THE PSYCHIATRIC COUNTER-NARRATIVE

The attitude toward human rights inside so many professional circles and businesses across the USA is not just disappointing. It is appalling. It reveals a culture that has lost any moral literacy.

How does this happen? There are only two explanations, and both are damning. The first is ignorance, a profound and willful ignorance in dealing with human suffering, dressed up in the tyrannical quackery of psychiatric stigmatization. Slap a label on a person, declare them unstable, unreliable, disordered, and you no longer have to examine what was done to them. The second explanation is pure sadistic psychopathy. The pleasure taken in watching someone be punished for refusing to be abused. In truth, it is often both at once.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the ritual of blacklisting.

A highly qualified, capable person walks out on an abusive situation to literally save their own life. That should be understood as an act of courage and basic self-preservation. Instead, what follows is a frenzied excitement among other professional concerns and businesses to join in. Calls are made. Whispers are passed. Resumes disappear. Doors quietly close.

When they do this, they are sending a very clear message, whether they have the honesty to say it aloud or not: we endorse such ignorant barbaric behavior ourselves, so don't bother walking into the front door of our place too. If you will not submit to abuse there, you will not be tolerated here either.

Then there are the cases where the targeted individual does have some assets, and employers use that as their excuse, insisting he does not need the jobs anyway. But if those assets are not exceptionally high, perhaps from an inheritance that was already largely stolen from him by vultures feeding off these same issues, then what follows is a painful depletion one step at a time in a literal fight for survival. The targeted warrior is forced to fight daily just to survive, suffering a horribly low quality of life on the fringes of society, while others with his same aptitude, his same intelligence and capability, are out golfing and boating and traveling as they age, trying to enjoy some of their one life in a world where this is what America promised them.

And let us be honest about what a total blacklist really is, and what its polite cousin, deliberate underemployment, really is. Forcing a person of high intellect and capability into either no work at all or only into jobs far below their capacities at unusually low wages is not just unfair. It is not just discrimination. It often amounts to black and white murder. It is a slow, methodical destruction of a person's livelihood, health, housing, and future, executed in a way that psychopaths can get away with in a disgustingly corrupt America.

This is the same America that keeps insisting there are laws against all of this. The statutes are on the books. The posters are on the break room walls. But those laws are never enforced. Worse, it increasingly appears that sadistic cops and agents do not merely look away, they often assist with the abuses, providing the muscle and the intimidation that private blacklists need to function with impunity.

Do not expect federal and state employers to be better. They are no better. In fact they are often the model for this cruelty. Their answer is blunt and institutional: that's why we have mental institutions and jails and the filthy streets. If you do not accept abuse, if you dare to save yourself, then you belong in one of those three places.

That answer is itself tantamount to the methodical murder of good people. Good, capable, decent people whose only mistake was being born in the USA, a mistake they could do nothing about.

It is a shock to the human soul that a committee such as the Nobel committee could ever consider giving a Nobel Prize to any psychiatrist for any reason.

In view of the inherent nature of cruelty in the discipline at large, such an honor is not just misplaced — it is obscene. No other field in modern medicine has done more to take modern civilization down toward the darkest paths of human existence imaginable, all while draped in the white coat of progress.

Psychiatry writes off human potential and human lives faster than you can squash cockroaches running across the floor to survive. A label is affixed, a life is filed away, a person is reduced to a chemical imbalance that was never proven and a prognosis that was never meant to include recovery. The cold efficiency of it would be admired by any authoritarian regime in history.

Consider the esoteric, so-called achievements of psychiatric researchers. Year after year we are treated to irrelevant experiments on the human brain from their ivory towers — colorful brain scans, novel neurotransmitter theories, genetically-informed subtyping that leads precisely nowhere. These achievements have no practical implications for the millions upon millions of victims of psychiatric tyranny. Of those victims, the psychiatrists have no intention of ever looking back.

Where are the apologies for the lobotomies, the forced sterilizations, the warehousing, the chemical straitjackets? There are none. Because the path forward with these unethical, cruel barbarians and quacks is to simply continue to glorify the next experiment, the next molecule, the next breakthrough that never breaks through for anyone but their own careers.

The entire enterprise is man-made. This side of reality is man-made.

