Chatting, recently, to two different friends of his separately, mentioning the possible role of SSRIs or other meds in the Tumbler Ridge shooting, a colleague (C1 – the first of 3 colleagues in this post) got blown away by both of them. Conspiracy theories, they told him. Misinformation – you’re being ridiculous.
One of them – a decent scientist – sent him a ChatGPT read out, which dismissed the role of meds in events like Tumbler Ridge out of hand. Zero credibility.
This echoed my experience with gifted members of my extended family a few months ago, outlined in The Miracle of Artificial Intelligence. They had just had or were about to have children. The issue of RSV vaccines taken while pregnant came up. Have or have not? They’d all checked with ChatGPT – having the vaccine was absolutely a no brainer.
Looking at the RSV clinical trials around this time, the data indicates babies brains are exactly what’s at risk with these vaccines. Thanks to The Prozac Liberation Front, central to this post, there a ton of ways companies can hide the hazards. Chat GPT is the latest weapon in the Liberation Front armory.
Doing anything other than going along with the RSV or SSRIs are safe narrative risks pariah status. Forget Socratic questioning as a means of getting a friend or a family member to grapple with the basis of their beliefs. If ChatGPT has spoken, who needs to grapple? There are instant infallible answers.
Is the Miracle of AI turning Wine into water?
AI and Homicide
Another colleague (C2) found an Armed with Reason substack with a linked Gun Violence Pedia (GVPedia), who, deploying AI, seem to have a mission to brand any idea that homicides with a gun might be linked to psychotropic drug use as a complete (NRA sponsored) myth aimed at deflecting attention from the guns themselves.
See AI Tsunami for more. There is a divide here that AI has the potential to make unbridgeable. Megaphone diplomacy across divides never gets anywhere. Neither democracy nor science can survive in circumstances like these.
Artificial I
Only a few months ago, C3 faced an even more difficult challenge. Having been on the coalface of transgender debates in a listening capacity, he ended up trying to be Socratic in a conversation with his daughters who turned to ChatGPT to refute everything he was attempting to tell them about things he knew more about than Chat GPT. See Artificial I.
While we once were able to think we had our own opinions because they differed from a friend, a child or a parent, we also used to know that newspaper X always gave us certain opinions while newspaper Y gave just the opposite and that to some extent we were tribal. We sometimes wore the tribal badge with pride. Can there be other tribes with AI? Grok might have a more risque sense of humor than Anthropic but they’re both going to dish up essentially the same stuff.
C 1 above figured he was (we are) up against AI Slop – last year’s word of the year. How can he get friends to engage again?
Have we just now ended up with the kind of unanimity featured in books like We, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – books that have been around for 60 years describing a then imminent future – starting in 1984. Or did this future start – 40 years ago?.
The Great Steal
. 
The Great Seal of the United States – doctored. It normally reads E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one people. The Latin Unum has been replaced with Mediocris – Latin for Average.
Averages are what both Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and AI deliver. They are like meat mincers where you can’t distinguish what comes out the far end as human, cow or horse. In the case of RCTs, you can put LSD, SSRIs, stimulants, antipsychotics, alcohol, benzodiazepines or nicotine into the mincer and they will come out the far end with almost identical rating scale changes.
They tell a doctor nothing about how to treat the person in front of them.
Just as meat mincers are a good way to hide a murder, so too with RCTs. They are the gold standard way to hide adverse events.
Who says all these things? Austin Bradford Hill – the creator of RCTs.
Hill said to treat the person in front of you, you need to talk to them. You should not average them. Back in 1965, he said we’ve been doing RCTs for 20 years and we should have learnt by now they’re not much use.
Everything Hill said was turned upside down in 1990 when Prozac was reported as causing suicide – See Bad Trips on SSRIs. Eli Lilly, Prozac’s maker conjured up a Prozac Liberation Front (PLF).
The PLF took a rake of cases reported to the company in clinical trials – perhaps hundreds overall, some in healthy volunteers, all despite damping down SSRI effects with benzodiazepines – and put all these cases through their RCT grinder.
This was followed up with a borrowed and edited message taken from, you might have thought, an unlikely source. Just as on average it would be a slur on pedophiles to say that what they do harms people – you shouldn’t confuse the good intentions of pedophiles with anecdotes of unfortunate events. See File under Phile.
