institutionalized

I often wonder what my life would be like if I were an adolescent today. An absurd question, I suppose, because we are the products of the effect of the influences in our environment. The world has radically changed in the 45 years since I was a teen. Would I have been flagged as possible problem and singled out as a potentially anti authoritarian misfit and then treated?
My bigger point is America now is mass producing it's own monsters. When I was young, there was a lot more leeway to be an individual. You life should be yours to screw up or excel. I made the observation very early that some of the most disturbed kids I knew were the siblings of psychiatrists. Back in the 60's, they were the kids on Ritalin and in and out of "treatment".
As the pharmaceutical industry grew along side the trend to professionally treat kids with problems, America seemed to suddenly have an explosion of kids with profound problems. Why do we refuse to co relate the use of psychoactive mood altering drugs to modify anti social. anti authoritarian behavior with the evidence that most of the irrational violence in schools and our work places demonstrate this relationship over and over again?

Every time we turn around these days someone is taking another bite out of our freedom or exerting some authority over us. We all have problems with how we handle authority. Kids who are angry, defiant and uninvolved with ‘authority’ always have good reason to be so. Neglectful, abusive, chaotic families do not create secure attachment which would lead to a desire to be in relationship with those who have more power, knowledge etc, and instead foster resentment, envy and high levels of anxiety.

If your amygdala screams at the perception of a powerful others, and there is no rewarding dopaminergic connection with such figures, what can we expect?

Instead of diagnosing, medicating and trying to control these persons, how about understanding and joining their really painful reality? Just giving words really helps.

That's the key here. It's too simple to diagnose. It's too simple to medicate. If a kid is really a problem, well then, there are professional facilities to file them away in.

In Lacanian terms, trauma that can not be talked about, will be expressed in some kind of action that involves the body, and not the conscious mind.

Easy to hand out chemicals, but listening and really educating, harder and priceless.

I read a really great piece by an American Clinical Psychologist, Bruce Levine, who tries to illustrate the how the clinical laziness of the discipline creates the very monsters it claims to be dealing with. Psychiatric Medicine becomes an abusive tool for control. Anti conformity becomes a symptom. Questioning authority must be treated. Most remarkable humans in our history, if they had fallen into the hands of clinical institutional psychiatry would have been classified as having potential problems which in many cases, would have been treated. The treatment only re channels the impulses into different and  warped direction.  I feel American parents are basically afraid of their children. This isn't new, it didn't happen over night, and of course there is a great quote from Frank Zappa, circa 1966, when the Mothers of Invention were playing at The Whiskey a Go Go on the La Strip and busloads of tourist would come in to watch the freak show. Frank would tell the middle aged tourists, "If your kids knew how lame you really were, they'd murder you in your sleep.

(the music is from 1989 by the great LA Thrash Core band Suicidal Tendencies.
 They nailed it!)