The Mind Benders

Article #3: The Mind-Benders by Kecki R. Sidhwa, N.D., D.O.

When people show symptoms of mental instability or mental sickness, we invariably swallow the old gobbledygook that modern psychiatry with its drugs, injections, electric shock treatments, prefrontal lobotomy or psychotherapy a la Freud, Jung or Adler will right all the wrongs in a few short sessions. But if the truth be told, and it’s time we were told the truth, psychiatry as practiced today is falling apart at the seams.

Both psychiatry and psychotherapy are branches of orthodox medicine. Medicine was once based mainly on magic and still is. Plato, the Greek philosopher, believed that the womb or hysteros had a strong desire to produce children. If it remained sterile for long after puberty, it became temperamental. It started to flow around, and hysteria was attributed to this cause. Hippocrates (the so-called Father of Medicine) prescribed valerian to drive the womb back to its rightful place. In England some physicians still prescribe a mixture of valerian and bromide as a treatment for mentally depressed women. Valerian is a depressant!

Another example of physician—and drug—induced mental and emotional problems was observed in a survey. People who had taken barbiturates for one year or over had chronic psychiatric and physical complaints and made increasing demands for barbiturates. Barbiturates make people more anxious and more depressed in the long run.

Harry Solomon, a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University, banned all barbiturates, and his patients became much more competent. It has been suggested and suspected that the taking of barbiturates addles the brains of young human embryos and affects the intelligence of the child. Yet, hospitals, doctors and psychiatrists prescribe these drugs in order to “cure” depression, insomnia and anxiety. Treatment by drugs is nearly always assumed to be good, both by the physician and the public, until proved otherwise—this takes some proving and some time—meanwhile the damage has been done.

That mental and nervous disorders spring out of our misbehaviour in life and unnatural living habits, as much as physical disorders, has to be drummed into the minds of the public as much as into the medical profession. Bad nutrition; lack of exercise; polluted air; lack of sunshine; insufficient rest and sleep; enervation; and mental and emotional habits; and the taking of drugs, medicines and social poisons like tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa and alcohol, all lead to toxemic tissues, resulting in breakdown of brain cells and nervous tissues.

Instead of dealing with these primordial causes of our lack of well-being, the medical profession doles out pills and/or so many sessions on the analyst’s couch, both causing further trouble, apart from waste of time and money.

No one knows how much illness and death is attributable to alcohol. The middle-course alcoholic has nearly four times as much sick leave from work as does an average person, and his life expectancy is reduced by ten or twelve years compared with the average. In Britain, about 1% of the population, i.e., nearly 350,000 people, are alcoholics, and a quarter of these show mental and physical deterioration. In America, the percentage is higher, 47%. Psychiatrists, with all their panhandling of substituting one stimulant for another, one drug for another, are unsuccessful at stopping people from drinking. So far, physicians have been more successful at causing addiction than at curing it.

The blame for drug addiction of all kinds can and should be rightly laid at the door of:

1. Physicians and the orthodox medical profession for lulling us into a false sense of security by drug dependence;
2. The manufacturers of drugs, alcohol and other poisons; and
3. The government which tolerates and even encourages sale of these commodities.

Drug companies are not charitable institutions. Our aches and pains, our mental discomforts and our insomnia are their gold. Not surprisingly, their most profitable drugs are those that have the public gently but surely hooked on taking them, as they ensure a regular and enthusiastic clientele. The drug companies, the breweries and the tobacco companies all exploit our addiction to various chemicals. The mind-bending process, already started from early childhood, gets its final coup de grace with the stress, strain, rat race, and political and social injustices of our modern-day society.