Brainwashing Is Real and It’s Really Not Therapy

Dear People,

I would like encourage America to make brainwashing illegal. Would you please forward this email to fellow survivors, their families, psychologists, politicians, the media, anyone at all interested….

Brainwashing Is Real and It’s Really Not Therapy

I was a 16 year old pot head. I needed help and my parents decided I should be put in a program. When I mentioned this to a friend he said, “Don’t go Marcus, they’ll brainwash you in there!” I knew better though, there was no such thing as brainwashing. It only happened in cartoons, the cat would brainwash the mice, their eyes became turning spiral pinwheels and they held their little arms out in front of them like zombies. This was brainwashing, it was cartoon fiction and I wasn’t scared. I knew what would happen in there, I’d get help. I was going for therapy.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), all ethical therapy consists of proven, safe and effective practices that a client or client guardian has consented to. This is one reason that the practice of coercive persuasion and thought reform is officially non-therapeutic. The methods used have not been proven to be safe or effective, so why are they legal?

Verbal attack, isolation and forced exercise; food, water and sleep deprivations; communication and toilet restrictions; humiliation rituals, emotional abuse and manipulation are all practices currently employed on a daily basis, as “therapy” for troubled teens. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has acknowledged thousands of reported claims of abuse in today’s behavior modification programs, but no one has yet addressed the technology at work in these facilities. This technology is based on several forms of manipulation. These efforts to manipulate behavior through intentionally inducing stress, are inherently abusive, often violent and many teens have died while subjected to this type of “therapy.”
The APA does not officially acknowledge the existence of brainwashing. There are legal questions and implications that would be very difficult to address. There are also many crimes that could potentially be defended with a plea of “I’m innocent, I was brainwashed!” It’s a can of legal worms. But while focusing on brainwashing’s potential effects on the judicial system, the damaging effects of the process itself have been ignored. There is an overwhelming amount of personal testimony about the negative long-term side-effects that brainwashing can inflict. I personally believe there are also long-lasting physiological changes in the brain that occur when adolescents are subjected to thought reform and behavior modification in an institutional setting.

I believe that the underlying reason for the perpetual abuses in the troubled-teen industry is that the “theory of brainwashing” has not yet been officially “proven.” The technology cannot be banned until it is proven to exist. There is a system at work within the systematic abuses. Until the system itself is identified and dismantled, the tell-tale “symptoms” will persist.
Physical and psychological abuse is built into many of these programs by design. According to several different experts on the subject, the exhaustion and pressure that is induced by sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue and emotional manipulation, “unfreezes” the psychological framework. Through this orchestrated crisis, a new identity is instilled by manipulating the environment and the emotions of the subject to an extreme degree until the “changed” mind of the subject has undergone “re-freezing.” This process requires varied amounts of time according to the individual character of each client, which is why there is no fixed length of time to “complete” this type of treatment.

Much of the power of this process relies on the secretiveness surrounding it. The methods work best if the intention behind them is not revealed to the subject. Understanding the principles and dynamics involved in this behavioral technology, reduces their effectiveness. Could you give an informed consent to treatment if it were described like this?… “The process then is the abrupt dissolution of the structure of intentionality by an electrochemical discharge in the brain, leaving the brain in a state of malleability for the construction of a new belief structure by which to guide behavior.” (Walter J. Freeman, Chaotic State Transitions in Brains As a Basis For the Formation of Social Groups, 1995) While these underlying principles and dynamics are not revealed to the client or the legal guardian, a consent to treatment is impossible.

The effectiveness of coercive thought reform upon teens has not been proven and the ethical questions have been quietly ignored. The debate within the APA has centered around various legal implications but questions about the potential for harm have been avoided. By ignoring the unproven “theory of brainwashing,” the APA has been ignoring the damage done by the practice of brainwashing.

These practices have never been proven safe and as an unproven treatment, are technically experimental. Also, according to several prominent experts that I’ve spoken with, there has not been any research on the long-term side-effects of this type of treatment upon adolescents. Perhaps the most relevant research is a European study that was recently conducted, which showed that 80% of adult survivors of institutional child abuse in Ireland, still suffer from psychological damage.

Adolescents who have been subjected to “brainwashing” were often witness to a heartbreaking cruelty. These stories combined tell the larger story of an invisible monster, sold to parents and the public as therapeutic growth. “Brainwashing” is not therapy, it’s refined torture. Merely addressing the symptoms of the process has enabled the abuses to continue.

