The U.S. population makes up 5% of the world population, yet are prescribed 2/3rds of all psychiatric drugs used worldwide. If this is not a sign of looming mental health collapse, we don’t know what is!
As a doctor, I can tell you that stress has reached pandemic levels, though many still hold back from admitting it to themselves or their peers. Our normalcy bias prevents us from taking notice that tens of millions of people in Western countries are dropping like flies from illness, depression and self-destruction. I came across this article by David Kupelain on Americans’ health and agreed with some of the observations made about the dire state of affairs:
- Fully one-third of U.S. employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, and more than half of all “millennials” (18 to 33 year olds) experience a level of stress that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder.
- Shocking new research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that one in five high-school-aged children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with ADHD, and likewise a large new study of New York City residents shows, sadly, that one in five preteens – children aged six to 12 – have been medically diagnosed with either ADHD, anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder.
- New research concludes that stress renders people susceptible to serious illness, and a growing number of studies now confirm that chronic stress plays a major role in the progression of cancer, the nation’s second-biggest killer. The biggest killer of all, heart disease, which causes one in four deaths in the U.S., is also known to have a huge stress component.
- Incredibly, 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older are currently taking SSRI antidepressants – those highly controversial, mood-altering psychiatric drugs with the FDA’s “suicidality” warning label and alarming correlation with school shooters. Women are especially prone to depression, with a stunning 23 percent of all American women in their 40s and 50s – almost one in four – now taking antidepressants, according to a major study by the CDC.
- Add to that the tens of millions of users of all other types of psychiatric drugs, including (just to pick one) the 6.4 million American children between 4 and 17 diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin or similar psycho-stimulants. Throw in the 28 percent of American adults with a drinking problem, that’s more than 60 million, plus the 22 million using illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens and inhalants, and pretty soon a picture emerges of a nation of drug-takers, with hundreds of millions dependent on one toxic substance or another – legal or illegal – to “help” them deal with the stresses and problems of life.
Likewise, the CDC has reported that antidepressant use in the U.S. has increased nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans aged 18-44. The U.S. population makes up 5% of the world population, yet are prescribed two-thirds of all psychiatric drugs used worldwide. If this is not a sign of looming mental health collapse, I don’t know what is!
With so many people on meds, I think we can basically say that the U.S. is a ‘zombie nation’. People are so out of touch with themselves and with reality that they think they have to use anti-depressants in order to ‘go back to normal’, not realizing that the reason why reality is shitty is because it is sending them a strong signal to sit up and take notice. Instead, taking mind-numbing drugs makes them even more ignorant of what is going on around them – the false-flag attacks, the fireballs raining down from the sky and Earth changes.
The pandemic is by no means confined to the U.S. One major study mentioned by Kupelain concluded almost 40 percent of Europeans are plagued by mental illness.
Consider this:
- A cross-border report on suicide shows the rate among young people on the island of Ireland is one of the highest in Europe.
- The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling “suicide by economic crisis.”
- Bulgaria’s suicide rate is among the highest in Europe. Psychologists named poverty and stress as the main reasons behind the suicide wave that shocked the Balkan country recently.
- According to official figures, Russia sees 19-20 suicides per 100,000 teenagers a year, which is three times the world average.
- France has one of the highest suicide rates in western Europe, ranking second behind Finland and more than double the UK or Greece. Workplace suicides have sparked a French outcry over France’s elite system where the graduates of an exclusive group of schools are promoted straight into top jobs, denying any possibility of advancement to graduates of lesser schools.
- Japan has consistently maintained the world’s suicide record for years. The number of students who committed suicide in 2011 hit a record figure of 10.9 per cent from the previous year and the total number of suicides across the nation has exceeded 30,000 for 14 consecutive years up to 2011.
Kupelain asks:
What on earth is going on? Why isn’t medical science – and for that matter all of our incredible scientific and technological innovations in every area of life – reducing our stress and lightening our load? Why doesn’t the almost-magical availability of the world’s accumulated knowledge, thanks to the Internet, make us more enlightened and happy? Why is it that, instead, more and more of us are so stressed out as to be on a collision course with illness, misery, tragedy and death?
Most important, what can we do to reverse course?
Indeed, why hasn’t our wonderful advanced technological civilization saved us from ourselves? Maybe it is turning out to not be so wonderful after all…
There is in fact a proven, effective way of dealing with stress from coping with the increasing global madness, something I’ll get on to later.
First, let’s have a closer look at some of the causes of this stress pandemic.
Hysterical and nervous collapse
Martha Stout writes in The Myth of Sanity:
[A]s time passes we often feel that we are growing benumbed, that we have lost something – some element of vitality that used to be there. Without talking about this very much with one another, we grow nostalgic for our own selves. We try to remember the exuberance, and even the joy, we used to feel in things. And we cannot. Mysteriously, and before we realize what is happening, our lives are transfigured from places of imagination and hope into to-do lists, into day after day of just getting through it. Often we are able to envision only a long road of exhausting hurdles, that leads to somewhere we are no longer at all certain we even want to go. Instead of having dreams, we merely protect ourselves. We expend our brief and precious life force in the practice of damage control.[...]
