I posted this awhile back but I've made some additions to it that I
thought others might find interesting.  It's addressed to members of
a list of psychiatric child abuse survivors.

Subject: Psycumcision

I'd like to call people's attention to a major impending social
upheaval/scandal which will take place in the USA in the near future.
I believe it will present an enormous opportunity for the emotional
liberation movement (or whatever you want to call it... I have a lot of
problems with some of the medically-inspired terminology survivors use)
to reach a vast audience if handled properly.  It deals with the
general area of the extension of "medical competence" into what
might be termed social enforcement:  the scientifically unfounded
creation of medical diagnoses for which there is no demonstrable
organic pathology, but only massive amounts of social pathology.

In another article I outline the case against western medical MGM,
or male genital mutilation. This article will be concerned mostly
with psychiatry and the many parallels the two have from the
standpoint of their power dynamics, cultural context and social
function.

You can retrieve the MGM article at
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~rich/MGM/primer.html
For those who haven't read it, here's a synopsis:

The basic facts are: the modern day practice of MGM as a "public
health" measure originated in the 1800's as a medical "cure" for
the "problem" of masturbation, which was thought (in keeping with
Victorian morality) to be connected to everything from TB to
blindness, parasites and (surprise) "mental illness".  Since it
was well known at the time (but forgotten/suppressed by modern US
medicine) that the sexual touch receptors on the penis (essentially
the core of male sexuality) are concentrated at the end of the
penis, in the so-called foreskin (which is actually a complex nexus
of highly sensitive specialized nerves, ridges, blood and lymphatic
vessels, smooth muscle and mucous membrane), their solution was a
radical version of biblical circumcision.

In biblical and Jewish c., only the tip of the foreskin was cut off,
leaving much of the erogenous (pleasurable) nerves intact, though
still significantly impacting penile sensitivity.  The "new" medical
circumcision went much further, amputating as much of sexual pleasure and
sensitivity as technology would allow. (Today, a typical infant MGM
procedure in a US hospital amputates somewhere between 50 and 80% of
the erogenous nerves in the penis.  An authority on FGM and MGM I spoke
to compared MGM to the amputation of a woman's inner and outer labia
and "G-spot".  This is only logical: if sexual ecstasy is
nature's inducement to screw, the logical place to put the most
sensitive structures would be on the part of the penis which would come
into the most intimate contact with the vagina: the "foreskin."  A
circumcised man can readily confirm this by exploring his feelings
along the length of his penis.  The most erogenous area is right behind
the head.  This is just a small remnant of his inner foreskin)

Furthermore, the "doctors" of the time openly promoted the maximum
infliction of pain on the "patient" so he would associate his penis
with pain (a MediEvil version of aversive conditioning) so anesthesia
was purposely withheld.  This is essentially the procedure being
practiced in hospitals around the USA today, though on infants
instead of children.  I'll spare you the details of the actual
procedure except to say that the newborn foreskin is bonded to the
head of the penis (similarly to how a fingernail is bonded to the
finger) and must be peeled in order to be cut off.  Torture and
mutilation in pursuit of social control.  It's not difficult to
see how this can imprint on a man's sexual identity, with many
possible consequences (impotence, divorce, some kind of sex-related
PTSD, suicide etc).

As the masturbation boogy-man lost its power to cause public alarm,
doctors resorted to pushing MGM using the same excuses used to
justify FGM in Africa (hygiene, aesthetics etc).  Then they marketed
it as a preventative for syphilis and gonorrhea.  When that fell
through they hit on penile and cervical cancer.  Now that the
american cancer society has distanced itself from that claim,
they're using AIDS.  In each case they have relied on a highly
selective, unrepresentative and statistically suspect sampling of
studies which purport to demonstrate connections between foreskin
and whatever the plague of the day happens to be.

To add insult to injury, they can turn around and sell the
"discarded" foreskins to biotechnology companies for $200-300 a
pop, a bargain for the biotech company, which can generate 1000s
of dollars of profit from a single foreskin.

