to say that my doubts about the efficacy of psychiatric interventions should be disregarded because I am a mere lawyer and have no degrees in psychiatry.
However, I submit that sometimes only a non-expert can truly understand the failings of experts. An expert is often not equipped to investigate his field just as the NYC Police Department is unfit to investigate whether it used excessive force in an arrest. An expert has spent a lot of money getting a certain education, has spent a lot of time getting certain training, and has devoted a lot of time in the service of his profession and its dogma. Therefore, it is against his economic and professional interests for him to objectively reevaluate the dogma his profession upholds. For example, for years Freudian analysts said homosexuality was rank and patent pathology. They were afraid to question their beliefs because to admit that they were wrong is to implicitly admit that their professed excellence was illusory and that they are not entitled to their fees. 2
Depression: The Causes and the Cures Staring You in the Face, and Psychiatry’s New-Found Relucance to Recognize that Emotional Harms can Create Emotional Ills.
One day, when I was a child, I was sulking around the house, and I sought the counsel of the forbidden fruit: My Mother’s Magisterial and Menacing Library.
Almost by chance I swallowed up “Ego, Hunger and Aggression,” authored by Fritz Perls. It was about 180 degrees from the womanly psychiatry of “The View.” It bristled with angry logic. It was German. It was Jewish. It was breath-taking. It makes me realize why I often found Anglo-American philosophy and letters as bland as porridge, scotch eggs, and Shepards Pie. Perls’ acerbic sentences twanged my taste buds like caviar.
Among other things, Perls said that depression was anger turned inwards. I sat down and I thought about it, and I realized that every time I had ever been depressed it was because someone had hurt me. I did not feel powerful enough to combat the person who had hurt me so I turned the anger against myself and got depressed. I even realized that suicide had its origins in anger towards others as I thought long and hard about certain people, their ostensible reasons for wanting to kill themselves, and the truth behind the mirage: Their fear of combatting the person who had hurt them.
It occurred to me that I had found the cure for depression. If depression is anger turned inwards, one simply had to turn the angers outwards: Find a victim and beat the crap out of him.
I can’t go into details, as I would arouse too much rage if I were frank, but with my pranks and petty crime I saved myself from death, and I picked my very messed-up 15 year old self off of the mat and graduated college, and graduated from NYU Law School, and argued law in some of the most distinguished Courts in the country until I became ill with two devastating physical diseases.
Of course, doctors can’t tell you that you can cure your depression by beating the shit out of someone. What benefits your private health will sometimes harm the public health, and the sheisters who rule this country are so glad you haven’t begun to distinguish between public health and private health. 3
Years ago, doctors would talk you to death about depression, and if you were a compliant analysand you would learn how to talk all of your friends to death until you had no friends and needed more psychiatric care and made your doctors that much richer as you got sicker.
Of course, the doctors have moved away from talk therapy. That move away from talk therapy started in the 70’s, and the cause was, in part, feminism. Since most of my readers are thoroughly under the witchery spell of Gloria Steinum et al. and loathe my discussions of bitchism (sorry, I mean to say feminism) I will be brief: Talk therapists often found that the origins of psychopathology lay in the triangle of mommy, daddy and baby. Sick Mommies and Daddies could make Babies sick. Feminists were enraged: Mommies are women, and women are perfect. Ergo, mommies are perfect and can never make babies sick. Hence, talk therapy had to stop and everybody had to get Prozac, which can give you a limp dick (I am sure that giving guys limp dicks sent a shiver of delight through the normally ice-cold blood of sterile and sardonic female psychiatrists), and when Prozac became passe, they started playing with deadly shit such as Ketamine.
The Crime that is Ketamine
I knew a board-certified psychiatrist who was receiving Ketamine for depression. Not too long ago, his lover found him at home with over a dozen fentanyl patches affixed to his body. He was stone cold dead.
It is high time that people realize that treatments are often not very well scrutinized before they are prescribed, and it’s getting harder and harder to scrutinize treatments because of legal and political trends which are designed to make Big Pharma Richer:
For Starters: The Supreme Court in the Medtronics case ruled, a few years ago, that if the FDA rules that a drug is safe, no state court can award anyone a malpractice suit for injuries sustained on the grounds that the drug was unsafe; an award for Plaintiff “offends” the authority of the FDA which said the drug was safe. However, it’s so very easy for a drug company to get anything past the FDA because the drug company attorneys are paid twice what the FDA attorneys and scientists are paid, and the employees of the FDA want to jump ship and work for better-paying Big Pharma.
And with respect to medications for the emotionally troubled, some of the most irksome drugs and treatments have always been pushed.
Electric Shock Treatment, aka electro convulsive shock therapy, was first used, in the United States, in Bellevue in New York City. Prior to its debut in New York City, it had been used in only one other venue: Mussolini’s Italy. I knew a 16-year-old black boy who had gotten shock therapy. After a few treatments (He had many more to go), he could barely communicate, did not know the meanings of simple words such as egg, beef and knife, and he had been a student at one of New York’s Specialized Science High Schools, Brooklyn Tech. He never went back to school.
Because psychiatry is so much vaguer and ambiguous, the law makes it harder to sue a psychiatrist than a doctor who treats physical illness. (Otherwise shrinks would have to pay a mint in damages.) A psychiatrist can avoid liability if he can show that his treatment conformed to the guidelines set forth by any respectable minority school of psychiatrists. A doctor defending against malpractice in the case of physical illness must show that he conformed to the guidelines espoused by the majority of doctors.
Also, experts very often are so closely tethered to the corpus of knowledge of their profession that they are oblivious to the ways in which phenomena, extraneous to their profession, can influence phenomena within their profession. For example, Norman Podhoretz in “Breaking Ranks” said that political analysts and pollsters underestimated the strength of Eugene Mc Carthy, Robert Kennedy and George Mc Govern in the 1968 and 1972 presidential primaries because they were oblivious to the youth movement, rock n roll and the spirit of rebellion and how it served to boost certain anti war candidacies.
For example, in March of 2020, as Covid exploded in New York City, the media, at the urging of governmental authorities, said that people did not need a mask. The media and the government knew this was a lie. Your personal health would be boosted with a mask. Hence, from the perspective of private health a mask made sense. However, there were not enough masks to go around at the onset of the pandemic and public health mandated that laymen not have masks so all available masks were given to medical practitioners. Ergo, public health called for dissuading laymen from using masks.