Doctors swallowed this, gristle, viscera, bones and all. Yuck might be the appropriate word but doctors get outraged if, whatever about their good intentions, anyone, having looked closely at what is being served up, wants to pass on the dish.
The New Normal
Pharmaceutical companies write drug labels and are legally obliged to update these as new information becomes available. In the US, they routinely did so up to the turn of the millenium – with trickle down effects in Diego Britain, Europe, Australia, and Canada.
The legal obligation hasn’t changed. But taking a cue from the PLF, company lawyers said we cannot argue in court that RCTs give gold standard knowledge of what drugs do, if company doctors continue to interview patients/doctors and add our drug caused X or Y to the drug label – How the Safety of Medicines was Destroyed.
So company doctors were told to stop. A new narrative emerged. Regulators are responsible for drug labels and we in the company can do nothing unless the regulators act. Regulators don’t act because they would have to run RCTs to generate gold standard knowledge before changing anything. Incorporating Anecdotes into the label is not an option.
Lawyers advised medical journals against publishing adverse event reports written by doctors – see Silencing Doctors Silencing Safety – on the basis that the PLF reclassification of these as Anecdotes – Misinformation, indicators of treatment hesitancy and pharmaphobia. Publication would risk a pharma lawsuit for damage to their product.
Medical insurers, who are supposed to make medical practice possible the way travel insurance makes travel possible, told doctors never to say a drug had caused a patient’s death at an inquest. If you can’t stomach this, let our lawyer blame the terrible illness for you – see Making Medicine Great Again and When Will Insurers Stop Killing people. .
Medical Guideline makers know they are incorporating fake or fraudulent results into their Guidelines but give their shoulders a ‘What can we do about it’ shrug. See – The NICE Before Xmas.
The rubber really hits the road if treatment causes manslaughter or homicide. You will not be able to get a lawyer to fight in your not-guilty corner. The third party to this injury, happy that the guilty party – you – has been sent down will never know what really happaned to a family member
The Sound of Silence
We are all now liable to be gaslit if injured. Our families are gaslit if we’re dead. When this has happened in cases where the only sensible way to explain things has been Drug X did it, activists fighting finasteride, isotretinoin and SSRI cases bamboozled by companies into thinking regulators count have laid siege to regulatory offices and forced label changes, which typically feel derisory given the gravity of the problems –
Health Activism was at its zenith in 1848 when it created social democracy and fed into liberalism – see Can We Avoid Bring Eaten.
Possibly stimulated by German demonstrations in the 1940s of just how horrific health systems out of control could be, health related political activism was still potent enough in 1968, mental health in particular, to be central to the Revolutions of that year.
Now, when health systems routinely sterilize and kill more than Germany did in the 1940s, health activism comes only from those injured by treatment and looks rather like a primitive Amazonian tribe pitted against a superpower. A fly pitted against an Elephant.
Conversations are a key marker to what has happened. They’ve stopped. Central to Shipwreck of the Singular, which features in the image above, is the idea that if you want to understand the politics of our world, sit in a doctor’s office and you will see in microcosm what is happening outside.
The conversations have stopped. We as patients used to train doctors, just the way we often say children train parents to be parents. They listened to and learnt from us – not from books. They brought their experience dealing with us and our differences to bear on the problems we brought them (they didn’t give us problems) but this experience is now written off as anecdotal and risks punishment.
As patients we are increasingly aware that our doctors aren’t listening to us. Thinking Fast and Slow we can feel that there are Strangers in the Room who our doctors must listen to first.
When the Internet opened up, in the 1990s pioneers like Charles Medawar, who coined the idea of Pharmageddon, figured that it offered an opening for a democratization of medicine. But by 2010, he thought the Pharmageddon that threatened us had advanced so far and so fast that we were doomed.
For a brief few moments, some of the younger generation, who feature above, have been similarly enthused about the prospect that AI might level the playing field. Doctors would not be able to ignore the sheaf of LLM material we brought in to them.
Neither the younger generation nor doctors know that 4 years ago, Pfizer and GSK and friends were busy replacing their ghostwriters with AI. Back when Cochrane was also a force for the good, one of the striking statistics was the companies used to produce up to 50 publications for every single trial done. This doesn’t mean that the bilge that pours into places an older generation used to swim in when young has now been cleaned up.
