August 10, 2014

August 10, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

It is a total scandal that we have already known since the 1960s how to successfully treat people with so-called mental illnesses behaviorologically, but that because of the political, ideological biomedical model, we stuff them with psychotropic drugs, whose benefits are minimal to none-existent. Behaviorological research from back in the days proves unequivocally that changing environmental contingencies will significantly improve the behavior of those who are presumably mentally ill.

Mental health as it is practiced in the United States in 2014 is a racket. To call people who are suffering the consequences of the circumstances which they have endured and survived, mentally ill is not only stigmatizing, it is unethical, unscientific and  unprofessional. This writer, who has studied psychology and has worked in the field for more than 10 years, has first-hand experience of the lack of knowledge about operant conditioning, which turns people into obedient foot-soldiers for big pharma. The medicalization of our social problems is based on ignorance.

There is currently an outbreak of Ebola virus in Africa. As with AIDS, no superstition is going to do anybody any good. This real disease is only going to be stopped by understanding how it really works and spreads and by taking the scientific measures to prevent further contamination. 

Mental illness is not an illness. Diagnoses, which are used to classify them, which presumably lead to appropriate treatment, are decided by closed-door deliberations between medical professionals, psychiatrists, who have no background whatsoever, in behaviorology. People, in charge of the mental health services, are medical doctors, who pretend to treat problems that really do exist, but don’t go away, because they have no clue about the natural science of human behavior. The low levels of reliability and validity of their diagnoses go unchecked, because no one has the power to debunk their socially constructed nonsense.  

Just as nobody knows about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), this writer thinks that many people would like to have it, if only they knew how to have it. We throw rotten fruit away and we eat fresh fruit if we can. Likewise, we like to have happy relationships, but since we don’t know how to have them, we can't have them. It is may be hard to admit, but we continue to have many troubled relationships, because our communication creates and maintains all of this. It is called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), because it maintains behaviors which have aversive consequences. 

No matter how bad it is, we are stuck with what we have, until we know how to have something better. Mental health patients will enable the so-called mental health providers until they know how to permanently step out of this abusive cycle of exploitation.