The Mental health Matrix
For many the traditional Western mental health system has failed them.
I was taught that the reason that people weren’t getting better with mental health treatment is because some people were just “resistant to treatment.”
In actuality, it’s because the options provided don’t work the way they’re sold to us that they work.
Large bodies of long term research, that speak to a very different story, have gone unpublished by prominent agencies like American Psychiatric Association (APA), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI). The same agencies that recommendation treatment protocols for “disorders” like Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD), Depression, Anxiety, and ADHD.
Though the recommended protocols of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and pharmaceuticals are taught in graduate level training to become a therapist and social worker, the story this unpublished literature speaks to should be considered a crime.
The research speaks to the detriment of long term pharmaceutical use - as well as the possibility of every diagnosis healing without being medicated.
I think back to the clients I’ve worked with who reported an increase in symptoms and were then prescribed more medication or a higher level of care like Intensive Outpatient or Shock Therapy. When I hear their complaints I see a very different story now.
As I learned about the industrialization and modernization of mental health in it’s truest form, I begin to understand how we’ve landed here today. The story begins over a hundred years ago in Germany.
Long before the modernization of Western medicine.
The Modernization of medicine
In the late 1800’s, German scientists began researching infectious diseases. Their findings led to a thrilling concept: “If the invading organism is killed, the disease could be cured.” The problem, most scientists concluded, was that any drug toxic enough to kill the invading organism, would surely hurt the host.
Research from German scientist Paul Ehrlich suggested otherwise. He found that it was possible for the dyes he worked with to stain a single tissue in the body, leaving the rest untouched. After this he focused his work on manipulating chemicals to do the same. Selectively target the disease causing agent, leaving the rest of the human cells untouched.
In 1909, Ehrlich succeeded. He had found a drug, which came to be known as salvarsan, that eradicated the syphilis microbe from infected rabbits without harming the rabbits at all.
A magic bullet he referred to them as.
On the other side of the world, at this time in history, John D. Rockefeller had gained control over 90% of the oil refineries in the United States through the Standard Oil Corporation. Ehrlich’s success inspired other scientists to search for more of these magic pills against other disease-causing microbes. The scientific community became enamored with the potential that petrochemicals offered modern medicine.
In 1910, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation helped to fund the Flexner Report of 1910. Commissioned by the American Medical Association (AMA), the Flexner Report changed the nature and process of medical education in America. Proprietary schools were eliminated and the biomedical model became the gold star of medical training.
The Flexner report ultimately called for a standardization of medical education, and the American Medical Association (AMA), the same establishment that commissioned the report in the first place, would eventually become the only establishment to approve medical school licensure in America. The natural remedies and ancient medicinal wisdom that humans had been using for centuries, across countries and cultures, was now deemed “unscientific quakery.”
Following the Flexner report’s recommendation, Congress legally implemented allopathic medicine as the practicing standard of care. Rockefeller and Carnegie donated tens of millions of dollars to medical schools across the country, on the condition these schools only teach allopathic medicine, helping to systematically remove any mention of plant-based natural treatment, along with any teachings on nutrition and diet from medical education curriculum.
The petroleum influence now extended into professional education and the general public standard of care, paving the way for the model of psychiatry medicine and mental health we have today.
The STORY OF BIG PHARMA
The model for creating magic bullets was simple enough. Identify the cause or nature of the disorder and develop a treatment to counteract it. The creation of psychiatric magic bullets though, happened in reverse. There wasn’t a scientific breakthrough in the cause of the disorder that led to the discovery of the pharmaceutical itself.
Robert Whitaker details this beautifully in Anatomy of an Epidemic.
“As for the drugs, we discovered that there was no scientific breakthrough that led to the introduction of Thorazine and other first-generation psychiatric medications. Instead, scientists studying compounds for use as anesthetics and as magic bullets for infectious diseases, stumbled upon several agents that had novel side effects. Then, over the course of the next thirty years, researchers determined that the drugs work by perturbing the normal functioning of neuronal pathways in the brain. In response, the brain undergoes “compensatory adaptations” to cope with the drug’s mucking up of its messaging system, and this leaves the brain functioning in an abnormal manner. Rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brains, the drugs create them. We then combed through the outcome literature and found that these pills worsen long term outcomes.”
And the unpublished long term literature details just that. That people do worse, long term on all categories of psychiatric medications, than if they were never medicated - including antipsychotic for schizophrenia.
THE PUBLIC HEALTH IMPACT
Seeing the long term efficacy for treating the health of the general public not being taken into consideration makes it easy to understand why the mental health system has so many flaws - it was designed that way, to keep people as consumers.
The mental health and medical establishments are for profit corporations, each feeding into other for profit corporations - including the Federal and State Governments.
When this modernization of medical and mental health was created, it was pushed into academic settings that upheld the notoriety of said system. Rather than it being famous for a bad quality or deed, the propaganda pushed a narrative of “trust us, we are the experts,” leading to an entire generation that began the Western societal trend to blindly trusting those with degrees and titles.
In 2008, the APA acknowledged that the underlying cause of mental illnesses are unknown. Even today, researchers don’t exactly understand what causes these manifestations to occur. And yet, pharmaceuticals, which are made from petroleum, are the second largest industrial complex in the world, generating almost 1.42 trillion dollars in 2022, behind the military industrial complex.
With the amount of available mental health treatment we should see less disability and more people living fulfilling lives. Unfortunately that is not what we see. As mental health awareness and access increases, so do disability rates.
Rather than mental health awareness, it’s time for a movement to depathologize. To begin understanding our human experiences not as biological problems or illnesses that are remedied with pharmaceuticals, but rather our responses are indicative of our environment, thoughts, and behaviors.
It is no measure of success to be healthy in a profoundly unhealthy world.
Our human experience deserves so much more than that.
