This picture of the USS Beloit is my iPhone wallpaper. Unfortunately, I missed the livestream of the ship commissioning. I ended up watching most of the replay on YouTube but fast forwarded through all but the last 19 minutes.

This picture of the USS Beloit is my iPhone wallpaper. Unfortunately, I missed the livestream of the ship commissioning. I ended up watching most of the replay on YouTube but fast forwarded through all but the last 19 minutes.

As Phyllis Chesler warned us in 1974, gender bias has accompanied psychiatric power throughout its history. Years later, in 2005, in the last annotated edition of Women and Madness , the author insisted on the persistence of this bias, which even today, 50 years later, seems to remain unchanged. Authors such as Ussher, Caplan, Margot Pujal and many others were situated in that same space. With their differences and nuances, they all converge on the same point: gender problems and discomforts produce deep suffering. This suffering leaves marks on our bodies and our behavior.
Bryan O’Neal has spent two decades grinding his way up the U.S. Army ranks, from lowly private to command sergeant major — the highest rank for a non-commissioned officer. He could write a textbook on modern warfare history — and his own unique place in it — but much of what he’s seen and done could be hard for anyone to hear. Significant numbers of the men and women under his command weren’t even born until after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that inspired him to enlist.
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In the spring of 2004, perhaps the last thing President George W. Bush’s administration needed was another war-related PR problem. No one could find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which the administration had used to build a case for war. Less than a month before Tillman’s death, four contractors for the Blackwater private security firm in Iraq were ambushed and dragged through the streets, and their corpses were hung from a bridge. In April came shocking images of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.
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In our relentless pursuit to transcend the human suffering, we’ve stumbled into a dangerous oversimplification: an improved mental state reflects the absence or decrease in negative emotional states. This reductionist view has not only cheapened our understanding of the human emotional spectrum but has also paved the way for a troubling linguistic shift.

Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it – grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.
Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
It must be demons, said Psychiatry
The list of explanations above tracks psychiatry’s main theories, narratives and social messages over 200 years. Many people are unaware of the origins and belief systems which underpin psychiatry. Even many psychiatrists do not know that their discipline was chiefly founded and spread by the church. Religion has always been intertwined with psychiatry.
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