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by James Corbett
from
CorbettReport Website
"WA State Bill will send Political Enemies to Psych Wards" blares a recent headline from Kurt Nimmo's Substack.
The bill in question, Washington State Legislature House Bill 1333, "Establishing the domestic violent extremism commission," would, according to its critics,
Although there is nothing in the bill itself declaring that "political enemies" of the state will be sent to "psych wards," the idea that psychologists and psychiatrists might be employed on such a "domestic violent extremism commission" to diagnose political dissidents with some form of mental disorder is not a misplaced one.
In fact, as it turns out, there is a long and worrying history of psychiatry being used as a weapon to silence those declared to be enemies of the state.
And, more worrying still, recent events have demonstrated that - far from being a relic of the past - the pathologization of political dissent is becoming even more widespread than ever before.
The Bad Old Days
The history of psychology is, to a large extent, the history of cruel and unusual punishments meted out by rulers on political dissidents.
That psychology has always been a convenient tool for the ruling class to wield against dissenters may seem like a controversial observation at first glance.
But this is precisely what the most mainstream of establishment sources tell us... when they're talking about the establishment's enemies.
In 1983, for example, Dr. Walter Reich was afforded prime journalistic real estate in America's newspaper of record, The New York Times, for a lengthy report on "The World of Soviet Psychiatry."
After reporting that the 1977 congress of the World Psychiatric Association in Hawaii had voted to condemn,
Reich then spends the majority of the rest of his 6,000-word article contrasting the American approach to mental health, in which,
The Soviets, we are told, had taken the honorable study of the human mind and weaponized it, turning it into an instrument of political oppression.
Lest the reader be left in any doubt as to his message, Reich states it clearly later on in the piece:
To be sure, Reich isn't wrong.
The horrors of the Soviet psychiatric system - in which political dissidents were routinely diagnosed with "sluggish schizophrenia," psychiatric hospitals were used as temporary prisons during periods of protest, and troublesome rebels were kept in medically induced comas or drug-induced catatonic states for extended periods of time - has been well documented in numerous mainstream sources, both popular and academic.
But these horrors were given their most poignant expression in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
As Reich correctly observes in his report, the Soviet pathologization of dissent does indeed serve as a warning that psychiatry is vulnerable to being misused "wherever it is practiced."
But, by a funny coincidence, these concerns only ever seem to come up when psychiatry is being "misused" in countries that are on the US State Department's enemies list.
Thus, there are no shortage of sources that will tell you about:
...and any number of similar examples of psychiatric abuse by governments at war with or in the crosshairs of the US government.
Often excluded from this analysis, however, are the horrific abuses that psychiatrists in the West have inflicted on their patients in the name of state security.
For example, while the history books will rightly condemn the horrors of the Nazi eugenic sterilization program, they seldom explore the roots of that program.
As it turns out, those roots were in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
What's more, Ernst Rüdin - the director of the also-Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and one of the key architects of Germany’s eugenics program - modeled the Nazi eugenics legislation on America's own "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law."
In fact, America's first professor of psychology, James McKeen Cattell, helped bring the eugenics pseudoscience to the shores of America in the first place.
Having befriended Francis Galton, the progenitor of eugenics, during a trip to England in 1887, Cattell returned to the US with an enthusiasm for the idea.
He later wrote a letter to Galton bragging,
Still further back in history, Benjamin Rush - one of the founding fathers of the United States and the man officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as the "father of American psychiatry" - made early contributions to the weaponization of psychiatry by inventing a number of mental disorders to pathologize dissent.
The most notable of these made-up disorders was "anarchia," a type of madness Rush defined as,
And what did this "father of American psychiatry" prescribe for those he deemed to be suffering from mental illness?
Well, for starters, he,
He also invented two mechanical devices for the treatment of the insane:
Rush's apprentice, physician and outspoken germ theory critic Samuel Cartwright, made his own contribution to the field by inventing a disorder he named "drapetomania, or the disease causing negroes [slaves] to run away":
Yes, the history of psychiatry is replete with examples of political dissidents, unruly populations or other "social undesirables" being labeled as insane and sent to the madhouse... or worse.
