Comment // Culture & Media

BBC: Is Internet “Addiction” A Mental Illness?

Especially since the last world war we have done much to infiltrate the various social organisations throughout the country, and in their work and in their point of view one can see clearly how the principles for which this society and others stood in the past have become accepted as part of the ordinary working plan of these various bodies. That is as it should be, and while we can take heart from this we must be healthily discontented and realise that there is still more work to be done along this line. Similarly we have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine...

If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organise some kind of fifth column activity!

- John Rawlings Rees M.D. (Address to the Annual Meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene June 18th 1940)

On my way into the office this morning I was treated to yet another slice of the habitual, and cleverly packaged “but, we are only trying to help” medicine from our good friends at the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation. The topic in question was a new report published in the journal “Public Library of Science 1” by researchers in China, indicating that incessant internet use leads to physiological and neurological disorders.

The guest, Professor Colin Drummond, of Kings College in London, was engaged by the radio presenter in the following dialogue:

Q: “Do you think people can be addicted to the internet?”

A: “Well, I think one way to look at this is as an extreme end of the distribution of internet use ... there is no question that some people use the internet to feed compulsive behaviour. There is a question over the validity of the research given the sample size, which makes it difficult to differentiate between the cause and effect of brain disorders.”

Q: “You mean, their brains where like that anyway?”

In response to which Mr Drummond answered with a due sense of “present company accepted” political correctness, but without any genuine hint of irony, that we would be wise to exercise caution in referring to users of the internet as “addicts”. After all, this might detract from the real and very serious epidemic of alcohol, illegal Class A and legal prescription drugs and pornography addition that our entire society is presently drowning in.

To which, I was tempted to quip: what, you mean all the government sponsored ones?

I suppose it is heartening to see our loving government sponsored propaganda agency taking such a keen interest in our mental health and wellbeing, for a change. NOT.

The grim truth is that ever since John Rawling Rees and his chums at Tavistock whitewashed the true history of British involvement in the Eugenics and world “mental health” movement which, along with Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, were the true progenitors of the Nazi regime, we have been subject to a sustained and insidious attack by the  World Federation of Mental Health and its insidious army of “mental healers”.

A quick review of the latest work and initiatives by the WFMH give a pretty good indication of where the “mental health” industry is heading, under the support and patronage of its umbrella organisation, the WHO.  A report from their 2009 conference talks about the ongoing drive to integrate mental health into front line medical services, under the rubric of “holistic health”. And looking ahead, their 2011 conference in sunny Cape Town carries the business friendly theme of “The Great Push: Investing in Mental Health”.

Call me a cynic if you like, but when we look at the NHS reforms currently underway in UK, and the rapidly burgeoning involvement of the private sector in the provision of “health services” to the public, it would not be too much of a stretch to argue that we could be witnessing the steady corporatisation of mental health in the UK, under an unholy alliance of big pharma, private equity investors, and legal lobbying firms.

Perhaps this unholy alliance could go some way to explaining the reported 400% increase in prescription anti-depressant drug abuse in the United States alone in the last decade, or the equivalent statistic for the UK, which is that 6 million people are now on long term anti-depressant use, i.e. addiction.

And what about the shocking reports of neglect and abuse that are all too common in our hospitals today? Is this obsession with trendy “alternative medicine” and the rise of “nursing degrees” that in reality are nothing more than a cheap attempt to stop gap the crisis in hospital funding of qualified doctors, by delegating more of the work traditionally performed by doctors to nurses themselves? In a recent article in the Daily Mail, Melanie Philips takes this argument head on, by recalling a conversation she had with Tony Blair on the subject of NHS reform following a traumatic experience her mother had in hospital. Her argument centers on the shift away from traditional nursing to academic subjects, under the university, rather than hospital system itself.

“Student nurses now studied sociology, politics, psychology, microbiology and management, and were assessed for their communication, management and analytical skills. ‘Specific clinical nursing skills were not mentioned,’ she wrote.”

The net result of this collapse in standards is a self perpetuating cycle, as successive, entirely well meaning government ministers commission reports, studies and “fact finding” missions to resolve a crisis, which such studies will only ever conclude, in contemporary politically correct parlance, is at root cause a training issue, as opposed to the essential truth of the matter, which is to be found in the destructive effects of the underlying marxist/feminist brainwashing of the women who make up the profession.

No doubt, once they are fully armed with the requisite “holistic mental health” jargon, in the wake of the “big push for mental health” being promoted by the WFMH, a whole new raft of psychological disorders affecting primarily the aged and infirm, will spring into existence, to account for the rapid rise of patients suffering the abuse and neglect at the hands of this new generation of gaulieters, masquerading as medical professionals.

But, I digress.

In view of the ongoing effort by big business to regulate the internet, ostensibly on the specious grounds of “piracy”, and the rapidly collapsing credibility of the progenitors and gatekeepers of “truthiness” across the spectrum of our mainstream media, the establishment must be falling over themselves to find a casus belli to label those of us in the alternative media, along with our readers and supporters who manifestly spend a much higher proportion of our time on the internet than the statistical average, as “mentally ill”.

Without doubt, somewhere out there in the shiny glass and marble fronted world of private equity, there is a spreadsheet model on a business development managers hard drive, forecasting the fabulous profit opportunities to be had in the misdiagnosis of mental illness sector of the “mental health market”.

But peeling back one more layer of the stinking psychiatric-pharmaceutical onion, with moves to legalize “assisted suicide” now being debated openly in Parliament by such glowing Paragons of human virtue and ethics as Lord Falconer, and the increasing number of cases where political dissidents and other persistent nuisances to the emerging EU police state are subject to mental health orders, how long will it be before the true intentions of these rabid fascists and totalitarians takes us back to the horrors of Tiergarten-4 and the Nazi killing machine?

After all, epidemic clinical depression from the destruction of our country, economy and world peace, surely justifies the merciful termination of “lives not worthy to be lived”, does it not?