1 year later....still glad u went to law school?

[driven]

Enter Radovan Karadzic: was Karadzic merely a doctor who ran a genocide, or did his profession as a doctor play a significant part in his genocidal role?

Psychiatrists may be more cognizant than most people of the devastating effects of stigmatizing the mentally ill, but that does not prevent them from suffering its consequences when they develop a mental illness. The stigma attached to mental illness is certainly not an abstract concept to psychiatrists. Their patients deal with it almost every day. But psychiatrists can be startled by how devastating stigma can really be when they are the ones on the receiving end. When those psychiatrists are also members of a minority group, coping with and overcoming the effects of stigma add difficult, and often unexpected, challenges to the recovery process. Three psychiatrists who have endured stigma from the public as well as their medical colleagues participated in an APA annual meeting workshop cosponsored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. The psychiatrists described the anguish they experienced as they tried to recover from mental illness and overcome stigmatizing behavior.

Michelle Clark, M.D., began to experience some classic symptoms of major depression several years ago after a serious physical illness, but despite being an experienced psychiatrist who has treated many people with depression, she convinced herself that her symptoms were not signs that she needed treatment, but the result of the stress she was under. A psychiatrist colleague at the University of California, San Francisco, where Clark is an associate clinical professor and has developed culture-based treatment programs, noticed her symptoms and eventually prescribed an SSRI for her, Clark said. She began to improve. Even after she acknowledged that she was suffering from depression, her family "remained clueless," about what the illness entailed and how some of her behaviors were manifestations of it. It took a long time, Clark emphasized, but she finally realized that the stigma attached to having a mental illness, added to the stigma that comes with being African American in this country, left her in the position of "colluding with" the stigmatizers. She came away from the experience with a vivid picture of how stigma and the resulting failure to recognize symptoms that would have been evident in patients she treats had slowed her recovery process.

Suzanne Vogel-Scibilia, M.D., is also familiar with the devastating effects of stigma, having had bipolar illness so severe since she was a child that she has had several psychotic episodes. After the birth of her third child, she told the workshop audience, she experienced a period of catatonia. Now medical director of a consumer-run mental health center in Beaver, Pa., Vogel-Scibilia stressed that psychiatrists who are minority-group members can in fact confront a triple stigma—that of being a minority, a person with mental illness, and, in some communities, a psychiatrist. She believes that as a psychiatry resident with a serious mental illness, she also was stigmatized by supervisors and other residents. One residency supervisor, she said, told her that other residents believed she needed ECT. While that supervisor agreed that such a response was "probably overkill," he advised Vogel-Scibilia to "stay away" until her symptoms abated and she was no longer "scaring the other residents," she said. Too many physicians, and particularly psychiatrists, are convinced they’re immune from mental illness, she said. When it strikes, an additional source of stigma often keeps psychiatrists and mental health professionals from acknowledging it and getting treatment. That, she stated, is the belief that many people inside and outside of medicine harbor that a mentally ill psychiatrist "must have done something to cause it or isn’t qualified to be a psychiatrist." When a clinician is part of a minority group, it gives people an additional reason to distance that person from other psychiatrists, Vogel-Scibilia suggested, since it supplies some people with a reason to explain why a psychiatrist can end up with a mental illness.

She also warned that mentally ill psychiatrists should not expect to find empathy in the "ex-patient community." Many of those former patients refuse to view psychiatrists with mental illness as part of them, harboring resentment from what they consider to have been coercive medical treatment. Vogel-Scibilia calls these psychiatrists who have or have had mental illness "prosumers"—a blend of providers and consumers—and urged them to look for support in several arenas. These include through APA, which puts on educational workshops such as this one, and through the AMA, which is "welcoming of consumer-providers, especially those with minority status," she said. One of the worst things psychiatrists can do in response to having suffered a mental illness, she stressed, is to change the way they practice. Doing so "becomes a knife you've sharpened for others to use." A few years ago, when he worked at a Pennsylvania hospital, Raymond Reyes, M.D., refused to order restraints for a nonpsychotic patient who was exhibiting disruptive behavior. His refusal got him in hot water with his supervisor. Reyes, a son of Phillipine immigrants, wondered whether he would have taken such a stand if he had not suffered from a mental illness himself. Reyes explained that he has suffered from dysthymia and major depression, first realizing that he needed psychiatric treatment after he graduated from residency and joined the Air Force, where he supervised an inpatient unit.

After believing that as a physician he was expected to be "stoic" about his depression symptoms, he told a superior at the air base that he needed treatment. He asked the superior, who was also his friend, to treat him. "That ended both the friendship and our working relationship," Reyes said. At that point he had second thoughts about whether he should have put himself on the line by admitting he had a serious psychiatric disorder, but he explained that he didn’t want to self-medicate or "do anything under the table." He said that he has identified one "silver lining" in his continuing battle with mental illness, namely, that he has even more empathy with other people suffering from similar disorders than he might otherwise. He wonders, he noted, whether he would have refused to restrain that patient in Pennsylvania if he had not seen mental illness from the inside. He currently works at a community mental health center in Solano County, Calif. Workshop cochair Michael Myers, M.D., pointed out, "We have a long way to go in the house of medicine" when psychiatrists and other physicians with mental illness are still forced to overcome stigma directed at them by their colleagues. 

