The mental health professions are failing. Those of us who are in the profession know why. To face the reality of what we have done would be too painful, too overwhelming, too damning to admit. Instead, we continue the lies in hopes that vindication will come with the next wonder drug or distraction. Apologists in the mental health fields say we need “a tighter focus on mental health” after the revelations of infanticide in an abortion clinic and mass shooting in an elementary school. A “focus” on mental health is a red herring. It has little to do with real answers, because the mental health professionals have no answers. The focus is on money.
No matter how much they say they want to save women and babies from atrocities like the one that took place at the hands of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, or save children from mass school shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School, actions speak louder than words. As the politicians and pundits shift blame to the lack of mental health funding, it is high time mental health professionals like me talk about the real cover-up going on. Our greed and self importance have harmed countless innocent lives.
I think I know why mental health “professionals” continue to grasp for answers, and have none when it comes to the slaying of innocent children. The mental health profession has been indulged for too long. Here are three examples:
1) The profession promotes a Marxist philosophy that overrides any dissenting opinion, no matter how solid the research to the contrary. Our profession places a higher priority on political philosophy than on the clients’ mental health.
2) The profession has the attitude “We can’t be wrong. We are helping professionals.” I think our desire to help people simply allows us to feel good about ourselves even if our patients don’t improve under our care.
3) The profession is very good at ensuring its practitioners get paid. If a patient fails to improve, that means they need more treatment. It never means that we don’t know what we are talking about.
The tragedies of school shootings and the abortion industry have many similarities. We refuse to abandon our politically correct ideologies. We dodge the real problems. And the mental health industry provides cover for this subterfuge.
In 1970, Israel passed the most effective bill in history preventing school deaths by gun violence—They armed volunteers and administrators in schools. Since that day, they haven’t had a single school shooting—mentally ill, or otherwise. It is naïve to think that Israel magically has less mental illness than the US. They simply have more sensible laws based on what really works, not based on political correctness.
The Israel method would stop the killing.
Likewise, Kermit Gosnell can’t be allowed to upset the politically correct abortion apple cart, he was immune from the health inspections required for every corner diner, for one reason and one reason alone. Gosnell had abortion on his side. Abortion is the Justin Bieber of the politically correct lot. Abortion gets a pass that a corner diner doesn’t get. At inspection time, heads magically turn the other way.
The real answers to these two tragedies are far beyond the competencies of mental health professionals. Real solutions might include limiting abortion to the first trimester and arming teachers to end school murders. Mental health professionals have no real expertise in these areas.
Before university elites will ever even consider limiting abortion to prevent Gosnell-scale atrocities, they will gladly demand more funding to “think” about it. Before university elites will even consider an Israeli model of arming free citizens to protect children in schools, they will advocate gun control: gun confiscation from anyone who ever saw a counselor (think ADHD, PTSD Veterans, temporary depression, anxiety, etc), background checks, and re-institutionalization.
During my time in grad school, I tried to have serious conversations with professors about how little we knew in terms of actual therapies to help those in dangerous situations, and how much we knew about perpetuating victimhood, extending social services, and creating a need in the social services system that would provide gainful employment for the rest of our lives. They didn’t want to discuss whether or not we were helping patients in real ways, or not. Instead, I was taught that conservatism was a mental illness, that personality profiles of Hitler, Machiavelli, and others were fascist which was a result of radical right wing politics (this is historically false—all were leftists believing in big governments and winning their own power by any means necessary). I was taught to diagnose, but not to treat--only to talk. I was taught how to legally protect myself by keeping certain records, and not keeping others that might have been helpful to the patient, but might get a “therapist” in trouble. I was taught mandatory reporting of potential abuse and how it was related to “radical, Christian families in big ways, especially those who home school.”
I, myself, was never taught what to do if I had a case of mental illness that was declining on my hands, other than to medicate. But medications are complicated and many patients don’t want to take them. In that case, we mental health professionals have no idea what to do.
Interestingly, as one who asked too many questions, but was the president of my undergrad honor society, the school faculty saw me as a liability. They knew I was a conservative, and they didn’t want me to pass for that reason. Despite a 3.8 GPA in my first master’s degree program, St. Louis University tried to keep me from passing by failing me in the 11th hour at my oral exam—an exam I later learned was a formality that NO one had ever failed before.
Ultimately, they gave up on failing me because I continued to fight, but I had to leave that school and transfer to another state, so that I could go in “under cover” because it was clear to me that the schools did not like conservatives and did not like students who asked the hard questions about what really worked for those we claimed to serve.
At the new school, I kept my head down and my mouth shut and went along to get along so that I could ultimately receive my second Master’s Degree and PhD. Somewhere about halfway through my second program, I received the initial Masters Degree I had earned from SLU. No one needs two Master’s Degrees, but I was stuck paying for them because the administration at SLU wanted to keep me from ever practicing. This illustrates the extremes these schools will go to, to keep a conservative critic of the field from among their ranks. Conservatives and critics are a danger to political correctness, to entitlement dollars, and to the masquerade that the psychological fields perpetuate.
We can neither treat the seriously mentally ill individual, nor cure a widespread social problem. The reality is that the mental health profession has no idea—NO IDEA what to do to prevent such crimes—because that has never been the focus of the profession. We are marred by political correctness (adherence to the statist ideology) and self proliferation (assuring funding to the field) as its top two priorities.
American mental health professionals will gladly accept the Sandy Hook publicity to say they need more money to figure out what is wrong with the system that turns out the killers of this world. They will use the money to line their own pockets and legitimize their own profession. No cures will be found. Freedoms will erode.
The bloated, selfish, self-proliferating mental health profession needs a house cleaning as badly as the US Capitol. Begin in the propagandized universities. If we let the herring of mental health reform be our distraction, there will be more dead children.