Fighting Memes!

For The Rome Observer: November 23, 2010

By Elizabeth Szlek, Licensed Mental Health Counselor


Someone recently gave me a book to look at, Carol Kivler’s Will I Ever Be The Same Again? It’s a pretty short book, but the message is very important- in a negative way. What the book amounts to is propaganda, and dangerous propaganda at that. It’s the story of an unhappy woman who can’t face the fact that she is living the American dream, and hating it. She becomes very sad, and then decides to bow to the nudging of the kindly medical professionals and agree to some mind-altering treatments.

I am quite sure that Ms. Kivler is earnest in her attempt to help us all understand her pain in suffering from depression, and is equally earnest to enlighten about the wonders of Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT). Unfortunately, her efforts are blighted by both her scientific knowledge, and perhaps even self-knowledge. In a word, the book represents a view of emotional distress that is not consistent with reality. Ms. Kivler has been fully indoctrinated into the biopsychiatric worldview, and is a mouthpiece for this dangerous and harmful philosophy. I will write more about this view, but, briefly, it proposes that humans are mere conglomerations of chemicals, without souls. All mental distress, in this view, is caused by some unexplainable balance of brain chemicals, and fixing the problem revolves, mostly, around taking psychotropic, or mind-altering medications, or submitting, like Ms. Kivler, to barbaric assaults on the fully functioning brain.

First, I must explain my reaction to her subtitle: “Transforming the Face of ECT (Shock Therapy).” In fact, ECT needs no such transformation. It has always been feared by patients, and rightly so. No one will benefit from embracing this disabling “treatment”, except perhaps the doctors who earn thousands of dollars every time they flip the switch and light up someone’s brain.

Many books have been devoted to this topic already, but to just name a couple: Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, by Peter Breggin, M.D., who is an internationally respected psychiatrist, and The History of Shock Treatment, by Leonard Roy Frank, a patient’s rights advocate, mental health activist, and victim of shock therapy. These books outline in minute detail the negative effects of this brain-disabling method of dealing with people in distress. So, right out of the box, we must face the fact that ECT destroys brain cells. Lots of brain cells!

One example Ms. Kivler failed to include in her pantheon of “celebrities” who have undergone ECT is Ernest Hemingway, who famously blew his brains out after he realized he had suffered brain damage following this “treatment” for his depression. Few among us would every consider seizures as healing events, and neurologists struggle to prevent them in those who suffer them naturally.

There is no credible science to suggest that ECT does anything except kill brain cells, and Ms. Kivler’s “scientific” explanation is ludicrous. If someone feels “better” after ECT, this is by no means any indication that the seizure has “fixed something”. It hasn’t. Perhaps the pain of existence burns less brightly, and this is translated into “relief”. Or, the memory loss that inevitably follows blunts one’s distress to some degree, and that is regarded as “remission”. As Peter Breggin notes in his latest book Medication Madness, people with altered brains are very poor judges of their own mental states, and those with brain trauma are among the least capable of such judgment.

Cui Bono?

This is a legal term, meaning, “whose benefit?” I ask this question of Ms. Kivler. Who benefits from this little tome? I looked at her testimonials, and saw that this was a book supporting (or supported by?) NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. If we get into the book at all, it is obvious that Ms. Kivler has bought their perspective on mental illness, hook, line and sinker. She calls herself a “consumer”, she is not to blame at all for her depression, and shares no part in its genesis, she has nothing to be ashamed of or guilty about, she needs to be on medication forever, she spends a lot of time with others similarly indoctrinated, realizes that she has a chemical imbalance in her brain, and that she has a real illness, called depression. This is the total package of NAMI thinking, and all I can say is: Nah! Nope! No way! Not so! And especially: Ain’t true!

So, who benefits from this propaganda? Not Ms. Kivler, who has sacrificed untold numbers of brain cells to the cause. No, the big winners in this are biopsychiatry and Big Pharma, via the Big Pharma funded NAMI, who spreads their poisonous thinking far and wide.

Fighting the Memes!

I have decided that in future articles I will attempt to disassemble many of the memes currently overhanging our society. Memes are ideas, or thoughts which are disseminated by those in power to sway the thinking and behavior of us all. Memes are a deliberate and distinct form of propaganda.

It takes a lot of work, reading, research and study to overcome the power of the meme. One such meme, obviously, is “Depression is a disease, like diabetes.” This meme has been floating about for years, if nowhere else than in the billion-dollar ads for such poison as Zoloft or Zyprexa. If you will give me a few moments each week, I will try to present some anti-memes to you all. You can certainly disagree with me, but you had better come up with some real science, because I am armed and ready with mine!

I am greatly moved by the suffering, spiritual, emotional and physical, of those around me. I try my best to help people look within and without themselves to find the source of their unease. Very often, it works! What never works is medication for spiritual or emotional problems. But, I hope I will have many weeks ahead to give you all the latest information on an alternate reality I inhabit. It is a place where people are sad, or despondent, not “clinically depressed”. I never used labels for people, such as “schizophrenic”. I call people “overwhelmed”. I believe that we are not mere animals, concentrations of various chemicals which mysteriously interact to make us “depressed”.

No, we are alive and responding to our thoughts, our lives, even our nutrition. There are understandable reasons we become sad. In fact, in reading Ms. Kivler’s early chapters, it became apparent to me that she was less than thrilled with her endless motherly duties, and lack of personal fulfillment. I think that, plus a somewhat lousy marriage, was the REAL cause of her “clinical depression”, and I think she was too polite to say anything about it. If she were my client, and I sincerely wish she had been before she killed off millions of brain cells, I probably would have told her to can the idea of being Super Mom, and go out and do something she felt was more life-enhancing – even if it meant her kids didn’t have a home-baked brownie every afternoon. But, that’s just me.

One last word: Let’s fight the memes together! Stayed tuned!



Elizabeth Szlek is the Director of The Door Counseling Center of Yorkville, NY. Questions and comments can be directed to her at (315) 768-8900 or at info@thedoorcounseling.com.