Artists harmed by psychiatry

Found this pdf on Psychbusters – Artists who were harmed by psychiatry – https://h11.protectedsite.net/files/7513/artists_EN.pdf

You can also find the html version here: https://www.mental-health-abuse.org/harmingArtists.html.  Here is an excerpt:

“The true story about the pain, confusion and the crushed artistic dreams that psychiatry (and its cousins psychology and psychoanalysis) have brought to the artistic community is one that must be told and recognized.” — Chick Corea, 11-time Grammy Award-winning jazz musician

In recent decades we have all mourned the untimely deaths of great artists who enriched our lives, yet left before their work was done. Luminaries of literature, the screen, the theater and the concert stage, names such as Ernest Hemingway, France’s great writer Antonin Artaud, jazz singer Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence, Phil Hartman and many, many more.

Faced with even this partial list, it would be easy to form the impression that the lives of artists are unavoidably tumultuous and that for some, the pressures of success bring demands too great to be borne. It would also be easy to believe that to be a successful artist you must be neurotic or some sort of tragic figure.

None of this is true. In each of the cases above, hidden influences worked to ensure the deadly outcome. The truth is, each of these great artists and many of the others who have left us were offered “help.” Instead they were betrayed and placed on a path which assured their destruction.

This betrayal came through the direct or indirect influence of psychiatrists or psychologists, who claimed they would help but were, in effect, a destructive influence that left these artists dreadfully damaged— or dead—after their foundations of strength and certainty were torn away.

Today there is an added urgency that this message be heard and understood, for the assault upon artists of every genre has only increased in both volume and efficiency. The weapons now include an array of deadly drugs that masquerade as therapeutic cures, just as the prefrontal lobotomy once did. In Hollywood, the mecca of the entertainment industry, those mindaltering and addictive psychotropic drugs are exacting too high a cost in creative lives.

Quite apart from the devastation being spread within the ranks of artists themselves, we must not forget: Artists create the future of our culture. Is this the future we face? One in which we will follow these leaders of public opinion into the brave new therapeutic world of stunted creative personalities, ruined families, wasted lives and self-destruction?

If this seems alarmist, then review the figures below—they show what the future holds unless some drastic changes are made quickly: Currently, 17 million children around the world are prescribed mind-altering psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants that both United Kingdom and United States drug regulatory agencies have warned can cause suicide and violent behavior. Indeed, the increasing incidence of school shootings and violent crime among teens can be traced to the proliferation of these drugs being prescribed them. Millions are also prescribed stimulants that are more potent than cocaine.

Among these millions, consider how many potentially great artists will never fulfill their destiny? And how will our culture suffer from their absence?

We have mourned the great artists we have lost too soon. Let’s not grieve for more.

Artists harmed by psychiatry include Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Vivien Leigh, Frances Farmer, Ernest Hemingway, Stevie Wright – subjected to Deep Sleep Treatment in Sydney Australia, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Kurt Cobain(Nirvana), Stevie Nicks(Fleetwood Mac), and many others.

You have to look at it. It is quite a history lesson. You’d think that artists, or at least film stars, live privileged and pampered lives. Not these artists, at least not when psychiatry became involved. Their lives were very tragic. 

The story of Frances Farmer 1914-1970 really broke my heart. https://www.mental-health-abuse.org/harmingArtists15.html

The story of actress Frances Farmer’s life was portrayed by Jessica Lange in the 1982 movie “Frances.” It is a story of the savage, brutal and unforgivable destruction brought upon one of the most talented actresses of her time by psychiatrists.

Farmer was a beautiful screen and stage actress whose career lit up Hollywood and Broadway in the 1930s and 1940s. By age 27, she had appeared in 18 films, three Broadway plays and 30 major radio shows. She was compared to the great Greta Garbo.

Upset over a string of failed relationships and stressed by career demands, she was also addicted to amphetamines prescribed to keep her weight under control. Farmer was committed to a psychiatric institution in 1943. It was the ruin of her career as she spent the next seven years in mental institutions and was forced to undergo brutal and unworkable electroshock and drugs. She was also subjected to 90 insulin shocks. When she tried to escape, psychiatrists punitively administered more ECT in an effort to break her defiant and rebellious will. When this failed to turn her into a “model” patient, she was given “hydrotherapy”—stripped naked and thrown into a tub of icy water for six to eight hours. Unable to muster any resistance due to her drug-induced stupor, she was raped by orderlies and rented out as a sex toy for local soldiers: “One of the most vivid recollections of some veterans of the institution would be the sight of Frances Farmer being held down by orderlies and raped by drunken soldiers.”

Farmer’s last “treatment” was at the hands of Walter J. Freeman, psychiatry’s czar of lobotomy. Frances Farmer never regained her abilities. She realized that the psychiatrists had been “systematically destroying the only thing she had ever been able to hold onto in life—her faith in her artistic creativity.”

She died at the age of 57, destitute and her spirit broken.

“Never console yourself into believing that the terror has passed, for it looms as large and as evil today as it did in the despicable era of Bedlam. But I must relate the horrors as I recall them, in the hope that some force for mankind might be moved to relieve forever the unfortunate creatures who are still imprisoned in the back wards of decaying institutions.”  — Frances Farmer

David Kaiser, trained psychiatrist, makes a very valid point I believe.

http///www.mental-health-abuse.org/harmingArtists9.html 

David Kaiser, a medical author who is trained as a psychiatrist, has condemned the DSM criteria: “This is essentially a pseudoscientific enterprise that grew out of modern psychiatry’s desire to emulate modern medical science.”

This doesn’t mean that people do not have problems; mental travail and upsets exist. But as Dr. Hagen points out, “Unhappiness is a problem; it is not a disease. Low self-esteem also is not a disease. Eating too much is not a disease, and neither is eating too little. And, despite a huge lobby to the contrary, drinking too much alcohol is not a disease either … the psychological establishment has defined virtually all less-than-desirable behaviors, from hatred of first grade to serial rape, as psychological diseases, and represents itself as uniquely able to provide the necessary ‘therapies’ for them.”