What unifies MGM and forced psychiatry, and sets them apart from the
rest of "medical" practice, is the mercenary aspect of the doctor's
role.  Normally a doctor would be hired by the patient in order to act
on the patient's behalf, but in these cases the "treatment" is marketed
to and paid for by third parties (who would probably never agree
to such treatment for themselves, by the way) over the expressed
or implied wishes of the "consumer." Even the most dim-witted
reporter can grasp the idea of "conflict of interest", and the
demonstrable barbarism of MGM could surely be used to open the
public mind to the horrific consequences such questionable financial
relationships could (and as we know, does) have in psychiatry.  In
my opinion, with a little intelligent PR and planning, mentalibbers
could readily piggyback onto the MGM issue and gain the public
credibility and empathy that has thus far eluded the movement.

It's not a perfect opportunity, but it's the best I see on the
horizon. The MGM issue is rapidly gaining the attention of the
national media.

Parallels between MGM and forced (violent) psychiatry:

Both can be readily branded as "mercenary medicine".  Who is the
"doctor" working for?  It surely can't be the patient, since force
is required to impose the "treatment".  The obvious answer is that
he's working on behalf of his wallet.

The "medical indication" for the practice is dependent on arbitrary
culturally and/or economically determined power relationships and
social norms of behavior.  Both practices use "medical" technology
in pursuit of social/behavioral engineering and enforcement.

During "treatment" the victim's protests are ignored.  In MGM, the
mainstream orthodoxy for many years (still believed in many quarters)
was that babies feel no pain or, more recently, that they don't
remember it (see "birth related trauma" below).  Anyone who has
watched a circumcision, where the baby must be strapped down to a
"circumstraint", and frequently defecates and lapses into shock
during the "procedure", who actually believes the baby doesn't feel
it, has the sensitivity of a nazi prison guard.  In the 1800's when
medical MGM was first being established, the pain factor was seen
as part of the "treatment," but in these more enlightened times,
the above claims allow a doctor to protect his humanitarian
"conscience" while still brutalizing helpless infants.  In psychiatry
of course, resistance is evidence of the need for treatment, and
the shrink's conscience is soothed by the pathologization of the
"patient's" behavior (or, more honestly, of the "patient" itself).
In both cases, the victim is effectively rendered mute.

Post-treatment, the victim is often unaware of what is missing in his
life.  And in case he figures out what happened, there is a sufficient
stigma or embarrassment attached to the subject to render him
vulnerable to ridicule or marginalization if he chooses to publically
protest.

The perpetrators/mutilators are above reproach, respected professionals
who are granted extraordinary authority over the life and body of
the victim, by virtue of their presumed humanity, impartiality and
mastery of a difficult subject.  They are in effect given the status
of a priesthood.  This creates barriers to public protest by
eliminating "naive" (and quite obvious and compelling) arguments
about the rights of the "patient."

Psychiatry has facilitated the practice of MGM by branding people who
question the practice as "mentally ill," thus fulfilling their usual
function as medical guardians of the status quo.  Whether it be in nazi
germany, stalinist russia or child-abusive amerika, psychiatry finds a
way to ally itself with the most repressive forces in society.
Its institutional motivations should be obvious: its bread and
butter business is its mercenary selling of oppression and
"corrections" services to families and the state, so it naturally
aligns itself with its market:  the oppressors.  (see
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~rich/MGM/insane.html)

Psychiatry has managed to overlook the obvious and as-yet-unresearched
connections between divorce rates, male suicide, violence and social
alienation, and infant MGM.  Recent medical studies have shown that
birth-related trauma produces a large increase in the probability of
adult suicide and post-traumatic stress.  Similarly, the amputation
of sexual nerves without affecting sexual drive (centered in the
brain) is a recipe for what shrinks call "obsessive-compulsive"
disorder.  It's what happens when a primary drive is habitually
frustrated in its fulfillment: the victim either obsesses on it or
rechannels the drive into other activities, like overeating.
Surveys of circed males confirm a higher rate of exotic sexual
practices (and, ironically, masturbation) than intact males, and
a frequent complaint women have about men in this country is their
"obsession with sex." In some men, rechannelled sexual energy seems
to be often manifested in socially approved "productive" behavior
like workaholism, contact sports, etc, and in more annoying ways,
like hyper-macho behavior, physical and sexual violence, militarism
etc.  Where is the predictive power of the "science" of psychiatry?
Of course we know that psychiatry is just the use of technology in
the service of power, and so is no more a science than is "military
science."

