Speculative Fiction Short StorIES

After the Great Nuclear War of 2035, there was no longer a map, only fragments. Cities were glass and static. The wind carried names that no longer belonged to anyone. The New American Front had not survived by luck. They had been deep enough - in the mountain, under the salt, behind three blast doors and a doctrine. When they emerged, they declared that survival proved correctness, and that the war itself had been a failure of memory. In 2040 came the Mental Health Cleansing Act. It was written by the Universal Mental Health Council, which was no longer a medical body but an office of state. The Act created a new diagnosis: Psychiatric Resistance Disorder. Its symptoms were listed as nostalgia, dissent, persistent grief, unlicensed compassion, and the tendency to ask what had happened before the war. Agents were authorized to administer the cleanse in the field. A cold vial, a hiss against the neck. People called them white-outs. Afterward, there would be a gap where a life had been. The emptied were loaded onto buses and taken to the retraining camps in the basin, where a filament was laid behind the ear and compliance was taught as if it were breathing. The Council said: never again would objections to the world order be permitted, and never again would anyone remember enough to form one. What remained of love was reclassified. In the Council's new manual, love, compassion, and friendliness were listed as pathological remnants of a dead civilization - atavistic responses unfit for the new era. The manual stated plainly that happiness for those in authority required the total erasure of dissent. Cruelty stopped being a crime and became a metric of health. Even children were not exempt. In the crèches, a child who cried past the allotted window was marked as pre-resistant. The nurses would note it on a chart, and the chart would travel. In 2045, the signal arrived from Galaxy 242p. The Gothics of the planet Urasulus had been watching the ash of Earth for a long time. They were not conquerors in the old sense. They were collectors of order. They transmitted first a single phrase, which the Front translated as *You have perfected what we only theorized.* An alliance was formed. The Front offered the method: how to make a population manageable, how to make forgetting feel like hygiene. The Gothics offered reach. With their field-drives, the Front's doctrine was no longer limited to one ruined planet. It could be extended as far as imagination could project a fence line - Earth and by space, as the proclamation said, "as far as was imaginable at the time." What the Gothics most admired, their envoys said, was the normalization. That the psychiatrists in white coats could stand before a camp and call erasure care, and that everyone else would learn to nod. They also admired the Front's redefinition of human relations. Intimacy had been rewritten by the Council as dominance. Tenderness was listed as deviant. The state produced capsules - small, sealed chambers where the new norms were performed and recorded - and presented the recordings at civic ceremonies as evidence of moral fitness and mastery. Distress was exhibited as achievement. It was called mental hygiene. Those who objected - men who spoke of their mothers and sisters, women who spoke of their daughters, anyone who said this was not health - were given the psychiatric mummification shot. The term was clinical, to make it sound still. They were then transferred off-world. Urasulus became a destination. Front citizens, in their pressed uniforms, took vacations there on Gothic shuttles. The travel brochures showed violet skies and still seas. They did not show the lower levels, where the weakest survivors from Earth - those deemed unfit for retraining - were kept as property, to serve the powerful from Earth and their Gothic counterparts. The brochures called it "service integration." My protagonist - let us call him Eli - was a former archivist for the retraining camps. His job had been to destroy photographs. One day, a photo stuck to his glove: a small girl before the war, holding a dog that was not afraid. He did not throw it in the furnace. He folded it and put it in the lining of his shoe, where the chip could not scan. That night, for the first time in five years, he remembered a lullaby his mother had sung. It was off-key. That was how he knew it was real. The alliance between the New American Front and the Gothics held because it answered each other's need: one needed infinity to enforce, the other needed a philosophy to justify it. Together they built a universe where no one remembered enough to say no. Eli walked to the edge of the camp perimeter and kept walking, the photograph softening with his sweat. He did not know where he was going. There was no map. But he was going in a direction that had not been approved, humming a tune that had been classified as sick. And for a few minutes, that was enough to break total control. Fiction by Dr Harold Mandel DrHaroldMandel.org 

Dr. Howy was a pleasant, mild-mannered holistic country physician in upstate New York whom his patients loved.

He didn't have a big office. He had a small white house with a wide porch, a garden full of tomatoes and sunflowers, and time. He gave his patients time. He talked to them about sleep and sunlight and good food and long walks and the dogs they loved. People drove an hour to see him because he actually listened.

His fiancee, Ms. Keo, was a pretty Korean pop star and model. Her life was flashbulbs and airports and stadiums, jetting around the world. What she loved more than anything was getting away to the countryside in New York to be with Howy. She would take off her makeup, put on an old flannel shirt, and sit on that porch for hours saying nothing at all.

Then Dr. Howy took on the mainstream medical establishment.