Just the opposite. Anthropic and friends now produce clinical trial articles within days of an RCT finishing – with algorithms in place to ensure the right outcomes are reported, leaving little or no chance the company will be sued for fraud because there’s not be a scrap of intention, never mind intention to deceive, anywhere in the system on which to base a fraud charge.
Doctors rapidly became puppets through which the RCT averaging machine embodied in guidelines and a fraudulent medical literature spoke. We are now even more rapidly becoming artificial versions of us through whom Chat GPT speaks – echoing exactly what the doctor is also saying.
There will be no opening for conversations.
Health in the Cloud? I’ve looked at Clouds from both Sides now – its Health’s Illusions I recall, I really don’t know Health at all.
At its heart, Science involves discussion about observables. After we take a prescription drug, an experiment starts and the observables are all in us. It’s as Lutheran – Here We Stand, We Can Do No Other – moment.
Our doctor is yoked to us and is obliged to have a real conversation with us. But to adapt a phrase from Mahatma Gandhi:
How can those who think they possess absolute truth be scientific?
This post is a not-identical twin of Bad Trips on SSRIs.
AI Slop – ‘Oh, what a lovely war’ – Oh, what a lovely read…
‘Doctors swallowed this, gristle, viscera, bones and all. Yuck might be the appropriate word’
‘The New Normal’
Cue – ‘question the norms’
In first speech to her FDA staff, Høeg says she’ll scrutinize RSV shots and SSRIs in pregnancy
Høeg also told staff to ‘question the norms’ and quoted the philosopher Ayn Rand
https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/19/tracy-beth-hoeg-fda-speech-to-staff-ssris-in-pregnancy-rsv-shots/
WASHINGTON — Tracy Beth Høeg, the top drug regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, indicated in her first address to staff that she’ll scrutinize antidepressants and the shots used to protect babies from RSV.
Høeg told employees on Thursday that her top priorities include two issues she’s focused on in the recent past: evaluating the safety of antidepressants taken by pregnant women and of monoclonal antibodies that protect infants against RSV.
“I’ve been interested to learn we really haven’t been doing sort of thorough safety monitoring of these products during pregnancy, and so I think we could do a better job,” Høeg said. “I actually think that there’s agreement about that, and among the CDER staff that I’ve been working with on this issue, so I’m excited to see that.”
AI ‘slop’ is transforming social media – and a backlash is brewing
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wx2dz2v44o
‘Neither democracy nor science can survive in circumstances like these’.
Another perfectly captured concept on the mantelpiece of despair is – COGNITIVE SURRENDER.
The Wharton School has recently published a paper, ‘Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender’ – a slightly torturous academic fandango- that boils down to – swallow too much AI slop and you’ll surrender your critical faculties.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
Of course we are seeing something of a volte-face in educational systems. Last I heard,the Swedes were bringing back physical books and handwriting. And banned digital learning for kids under 6.
Plus ça change in medicine – where I guess the AI metrics are mostly driven by industry’s return on investment and the system’s health economics’ calculations – not health nor learning.
What is quite interesting is all the discussion around digital versus analog thinking styles. Those of us – lucky enough, in fact – to be born pre 1991 learned to think the hard way. Physical as well as mental combat with maps and dictionaries and splodgy pens – as well as interacting with human beings in search of understanding. What Cornelia Walthur, another thoughtful Whartonite, called thinking that developed through ‘positive friction’.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-the-last-analogue-generation-can-shape-ai/
In fact, a thinking style that used to characterise medicine. And still characterises the ways in which those harmed by it – or struggling to understand what the hell happened – seem to think and and communicate to others.
It’s the way the resistance thinks. One of the high points of having my leg in a cast was several rides in local taxis to and from hospital. Inevitably health was a topic of conversation. These guys were not only great drivers – (I’m a terrible passenger) – they were also the local health resistance underground. Both had been victims of middle aged AI slop prescribing – stuffed on anti-hypertensives and statins. And they didn’t feel well on these drugs. So during the nonsense of lockdown, they’d thought, sod this, and dumped them. They never felt better. And never looked back. Classic analog thinkers – wrestling with physical reality and bouncing ideas around in a highly social space.