Subjective victim experience of violence & torture.   It is now
well documented that infants undergoing MGM experience the
physiological symptoms of being tortured.  The subjective experience
of psych survivors is also well known, and studiously ignored or
redefined as shortcomings of current technology rather than
egregious abuses of power.  In both cases, the only meaningful
gauge of "treatment" outcome is the subjective experience of the
"patient", so this willfull neglect is transparently indefensible,
but of course entirely in keeping with the actual purpose of the
"treatment", which is to oppress and control the individual.

Both practices predate modern concepts of human rights, and have
been "grandfathered in" to our culture.  If MGM was introduced
today, its practitioners would be prosecuted and imprisoned as
child abusers/molesters.  If imprisonment, forcible drugging and
shock treatment of non-criminals was introduced, its practitioners
would be prosecuted for false imprisonment and human rights abuse.
A significant investment in PR would be required to overcome people's
natural inclination to protect the powerless.

The mutilation is carried out in secret, so that the violence and
barbarity involved remains invisible.

The resultant destruction of functionality still allows the victim to
live out a "normal" life (at least in a publically visible,
superficially defined sense).  The damage is invisible to the casual
observer.

The affected organ has a critical functionality that can be fulfilled
by no other, and is a major factor in human behavior.

Fraud.  Parents handing over their newborn son to a mutilator are
seldom informed of the erogenous value of the foreskin, the physical
and unknowable psychological trauma of the un-anesthetized ripping,
peeling, crushing and cutting of the most sensitive part of a
newborn boy's body, or the impact on mother-child bonding, breast
feeding, and sensitivity to pain and stress which are all common
consequences of circumcision.  Nor are they informed of possible
complications such as "skin bridges", partial penile amputation,
gangrene and even death.  Similarly, even abusive parents (many of
whom are not "conscious" of their abuse, but are emulating their
own parents' behavior) who take their children to shrinks are not
likely intending for them to be traumatically violated and permanently
damaged.  They are not told of the lack of objective scientific
evidence for most psychiatric "diagnoses", nor of the brain damaging
effects of many psychiatric drugs and treatments, nor of the strong
statistical correlation between being domestically abused and being
psychiatrically labelled, which might cause them to constructively
question the social context of their child's "illness".  Even
mercenary soldiers are held to higher standards of accountability.
In both cases the doctor violates the medical maxim to "first, do
no harm", which in any other branch of "medicine" would be sufficient
to warrant an effective malpractice suit.

Unconscious (or conscious) motivation of the "doctors".  There are
actually organizations (such as the acorn society) for circumcision
fetishists, who are usually mutilated themselves, and who are known to
masturbate while watching others get circumcised (live or on video).
They buy and sell circumcision "memorabilia" like videos, gomco
clamps and circumstraints.  Apparently there's even a market for
items made from infant foreskins, like coin purses.  The question
arises of possible unconscious motivations of genital mutilators.  In
the same way, it's well known in university psychology departments that
those who choose clinical psychology (as opposed to research
psychology) are frequently pursuing a solution to their own emotional
problems.  The question of motivation again arises.  Power over others
can bring temporary relief from feelings of victimization.  Each
"profession" is thus a magnet for its respective pool of victims,
setting up the sufficient conditions for the perpetuation of the
practice.  We could use this connection to push for psychological
screening of psychiatrists as in interim measure towards the
elimination of all violence in psychiatry.  After all, most police
departments require it, and shrinks have far more power than cops over
their "wards".

MGM represents a successful medical PR campaign to "pathologize"
and stigmatize, essentially, male sexuality itself, effectively
allowing doctors to broaden their own job description in order to
add the profits from circumcision and increase their wholly
unwarranted prestige in the area of child birth, which has largely
become a surgical procedure involving not only MGM but unnecessary
cesarian sections or genital cutting (episiotomy) of the mother.
(Episiotomies, to the extent they're needed at all, are done largely
to compensate for doctors' continuing preference to have birthing
mothers lie on their backs during delivery for the doctor's
convenience, when even the most primitive tribes have the common
sense to enlist the aid of gravity by giving birth in a squatting
or on-all-fours position.  As a consequence of this cutting, the
vaginal wall is severely weakened, and traumatic tears often occur
during birth, sometimes extending into the rectum and resulting in
major infections.  Again, the research has been done, the facts are
in, and there's no question that it is detrimental to the sexuality
and healing process of the mother.  Yet it remains one of the most
common procures in child birth)  A triumph of medical conflicts of
interest over the health and rights of the patient.  It makes perfect
sense in light of the fact that medicine is in the business of
selling treatments, not health.