A small-town General Practitioner or Naturopath who concentrates on holistic, natural healthcare can do more for the mental health of a patient in a single conversation — with suggestions of good nutrition, sunshine, exercise, sleep, purpose, community, meaningful work — than a psychiatrist ever considered doing in a lifetime of practice.

But to the psychiatrist, such approaches are too simple. They want to know why these professionals bothered going to professional school if they're not going to pull out that script pad and prove their worth with prescriptions for toxic drugs coupled with harmful, stigmatizing labels. Labels meant to impress the public on the morning talk show circuit.

It is harder, apparently, to learn to say the words schizophrenia and bipolar disorder again and again and again than it is to say holistic, sunshine, good nutrition, and exercise. One requires four years of memorizing a manual of human suffering turned into billing codes. The other requires actual care for a human being.

We are seeing the darkest sides of what mankind calls progress unfold with psychiatry year after year, as the doomsday clock also strikes closer to midnight. We call it advancement while we drug our children into submission, sedate our elderly into silence, and tell our most sensitive and creative souls that their pain is a pathology rather than a rational response to an irrational world.

Civilization does not fall only with bombs and missiles. It falls when we outsource the soul itself to a profession that has monetized despair and declared itself the expert on what it means to be human.

The growing divide between the ultra-wealthy and ordinary people is not merely an economic problem. It is a moral crisis. While wealth itself is not inherently wrong, the concentration of immense financial power alongside widespread insecurity, homelessness, and hardship raises serious questions about the values that shape modern society.

Money is a human invention, not a law of nature. The economic systems governing opportunity and prosperity are created by people and can be changed by people. Yet extreme inequality is often defended as a form of "survival of the fittest," suggesting that those who rise to the top deserve their position while those who struggle somehow deserve their fate. Such arguments ignore inherited advantages, unequal opportunities, political influence, and systems designed to protect existing power.

Natural selection may explain biological evolution, but it does not justify human injustice. When people lose jobs, opportunities, financial stability, or social standing because of discrimination, institutional retaliation, or exclusion, their suffering is not evidence of inferiority. It is evidence of a system that has failed to uphold fairness and equal dignity.

One of the most troubling aspects of concentrated power is its ability to use institutions as instruments of social control. Throughout history, individuals who challenged prevailing political, economic, or social interests have sometimes faced efforts to discredit, marginalize, or silence them. In some cases, psychiatric labeling has been criticized as a tool that can be misused to stigmatize dissent, undermine credibility, or isolate individuals from social and professional participation. Legitimate mental health care serves an important purpose, but psychiatric labels should never be weaponized to dismiss arguments, suppress criticism, or deny people their basic rights and opportunities. When any institution is used to silence rather than understand, injustice follows.

The problem extends beyond psychiatry alone. Economic power, professional gatekeeping, political influence, media narratives, and institutional authority can all be used in ways that create barriers for individuals who challenge entrenched interests. Whether the mechanism is blacklisting, discrimination, social exclusion, or reputational attacks, the result is often the same: the concentration of power at the expense of personal freedom and human dignity.

Humanity has achieved remarkable technological and scientific progress, yet moral progress has often lagged behind. We have developed extraordinary tools for prosperity and innovation, but we still tolerate systems that leave millions struggling while a privileged minority accumulates unprecedented wealth and influence. Too often, society celebrates financial success while ignoring the human cost borne by those pushed to the margins.

A truly advanced civilization would measure success not merely by stock prices, corporate valuations, or the fortunes of billionaires, but by how effectively it protects freedom, dignity, opportunity, and due process for all people. It would reject the idea that power confers moral superiority and recognize that no person's worth can be measured by wealth, status, or institutional approval.

The central question facing humanity is not whether some individuals will achieve greater success than others. The question is whether society will continue to allow wealth and power to become so detached from responsibility that the suffering of ordinary people is accepted as a reasonable cost of maintaining the status quo.

Progress should serve humanity, not dominate it. A healthy society protects the vulnerable, welcomes legitimate dissent, restrains concentrated power, and ensures that institutions exist to serve people rather than control them. Until those principles become central to public life, inequality will remain more than an economic issue. It will remain a symptom of a deeper failure to recognize the equal dignity and value of every human being.