[isaura]

You've got to be kidding me, just sex - you are dissapointed with doctors because they may have used as pawns homeless people! Doctors and medical professionals are absolutely not champions in this field - how about intelligence agencies having conducted non-consensual human experiments (e.g., trauma-based mind control, etc).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZME1aZ7E7w

Conditioning

As far as I understand it (which admittedly is nothing close to first-hand experience), trauma-based mind control is kind of similar to the whole favorite-album phenomenon. The idea is basically that you condition the mind according to certain stimuli. When you experience a sensory trigger, a correlated interior state is achieved. The most common example of this is called Classical or Pavlovian Conditioning:

Classical Conditioning is the type of learning made famous by Pavlov's experiments with dogs. The gist of the experiment is this: Pavlov presented dogs with food, and measured their salivary response (how much they drooled). Then he began ringing a bell just before presenting the food. At first, the dogs did not begin salivating until the food was presented. After a while, however, the dogs began to salivate when the sound of the bell was presented. They learned to associate the sound of the bell with the presentation of the food. As far as their immediate physiological responses were concerned, the sound of the bell became equivalent to the presentation of the food.

Other types of behavioral conditioning exist as well, with "operant conditioning" relating to the reinforcement or punishing of behavior. For our current purposes though, the easiest way to understand all this is through Pavlov's dogs salivating when they hear a bell, or us being flooded by emotions when we hear a song we've not heard for many years.

Trauma & Dissociation

Now, listening to a record over and over may be a lot of fun, but it's not the most significant physical stimulus available to us. Extremes of pleasure and pain may go well beyond that, triggering far greater physiological responses and long-term effects. Imagine instead of listening to a record over and over again, you are severely beaten repeatedly, or subjected to electric shocks. And at varying intervals to this, you are in turn sexually abused. Maybe this goes on for months or years. It's not very difficult to imagine that such events would seriously contort your psyche in unimaginable ways. Especially if these things were combined and overlaid with other types of classical and operant conditioning. For a creepy elaboration of this, check out Beth Goobie's article, "The Network of Stolen Consciousness." Goobie claims to be the survivor of a systematic process of mind control. Before we delve too deeply into that stuff though, let's look at one very real and verifiable facet of traumatic experience which Goobie discusses:

Dissociation is commonly experienced during trauma. Rape and traffic accident survivors describe out-of-body experiences during which they float above their bodies and watch terrifying activities transpire below. This experience occurs naturally, whether the actual trauma is a fluke occurrence or a calculated torture session.

This same phenomenon can be seen in many near-death experiences. It sounds crazy when you talk about it in terms of mind-control stuff, but what about if we turn to a "legitimate" psychological source, discussing trauma and dissociation:

Technically, dissociation is a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. When a person is dissociating, certain information is not associated with other information as it normally would be. For example, during a traumatic experience, a person may dissociate the memory of the place and circumstances of the trauma from his ongoing memory, resulting in a temporary mental escape from the fear and pain of the trauma and, in some cases, a memory gap surrounding the experience. Because this process can produce changes in memory, people who frequently dissociate often find their senses of personal history and identity are affected.

[...] Dissociative disorders develop under fairly consistent circumstances. When faced with overwhelmingly traumatic situations from which there is no physical escape, a child may resort to "going away" in his or her head. This ability is typically used by children as an extremely effective defense against acute physical and emotional pain, or anxious anticipation of that pain. By this dissociative process, thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions of the traumatic experiences can be separated off psychologically, allowing the child to function as if the trauma had not occurred.

Dissociation is often referred to as a highly creative survival technique because it allows individuals enduring "hopeless" circumstances to preserve some areas of healthy functioning. Over time, however, for a child who has been repeatedly physically and sexually assaulted, defensive dissociation becomes reinforced and conditioned. Because the dissociative escape is so effective, children who are very practiced at it may automatically use it whenever they feel threatened or anxious — even if the anxiety-producing situation is not abusive. Often, even after the traumatic circumstances are long past, the left-over pattern of defensive dissociation remains

Goobie describes virtually this same thing in her article. But rather than it being an accidental coping mechanism, she discusses quasi-occult techniques which systematically take advantage of this otherwise natural tendency of dissociation during trauma. She describes doctors, programmers and handlers who brutally abused her, and combined it with elaborate systems of guided imagery and other types of conditioning. As a result, her personality was fragmented into "alters" which were largely unaware of one another, and each of which had it’s own personality, training and purpose.

Autonomous Complexes & Possession

The basic idea is that triggers are set up during the traumatic programming which can later be used to initiate dissociation of the main personality, allowing one of the alters to take control. The concept, at its core, is really no different from what Jung termed "complexes":

"Complexes are autonomous groups of associations that have a tendency to move by themselves, to live their own life apart from our intentions. I hold that our personal unconscious as well as the collective unconscious, consists of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragment personalities."

What we call the ego is thought to be just one of many complexes which make up the mind. Jung's student Marie Louise Von Franz also writes:

"Even an unconscious complex can make an act of volition or decide or arrange something, as an ego can. In a way, there are as many little egos as there are autonomous complexes in a human being; like the sun among the stars, the ego complex rules [...]

Not coincidentally, these other complexes may spontaneously take over during moments of extreme stress or trauma. Von Franz writes:

"That happens when you get into a state in which you are not yourself, or into an emotional upset where you lose control of yourself, but afterwards wake up completely sober and look at the stupid things you did during your possessed state and wonder what got into you: something got hold of you, you weren’t yourself, though while you were behaving like that, you thought you were - it was just as if an evil spirit or the devil had got into you.