Similarly, psychiatry is unparalleled in its institutional ability
to pathologize human nature and write its own job description via
the "DSM", which is largely a study in the social pathology of the
pathologization of emotion, especially the emotions of victims, as
opposed to perpetrators of domestic abuse.  This is of course
dictated by the market:  victims of domestic violence such as
children are seldom in a position to drag their abuser to a shrink,
whereas the reverse is commonplace.  Again, an inherent conflict
of interest, as evidenced by the ever-growing size of the DSM and
the extraordinarily high rate of domestic abuse victims among
psychiatric "patients."  Wouldn't it be nice if we could all modify
our job descriptions to do whatever we happen to want to do, and
still get paid for it?

Social control.  This is the most fascinating connection between
the two, and I believe a classic example of spontaneous social
self-organization.  A stable self-organized social system has to
work on EVERY level in which organization occurs, from the top
(social mass action) down to the bottom (chemical reactions in the
biological systems which make up the population).  Each realm of
activity contributes to the maintenance of the whole, and both
depends on and feeds into the mass of nested and entangled causality
loops which makes up the the overall system and maintains it in a
state of dynamic equilibrium.  

In an information-based organism such as a "democratic" society,
there are two broad information domains in which social control is
exercised in a population:  manipulation of information dealing
with events which are external to the individual, and manipulation
of information dealing with the internal world (i.e. self perception
and self-identification).  The first deals with standard everyday
propaganda & censorship, while the latter is the domain of EMOTIONS.
The latter, largely ignored domain is by far the more potent realm
of social control, and is the area where medicine has staked its
claim and largely unseated organized religion as a tool of mass
organization in an increasingly secular society.  The system has
adapted to the increasing information-sophistication of the population
by simply adapting the priesthood accordingly.

Psychiatry and MGM are concerned with the manipulation of the two
extremes of human emotion, misery and ecstacy, the control of which
are essential to maintaining a docile population.

Constructive (i.e. individually liberating) social evolution is
fueled by two essential ingredients:  human pain and misery, and
human joy and creativity.  The former drives the desire, the latter
provides the means.  Without the latter, misery only leads to more
misery.

Psychiatry addresses the former by pathologizing and suppressing
people's emotional responses to dysfunctional social environments
such as domestic abuse, poverty etc.  Anti-depressants and shock
treatment are different ways of blocking the self-perception of
suffering, and thus defusing the drive to social change and allowing
for a much greater degree of social dysfunction than would otherwise be
possible in a stable society.  A form of brainwashing, pure and
simple.

MGM deals with the opposite end of human emotional experience: the
suppression of ecstatic emotional connectedness.  The primary
obstacle to efficient mass social organization is local social
organization, which diverts resources and individual self-identification
into personal and community relationships instead of state
institutions.  The extent to which a person has attained a degree
of self-fulfillment and satisfaction in his/her personal life is
the extent to which s/he is resistant to the inducements and
conditioning of large-scale social structures.  By literally cutting
off much of a person's capacity for shared ecstatic emotional
experience and identification with the opposite sex, MGM frees up
and allows for the redirection of self identification from
interpersonal and community-oriented attachments into identification
with the state.  Thus psychiatry and MGM both increase the "fitness"
(in a darwinian sense) of the dominator social order relative to
more "primitive" groups.

In both cases (MGM & psychiatry), the absence of impartial oversight
or effective client feedback absolutely guarantees massive corruption
and abuse.  The question is how to get this elementary point across
to the brainwashed wage slaves of the USA.

Slogan for the day:
REAL DOCTORS DO NO HARM

Also see:

http://www.math.missouri.edu/~rich/psych/
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~rich/MGM/

http://www.mindfreedom.org/mindfreedom/hungerstrike.shtml