Hidden Killer of U.S. Veterans Found in Abusive Psychiatry Practices

""According to a shocking statistic from the Department of Veterans Affairs from 2013, 22 U.S. military veterans were committing suicide every day. And while the figure may have tempered somewhat since then, it still remains high.

There have been a number of "mainstream" reasons given for the high suicide rate among military members. Deployment to one or both of the recent "war on terror" combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan has been blamed, though that was debunked somewhat in findingsearlier this year. According to that study, there were some "patterns" that were identified:

— Members who left the military early had a 63 percent higher suicide rate than those who had not yet left the service;

— Those with the fewest years of military service were more at risk;

— Those who served a short stint – less than four years – were at higher risk than those who left after serving four or more years, whether they had been deployed or not.

While the study did not examine potential reasons for these identified trends, the authors did speculate that difficulty finding employment, losing their identity with the military and the need to find new social support may have all played a role.

Conspiracy revealed

But a recently released documentary featuring Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, offered another view, based on evidence examined: psychiatry and, more specifically, its conspiracy against the U.S. military.

The documentary, The Hidden Enemy: Inside Psychiatry's Covert Agenda, produced by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, details psychiatry's rise in the military, from World Wars I and II to its prominence today, laying bare a sinister conspiracy to use men and women in uniform as nothing more than guinea pigs.

When the "war to end all wars" broke out, psychiatry was first introduced into the military. In Germany, soldiers who were unwilling to return to the hellish trench warfare at the front were subjected to what was called the "Kaufmann Cure." However, in reality, it was anything but a cure. Rather, it was a procedure that involved shooting painful electrical currents through the soldier's body while a practitioner intoned hypnotic suggestions. Victims of this "treatment" rightly deemed it a form of torture, but the Kaufmann Cure was widely seen as successful by psychiatrists because it did indeed induce terrified soldiers to return to the front lines, and in a rush.

Mainstreaming psychiatry and psychotropic drugs

When World War II began, psychiatrists had made inroads into the militaries of many nations. And it was through the military that psychiatrists finally achieved newfound status as "medical doctors." But influence over the psychology of the military was just a small fraction of what psychiatrists had planned.

On June 18, 1940, Brig. Gen. J. R. Rees, a psychiatrist, stood before the Annual Meeting of the National Council for Mental Hygiene to outline psychiatry's ambitions for the future:

We must aim to make it [psychiatry] permeate every educational activity in our national life... Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.

And by any measure, that effort has been successful.

As noted in the film, the dramatic rise in military suicides today can be directly linked to a similar dramatic rise in military personnel being prescribed mind-altering psychotropic drugs for "mental health conditions" that have never been scientifically validated.

But why? What makes today's fighters so much less capable than those of earlier periods?

More than just the soldier is at risk

Is it "combat stress"? That's the reason being given by the military psychiatric community. But the very visible effects of combat stress have been chronicled by warriors, writers and other observers going back to ancient times; the lethality and brutality of combat has been much worse in the past than today.

In the documentary, a number of former military members recall how they were routinely prescribed a witch's brew of antidepressants and other mood-altering drugs for their "conditions," many of which were prescribed without proper testing or evaluation. Physicians and psychiatrists who were interviewed lamented the heavy use of psychotropic and other mood-altering drugs as well in the military.

The documentary also makes note of a number of high-profile murders by current and former military members who were also taking psychotropics at the time of their crimes.""

http://www.naturalnews.com/050109_US_veterans_psychiatry_psych_drugs.html

Savant by Accident Opens World of Hidden Numbers for Regular Joe

""When Seattle man, Jason Padgett, walked into a bar for a drink a few years ago, he was an ordinary man with seemingly average intelligence leading an unremarkable life. He worked contentedly in his father's furniture shop and had never done well academically or ever cared to do so. On exiting the bar that night, he was viciously mugged, hit on the head and knocked out. After a hospital evaluation for a concussion, he was sent him home with typical instructions. When he awoke the next morning, he noticed something both disturbing and enthralling. He was seeing things as if they were pixelated, like separate movie camera images but still integrated into a comprehensive but very strange whole. He saw geometric curves in everything, even the plainest things like water going down a drain.

