Are Independent Thinkers Mentally Ill?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the official handbook of the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM constantly adds new “mental disorders,” while dropping Establishment-approved disorders like homosexuality.
by Mark Nestmann
DO YOU QUESTION authority? Fail to accept conventional wisdom? Lose your temper when you hear a politician make a promise that you know he or she can’t keep?
If so, you may be mentally ill, according to the most recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In this revision, psychiatrists hope to add dozens of new mental disorders. Unfortunately, many of these so-called illnesses target people who merely think or behave differently from the majority population.
A case in point is “oppositional defiant disorder (ODD).” DSM defines ODD as “an ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Symptoms include losing one’s temper, annoying people and being “touchy.” Other “disorders” include antisocial behavior, arrogance, cynicism and narcissism. Sounds like many of my readers!
While diagnosis of ODD “victims” focuses on children, there’s no reason why ODD can’t exist in adults. Indeed, ODD can evolve into “conduct disorder” (CD), which DSM defines as “wherein the rights of others or social norms are violated.”
Uh-oh. So violating “social norms” is now a mental illness as well.
Let’s connect the dots, shall we? There’s a long and sordid history of governments using psychiatry for political repression….
Laws in most states allow child protective services agencies to forcibly medicate your children. Indeed, if you fail to administer drugs ordered by a physician or have your children submit to vaccinations, you can be imprisoned.
As the Washington Post observed:
“If seven-year-old Mozart tried composing his concertos today, he might be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated into barren normality.”
The conversion of personality differences into psychiatric disorders, and the forced medication of children, is a dangerous trend….
I’d prefer a different approach: institutionalizing the psychiatrists that came up with all these new disorders. Perhaps we could call their condition “overmedication psychosis.” And those of us with ODD, CD, or who simply don’t like the government telling us how to live our lives could breathe a bit easier.
Read the full article at Sovereign Society
Normopathy is a recognized affliction.
I’ve actually read the entire DSM-V (well, I largely skimmed the paraphilias) and can attest to this potential for abuse that seems to be written into it. I haven’t read the DSM-IV, so I don’t know everything that has been changed. There is clearly an assumption though that blind obedience to authority is ‘normal’ and thus ‘healthy’. At best an example of what Nietzsche noted about those in a sick society perceiving their normal as healthy, at worst (and I assume the worst of humans– quite reasonably) it is setting the stage for the use of psychology/psychiatry to be used to declare dissidents mentally ill as was done in the Soviet Union. You are hearing the rumblings of this already with us “anti-maskers” (i.e. those of use who can do… Read more »
Hence the importance of having respectable order in a society. Otherwise its quality apes are pretty much kept in captivity by the other apes. The mere risk of this happening suffices to make any healthy person paranoid a little as a natural defense.
The current Mozarts must aim their creative genius at establishing this Order first and foremost, otherwise any other aim is futile, obviously. You need not to be obstructed, invaded and violated to produce art, or anything for that matter.