AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

Modesto Anarcho: How is civilization linked with mental illness within modern society?

John Zerzan: Durkheim in the 19th century found that civilization and cities in particular greatly increase suicide and insanity. The correspondence is as easy to see as the correlation between Global Warming and industrialization: the former is a function of the latter. We are all damaged. More and more so, more transparently so. As you say, who doesn't have close friends who suffer from severe depression, anxiety, has thought seriously of suicide, etc.? Domesticated life is increasingly barren and desolate and this is registered in so many sad ways.

The Wingnut's Liberation Project (WLP) has now been in construction (piece by piece) since October of 2006. Nobody is claiming any credentials or is claiming any "professionalism" here. Just another average working class Joe/Joan that suffers from depression (without giving it a conventionally institutionalized label) and has years under their belt fighting addiction(s)/substance abuse(s).

What is "political"? What does it mean to be "political"? To act in a "political" way? One of the most significant aspects of the social and cultural movements of the 1960's in America, Europe, and across the world was to explode a rigid and narrow definition of "political" which—due partially to a legacy of marxian concepts—reduced it to a byproduct of economics. By seeing the need to understand and to respond not only to imperialism and to racism, but to the authoritarianism of our schools and factories and to the sexism that defined many of our most intimate relationships, the confining boundaries of what had constituted the political became more and more obviously inadequate. We could no longer only one-sidedly examine and criticize a world of structures and powers and inequalities that were external to us. Neither politics-asvoting-electing nor politics-as-simple-and-necessary-response-to-economics could move us to revise our scant attention to the quality of our daily existences.

Too many people have been screened and labeled with a false diagnosis (1). Far too many have died from the use of psychiatric drugs which were prescribed after they agreed to be screened. Antidepressant drugs carry FDA-mandated warnings stating that taking them could cause increased suicidal thinking and behavior (2). Many psychiatric drugs are known to cause violence, hallucinations, addiction, heart attacks and sudden death. (3)

Schools are temples for TeenScreen, and other screenings now run by the priests of the God known as “Drug”. They carry out their sacred ritual with devotion and make sure that no priests or ministers of other creeds or faiths offer and do help. Drug is a jealous God; spiritual help is now forbidden, and help for the real diseases of the body are not looked for and are left without real help.

Even as the unindicted war criminal Donald Rumsfeld persists in the totally-discredited fiction that the U.S. military doesn't torture, the American Psychological Association (APA) provides cover for its uniformed professionals to continue to devise torture plans for inmates at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and perhaps other secret prisons of the far-flung American empire. Mimicking the Pentagon lie model, the APA recently uttered a gratuitous self-serving pronouncement that participation in torture by its psychologist members is forbidden, while at the same time failing to modify its more permissive Code of Ethics to reflect such high piety.

While unfunded individuals and grass-roots groups are screaming at the top of their lungs about psychiatrists drugging our children based on made-up diseases, drug companies run hourly television ads to spread the false message of chemical imbalances.

Psychiatrists claim that people who experience certain feelings or behaviors are sick, that they are "mentally ill" with bio-chemical imbalances of the brain. These feelings and behaviors are organized into lists, and their symptoms are promoted as "disorders" in order to align with a medical model of disease.

Our next generation of children is in grave danger. TeenScreen is working insidiously in schools to find children who can become the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry's next cash cow. Bolstered by Bush's very stupidly named "New Freedom Commission", TeenScreen is
being pushed secretly into schools. This may be good for the drug business but is very bad for our children and, factually, for the future of this entire society.