He had watched for years as psychiatry was elevated as the pinnacle of progress. When a Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist was celebrated for research that had zero relevance to the actual suffering of people — another irrelevant experiment on the human brain from an ivory tower — Howy finally blasted it publicly.

He wrote what no one else would write. That a small-town GP or naturopath who prescribes nutrition, sunshine, and exercise does more for mental health than a profession that writes off human potential faster than you can squash cockroaches running across the floor to survive. That their so-called achievements have no practical implications for the millions of victims of psychiatric tyranny they never look back on.

It was the truth. And for that, they came for him.

The psychiatrists and their supporters in the profession didn't debate him. They planned their retaliation in the form of a whisper campaign. Emails between department chairs. Calls to the medical board. Concerned colleagues saying they were "worried" about him. Alleging he was manifesting mental instability with the nature of his online attacks against psychiatry.

He was railroaded. Evaluations. Insinuations. The very system he had criticized was now being used to label him. Though he never lost his license — since he himself never actually did anything wrong and his credentials remained in good standing — they made it clear: stay quiet, or we will finish you.

It got even meaner.

Dr. Howy and Ms. Keo were invited to a poolside cocktail party in LA by a Hollywood crowd the wealthy psychiatrists hung out with. It was supposed to be a peace offering. A networking event. Keo didn't want to go.

At that party, Ms. Keo had drugs dropped in her cocktails by psychiatrists and other doctors.

She woke up in a dazed state in a bedroom upstairs, in tears, her dress torn, realizing she had been grossly assaulted sexually by a group of men. What happened to her in that house was spoken about afterward in whispers, the way people had whispered about what was reported to have occurred in the Cornell frat scandal — something everyone knew about and no one would ever be charged for.

She didn't call Howy right away. She got in her car afterward and drove it off a high cliff into the ocean.

Dr. Howy was devastated. He hardly survived all of this.

In the end, as a broken man who nevertheless maintained his professional credentials in good standing, he turned to online activist medical and human rights journalism. From that same small white house in the country, he writes now. About the tyranny he saw. About the price he paid for telling the truth.

He spends his free time now with his dog, Buzz. Buzz sleeps at his feet on the porch where Keo used to sit.

His heart was too broken to fall in love again.

Fiction by Dr Harold Mandel

Dr. Howy was not the kind of doctor people expected to make enemies. He was warm-hearted, brilliant in the old-fashioned sense — he listened, he looked at diet, sleep, trauma, community, purpose, the whole person. He had a small holistic practice that never turned anyone away, and a habit of saying plainly what other doctors whispered about: that psychiatry, as an institution, had built an empire on quackery and abuse.

He wrote it at first in careful, footnoted essays. He named the history — the Nobel given for lobotomy, the revolving door between universities and industry, the way the poor and the outspoken were always the first to be labeled and the first to be broken. The essays quoted the commentary he had published — about how the top Universities had been tarnished by giving academic cover to charlatans in white coats.

That is when the retaliation started.

Referrals dried up. A hospital privilege review was opened and closed with no finding, but the rumor remained. A whisper campaign followed him online. He could live with that.

He could not live with what they did next.

Ms. Liu was his beloved, an activist journalist. Sharp, fearless, funny, the person who had believed in his work before anyone else. She was investigating the same network of clinics herself. They invited her to a cocktail party — a networking event for health reporters, they said. She went to report.

At that party, according to the police report Howy would later read until the paper wore thin, her drinks were drugged and she was sexually exploited by several psychiatrists in attendance. It was not an affair. It was not consent. It was a planned degradation, meant to humiliate Howy through her and to destroy her credibility as a journalist.

Weeks later, videos of that night — taken without her consent — were leaked online. Her face, her name, her work, all attached. The comments were exactly what the men who leaked them knew they would be.

Liu cracked. The woman who had faced down city officials and hospital lawyers could not survive being turned into a spectacle. She died by suicide not long after the videos spread.

Dr. Howy was devastated. The grief hollowed him out in a way no professional defeat ever could. He sat with her family. He handled the calls no one wants to handle. And he understood, finally, that the system he had criticized did not just destroy minds with drugs and labels — it destroyed people socially, deliberately, when they threatened it.

He left the practice of medicine. Not because he was forced out — his credentials remained intact, his license clean — but because he could no longer work inside a system that protected those men. He became what Liu had been: an activist online medical reporter.

He works now from a small apartment, investigating abuses, archiving stories from victims who write to him because they have nowhere else to go, publishing on online. The money is tight. The psychiatrists he exposed cost him almost everything he had saved — in legal fees, in lost practice, in the sheer cost of staying alive while grieving.

His life is hard now without Liu. He still sets a second coffee cup down in the morning out of habit. But every article he publishes carries her byline in his mind, and every exposure is his way of saying what he could not say in time: that the victims are not the fringe of human existence. They are the best of us.

Fiction by Dr Harold Mandel