The Great Mental Health Hoax

By James Donahue

I keep seeing web reports that the Bush Administration has a plan to screen all American citizens to determine their mental state.

At first I wrote off the report as another wild rumor floating around on the Internet and something not to be taken seriously. But the story continues to circulate. And I have been thinking about the mind-set of a government bent on stopping terrorists.

Someone like U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who shows personal signs of insanity (personally anointing himself with Crisco and his fear of exposed female breasts on statues in State Department buildings) might think a national mental health screening is a good idea.

Ashcroft and the people around him might reason that a screening like this would expose the would-be terrorists lurking among us. After all, they would think, anyone who would blow themselves up in a crowded public building, bus or on an open street must be nuts.

What he, or they, apparently fail to understand, is that the men and women of the Moslem faith are as devoted to their extreme religious belief system as Ashcroft is to his. And the people willing to blow themselves up in an effort to fight American imperialism are doing it in the name of Allah. They believe they are going to be rewarded for their actions, but in another life. Thus they will not test out as insane at all.

What a national screening like that might do, instead, is put a government computerized peg on the heads of a lot of innocent people who fail to fit within a mold of social conformity. Thus the brilliant minds, the people who would rather take a quiet walk in the woods than attended a crowded and nonsensical football game, and the various social misfits that seek their own path rather than pray to Jesus, could be singled out as enemies of the state.

This is a frightening thought. I find myself fitting in the role of the social non-conformist. But it does not make me mentally ill. It merely means I choose another path for my life.

The whole concept of government sponsored mental health has been a scam on the American public for years. We would all do well to not trust anything generated from the bowels of that branch of our government, even if it comes from state levels.

As a student of sociology in my college years, I think I generated an early mistrust of psychology and for good reason. Humans are generally guided by the society in which they live. Their mental state is often set by the entity living within their bodies. If we learn to drive and lock-out the alien, we can discover ourselves. Few people are aware of this, and never bother to fix their state in life. And since psychologists don’t believe this, their work is no more than high-cost hocus-pocus and of little or no social value.

A few years back, while working as a news reporter on a county government beat, I started uncovering some very dark issues regarding the state-financed mental health department. My probing went all the way to state levels with the help of a relative that worked for the state.

I got close to something sinister. There was a strange telephone call in the night that brought a warning. That very week, the editor of the daily newspaper I worked for ordered me off the mental health story. Even though editors came and went after that, as long as I worked on that newspaper, I was never allowed to write another story about mental health and the things going on under everybody's nose. There was a gross misappropriation of tax dollars occurring when I last looked at that mess. Nothing makes me think anything has changed.

Before I was stopped, my stories began exposing declared psychologists, without any real training or credentials, who were highly paid for “treating” people.

I found that the program mostly was an expensive tax-supported cover-up for a shut down of state mental institutions and the release the feeble minded to private homes in various communities. The staff of reportedly “trained” psychologists and social workers turned out to be no more than a glorified baby-sitting operation, complete with poorly run private homes where the “clients” slept at night, institutionalized day-care programs where the “clients” were supervised by day, and an elaborate busing program that shuttled the inmates back and forth.

We no longer called the feeble minded and idiots and mongoloids what they were. They now were all “mentally handicapped” clients of the local mental health program.

The thought of having untrained and government-paid staff like this turned loose on the mind-set of the nation is frightening. There is a potential here for social control of an extreme that rivals Orwell’s dark dreams from the novel “1984.”