These things one must not just take in a kind of colloquial amusing way, but quite literally, for a devil - or we would say, more neutrally, an autonomous complex - temporarily replaces the ego complex; it feels like the ego at the time, but it isn’t, for afterwards, when dissociated from it, one cannot understand how one came to do or think such things.”

[These and other related quotes and theories can be explored at these two articles I wrote - Also check out "Multiple Personality and the Holographic Mind"]

Mind Control, Then & Now

The point I'm trying to make with all this is that for countless millenia, humans have known about the dissociative tendency of the human mind. It's understood by different models in different cultures of course. Nowadays we might say dissociative identity order is related to trauma. But in medieval times, they might have said that self-flagellation brings you closer to god. In another culture, a shaman might drum and dance to the point of exhaustion so that he could enter the world of the spirits. In Voodoo, practitioners too become "mounted" by gods. Even modern day "magickians" use similar techniques. In his article Pop Magic! Grant Morrison talks about "charging" a sigil, which is a magical symbol created for fulfillment of a specific purpose.

To charge your sigil you must concentrate on its shape, and hold that form in your mind as you evacuate all other thoughts. Almost impossible, you might say, but the human body has various mechanisms for inducing brief no-mind' states. Fasting, spinning, intense exhaustion, fear, sex, the fight-or-flight response will all do the trick. I have charged sigils while bungee-jumping, lying dying in a hospital bed, experiencing a total solar eclipse and dancing to Techno.

[isaura]

Morrison also suggests that another critically useful moment for magical working is the 'no-mind' state experienced during the moment of orgasm: At the moment of orgasm, the mind blinks. Into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched. What I'm trying to say with all this is that all of this has been known and actively used throughout all of human history. It's not always been phrased the same way, but it's pretty much never gone out of style. As a result, there's no reason to assume that suddenly these techniques have disappeared off the face of the earth. I think it was Jacques Ellul who said that technology always expands to fill all its potential uses. And make no mistake about it, these techniques are a technology, and they have undoubtedly been put to negative uses at some conceivable point.

Brain-Change

Does that necessarily mean there is a vast Illuminati network of ritual abuse and mind control? I won't pretend to have the answer there. But I do think we can quite readily find evidence that such techniques have been used with great effectiveness for the purposes of "mind-control" throughout human history. Although, maybe "brain-change" is a slightly more neutral term. For evidence of how this works, we need look no farther than our recent discussion of primitive rites of passage. A commenter on Rigorous Intuition also left a useful description of these events, which we can use to summarize here:

Melanesian, or Aboriginal, rites of passage begin with a separation of the boys from their mothers. They are brought to a place they have never been. They recognize nothing. They are treated strangely, perhaps dressed in women's clothes. They are often drugged. Everything that happens to them in this liminal state is meant to completely erase whatever they knew and learned before - mother knowledge, if you will, which is considered inappropriate for an adult male.

When the initiation ceremonies reach their peak, the boys are marked in some way - some tribes burn the skin, or use tatooing. When the adult males consider the initiation to be complete, the boys are brought back to the village and use their adult names, and are accepted as adult men. The attachment to the mother (and feminine ways) is forever broken. While the author of that comment goes on to suggest these rites have nothing to do with "mind-control" I tend to disagree. Formalized rites of passage are intentional cultural conditioning rituals. They take people whose minds are at moments of imprint vulnerability, and subject them to an ordeal which fundamentally and purposely changes their identity and relationship to society. What we call mind control - once you strip away the sci-fi Illuminati trappings - is fundamentally no different from this. Especially noteworthy in this discussion is the importance of ritualized trauma (especially involving the sex organs). Being subjected to extreme sensory stimulus causes a point of dissociation. The mind blinks off. And in traditional cultures, this momentary gap is filled then with a new cultural mythos. The initiate undergoing the rite of passage is inculcated at this moment with the new story and correlated teachings which will allow them to take on a new functional role in society.

Trauma-based mind control would function according to this same general principle, except it would continually repeat and reinforce the conditioning for a long period of time. Whether or not the CIA/shadow government uses such techniques, you can bet your sweet bippy they are used on us routinely and ruthlessly by various other parties (intentionally or not). Spend 12 years being forced to sit still in school - a supremely unnatural and traumatic series of highly repetitive events for mammals. Then go home and watch the same commercials and television shows endlessly. Make no mistake about it, ritualized trauma-based mind control and conditioning are very real things which we all have a great deal of firsthand experience in. Most people nowadays just call it "education," "entertainment" or "work" though - in true Orwellian fashion.