-Marcus Chatfield

(please write and call the APA if you have any questions or if you would like to share your brainwashing experiences with them.)
executiveoffice@apa.org
public.affairs@apa.org
pracgovt@apa.org

APA Main Telephone (800) 374-2721 or (202) 336-5500
APA Ethics (800) 374-2721 or (202) 336-5930

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-08-146T GAO Report on Deaths and Abuses in Troubled Youth Programs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_control General information on “brainwashing”

http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/FreemanWWW/manuscripts/V1/95.html Walter J Freeman, Chaotic State Transitions of the Brain, 1995

http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/pdfs/data/1996/150-18/15018-13.pdf Walter J Freeman, the physiology of thought reform

http://www.meadowhaven.org/liftoncriteria.pdf Lifton’s conditions for thought reform

http://www.csj.org/studyindex/studymindctr/study_mindctr_singer.htm Margaret Singer’s Conditions for thought reform

http://www.factnet.org/rancho1.htm information about coercive persuasion

http://www.ninehundred.net/control/ Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind

http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/info_researchers.asp?Subject=Academic+Disputes+and+Dialogue+Collection%3A+Preface Michael Langone, Preface to Academic Disputes and Dialogues Collection

http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/UN-declaration/ 1959 UN Declaration of Rights of the Child

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=36428&Cr=children&Cr1= Request From UN to the US and Somalia to Ratify the Rights of the Child

http://www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing3.html APA Memorandum on Brainwashing 1983
http://www.rickross.com/reference/apologist/apologist23.html APA Task Force Report

http://www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing4.html APA Memorandum on
Brainwashing 1986

http://www.apa.org/news/press/statements/juvenile-justice.aspx APA Statement on reforming the Juvenile Justice System 2010

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Brainwashing more info on “brainwashing”

http://www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/pdfs/CICA-VOL5-03.pdf 2010 Report on Irish adult survivors of institutional child abuse

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-911 Congressman George Miller’s proposed legislation to establish federal regulations

Placebo effect beats God, Prozac

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

This is the story of three drugs. Except one is not really a drug at all and is merely an illusion, a nifty construct, an intense belief that it might be a drug, even though, as mentioned, it is very much not. We just think it is. Isn’t that strange? Wonderful? Both?

The three drugs — which, sorry, are not so much drugs as they are modes of comprehending our own weird little minds, needs and inherent psychoses — are presented here by way of two recent studies that essentially reinforce what similar studies have been declaring for years and decades and, in the second case, since the ancient mystics suckled wild plants in the forest, licked God, found the source of the soul, and said, you know, holy f–.

Let’s lay it out: According to a major new overview study, all of America’s beloved wonderdrug antidepressants — all the Prozacs, Paxils, Effexors, Zolofts of the world — are essentially useless and don’t really work worth a damn.

Wait, that’s not quite right. They can sort of work just fine, help millions of people and have enjoyed tremendous success. But there’s a huge caveat: Statistically speaking, all these drugs work no better — and often are far worse for you — than sugar pills, fake pills, placebos that patients only think are powerful, mind-altering compounds, but which in fact are no more chemically miraculous than a peppermint Altoid.

Have you heard this before? Of course you have. The placebo effect has been known for years. Decades. Forever. It’s one of those hotly controversial, yet irrefutable medical/psychological wonders that we don’t have the slightest clue how to unravel, much less leverage. And hence, it just freaks us the hell out.

Nevertheless, the recent findings, the result of one of the most comprehensive studies in recent years, are still nothing short of astounding. A sugar pill works as well as a hit of Prozac, if the patient believes she’s getting the latter? It’s just all sorts of confounding, in how it reveals how the power of the mind is still, to this day, barely understood, untapped, wildly feral, far more brightly powerful than we know what to do with.

It also reveals just how deeply invested massive drug companies are in convincing everyone they can “cure” depression with powerful, often dangerous chemical alternatives, how fearful doctors are of refuting this, how reluctant patients are to understand the difference, and how, above all else, nothing is as it seems.

Problem is, it ain’t just the pills. The placebo effect — hereby defined as the sheer force of will and belief, of the mind’s (and heart’s) ability to heal and nurture itself sans external assistance — applies to all sorts of constructs in our tortured modern world.

Organized religion? Hell yes. Is your life flawed and painful? Are you guilt-ridden and terrified of the world’s swarm of demons and daggers? Of course you are, sinner. Here, have a giant, unknowable deity. Give to it all your faith, hope, belief, money, angst, sexual shame. Believe in it wholly and without doubt, to the point where you lose a sense of yourself and your true divine source, forever and ever, amen.

There now. Feel better? Are miracles starting to happen in your life? Do you feel uplifted and joyful? Are you healed? It’s the power of Jesus! It’s God in your life! It’s because you have blind faith! No no no, it’s not you, silly. Even though, in fact, it totally is. Shhh.

Of course, what we call the power of faith is just the power of the mind, soul, the Self, rather harshly rerouted through some external conduit that relieves us from having to figure s–t out for ourselves. After all, it’s just much easier to give it all over to the god, the pill, the product, than it is to delve deep into one’s own dark and inscrutable psyche. Same as it ever was.