Great comment and thanks for the paper – worth downloading for anyone who reads these comments. They describe 3 thinking styles – intuitive (fast), deliberative (slow), and artificial – but they don’t include consensus based thinking – exchanging views aimed at seeking a consensus.
At the moment AI isn’t built for this and it is not clear it ever can be but if we ran an experiments where AI checks the outcomes of doctors adhering to the Evidence – which AI can provide – the post Prozac company trial results against doctors who listen to and engage with patients in a genuine effort to achieve something both are happy with – my hunch is that the second group would have better results. The second way is what we should view as the scientific method. The system at present wants us to view the first way as the scientific way.
D
Apparently a bloke called Guy Levi, ‘an innovator focussing on developing universal Generative AI literacy’, coined the phrase du jour- Cognitive Surrender.
‘Real thinking demands friction — the pause to examine, the pushback to challenge, the resistance to easy answers. Without that friction, cognition flattens. Ideas stop evolving and settle into mere outputs.,, To think with AI is powerful; to let it think for me is seductive. But the moment that line blurs, I haven’t gained a co-pilot — I’ve lost the wheel.’
https://medium.com/@guylevi.57/avoiding-cognitive-surrender-e29f8a487192
For him AI is a source of cognitive FRICTION to stimulate further deliberative inquiry, not instead of. Fair enough – but that isn’t the case for lots of others who believe in – next new word – ‘ALGORITY’. I read another paper – findings seemed self-evident to me – as so much quantitative attitudinal research is -reducing human responsiveness to a few superficial macro-dimensions. Shades of ‘evidence based medicine’.
‘significant correlations between trust in automation (TiA), perceptions of automated performance (PAS), and the propensity to defer to AI, particularly in high-stakes scenarios like criminal justice and job-matching. Trust in automation emerged as a primary factor, while moral attitudes moderated deference while moral attitudes moderated deference in ethically sensitive contexts.’https://www.mdpi.com/2504-4990/8/2/36
When you question AI’s capability for consensus thinking – it’s perfectly possible to have a debate with Grok, for example – if you know what lies behind the tsunami of slop. But that’s just input to deliberative thinking. A spot of cognitive friction.
The point about AI is that it is incapable of intuition – instinctive fast thinking. And I’m sure, to varying degrees, we all use both intuitive and deliberative modes – to construct and articulate the intuitions that are part of the process of consensus.
H
Again a great comment but this sounds like Guy Levin is where Charles Medawar was originally with the internet democratizing medicine but then realizing that far from democracy we face Pharmageddon – and soon afterwards figuring we had passed the point of no return.
Charles could have used the same language as GL. Its aspirational but look what happened. EBM introduce by Lilly created EBM slop which is now built into Guidelines which prevent doctors having conversations that have an element of friction to them – other than if you don’t take a statin I will have to dismiss you from my list or if you think you have PSSD I need to detain you and give you an antipsychotic.
Guidelines began as Guidance (a steer to be considered) but became tramlines – I have a 2009 article called Guidelines, Tramlines and Faultlines. We now have a faultline between the orthodoxy that killed Romain and Dexter and lots of others we know and the knowledge Yoko, Dan and others have gained from terrible events but there is no possibility of a conversation and the legal system is increasingly unlikely to be of any help.
This may be unfair but at this point my instinct is that Guy and others are just re-inventing the wheel and the cycle from the latest insight to the next disillusion is getting shorter and shorter
D
I fear Charles Medawar – and you – are right.
AI has not delivered democracy in medicine. Yes, patients have access to the same (mis)information as so called professionals.
And, more importantly, they have easy access to each other – which cuts both ways ofc. Harmed patients can find validation and support. Young women particularly can find pathologised and drugged identities. They seem oblivious to the escalating number of suicides amongst their peers.
But the bottom line is, bar a few, this doesn’t make doctors pay any more attention to patients. Any dissonance with the beliefs implanted in medical school, any sign of disrespect for medical authority, any twinge of cognitive dissonance – and the system of which they are a part pumps up the volume. The ubiquitous defensive bs spouted after the FDA SSRI pregnancy risks panel was classic. Mothers died from untreated ‘depression’ – where is the unconfounded evidence for that?