Generational Trauma

I believe there are also events which act as generational trauma-events, opening up the possibility of radical conditioning on a mass scale. Whether or not these events are committed with such purposes in mind, they seem to be invariably used by those in power for this purpose. Jeff Wells recently posted an excellent quote by a JFK assassination researcher, which raises the possibility that these events are indeed crafted with specific purposes in mind:

Don't you think the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: "We are in control and no one not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it." It was a message to the people that their government was powerless. And the people eventually got the message

The barbarously public JFK assassination sent this message to the generation previous to us, our parents, who now have grown old. The possibility exists that this message needed to be updated for our generation - the young people moving upwards in the world today, coming into positions of power. None of us lived through the JFK, RFK or MLK assassinations, but for those who did, it left an indelible mark on their psyche. You could protest all you want, and achieve great progress, but ultimately it was fruitless. You go too far and you will be killed. Since most of us don't even learn history in school anymore, the speculative powers-that-be might have decided to revive these tactics. I wonder if 9/11 was actually a sort of culture-wide initiation - trauma-based mind control on a mass scale. Though for most of us it was a vicarious experience (in other words, it reached a huge audience), it was a particularly brutal one which forever transformed us as a result. Whether or not you believe that 9/11 was a "staged" event, it's inescapable that the government well understood this was a point of "imprint vulnerability." Do you remember watching it all unfold on television and feeling somehow like it "wasn't real"? That's a crucial symptom of traumatic dissociation. Your mind splits, blinks off for a moment, creating a critical space which can be filled with a new story, a new mythos. Before that, almost none of us gave a *&^% about terrorism or national security. But as a result of this trauma-based rite of passage, we were suddenly conditioned to a completely new value system - one in which everything we held dear before was turned upside-down: personal freedom, the Bill of Rights, etc. It's virtually identical to what happens to a child in a traditional culture who is re-aligned to adulthood through ritual circumcision and the supporting transformative mythos. Maybe the WTC tumbling down was the ritual circumcision of the American psyche. We are now adults. We are now warriors.

Survival & Recovery

All is not lost of course. It never is. Just because somebody else either designed or exploited a moment of trauma to push their agenda on you, you're still the one in charge of what happens as a result. Ran Prieur makes an excellent point about how 9/11 effected different people in various ways:

For me, it was liberating, like a near-death experience. That was the day I started going barefoot in the city, and started standing up to my temp agency, which got me fired two weeks later. I was surprised that it had the opposite effect on the culture at large, making people more fearful, narrow-minded, and generally emotionally contractive.

Also, in relation to the conspiracy theory wet-dream that is mind control, it's important to look at where most of our information comes from. It comes from people like Beth Goobie, like Kathleen Sullivan, like Cathy O'Brien, people who are mind control survivors. Whether or not you "believe" their experiences, these are people who have committed themselves to a process of public healing and recovery. They are, if nothing else, a testament to the notion that no matter what trauma has happened to you in the past, you can move beyond it. It may be an intense struggle, but hell, so is life. As Derek Gilbert pointed out, the point of life is not getting your ass kicked, but in getting your ass kicked and picking yourself up and moving on. Becoming aware of weird *&^% like this can either freak you out, or it can be a wake-up call about how things work. Once you understand the techniques that are being applied, there's nothing to stop you from using them yourself. You can go back into your life and use this knowledge. Heck, you probably already do when you listen to a new album over and over again. You're subtly conditioning yourself to forever associate it with your life at this moment. The most effective mind control agent in the world is not only on your side: it's you. Sometimes the hardest thing in life is accepting responsibility for yourself.

[cameo]

Enter Radovan Karadzic: was Karadzic merely a doctor who ran a genocide, or did his profession as a doctor play a significant part in his genocidal role?

Psychiatrists may be more cognizant than most people of the devastating effects of stigmatizing the mentally ill, but that does not prevent them from suffering its consequences when they develop a mental illness. The stigma attached to mental illness is certainly not an abstract concept to psychiatrists. Their patients deal with it almost every day. But psychiatrists can be startled by how devastating stigma can really be when they are the ones on the receiving end. When those psychiatrists are also members of a minority group, coping with and overcoming the effects of stigma add difficult, and often unexpected, challenges to the recovery process. Three psychiatrists who have endured stigma from the public as well as their medical colleagues participated in an APA annual meeting workshop cosponsored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. The psychiatrists described the anguish they experienced as they tried to recover from mental illness and overcome stigmatizing behavior.

Michelle Clark, M.D., began to experience some classic symptoms of major depression several years ago after a serious physical illness, but despite being an experienced psychiatrist who has treated many people with depression, she convinced herself that her symptoms were not signs that she needed treatment, but the result of the stress she was under. A psychiatrist colleague at the University of California, San Francisco, where Clark is an associate clinical professor and has developed culture-based treatment programs, noticed her symptoms and eventually prescribed an SSRI for her, Clark said. She began to improve. Even after she acknowledged that she was suffering from depression, her family "remained clueless," about what the illness entailed and how some of her behaviors were manifestations of it. It took a long time, Clark emphasized, but she finally realized that the stigma attached to having a mental illness, added to the stigma that comes with being African American in this country, left her in the position of "colluding with" the stigmatizers. She came away from the experience with a vivid picture of how stigma and the resulting failure to recognize symptoms that would have been evident in patients she treats had slowed her recovery process.

Suzanne Vogel-Scibilia, M.D., is also familiar with the devastating effects of stigma, having had bipolar illness so severe since she was a child that she has had several psychotic episodes. After the birth of her third child, she told the workshop audience, she experienced a period of catatonia. Now medical director of a consumer-run mental health center in Beaver, Pa., Vogel-Scibilia stressed that psychiatrists who are minority-group members can in fact confront a triple stigma—that of being a minority, a person with mental illness, and, in some communities, a psychiatrist. She believes that as a psychiatry resident with a serious mental illness, she also was stigmatized by supervisors and other residents. One residency supervisor, she said, told her that other residents believed she needed ECT. While that supervisor agreed that such a response was "probably overkill," he advised Vogel-Scibilia to "stay away" until her symptoms abated and she was no longer "scaring the other residents," she said. Too many physicians, and particularly psychiatrists, are convinced they’re immune from mental illness, she said. When it strikes, an additional source of stigma often keeps psychiatrists and mental health professionals from acknowledging it and getting treatment. That, she stated, is the belief that many people inside and outside of medicine harbor that a mentally ill psychiatrist "must have done something to cause it or isn’t qualified to be a psychiatrist." When a clinician is part of a minority group, it gives people an additional reason to distance that person from other psychiatrists, Vogel-Scibilia suggested, since it supplies some people with a reason to explain why a psychiatrist can end up with a mental illness.