In plain fact, the list of consciousness-assailing events that are witnessed or endured by even the most protected children is extremely long: serious accidents, car crashes, the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, the fear or reality of peer ridicule, petrifying medical procedures, devastating custody battles, predictions of nuclear annihilation or environmental collapse, macabre lessons in how to get away from the “stranger” whom protective parents are constantly expecting.
Almost 25% of American women aged 40 through 59 are currently on antidepressants
Sounds familiar, yes? In a similar vein, Kupelain has this to say:
“Life is difficult,” wrote psychiatrist M. Scott Peck at the outset of his international best-seller, The Road Less Traveled. Stress, difficulties, disappointments, accidents, disease, misfortune, cruelty, betrayal – they’re unavoidable in this life.
Yet, during eras when society and families are stable, unified and fundamentally decent and moral – as, say, America during the 1950s – the stress level for each person is minimized, or at least not compounded by a perverse society. Conversely, when – as is the case today – we have widespread family breakdown, a depraved culture that mocks traditional moral values, a chaotic economy and disintegrating monetary system and a power-mad government dominated by demagogues and sociopaths, the normal stresses of life are greatly multiplied.
It’s doubtful whether America was “decent and moral in the 1950s”, but it’s safe to say that, relatively-speaking, things are much worse now. When you’re induced into behaving like a psychopath in order to survive life in a world run by psychopaths, the inevitable result is an enormous build-up of pressure – anxiety, fear, hopelessness and depression – in the masses of normal people… until they reach breaking point and snap.
Kupelain again:
Today’s relentless economic pressures: high unemployment (the actual rate is at least double that of the “official” government rate), foreclosures and bankruptcies, a stagnant growth rate, 11,000 new people signing up for food stamps every single day, rising taxes for the entire middle class whose net worth is simultaneously shrinking, ever-higher prices for food, gas and other essentials – and overshadowing it all, a galactic national debt burden, courtesy of a wildly out-of-control government unrestrained by either the Constitution or common sense.
That, too, is very stressful. Top it all off with an administration continually abusing the public for the sake of enlarging and consolidating its political power – for instance, by purposely making the “sequester” cuts hurt Americans, even our active-duty soldiers, as much as possible.
Obama is just one in a long chain of utterly incompetent leaders attempting to ‘correct problems’ but who are in fact making them worse. The nature of our ‘just-in-time’ global economy is such that we could withstand disruption from a natural disaster for barely a week before undergoing widespread systemic collapse.
With several forecasts predicting food prices increasing anywhere from 1.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent in 2013, consumers will have to rethink how they will spend their hard-earned discretionary income. I don’t know about you, but when I go to the store I notice that food prices have increased by far more than that – by about 30% in the last year alone. The ‘new normal’ in the agriculture business is fluctuating food prices, strongly influenced by crop failures from the extreme weather and financial speculators ‘making a killing‘ by betting the prices up and down.
Then there’s the stress that is deliberately propagated through societies via government-sponsored terrorism. As Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley wrote last week regarding the Boston Marathon bombing:
Many older Europeans ought to be familiar with the ‘Strategy of Tension in Europe in the ‘Cold War’ years. The strategy of tension, employed by US and European government agents, was a tactic that aimed to divide, manipulate and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and false flag terrorist attacks.
The theory began with allegations that the United States government and the Greek military junta of 1967-1974 supported far-right terrorist groups in Italy and Turkey, where communism was growing in popularity, to spread panic among the population who would in turn demand stronger and more dictatorial governments. There is no reason to assume, or believe, that governments today are any less interested in controlling the people through fear and terror.
Josef Stalin is supposed to have said, “The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The Public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened.” Kupelain comented in his article that “radical change cannot be accomplished while Americans are calm, happy, content and grateful for their blessings. Citizens must be unhappy and stressed out.” It’s an important point. Content people during relatively stable times would neither allow nor demand dictatorial government. And so, citizens must be fearful, unhappy and stressed out, at which point they themselves begin to clamour for government ‘protection’ and control.
The problem of overbearing government stressing us out is compounded by psychiatric practices that only make things worse. The pineal gland, long considered the ‘third eye’ or ‘seat of the soul’, is extremely sensitive to toxic fluoride compounds found in public water supplies and Prozac, which then seem to turn it to stone through calcification. How appropriate is that? As health researcher Sayer Ji explains,
Prozac may represent an archetypal example of how fluoride affects the personality/soul. This drug (chemical name fluoxetine) is approximately 30% fluoride by weight and marketed as an “antidepressant,” even while a major side effect of its use and/or withdrawal is suicidal depression. Modern psychiatry often treats depressive disorders – the “dark night of the soul” – as an organic disorder of the brain, targeting serotonin reuptake by any chemical means necessary. Fluoride and fluoxetine, in fact, may accomplish their intended “therapeutic effects” by poisoning the pineal gland. Animal studies confirm that when mice have their pineal glands removed they no longer respond to fluoxetine.