And more. Thanks to vigilant X friends (I’m still hacked and X -communicated) I saw a hit piece in the US Guardian on Retsef Levi – hardly a surprise from an industry dependent on vaccine sales (and fat busters) for its future bottom line. Paul Thacker then unearthed the fact that Pfizer was openly billed as the partner in this piece.
And, in our own small island, the Mephistophelian candidate for President of the Royal College of Carpet Fitters has written:
‘The College will make more use of the knowledge and expertise of the Academic Faculty to rapidly counter the misinformation with rigour and authority,
Every good psychiatrist should be critical and sceptical – but the organisations and individuals who use unscientific or anecdote-based methods to sow doubt and mistrust about mental health diagnosis and treatments can do real harm to vulnerable people…’
https://www.profrobhoward.com/new-page
I’m allergic to split infinitives. And arrogance.
The way I see it is that in day-to-day life, tools like AI or RCTs function mostly as heuristic devices. People figure that “on average” the answer will be closer to the truth than not, and if they’re satisfied by the simplistic view that if something is, if not definitely X, at least closer to X than Y, then this for most people is more than satisfactory. I’m not so sure all that much has changed. Yes, AI can generate a truckload more slop in half the time, but people have always slung slop. Having more is an issue, but I’m not sure if it’s the crux.
Case in point: a young registrar replied to a question I raised by using PubMed more or less like a Google search. They admitted they hadn’t read the articles results, nor would he be bothered to. For them, the titles of the papers, let alone their abstracts, were sufficient. Again, it’s essentially a heuristic. They didn’t need to prove me wrong by carefully reading all of the available evidence; they were satisfied simply by demonstrating what rose to the top of a quick search.
The other thing I think is at work is loss aversion. I’ve noticed this when I propose changes at work. If I present the idea in terms of ceasing some current practice on the grounds that its unhelpful, harmful or a waste of time, it is met with furious resistance. If I propose the same idea as an addition to the dizzying smorgasbord of eclectic options offered to consumers, it is met with applause and great enthusiasm. People just don’t like having something taken off them but they’re very happy to be given something extra. This is no doubt why people are so keen to try “new” medication to solve their problem but so reluctant to try ceasing a medication first.
P
There is an important point here – maybe there is nothing new under the sun but it looks like there might be this time around. The new factor is we have lost a Network as it were.
We lived in Networks and depended on the views of family and friends and could talk over critical issues in social and sociable settings. A great vignette as all this applies to medicine is that a pharma ‘truth’ was you can’t sell ADHD or ADHD meds anywhere there is a grandmother. She would say – there’s nothing wrong with that boy, he’s just like his father was and he’s turned out fine.
Now parents will turn to Chat GPT or parenting manuals etc. We don’t have access to other parenting experience – we get gurus.
Medicine changed from the the pre-1980s medicine where you brought questions you thought were problems to your doctor and he learnt from you and combined that with his pool of prior experience to try and help you – usually suggesting here is something we can try. He did not say here is what the guideline says should be done next. There is no medical experience behind a guideline.
We didn’t change – our doctors did – and it has not been a good change. It’s killing people. Just as no doctor in their right mind would have given an opioid for back pain pre 1990 and then starting dishing out bucket loads of opioids, so also no doctor pre 2000 would have countenanced you being on more than 3 meds per day and certainly not 10 psychotrpic meds as a teenager.
Doctors are doing this on the basis of a ghostwritten literature, a substantial portion of which is ghostwritten. This is bad enough but behind that the driving factor is the belief that RCTs provide infallibility – even shining through fraudulent articles.
The point behind the post is that we are also now changing. The change is driven by the same forces that changed our doctors. We are becoming the Stepford Patients of Stepford Doctors.
Some younger people – and perhaps you fall into this group – wanted to believe that AI would level the playing field and even doctors would appreciate having much better versed patients to deal with.
The sad truth seems to be that just like the lame little guy in the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the only folk to escape the trap are likely to be those who have been very clearly injured and it’s hard to see how they can do much to change things. Settling for somewhere in the outer darkness seems to be all that they can expect.
You could say we’ve lived in Theocratic and Fascist states before and survived – even thrived. But back then as a confused teenager you could visit a Rabbi or Imam or Pastor and say I’m having difficulties – I think I’m agnostic – to which the Rabbi might say – So am I – what’s wrong with that?