She also warned that mentally ill psychiatrists should not expect to find empathy in the "ex-patient community." Many of those former patients refuse to view psychiatrists with mental illness as part of them, harboring resentment from what they consider to have been coercive medical treatment. Vogel-Scibilia calls these psychiatrists who have or have had mental illness "prosumers"—a blend of providers and consumers—and urged them to look for support in several arenas. These include through APA, which puts on educational workshops such as this one, and through the AMA, which is "welcoming of consumer-providers, especially those with minority status," she said. One of the worst things psychiatrists can do in response to having suffered a mental illness, she stressed, is to change the way they practice. Doing so "becomes a knife you've sharpened for others to use." A few years ago, when he worked at a Pennsylvania hospital, Raymond Reyes, M.D., refused to order restraints for a nonpsychotic patient who was exhibiting disruptive behavior. His refusal got him in hot water with his supervisor. Reyes, a son of Phillipine immigrants, wondered whether he would have taken such a stand if he had not suffered from a mental illness himself. Reyes explained that he has suffered from dysthymia and major depression, first realizing that he needed psychiatric treatment after he graduated from residency and joined the Air Force, where he supervised an inpatient unit.

After believing that as a physician he was expected to be "stoic" about his depression symptoms, he told a superior at the air base that he needed treatment. He asked the superior, who was also his friend, to treat him. "That ended both the friendship and our working relationship," Reyes said. At that point he had second thoughts about whether he should have put himself on the line by admitting he had a serious psychiatric disorder, but he explained that he didn’t want to self-medicate or "do anything under the table." He said that he has identified one "silver lining" in his continuing battle with mental illness, namely, that he has even more empathy with other people suffering from similar disorders than he might otherwise. He wonders, he noted, whether he would have refused to restrain that patient in Pennsylvania if he had not seen mental illness from the inside. He currently works at a community mental health center in Solano County, Calif. Workshop cochair Michael Myers, M.D., pointed out, "We have a long way to go in the house of medicine" when psychiatrists and other physicians with mental illness are still forced to overcome stigma directed at them by their colleagues. 

Glas Javnosti reports that the investigative judge Milan Dilparic, the first official who talked to Dr. Karadzic late Monday night, when he was brought to him for hearing at 1 a.m, thought former president of Bosnian Serb republic was calm and respectful. That night, during the hearing that lasted hour and a half, Dr. Karadzic informed the judge he was not arrested on July 21 around 10 p.m, as the official story goes, but at 9:30 p.m. on July 18, on a city bus No. 73. "Karadzic was cooperative during the hearing. He was not afraid. He was calm and composed, and fully cooperated with the investigative officials. He wasn't presenting his defense regarding the charges by the Hague at the time, because that is not the part of procedure", Glas source from Belgrade Special Court revealed.

The employees of the Special Court, where Radovan Karadzic is held in custody, say that Bosnian Serb leader is a true gentleman. "He is a decent man, a highly educated scholar with a soaring intelligence, and not some quasi-intellectual", Special Court official said. He decisively denied malicious claims by the Bosnian Muslim daily Dnevni avaz, which reported that Karadzic "had asked for antidepressant pills in prison". "That is an absolute lie. We are checking his health every morning in the custodial unit and the investigative judge comes to receive report by the head of the custodial unit about Radovan Karadzic's condition. Such allegations are complete fabrications: Karadzic is perfectly healthy, both physically and mentally, and he sleeps well", Glas source from the Special Court is categorical. He added that Karadzic expressed a wish to have visits only by the family members and those who will take part in the preparation of his defense. "He told us he wishes to have visits only by the family members and by those who will help him prepare his defense. We are receiving over a million requests each day from those who want to see him, but the investigative judge who is making decisions about that has only approved visits by the family members and the lawyers," Special Court representative said.

[pregap]

[...]

[These and other related quotes and theories can be explored at these two articles I wrote - Also check out "Multiple Personality and the Holographic Mind"]

[...]

Can you direct us to some site where we can order this book?

[caribou]

[...]

As to surgeons:

Nasstasjia, actually 1˝ years out of medical school and awaiting a surgical residency says how while performing a hernia operation, the supervising surgeon told her "You have the skills but if you want to remain a woman in a man's world, you have to be a surgeon with testicles!!!! Or don't be a surgeon at all!!!"

Deeply offensive chauvinistic and sexist tones when surgery as a residency is concerned. Surgeons may indeed be more egotistical than other doctors -- their rapport with patients tends to be worse than other doctors. While this egotism may motivate some surgeons to work for their patients, I cannot believe that it is, or should be, the primary motivator for surgeons in general. Egotism my help in some instances, but it will also be counter-productive in other instances. Competence is certainly very important for surgeons, and confidence can be one of many aspects that has a bearing on this. Generally the best surgeons in most specialties are the ones who have performed the greatest number of procedures, therefore confidence and familiarity must be relevant. Egotism is something very different, and I believe that competence with humility is much more desirable since egotism and arrogance can lead to mistakes and coverups. Women can be excellent surgeons and "manliness" is not a requisite trait. It's just that medical students and residents are still being innundated with sexist attitudes.

