December 15, 2012
[W]hile some are calling for stricter gun laws in the wake of yesterday’s horrific shooting, it is the constant drumbeat in favor of mental health ‘reforms’ that I find most curious. Very little is known (or so we’re told) about the shooter, Adam Lanza, but beginning only a few hours into the constant news coverage, we began to hear a ‘mental health’ meme from TV ‘experts’ such as Dr. Phil and Dr. Drew. Yesterday on CNN International, Dr. Drew and a female psychologist (whose name escapes me) both mentioned a need for family and neighbors to ‘force’ patients to take their medicine, and that these loved ones and even neighbors should consider calling police to enforce compliance.
Derek and I have been watching ‘The Prisoner’ (original) on DVD recently, and last night’s episode dovetailed neatly into the call for mental health ‘enforcement’. The episode title is ‘Change of Mind’, and it follows the events inside ‘The Village’ during a time when the current No. 2 uses No. 86 (a euphemism for ‘death’ – as in ‘Let’s eighty-six the guy.’) to trick No. 6 (Patrick McGoohan) into revealing why he had resigned from his job as top spy for Britain. No. 6 is shown throughout the series as a rebel and a trouble-maker, and he is constantly on the lookout for a means of escaping. In this episode, the Committee (composed of cooperative villagers) determines that No. 6 is not only insolent and disruptive but also ‘unmutual’ (a buzz word that essentially means that he requires involuntary, mental health intervention). No sooner is the pronouncement made than we see the people of The Village actually rise up, drag No. 6 from his home, and force the recalcitrant ‘Six’ (Man, as in ‘created on the sixth day’) into a mental health facility!
As the show’s producer and star Patrick McGoohan explained in an interview conducted shortly before his death, the core premise of the The Prisoner and ‘The Village’:
“It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can’t break.” When asked why the people of The Village behave like automatons, McGoohan continues with this explanation: “…the majority of them have been sort of brain- washed. Their souls have been brainwashed out of them. Watching too many commercials is what happened to them.”
It’s tempting to laugh when you read that last bit, but McGoohan is serious. He explains:
“…we’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.”
In other words, our programming commences at birth. Perhaps, it is no coincidence that Hillary Clinton wrote a book that proclaims that ‘It takes a Village to raise a child’. Politics, law, social constraints, and consumerism program, conform, and constrain us from a very early age. Nearly every American household contains at least one psychotropic drug (a class that includes sleep aids as well as anti-depressants and ADHD drugs). Our chemical constraints fuel a $33 Billion industry, making it in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to find off-label uses and stoke the fires.
Does this mean the citizens of our ‘village’ are more often mentally ill, or are these drugs sometimes used for financial gain as well as ‘control’? The truth about Adam Lanza—or the ‘truth’ as we are allowed to know it—will become more clear in the coming days and weeks. The media would have us believe that many more potential ‘school shooters’ are lurking in our neighborhoods and towns. Our world is being programmed. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves permanent ‘prisoners’, where soulless ‘villagers’ enforce medical care and confinement upon any other ‘villagers’ whom they regard as ‘unmutual’.
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Addendum (Dec. 17) — As of this morning, Adam Lanza’s rare form of ‘autism’ (I put this in quotes, because the jury is still out on whether or not Asperger’s Syndrome is autism) reportedly manifested with a lack of physiological pain recognition. In other words, Adam did not feel injuries such as fire, cuts, scrapes, etc. I suspect that we will learn more and more about this troubled young man and about his family’s efforts to find him treatment as this week continues. The mental health drumbeat has only grown louder over the weekend, and I foresee a federal effort to regulate our children’s lives all the more by requiring increased mental health screenings (many school systems already conduct such screenings in middle or high school). There’s no quick fix, but a grieving nation gives lawmakers an excuse to quickly pass bills and bills and bills. Sigh.