But that was then, many would be inclined to argue. This is now.
Surely psychiatry isn't used to suppress dissent any more, is it?...
The Bad New Days
...It sure is! And I'm not just talking about psychiatric repression in some backward, evil dictatorship like Russia. (Although, to be sure, there is that, too.)
No, once again, it is the "liberal," "enlightened," "free and democratic" West that is leading the way in weaponizing psychiatry against the masses.
And, incredibly, the wielders of this psychiatric weapon don't try to hide the fact, but have instead actively sought to codify it in their "bible."
Since 1952, the American Psychiatric Association has published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, as a guideline for the classification and diagnoses of mental health issues.
Commonly referred to as the psychiatric diagnostic bible, the DSM, according to the APA itself,
Critics have long questioned the influence that Big Pharma has had in pressuring the APA to diagnose more and more behavior as "abnormal" in order to prescribe pharmaceutical interventions to a greater and greater percentage of the public.
Concerns over Big Pharma's influence on the creation of DSM are not trivial.
In 2012, a study led by University of Massachusetts-Boston researcher Lisa Cosgrove noted that 69% of the DSM-5 task force members had ties to the pharmaceutical industry, including paid work as consultants and spokespersons for drug manufacturers.
On certain panels, the conflict of interest was even more profound: 83% of the members of the panel working on mood disorders had pharmaceutical industry ties, and 100% - every single member - of the sleep disorder panel had,
If these task force members' goal is to make sure that more and more pharmaceuticals are sold, then by every measure they've been remarkably successful.
Recent surveys indicate one in six American adults report taking a psychiatric drug, such as an antidepressant or a sedative. Worryingly, the number of children being prescribed antipsychotic medications like Adderall and Ritalin has continued to increase decade after decade.
But more worrying still is the way that this increase in antipsychotic prescriptions has been justified - by the invention of a new "mental disorder" called Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine, who has spent decades ringing the alarm bell about the ways in which his profession is being used to repress legitimate political dissent, explains in his 2018 book, Resisting Illegitimate Authority:
Levine goes on to point out that the front line of this assault on the human psyche are the children who are diagnosed with a mental disorder for demonstrating previously normal childhood behavior:
But the pathologization of those who show signs of "oppositional defiance" is not confined to children.
Levine also observes, citing his own clinical experience:
As we shall see next week, the weaponization of psychology against those independent, free-thinkers who tend to question authority is not some vague, amorphous concern about a Big Pharma boondoggle that is hurting people in the pocketbook.
Rather, this weapon is now being used against critics of the biosecurity agenda and others who dare point out that the globalist, transhuman emperor is wearing no clothes.
But if it is true that the study of the mind has been weaponized and that that weapon is being deployed against conspiracy realists, the obvious question then becomes . . .
Who Loaded the Weapon?
In October 1945, George Brock Chisholm - the man who would go on to serve as the first Director-General of the World Health Organization and the man who helped spearhead the World Federation for Mental Health - delivered an incredibly candid lecture in which he laid out his plans for steering the profession of psychiatry in a bold new direction.
Published in 1946 as "The Reestablishment of Peacetime Psychiatry," the lecture includes a proclamation that psychiatrists should take it upon themselves to rid the population of the concept of good and evil entirely:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chisholm's call to action was taken up by the British military.
The "challenge" of "freeing the race" from the "crippling burden of good and evil" was taken up by British military psychiatrist Colonel John Rawlings Rees, the first president of Chisholm's World Federation of Mental Health and chair of the infamous Tavistock Institute from 1933 to 1947.
In 1940, Rees gave an address to the annual meeting of the UK's National Council for Mental Hygiene in which he laid out in predictably militaristic terms how this ambitious plan for reforming the public psyche was to be achieved.