A close friend of mine was the top student in anatomy and had a strong aptitude for spatial reasoning. Some thought that he should naturally be a surgeon including some in the surgery department. He did not like the competetive and often mean social atmosphere and made a different choice. For many years he wondered if he had missed his calling. He sees now clearly, however, that he would have never made a good surgeon despite the intellectual aptitude for the anatomical/technical aspects. He is much more at home with clinical work that benefits from reflection and patience. The chauvinistic traditions in surgery serve a useful function in forcing a self-selection of just the personality type most suited to the work. Specialty selection in medicine is largely a matter of matching personality to work, residents all pretty much have the aptitude to learn any of it. It would be interesting to see more research on personality and specialty selection in this regard. The flip side of the egotism allowing surgeons to make bold and irreversible decisions is that they make sometimes unavoidingly wrong decisions. That, of course, comes with a price.

I do not know what the hours and pay is in other countries, but in the United States many resident physicians routinely work more than 100 hours a week. It appears long hours are a necessary rite of passage, while at the same time an obsolete practice that endangers patients. Before Risa Moriarty resigned her plastic surgery residency 2˝ years into a seven-year program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, she was routinely working 110-130 hours per week, and sometimes worked a 60-hour shift. That's 3 days and 2 nights on call in the hospital with no sleep other than brief, catch-as-catch-can naps. "It takes an altered state of mind to get through it." she says. "Residency turns you into a very efficient machine. "I stayed longer than I should have," says Moriarty, now an executive at HealthCite Inc. in Baltimore. "It was a difficult decision to make and one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I considered changing to another specialty, but I was just completely burned out." She is not alone in her reaction to the relentlessly long work hours in some hospitals. She believes many physicians are bitter, even the older ones. "After I resigned, two attending physicians called me and said they were envious of my decision.

"Medicine is a militaristic culture," says Moriarty. "It's a hierarchical, macho fraternity, and hospitals hide behind the argument that doctors know best." Older doctors who went through the same rite of passage may believe that it weeds out those who don't have "the right stuff." However, Moriarty points out that modern-day residents probably are seeing 50 to 60 patients in a 100-hour workweek -- versus 20 in 1950 -- and the patients present a significantly more complex workload than in the past. Staying awake 24 hours impairs cognitive psychomotor performance, to the same degree as having a. 0.1 percent blood alcohol level, according to a study published in the journal Nature. That is above many states legal driving limits, which range from 0.04 percent to 0.1%. Sleep-deprived resident physicians can be a danger to themselves as well as to their patients. The American Medical Students Association says that residents who work excessive hours have high rates of motor vehicle accidents, depression and complications during pregenancy. The Boston, Va.-based group put together. "A Primer to Resident work Hours: A Patients-Safety Concern," arguing that. "This archaic practice of overworking residents has become useless in the current medical setting. Latching on to this tradition at the expense of patient safety is morally questionable." The paper cites studies linking sleep deprivation medical misdiagnosis.

Risa Morjarty, who resigned her plastic surgery residency 2˝ years into a 7-year program, says teaching hospitals systems of checks and balances are not always adequate to catch treatment errors attributable to overly tired medical personnel. For example, residents frequently in central intravenous lines, which develop complications in one out of 200 patients. "If a sleep-deprived resident makes an mistake, it's hard to prove in court," because usually it can be explained as a know complication of the procedure. As many as 100,000-people die annually from preventable medical accidents, according to the institute of Medicine (IOM), a Washington, D.C.-based society chartered by Congress to advise the government. At 1999, IOM report, To Err Is Human Building a Safer Health System found that most medical errors are caused by basic flaws in the hospitals, clinics and pharmactes operate, no by individual carelessness. But "common sense tells us that medical errors as a result of sleep deprivation must have happened," says Elien Wertherimer a professor who teach medical malpractice law at villanova University School of Law in Philadelpha. "However the documentation simply isn't there." Wertheimer says one of her students last year wanted to do a research project on he topic. "He eventually had to give up because he couldn't find the documentation. It's a great human resource issue."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_2_47/ai_83058908

[célibataire endurci]

[...] These include Indian doctors who came to the UK some years ago and are now choosing to return home for better working conditions. [...]

I'm wondering what was it that sounded so strange about it??

[hitch]

No doubt about it, besame. Even moreso if we'd be talking about foreign doctors looking to practice in the US. A government program to address a national health care crisis by placing foreign doctors in America's rural towns and inner cities is being undermined by employers - mostly U.S. doctors who profit by exploiting the physicians and diverting them from the patients who need them. Stories of abuses within the program, which receives little government oversight, are whispered among foreign doctors in hospital corridors, reported online and heard by colleagues in foreign medical schools. And the abuse appears to be a primary reason that fewer of them are participating in the program. Some of the foreign doctors are cheated financially and worked to dangerous levels of exhaustion, and they can't easily escape the jobs because the employers sponsor their visas. The doctors are sharing their experiences with colleagues back home - in places such as Ghana, Haiti, India and Pakistan - who are now finding other paths to U.S. residency to avoid being bullied and treated as indentured servants.