But whatever works, right? If expensive pills genuinely help millions, who’s to argue? If devout belief gives you stability and a sense of place, what’s wrong with that? It’s all well and good… until you factor in the cost.

The organized religion racket rakes in hundreds of billions a year, and requires a massive toll in guilt, shame, dogma, homophobia, war, pedophilia and sexual hysteria. The antidepressant market runs $10 billion a year and makes millions into casual addicts, convincing many they are powerless to get better without chemical assistance.

The placebo market is, at last check, absolutely free. Man, they just hate that.

Behold, study number two. This research reveals another time-honored truth that science is only now beginning to barely get a grip on, albeit nervously, suspiciously. Few want to claim it or ponder what it might mean to how we define illness, consciousness, God, the sanctity of the DSM-IV.

This research reveals, once again for the millionth time, that various psychedelics like MDMA, LSD and psilocybin really do, in fact, have a rather stunningly helpful — and often permanent — effect on the health and well-being of numerous patients, almost universally and without fail.

(Did you hear that? That’s the sound of a million mystics and healers, teachers and gurus throughout history, sighing and rolling their eyes).

Of these drugs’ power to dance and frolic with the brain’s synapses, there is absolutely no doubt. This is no placebo effect. This is no sheer force of will. Psilocybin, for one, is an E-ticket to a shifting dimension, a dance on the blurrier edges of definitive reality. Ecstasy is a widening out, a warming up, an opening into the cold, cold heart of the human species.

Patients who get to dabble with these fine plants and chemicals are reporting astonishingly positive, almost impossibly curative reactions. Lives are forever altered. Ideas of the soul, heart, human connection forever reset and restored. Possibilities expand, PTSD contracts, hearts open, fear and inhibition dissolve. Love expands. And man, the PTB hate that, too.

Do you know why? Two reasons: One: No one holds the patent to these drugs. No one company stands to rake in billions if, say, MDMA is somehow decriminalized. Two: Science loves reliable data, anchor points, the flawed sturdiness of the scientific method. But when it comes to hallucinogens and psychotropics, it’s all just a delightful, slippery mess. The swim and swirl of consciousness, it would appear, just refuses to be pinned down.

The grand upshot: We are but infants. We hammer and prod at the brain, the self, inundate it with chemicals and blast it with terminology to try and get it to behave and respond in somewhat predictable ways. And yet, the ancient plants, the mystical connections they offer to that original source seem to prove one irrefutable point: We still have a long, long way to go to get back to where we started.

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Battle for the Rally

Pot Crusader Marc Emery Jailed in Canada Pending Extradition

By Phillip S. Smith, Drug War Chronicle. Posted October 2, 2009.

Canadian “Prince of Pot” Marc Emery turned himself in to Canadian authorities Monday and is in custody in Vancouver pending extradition to the United States. The Canadian Justice Minister is expected to sign extradition papers within a matter of weeks, and then Emery will be driven to the border, handed over to US authorities, shackled, and sent to a federal detention center in the Seattle area. Shortly after that, Emery is set to plead guilty to a single count of marijuana distribution, with an expected sentence of five years in a US federal prison.

Emery and two employees of his cannabis seed selling business, Greg Rainey and Michelle Williams, were arrested in July 2005 by Canadian police honoring a US arrest warrant charging the trio with marijuana distribution and conspiracy for selling seeds to customers in the US. They faced decades or even life in prison under draconian US federal marijuana laws. Earlier this year, Rainey and Williams accepted a plea bargain in which they pleaded guilty to a single count and were sentenced to probation in Canada.

With his employees’ legal situation resolved, Emery then cut his own deal. But that doesn’t mean he’s changed his ways. At a press conference outside the BC Supreme Court in Vancouver Monday just before he turned himself in, Emery was in typical “Prince of Pot” form.

“I’m disappointed in my government, but very proud of my ‘Overgrow the Government’ revolution,” Emery told supporters. “This terrible, insidious prohibition has been propped up by Liberal and Conservative governments for 45 years. It’s a public policy with no public benefit, and it has caused so much misery, heartbreak, and torment for so many Canadians.”

Emery urged supporters to lobby the Canadian Justice Ministry to not sign his extradition order — something that is admittedly unlikely — or, barring that, to make the government pay at the polls in the next election. “And if they do sign they must be punished in the next election,” he said.

In the event that he is imprisoned in the US, Emery is urging supporters to demand that he be returned to Canada to serve his sentence. “I would be out on the streets in a year from now if I am transferred back to Canada as a first-time nonviolent offender in the Canadian system,” he told the crowd.