At the moment AI shows no capacity for agnosticism. It might say we don’t have an answer to your question – there is no research on this. It’s not going to say – look people have been grappling with this for centuries and have no answer. Nor is it likely to add – in situations like this, the best option is to sit down with some friends and have a cup of tea.
D
We lived in Networks – new under the sun
We need to talk more about the serial abuse from doctors. Not just the abuse of giving several psychotropic drugs, and other drugs, to patients, but the verbal abuse coming out of their mouths, when they don’t understand something.
We know about doctors laughing at PSSD. But, if all is not going according to plan with an antidepressant, what can you do when a doctor lashes out at you, who sees you as non-compliant, who sees you as a nuisance, who sees you as someone who keeps coming back time and time again, and instead of looking intelligently at your drug, or drugs, completely loses it, and shouts at you, gives vent, bursts their spleen, with invective that shrivels you up.
You go past the point of no return, and that’s you, doomed, sabotaged, gaslit, dead.
Nobody has ever spoken to me, like my doctor did, when I was always honest and forthcoming about what was happening to me. We weren’t equals, the superiority of status, was there for me to see. She took her position to another level when it came to not listening.
The High and Mighty Priestess who didn’t ever ask me anything, the absurd reason I was put on an antidepressant in the first place; bludgeoned and battered by someone, who even AI, couldn’t make up.
Many doctors might be more circumspect with their choice of words than mine was, but it all leads to being led-down-a-blind-alley.
If an AI programme were to do this, all-hell would let loose.
My doctor was the one with the loaded-gun to my head, trigger-happy, verbally violent. How fortunate that the only ‘gun’ I had was a loaded ‘water-pistol’.
My Network of family and friends, almost permanently vanished, as my doctor broke the back of it with the very public ‘stoning’ ..
What Annie is saying is not an atypical event. A medical colleague was recently shocked at the conversation in a doctors forum about a prominent suicide that a coroner had deemed likely antidepressant related. The family left behind and the coroner were abused in very degrading language. This was a closed doctors only group – not a social media group where people get egged on.
There has been a surprising coarsening of discourse and behavior among politicians – this is perhaps not surprising the degree of it is pretty shocking. There changes have been like once being shocked when women showed an ankle – but then desensitization raised the steaks higher and higher as it were
Perhaps the surprising thing is to be suprised that physicians can now be astonishingly uncouth.
D
I completely agree Annie.
GP and his colleagues pointed a loaded gun on my mum’s head too 10 years ago.
When I raised concerns, they refused to put the gun down. Instead changed the bullets.
Speaking of networks, some of my colleagues are working on bringing in the Open Dialogue model and building up people’s “networks”. They’ve noticed two major teething issues. One is that Australian society is far too individualistic, and the other is that the process exposes how farcical that individualism actually is.
Another issue is that clinicians are not used to being allowed to say what they actually think at work. The entire concept of speaking freely is causing an existential crisis. My old family doctors were always just themselves at work. They had the “town doctor” social role, but they did not construct elaborate clinical personas.
The biggest drawback of the model, though, is that there is still a dreadful cacophony of ideas and the pluralism constantly threatens to tip into eclecticism.
AI will obviously usher in a great deal that is new. What I meant is that, in tracing the root of this problem, we can see it is part of a much older thread. There has been a shift in conventional wisdom at a societal level.
Internet comment sections are also great averaging machines.
I do wonder if anyone is behind it, or whether the multinational companies and Rupert Murdoch’s of the world can scarcely believe their good fortune. The breeze of the world has simply turned in their favour. The lamb has delivered itself to the fox with a sprig of rosemary between its teeth.
My grandmother lived in a more collectivist society. She had networks that were not simply people who agreed with each other and that offered practical support which made unsolvable problems more bearable.
What she valued most was what she called “good sense”. Not common sense, something closer to wisdom, cultivated through experience and reflection. She also believed people were entitled to their opinions, stupid or otherwise.
In her day people had gentle euphemisms for behaviour they found odd. Someone might be “shy” or “eccentric”. Diseases were things you caught, not a framework for interpreting every variation in human behaviour.