The dire consequences of the program's problems may be no clearer than in the Nevada town of Beatty, population 1,154, "the gateway to Death Valley." The community is about to lose its only doctor, who is from the Philippines. She has fulfilled her commitment under the government program, and the non-profit organization that runs the clinic, Nevada Health Centers, has had no luck finding a replacement. Nevada Health Centers by all accounts treats the doctors fairly and as intended under the law. Several years ago, it was receiving about 100 applications a month from foreign physicians for openings at its 27 clinics. But now it gets no applications and recruiting efforts have been fruitless. The government program, adopted by Congress, is known both as the J-1 visa waiver program and the Conrad 30 program, for its author, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. It makes immigration concessions for foreign medical school graduates who are nearing the end of their medical residency training in the United States. The foreign doctors hold J-1 visas, which require them to return home when they finish their residency. If they return home, they must stay there for at least 2 years, and if they want to return to the United States, they must start the immigration process all over again.

Rather than go home after their medical training, foreign physicians can qualify for J-1 waivers to stay in the United States as long as they commit to at least 3 years of service in a federally designated physician shortage area - usually a rural or blighted urban area. And at the end of the term, these J-1 doctors can begin the U.S. residency process. About 3,100 foreign doctors participate in the program, a number that is declining year by year. Nationally, doctors who come from foreign medical schools say they are forgoing the J-1 visa for what they consider a more attractive option, called the H-1 visa. The H-1 visa takes more steps to acquire and limits where a doctor can do residency training, but it leads more quickly to a "green card." The downside for rural and inner city America is that the H-1 visa, unlike the J-1 visa, does not require foreign doctors to return home for 2 years after they finish their training. That eliminates any motive for foreign doctors to commit to 3 years of service in a medically underserved area. Nationwide, the numbers of J-1 visas and requests for waivers to work in underserved areas are plummeting, according to the statistics available.

J-1 doctors say that because of the buzz around the program in the international physician community, some medical residents are waiting longer for H-1 visas or, if they can get only a J-1 visa, are returning home for 2 years instead of taking a waiver to work in an underserved area. Dr. Wahab Brobbey, a J-1 doctor in Iowa who told the Sun he was exploited by his previous employer in Tennessee, said he advised his cousin and other medical school classmates to avoid the J-1 visa. The cousin is now doing his residency on an H-1 visa. "And they tell their brothers, and they tell their friends - there are lots of us," said Brobbey, who is from Ghana. Brobbey said the exploitation has gone on for so long, with no accountability for employers, that the J-1 visa waiver program is "basically dead." "The boat has sailed already," Brobbey said. "I don't know anyone who will do J-1 now." Given the Internet chatter, the problems with the J-1 waiver are widely known in the medical community, and the jobs carry a stigma. Some of the participating doctors refer to themselves as "J-1 positive" as if they're afflicted with a disease. It is unknown whether J-1 doctors have been sexually abused, though one doctor reported she had been sexually harassed. Many factors could explain why more foreign residents are pushing for H-1 visas over J-1 visas said Greg Siskind, a superstar immigration lawyer, but it's possible some foreign doctors who know about the "real and perceived problems" are deciding to "vote with their visa" by choosing the H-1.

In 2005, the American Medical Association adopted a resolution saying the foreign doctors often find themselves "in abusive and intolerable" employment situations and should be able to transfer to other employers without being forced to restart their three-year commitment in an underserved community. An AMA official said anecdotal accounts are heard frequently of J-1 doctors working unfair call schedules, suffering pay and salary disparities and having the terms of their contracts switched against their will. The J-1 doctors are in a "vulnerable position," said the AMA official, who because of association policy was not allowed to be quoted by name. "They know it's a privilege to be in our country. They don't want to make any waves, but they're totally being abused and taken advantage of." Employers who adhere to the J-1 waiver guidelines say they've heard the reports of other bosses flouting the J-1 laws. Saul Blair, executive director of the Phoenix region of IPC, a company that provides doctors to hospitals, employs 17 J-1 doctors, including several who came to him after being exploited by employers in other states. No one monitors where the doctors work or whether "I'm paying them 10 cents or $100,000," Blair said. It would be easy to audit a company's medical records to confirm that J-1 doctors are treating federally designated underserved patients, Blair said, but the government has not. J-1 doctors feel conflicted about staying in the United States. "If I had known about this I would have never done it here," one foreign doctor said. "I advise everyone I know not to come here on J-1. Go to Australia."

I am a foreign doctor (originally from Iraq) who was laid off several years back by my employer who sponsored my J-1 visa (I won the lottery fortunately that is how I got the residency) I remember it very well how hard it was to find employment - any type of employment - I guess it was because of my language skills that I got a job to survive during those hard years (I was employed by a contractor in need of translation services from Dari to English - Dari is the name given to classical Persian poetry and court language, as well as to Persian dialects spoken in Afghanistan. Various dialects of Dari are also spoken by a few people in Iran and by many in Pakistan.