Perhaps the primary reason why Prozac causes a favorable reaction in those who are treated (poisoned) with it, is that it disassociates that person from the psychospiritual conflicts that they must normally suppress in order to maintain the appearance of sanity and functionality in society, i.e. it is control and not health that is the goal of such “treatment.”
To paraphrase Krishnamurti, Big Government and Big Pharma have teamed together to ensure that you can readjust and reintegrate into a profoundly sick society – and that, surely, is no measure of health.
Completely divested from anything spiritual, mental health science leaves out all mention of the world’s problems and our capacity to figure them out. On the contrary, thinking is discouraged. Just focus on the positive and take your pill to make you essentially like a psychopath who doesn’t give a damn. Just get a prescription and don’t ask questions!
Escape from evil
“It is not group helplessness that leads to narcissistic rage, it is narcissistic rage that produces group helplessness. And a helpless group can be driven to any evil, even to their own destruction.” – Laura Knight-Jadczyk in ‘A Structural Theory of Narcissism and Psychopathy‘
Ok, so things are bad. Now, what can we do to heal the body, mind, emotions and spirit?
1. A genuinely healthy diet
Certain fundamental changes in diet and lifestyle that occurred after the Neolithic (Agricultural) Revolution, and especially after the Industrial Revolution, are too recent – on an evolutionary timescale – for the human genome to have completely adapted. This mismatch between our ancient physiology and the Western diet and lifestyle underlies many so-called diseases of civilization, including coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, epithelial cell cancers, autoimmune disease, and osteoporosis, which are rare or virtually absent in hunter-gatherers and other non-Westernized populations. Most of the human genome has ancestral genes that adapted over millions of years to a Paleolithic diet. Low-carbohydrate eating seems to be the normal metabolic state associated with health, which is consistent with the view that throughout most of our human evolution, we thrived under a low-carb diet. We are here today because our ancestors survived prolonged periods of fasting while they hunted for foods and they were able to thrive on animal foods under very interesting environmental conditions, particularly prolonged and intense periods of cold.
Humans are NOT meant to consume “healthy whole grains.” Our intolerance can show up as type 1 diabetes in kids, type 2 diabetes in kids and adults, acid reflux, bowel urgency, autoimmune diseases, dementia, seizures, hypertension, water retention, paranoia, anxiety, eating disorders, or just feeling rotten.
The most important tool you have with which to change your health is the food you eat. It doesn’t rely on the latest stem cell study or genetic tweaking in a mad scientist’s lab. Food is information that talks to your genes and is capable of turning them on or off, telling them what to do or what not to do. The food you eat has the information needed to affect your health in the fastest way.
From a biological, genetic, and physiological point of view, we are highly optimized and geared by nature to be ‘hunter-gatherers’. We have been mostly eating high-quality animal foods that were hormone-, antibiotic- and pesticide-free with no genetic alteration. This diet was very high in fat, something that was treasured, and low in carbs. The few carbs ingested, if any, were eaten as seasonally available.
For most of us, from an evolutionary perspective, a high-sugar diet is a metabolic challenge that some find difficult as early as birth and many fail to meet as early as adolescence. Humans are NOT meant to consume ‘healthy whole grains.’ Our intolerance can show up as type 1 diabetes in kids, type 2 diabetes in kids and adults, acid reflux, bowel urgency, autoimmune diseases, dementia, seizures, hypertension, water retention, paranoia, anxiety, eating disorders, or just plain feeling rotten. For more information, check out ‘Life Without Bread‘, the ‘Ketogenic Diet‘, or any resource on the Paleolithic diet.
2. Regular and healthy exercise
I know this is going to run counter to everything you’ve been told before, but chronic cardio-aerobic exercise is simply bad for your health, period. It stresses your adrenals into fight-or-flight mode, and besides burning you out, it also creates lots of joint problems. People who run marathons typically have CPK (creatine phosphokinase) blood levels that are high, a marker of muscle damage that is used to detect heart attacks. Excess aerobics cause over-training and muscle-wasting, which later leads to reduction in fat burning. Aerobic exercises increase your bodies’ need for oxygen. From running to spending hours on a treadmill or stationary bike, many aerobic workouts are long and their overall effect on your body is inflammatory. Quite a few people who have had a heart attack were jogging supposedly ‘for better health’.
Erwan le Corre, creator of MovNat, resistance training in a natural setting
In contrast to aerobic exercise, resistance training builds lean mass, but the implications are far more than just that. Resistance training minimizes and even reverses mitochondrial dysfunction – our powerhouse energy factories. It also induces mitochondrial biogenesis – a process where new mitochondria are formed within the cell, and it does it not only in the muscles, but in the brain, kidney, fat tissue and liver as well. The implications here are enormous! By exercising our muscles, we have the potential to not only reverse aging and brain-related diseases such as dementia which are characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction, but as it happens, mitochondrial dysfunction is the final step in ALL diseases. In fact, by making new mitochondria, there is a remodelling of entire networks of mitochondria. New mitochondria merge with old ones, leading to elimination of damaged or dysfunctional mitochondria.