In "Strategic Planning for Mental Health," Rees - after claiming that the psychiatrists of the council,
He then launches into a startling confession:
Then Rees brazenly proclaims that,
So what were Rees and his fellow travelers really aiming at in their "fifth column" campaign to "attack" the professions and propagandize the public?
His true intentions are revealed through his work for the British military - including his alleged drugging, poisoning and mesmerizing of Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer of the Nazi party who was captured and held by the British for decades after making a still-unexplained solo flight to Scotland in 1941 - and through his work at the Tavistock Institute, where he attempted to mould public opinion in the UK to his liking.
As The Campaigner magazine explained in a Tavistock exposé published in 1978:
That work, the article elaborates, included advising Rees' superiors how they,
In other words, Rees' work centered on the Problem-Reaction-Solution method of mass social control that Corbett Reporteers will be very familiar with by now.
It should be no surprise, then, to learn that Rees' research heavily influenced the operations of a budding young intelligence service that was then forming in the United States: the Central Intelligence Agency.
Indeed, the CIA has always been interested in weaponizing psychiatry as a way of achieving success in their covert operations.
In fact, the CIA even openly advertises job opportunities for psychiatrists to,
But when most people think of the CIA and weaponized psychiatry, they think of MKUltra and mind control.
As even the Wikipedia article on the subject admits, the CIA's "Project MKUltra" was,
There is much that the public still does not know about this project, its forerunner programs, Project Bluebird and Project ARTICHOKE, and the depths to which agents of the US government sank to discover ways of manipulating, melding, erasing or reprogramming individuals' psyches.
But what we do know about the program is chilling enough.
One series of experiments, presided over by Sidney Gottlieb, involved administering LSD to unwitting Americans, including mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes.
This included "Operation Midnight Climax," in which unsuspecting men were drugged and lured to CIA safe houses by prostitutes on the CIA payroll.
Their sexual activity was monitored behind one-way mirrors and was used to study the effect of sexual blackmail and the use of mind-altering substances in field operations.
Another experiment, dubbed MKULTRA Subproject 68, was overseen by the esteemed psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron.
This subproject involved Dr. Cameron using LSD, paralytic drugs, electroshock therapy and drug-induced comas to attempt to wipe patients' memories and reprogram their psyche.
When brought to light, the program was identified as an attempt to refine methods of medical torture for the purpose of extracting information from unwilling sources and was condemned.
Lawsuits regarding the blatantly illegal experimentation conducted by Cameron continue into the current era.
Although MKUltra "officially ended" after its exposure in the 1970s, the CIA has not stopped employing psychiatrists to find new and innovative ways to psychologically torment their opponents.
In May 2002, Martin Seligman, an influential American professor of psychology and a former president of the American Psychological Association, delivered a lecture at the San Diego Naval Base explaining how his research could help American personnel to - in his own words,
Among the hundred or so people in attendance at that lecture was one particularly enthused fan of Selgiman's work:
Naturally, Mitchell's interest in Seligman's talk was not in how it could be applied to help American personnel overcome learned helplessness and resist torture but rather how it could be used to induce learned helplessness in a CIA target and enhance torture.
As it turns out, Mitchell's theory (that "producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands") was bogus.
More experienced interrogators objected at the time, noting that torture would only induce a prisoner to say what his captor wants, not what he knows.
What those interrogators didn't understand was that extracting false confessions from prisoners was actually the point of the CIA torture program.
It was "confessions" extracted under torture, after all, that went on to form the backbone of the 9/11 Commission Report, with a full quarter of all of the report's footnotes deriving from torture testimony.
The Worst is Yet to Come . . .
Yes, from mind control experiments to torture programs to brainwashing and lobotomization, there can be no doubt that the governments, militaries and intelligence agencies of every major nation have devoted considerable resources to the weaponization of psychiatry over the course of the past century.
But, as it turns out, one of the simplest and easiest techniques for controlling dissent is simply to pathologize it.
As we are beginning to see, simply declaring resistance to the status quo to be a form of mental disorder can be an exceptionally powerful tool for silencing opposition.
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