[mapit]

You've got to be kidding me, just sex - you are dissapointed with doctors because they may have used as pawns homeless people! Doctors and medical professionals are absolutely not champions in this field - how about intelligence agencies having conducted non-consensual human experiments (e.g., trauma-based mind control, etc).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZME1aZ7E7w

Conditioning

As far as I understand it (which admittedly is nothing close to first-hand experience), trauma-based mind control is kind of similar to the whole favorite-album phenomenon. The idea is basically that you condition the mind according to certain stimuli. When you experience a sensory trigger, a correlated interior state is achieved. The most common example of this is called Classical or Pavlovian Conditioning:

Classical Conditioning is the type of learning made famous by Pavlov's experiments with dogs. The gist of the experiment is this: Pavlov presented dogs with food, and measured their salivary response (how much they drooled). Then he began ringing a bell just before presenting the food. At first, the dogs did not begin salivating until the food was presented. After a while, however, the dogs began to salivate when the sound of the bell was presented. They learned to associate the sound of the bell with the presentation of the food. As far as their immediate physiological responses were concerned, the sound of the bell became equivalent to the presentation of the food.

Other types of behavioral conditioning exist as well, with "operant conditioning" relating to the reinforcement or punishing of behavior. For our current purposes though, the easiest way to understand all this is through Pavlov's dogs salivating when they hear a bell, or us being flooded by emotions when we hear a song we've not heard for many years.

Trauma & Dissociation

Now, listening to a record over and over may be a lot of fun, but it's not the most significant physical stimulus available to us. Extremes of pleasure and pain may go well beyond that, triggering far greater physiological responses and long-term effects. Imagine instead of listening to a record over and over again, you are severely beaten repeatedly, or subjected to electric shocks. And at varying intervals to this, you are in turn sexually abused. Maybe this goes on for months or years. It's not very difficult to imagine that such events would seriously contort your psyche in unimaginable ways. Especially if these things were combined and overlaid with other types of classical and operant conditioning. For a creepy elaboration of this, check out Beth Goobie's article, "The Network of Stolen Consciousness." Goobie claims to be the survivor of a systematic process of mind control. Before we delve too deeply into that stuff though, let's look at one very real and verifiable facet of traumatic experience which Goobie discusses:

Viktor Frankl's 1946 book "Man's Search for Meaning" chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. According to Frankl, the book intends to answer the question "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?" Part One constitutes Frankl's analysis of his experiences in the concentration camps, while Part Two introduces his ideas of meaning and his theory of logotherapy.

Experiences in a concentration camp

Frankl identifies three psychological reactions experienced by all inmates to one degree or another: (1) shock during the initial admission phase to the camp, (2) apathy after becoming accustomed to camp existence, in which the inmate values only that which helps himself or others survive, and (3) reactions of depersonalization, moral deformity, bitterness, and disillusionment after being liberated. Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death. In a group therapy session during a mass fast inflicted on the camp's inmates trying to protect an anonymous fellow inmate from fatal retribution by authorities, Frankl offered the thought that for everyone in a dire condition there is someone looking down, a friend, family member, or even God, who would expect not to be disappointed. Frankl concludes from his experience that a prisoner's psychological reactions are not solely the result of the conditions of his life, but also from the freedom of choice he always has even in severe suffering. The inner hold a prisoner has on his spiritual self relies on having a faith in the future, and that once a prisoner loses that faith, he is doomed. He also concludes that there are only two races of men, decent men and indecent. No society is free of either of them, and thus there were "decent" Nazi guards and "indecent" prisoners, most notably the kapo who would torture and abuse their fellow prisoners for personal gain.

His concluding passage in Part One describes the psychological reaction of the inmates to their liberation, which he separates into three stages. The first is depersonalization—a period of readjustment, in which a prisoner gradually returns to the world. Initially, the liberated prisoners are so numb that they are unable to understand what freedom means, or to emotionally respond to it. Part of them believes that is an illusion or a dream that will be taken away from them. In their first foray outside their former prison, the prisoners realized that they could not comprehend pleasure. Flowers and the reality of the freedom they had dreamed about for years were all surreal, unable to be grasped in their depersonalization. The body is the first element to break out of this stage, responding by voracious eating and sleeping. Only after the partial replenishing of the body is the mind finally able to respond, as "feeling suddenly broke through the strange fetters which had restrained it." This begins the second stage, in which there is a danger of deformation. As the intense pressure on the mind is released, mental health can be endangered. Frankl uses the analogy of a diver suddenly released from his pressure chamber.

He recounts the story of a decent friend who became immediately obsessed with dispensing the same violence in judgment of his abusers that they had inflicted on him. Upon returning home, the prisoners had to struggle with two fundamental experiences which could also damage their mental health. The first is bitterness at the lack of responsiveness of the world outside — a "superficiality and lack of feeling...so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human being any more" (113). Worse was disillusionment, which was the discovery that suffering does not end, that the longed-for happiness will not come. This was the experience of those who — like Frankl — returned home to discover that no one awaited them. The hope which has sustained them throughout the camp was now gone. Frankl cites this experience as the most difficult to overcome. As time passed, however, the prisoner's experience in a concentration camp finally became nothing but a nightmare. What is more, he knows that he has nothing left to fear any more, "except his God."

[mapit]

Quotations

• "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles -- whatever one may choose to call them -- we know; the best of us did not return."
• "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
• "Nietzsche's words, 'He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.'"
• "When we are no longer able to change a situation — just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer — we are challenged to change ourselves"
• "Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp."
• "We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering."
• "It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."
• "Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary."
• "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death." (Cf. Song of Solomon 8:6)
• "We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."
• "A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely."
• "Woe to him, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it to be so different from all that he had longed for!"
• "We were not hoping for happiness --- And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness."
• "Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"
• "An incurable psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo."