Anti-authoritarians Diagnosed As Mentally Ill?

burtlancast

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In today's world, one very astute way of avoiding discussing issues is by using "anti-"....(labelling words).

I would especially be wary when psychiatrists use this tactic.

Take for instance the member here "frustrated" who made a thread about delayed sleep phase syndrome.
This syndrome is practically never diagnosed properly, and the sufferer is labelled "depressive" by doctors and sent to psychiatrists which are then trying to convince the patient there's something wrong with his mind.( plus they drug him silly).

The patient can see the treatment and the diagnostic dont resolve his problem, thus he tends to research other explanations to his troubles, and leaves the psychiatrist.

He then gets unjustly labelled "anti-authoritarian".

But the core problem is the ignorance and conformism of the medical profession, and the "anti-" labelling behind which they are hiding.
 

4peatssake

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gretchen said:

Interesting that you should bring this forward as I was reading RP's article "Intelligence and Metabolism" again this evening and so reading this article afterward was timely.

This is taken from the article you linked.

Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.

Here's some good stuff from RP.

Ray Peat said:
Education can either activate or suppress mental energy. If it is mainly obedience training, it suppresses energy. If it creates social dislocations, it disturbs mental and emotional energy.

Stress early in life can impair learning, cause aggressive or compulsive behavior, learned helplessness, shyness, alcoholism, and other problems.

He further writes:

Some educators say that their purpose is to socialize and indoctrinate the students into their discipline, others believe their purpose is to help their students to develop their minds. Both of these approaches may operate within the idea that “the culture” is something like a museum, and that students should become curators of the collection, or of some part of it. If we see the culture metaphorically as a mixture of madhouse, prison, factory, and theater, the idea of “developing the student's mind” will suggest very different methods and different attitudes toward “the curriculum”

In a world run by corporation executives, university presidents (“football is central to the university's mission”), congressmen, bankers, oilmen, and agency bureaucrats, people with the intelligence of an ant (a warm ant) might seem outlandishly intelligent. This is because the benighted self-interest of the self-appointed ruling class recognizes that objective reality is always a threat to their interests. If people, for example, realized that estrogen therapy and serotonin-active drugs and x-rays and nuclear power and atomic bomb tests were beneficial only to those whose wealth and power derive from them, the whole system would lose stability. Feigned stupidity becomes real stupidity.

But apart from ideologically institutionalized stupidity, there are real variations in the ability to learn, to remember and to apply knowledge, and to solve problems. These variations are generally metabolic differences, and so will change according to circumstances that affect metabolism. Everyday social experiences affect metabolism, stimulating and supporting some kinds of brain activity, suppressing and punishing others. All of the activities in the child's environment are educational, in one way or another...

In conventional schools (as in conventional society) 10,000 questions go unanswered, not only because a teacher with many students has no time to answer them, but also because most teachers wouldn't know most of the answers...

When questions are answered, curiosity is rewarded, and the person is enlivened. In school, when following instructions and conforming to a routine is the main business, many questions must go unanswered, and curiosity is punished by the dulling emptiness of the routine.

From what I have observed, so-called "anti-authoritarians," - you know, people who question authority - are far more sane than the so-called "professionals" who are doing the "labeling" and peddling Big Pharma's drugs. They too - like the educators - simply don't know the answers and in their ignorance and insanity congregate in their ivory towers clinging to their holy grail - the DSM-IV. :roll:
 

Swandattur

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I had some thoughts just reading the beginning of the article. One is that just having a college degree used to help people get jobs. I guess the reason for this was that you had shown you could be a compliant part of an authoritarian system.
It's funny (peculiar/ not ha ha) that psychologists did experiments showing the weirdness of people's compliance with authority figures like the one in which poor unsuspecting test subjects ended up shocking supposed test subjects, because the authority figures in the white coats said to. Then there was the experiment in which they created a pretend prison situation where some people played guards and others prisoners. It got so traumatizing for many of the participants that they had to call off the experiment. Maybe those experiments were done by sociologists, though. Why haven't these experiments raised questions about authoritarianism in the field of psychology, though?
 

Swandattur

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Robert Sapolksy, who studies stress partly by doing a long running study of wild baboon troops, found that the more subordinate the baboon, the worse his health is. The "Machievalian, backstabbing, bastards" or authoritarian leaders stay in great health as long as they don't eat human food in garbage dumps. So, does this mean that only the miserable lower echelon baboons have high serotonin? I assume these lower eschelon baboons don't qualify for the quote. Actually, I'm sure Sapolsky has data on this. I should look it up. I have seen Robert Sapolsky in the references of some of Peat's articles.
 

Asimov

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My friends grandpa always said "A college degree just proves you're trainable."

Whether he meant that as a positive, or a negative, I'll never know. The last impression I want my resume to give is that I'm "trainable."
 

4peatssake

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Asimov said:
My friends grandpa always said "A college degree just proves you're trainable."

Whether he meant that as a positive, or a negative, I'll never know. The last impression I want my resume to give is that I'm "trainable."

I think there still exists - although likely to be more and more rare these days as indoctrination comes early - those students who learn to work within the system but remain relatively intact. The ones Ray advises to not rock the boat but sail their own vessel quietly without much fanfare, at least not until reaching one's goals.

I actively coach my children (who are now teens) in working the system while I do my very best to fully expose the lies and drawbacks. I've always told my children the truth and some would be horrified by that but I'd rather have them fully awake and aware than the alternative.

I bought and made available to them "The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education" by Grace Llewellyn. They both still choose to attend school and after my oldest began seriously applying specific strategies to work the system ethically, she went from an "average" to "sub average" student (based on school metrics) to now having a 90% average this term in Grade 11.

Her Grade 1 teacher approached me in October 2002 greatly disturbed my daughter had some sort of "learning disability" because she was was not performing the same as the other kids in the class. I think my jaw dropped and I was appalled by her coming up to me in the hallway and making such a proclamation. This was this teacher's first year teaching and she was making such a sweeping judgment of a 6 year old child!

All I've done is coach her and give her strategies and tell her my story about handling school and how fortunately my love of learning remained intact despite my experiences with "formal" education. I am about as anti authoritarian as one can get and I've been diagnosed with mental illness. :lol:

She had a very bizarre (never diagnosed) medical issue in Grade 9 that scared us but she used this experience to completely turn her life around. It motivated her to succeed. It was amazing to watch her build upon this adversity and take charge of her life. At this time, she also began to watch what she ate, began to exercise (not to excess) and is active and fit. And she got a job today! ;)

She has no interest in drugs or alcohol, doesn't smoke and recognizes that the vast majority of her friends are asleep, addicted to machines and lack motivation. She still doesn't have a cell phone and thanks me now for being such a "mean mother." :roll: She now wants a car instead. :lol:

If I had my druthers Ray Peat would be "required" study in grade school.

Ray Peat said:
“More than 50 years ago, I realized that the US culture had become effectively totalitarian, with decorations, and even the decorations were being fixed by the specialists (the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example). I went through a series of graduate studies and projects looking for places where reality could influence the culture, rather than being obliterated by it. The academic culture, though, was rapidly changing for the worse. Over a period of a few years I happened to see a few people recover immediately from what doctors had considered incurable problems, using simple and inexpensive methods, and then I realized that some people were willing to discard their old ideas when those conflicted with useful facts, especially when the useful facts could save their life. I started doing evening and weekend classes in nutrition and endocrinology, seeing health as a way to get reality into the culture. My newsletter grew out of the classes, and that led to answering mail, which is cheaper and easier on the internet.”
 

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