AI is a serious development, but something changed in the way people think long before that. Internet culture is one thread, starting with 4Chan if you missed that cultural development, but another is the disappearance of wisdom, or what my grandmother called good sense, as an accepted way of knowing.
In 2016, David suggested a book to me.
A sketch of the Life of Elizabeth T. Stone, and of her Persecutions
With an Appendix of Her Treatment and Sufferings While in the Charlestown McLean
Asylum, Where She Was Confined Under the Pretence of Insanity.
This book is published by Forgotten Books, and I bought my copy from Book Depository. I kept the receipt inside this book.
This is why I don’t agree with Jamie Sarkonak.
Jamie Sarkonak: Reopen the asylums
Tumbler Ridge shooter not the first violent person to be released from psychiatric detention
By Jamie Sarkonak
Published Feb 19, 2026
Last updated Feb 19, 2026
5 minute read
232 Comments
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-reopen-the-asylums
Go up to the article
Peter Wood
Missing from this discussion is the critically important issue explained so well by Robert Whitaker, the award-winning investigative journalist who wrote 2 brilliant books* about the truth of psychiatric drugs. To briefly summarize his review of all the research since the advent of these medications:
Before psychiatric drugs, “mental illness” (which is not a biological phenomenon, but a behavioral one) was rarer, and usually transient. Since the advent of these drugs mental illness has become more serious, and chronic. Psych meds have devastating physical side effects and forcing them on people is traumatic and does nothing to teach coping skills, which is what people need. In fact, forced drugging and incarceration is expensive and harmful and a terrible shame when kinder, more effective options are available.
Research has shown that SSRI antidepresants cause a significant minority of takers to experience violent and suicidal thoughts.
Dr David Healy, a world authority on SSRIs, has often pointed out that what random shooters have in common (including Van Rootsselaar) is taking psych meds including SSRIs. We may know this but we interpret it backwards. What has caused this seriously distorted thinking? Is it inherent biological disturbance that the drugs help counter? If so, why weren’t made people violent before the advent of these drugs? What we normally see in individual cases is that people came into the system feeling sad or disoriented and the distorted violent thinking came after they started taking medications. Dr Healy often points out to a media that refuses to listen that it is not the UNTREATED mentally ill who are violent and suicidal, it is almost always those who have been treated with psych drugs.
This comment in praise of Robert Whitaker, of Mad In America, and David Healy, of David Healy, is perhaps a useful guide, but I would suggest that readers of PLF, read Elizabeth T, Stone.
“May God bring in light this awful crime, for my sufferings do not end in this world, although the crime was done by others.” 1842
Thank you, Annie, for drawing attention to:
‘Sketch of the life of Elizabeth T. Stone, and of her persecutions, with an appendix of her treatment and sufferings while in the charlestown mclean assylum, where she was confined under the pretence of insanity.’
It’s now directly available online https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56407/56407-h/56407-h.htm
As you will know too painfully well, it’s a distressing read. And- despite being written in 1842 – reflects an all too vivid and contemporary experience:
‘It was a pill and a little mug of mixture, and Mary Brigham went out and locked the door; but O, alas how little did I know where I was and what I was put into that house for. Such a crime I never read of, and it is covered up under the garb of derangement, and I am the poor sufferer. As soon as I took it I was thrown into most violent pain and distress, beyond the power of language to describe, neither can I give any one an adequate idea. The medicine effected my brain, the back part of my head, hardened or petrified it, and the brain is the seat of the nerves, and anyone can conceive of the distress that I must be thrown into all over in my body, every nerve in me drawing and straining convulsively. Sometimes I was almost drawn back double and then forward, rolling in the bed from one side to the other in the greatest agony. When my door was unlocked in the morning I rose. I had wept bitterly all night. The thoughts of my situation, and for so[23] strange a thing as it may appear, that medicine can be given to destroy the work of Grace in a person, even so it can be done, and Dr. Bell and Dr. Fox both possess that knowledge of giving medicine to accomplish this awful outrage upon Christianity; and it is done under the garb of derangement, and they are screened from public censure, and it is a greater crime than that they had tortured me to death any way that I ever read of. As I come out of my room a young lady asked me what made me weep; so I took her hand and asked her to tell me where I was, and what kind of people I was with. She asked me if I did not know, and I told her no. She then told me that I was in the Insane Assylum.’