It was “pure beauty” to him. And amazingly, he also saw numbers in everything, in recurring complex patterns called fractals. To his disbelieving astonishment, he had been transformed from a person that had no particular interest or ability in math into a savant able to solve complex mathematical equations.

His story, though extremely rare, is not unique. Padgett has experienced a phenomenon called acquired savantism. He is not the first to be so identified. Similar instances of unprecedented gifts being revealed are rare but many others have been recorded. Derek Amato was a 39- year-old sales trainer without any particular musical talent. Then he dove into the shallow end of a pool, and within days revealed previously untapped musical genius as a piano prodigy.

Interestingly, in both these instances of acquired savantism, the new gift is released on the one hand and new burdens are experienced on the other. This appears to occur in all cases of acquired savantism. In the case of Padgett, he developed temporarily crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder and the visual disturbance that granted his gift also required considerable post traumatic adaptation. Amato also has had to deal with various visual stigmata as the result of the injury and partial hearing loss.

Other instances of acquired savantism first appear as a very atypical reaction to a stroke. Tommy McHugh was a former builder in Liverpool, England who suffered a near fatal stroke and discovered thereafter that he could paint with exactness. He did so with extreme obsessiveness and went on to artistic acclaim. Yet he also suffered from post stoke disabilities including an inability to recognize familiar faces and could only speak in a form of rhyme.

Daniel Tammet was an autistic child that had bouts of epilepsy at age 4. Daniel achieved fame when he recited pi to 22,514 decimal places from memory and fluently learned Icelandic, one of the most challenging languages in the world, in seven days.

Is this sort of hidden ability within us all? Dr. Donald A Treffert has studied savants intensively and believes that we all have similar dormant potential. Dr. Treffert notes that most cases of acquired savantism surface during childhood are extremely sudden in onset and typically do so within the backdrop of some other kind of developmental disorder. From his perspective, this pattern of explosive release indicates that a pre-existing capacity is in place and therefore raises the possibility that such potentials are always present but remain hidden or locked in typical circumstances.

Traditionally, investigators have searched for answers to this enigma through genetic evaluation or by studying the neural pathways of savants searching for some kind of unique genetic mutation or singular neural connections. Yet, none have been identified. No specific neurological changes have been found that separate savants from the 'normal' person. Our current understanding suggests that savantism likely represents the selective inactivation of a gene or a group of genes that paradoxically inhibit these latent talents under the ordinary circumstance. When the genes that suppress these deep faculties are blocked, their expression is surprisingly released. In other words, a normal inhibitory neural mechanism is somehow broken enabling new faculties to blossom that have been previously suppressed. This is then linked in complex ways to other aspects of our personality. This combination accounts then for the presence of accompanying negative factors, and relates back to the mechanism by which acquired savantism is revealed only after brain trauma, strokes, febrile seizures and even dementia states.

Certainly, savantism teaches us that our brain capacities are vastly richer than we had previously understood. However, there is an even larger message. Savants teach us that the full capacities of our genomes are well beyond what we observe as our natural endowment. And if this is true for the brain, might it not be true for other bodily systems? This understanding also carries is a direct implication with respect to our evolutionary development and how novelty occurs in evolution. How might dramatic faculties accumulate by natural selection if they are hidden from expression? This represents an apparent contradiction with standard Darwinism. In Darwinism, phenotypic expression governs survivorship, which then determines genetic frequency and structure. If salient capacities are hidden, how might selection pressure act and why would abundant faculties be suppressed?

Savants matter too with respect to population genetics. There is no manner in which we might imagine the successful penetration of any specific savant's capabilities to an entire population as it arises in isolated individuals. Furthermore, it is not even clearly related to any change in genetic complement. In either case, no lasting imprint on our complex genome is left by any savant. Again, albeit a limited example, savantism points to the limitations of Darwinism in explaining how capacities arise, are expressed, or remain persistently hidden within populations.""

http://www.sciencecodex.com/what_savants_can_teach_us-154958