Emery showed no remorse — in fact, quite the opposite. “I’m proud of everything I’ve done; I only regret that I wasn’t able to do more,” Emery continued. “I did sell those seeds so people would overgrow the government, and I gave away $4 million that kick-started a worldwide movement. I’m the ‘Prince of Pot’ for a good reason. And there is no victim here; there are no dead people in my revolution.”

“Plant the seeds of freedom. Overgrow the government, everyone,” Emery yelled as he was led away by sheriffs.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Emery carved out a niche for himself as a cannabis entrepreneur and legalization advocate in Vancouver, but his activism extends back to his native Ontario, where, as a libertarian bookseller, he brought cases against Canadian censorship laws that then blocked magazines such as High Times from being sold in the country. After moving to Vancouver, Emery set up the Cannabis Culture shop, Cannabis Culture magazine, and the Marc Emery Seed Company.

A constant gadfly to law enforcement and drug warrior politicians on both sides of the border, Emery’s mouth, his money, and his commitment to the cause enabled him to become one of the most well-known voices worldwide for ending pot prohibition. Emery founded the BC Marijuana Party and crisscrossed Canada to spread the word about “Overgrowing the Government,” and profits from his seed sales help fund drug reform groups and activists in both Canada and the US.

That didn’t win him any friends with the DEA or US federal prosecutors, who indicted him on marijuana distribution charges after busting some American growers who had obtained their seeds from him. Then DEA head Karen Tandy crowed over his arrest, describing it as a blow to the legalization movement, but then quickly backtracked in the face of accusations that his arrest was politically motivated.

While Emery is behind bars awaiting extradition to the US, his friends and supporters are mobilizing. Their immediate objectives are three-fold: to urge the Justice Minister to refuse to sign the extradition papers, to urge the US sentencing judge to give him a short or non-custodial sentence, and, in the event he is sentenced to prison time in the US, to urge the Canadian Public Safety Minister to approve his transfer to a Canadian prison.

To that end, supporters have set up a web site, No Extradition, with instructions on how to contact the relevant authorities. They are also planning vigils at Emery’s current BC jail digs and a demonstration in Seattle when he arrives there for sentencing.

“We’re planning it right this second,” Seattle Hempfest executive director Vivian McPeak said Thursday. “It’s kind of difficult without having a date certain, but we’re trying to get it so we’re ready to go when it happens. There will probably be a rally at the federal courthouse,” he added, noting that protest information would be posted on the Hempfest web site after tomorrow.

“This is terrible,” said Jeremiah Vandemeer, an editor at Emery’s Cannabis Culture magazine, which recently switched from print to an all online format. “It is an affront to Canadian sovereignty that Marc will be handed over to the US government and its prison system. If he committed any crime, he should have been prosecuted here in Canada.”

In fact, Emery has been prosecuted in Canada for his seed sales, back in 1998. In that case, he was fined $2,000, with not a day of jail time. Since then, the Canadian government had been happy to ignore his seed sales and accept his tax payments from his seed business.

“It’s terrible to see my friend and boss put behind bars for something in which there are no victims,” said Vandemeer. “It’s difficult, but we’re getting through it, and we all have that extra resolve to work that much harder to get him back home.”

Emery’s young wife, Jodie, will be playing a key role, both in keeping Cannabis Culture and the Cannabis Culture Shop going and in waging the campaign to win his release. “Our campaign is about Free Marc Emery, but this is really about freeing everybody in prison for cannabis,” she said Wednesday.

“There is a lot of pressure up here, and different political actors are starting to voice their support,” she said. “There is all sorts of activism, and it’s just starting. We will start holding vigils outside his prison beginning Saturday and going on every day after that. We’re having postcards made today that people can send to flood the ministers with mail. I’m hearing that the Minister of Justice’s office is being flooded with phone calls, and people are pledging that they will call every day.”

But while Jodie Emery the cannabis activist is planning the campaign, Jodie Emery the figuratively widowed wife is feeling the pain. “It’s horribly rough,” she said. “During the day, I can keep busy. It’s only when I get home and I’m alone and I realize that he’s gone that it really hits me. I cry a lot,” she confessed. “Even if you think Marc is a loudmouth or got what was coming to him, think of what it does to the people who love him.”

Sensitized by her experiences, Jodie Emery is broadening her activism. “This has motivated me to start speaking up for the families of prisoners,” she said. “There are hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders in prison right now, nameless and faceless except to their loved ones. I want to speak up for all the drug war widows. We want to put faces and names to the people suffering endlessly year after year.”

The historical record will show that Marc and Jodie Emery know how to wage a campaign of agitation. Now, the question is whether they can use those skills to raise awareness not just of the injustice done to Emery, but to all the rest of the drug war incarcerated.

Source: http://www.alternet.org/story/143062/pot_crusader_marc_emery_jailed_in_canada_pending_extradition_to_us?page=entire