Babsie, little dearest, I'm in the mood tonight to love you. Do us a
favour and read 'Mask of Sanity'.
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/c%27sbook.htm Right-click or left-click,
it's wonderful reading. Forgive me, I'm not posting it here, too much of
a strain. It is a PDF. You can download it or read online. Go to page
102 and read one of the stories presented as material of illustration of
the anti-social personality. Yes, you are right, you have heard this
word before, and so had Hubbard. Mr. Hervey Cleckley, M.D. wrote this
book 1941. If you take the pleasure and read it, you will immediately
pick-up the sense of distinguished educated leasurely applied scrutiny
and science,
where Hubbard remembered a whiff of smell from later on, and invented
the hangman knot, to get rid of it. I urge you here and now in this
thread, as I am in sorrow, that innocent bystanders will take your
verbal petting with imagined and real responders to your rant against
psychatry as something to be read seriously. Mr. Cleckley is a true gem
to read. Know what? I post a story here, now. It's not the one from
Anna, this is Frank's. It sheds a wonderful light on how much of
scrupulous thoughts go into applied everyday's psychatry by good people
(That Hubbard stole from). Here it goes:

Frank
The following letter was received by an influential senator in
Washington and referred by him to the hospital.

Dear Sir: It is with regret that I find it necessary to seek
consideration from higher authority but I have been confined in the
Veterans Administration Hospital at for two years. During my period of
incarceration here I have tried in every available way to cooperate with
the officials, but it seems an impossibility to get any consideration
from them toward gaining my freedom. I was placed here on the
recommendation of my sister because she thought I was a drug addict, and
she has written some pretty nasty things against me to the officials
here. I can prove to the satisfaction of all concerned that I am not a
confirmed drug addict or habitual user of any form of drug sufficiently
to warrant continuous confinement. I am not a criminal, nor had I the
slightest minor charge of any description against me at the time I came
here. The Staff here has rated me less than 10 percent disabled and
discontinued all government compensation; therefore, I believe you will
agree with me that any man with a less than 10 percent disability could
not possess a physical or mental disorder sufficient to prevent his
having his freedom and making his own livelihood. I am not even allowed
parole privileges of the grounds as a great many of the patients here
are. Some are continually violating institutional rules and still retain
their parole privileges undisciplined. I have two children, who need my
support and as long as I am kept incarcerated I can't assist them in any
way for I have no means other than my labor to support them. I hereby
humbly request you to intercede in my behalf and demand these officials
here to grant my release in order that I may be able to support my
children to the best of my ability as is every man's duty. There are
quite a few men in these institutions that are nothing short of
impositions on the government and taxpayers of the United States. They,
the same as myself, are perfectly capable mentally and physically to
support themselves and should be forced to do so. I have begged for
parole, trial visit, or any other means to prove myself selfsustaining,
but the authorities here seem to take my plea as a joke and make a lot
of promises that they have no intention of putting into action. I will
gladly submit to any physical or mental examination you may deem
necessary to assist you in obtaining my release from this place. I pray
that you will give my earnest request your immediate consideration.
Please be assured that I hold no malice toward any of the officials here
or elsewhere but my only objective in writing you is to gain my freedom
and support my children. Please let me hear from you personally, Yours
very respectfully, Frank ______

The writer of this
letter has behind him a formidable record of misadventure. Detailed
knowledge of Frank's early life is not available beyond the following
facts. The son of a rustic blacksmith, he was raised in a small hamlet
near the mountains of north Georgia. So far as can be learned, no
members of his family suffered from nervous or mental disease or made
themselves objectionable in the community. He completed the fifth grade
in school, where he was considered by no means a dull boy, though often
truant. Many of the hours he was supposed to have spent in school or
working at some necessary chore for his family he is reported to have
idled away in loitering about a local millpond drowning goats and doing
other senseless or uninviting deeds of mischief. Before the United
States entered World War I, Frank had forged his father's name to a
false statement about his age and enlisted in the National Guard. He was
given vocational training by the government after his discharge from the
army. He was tried at several courses but made no serious effort to
complete any of them. In his community he soon made himself a problem,
sometimes drinking to excess, often behaving in a rowdy and threatening
manner, contracting to buy small businesses, filling stations, farms,
but never living up to his agreements. Local ex-service men, believing
that he took morphine and that treatment might help his maladjustment
(commonly referred to as "nervousness"), had him sent to a psychiatric
hospital. He remained for a month, then returned to continue in his old
ways. Now began a series of hospitalizations which extends to the
present time. He would be sent first to one place, then to another. He
has been treated in state hospitals, in federal hospitals, and in
private institutions at the expense of the government. All told, he has
been admitted no less than nineteen times to strictly mental hospitals
maintained for the purpose of treating psychotic people. Sometimes he
remained only three or four weeks and sometimes six or even eighteen
months. Over the years his periods of hospitalization have grown
slightly longer and his intervals outside shorter. He has never, during
the past fifteen years, been free longer than a few months. While not
under the care of psychiatrists he has received considerable attention
from the police. His jail sentences number seven at the present reading,
including a term of nine months in the Leavenworth Penitentiary (where
he was sent for forging a prescription for morphine) but not counting a
score or more of overnight or weekend stops in police barracks. Despite
these preoccupations Frank has found time to marry and have four
children and to become ordained as a minister in a small religious sect
noted for vigorous evangelical fervor. His marital relations have been
most unsatisfactory during the interludes when he
was free to be with the family.
His wife reports that he curses her and
fights with her, and it is well established that he seizes any money
that is available, hires automobiles, and drives aimlessly about the
countryside, often drinking to excess and, according to some reports,
occasionally taking morphine. At times he has seemed proud of his
ecclesiastical title, referring to himself as a pastor and assuming
unctuous and haughty airs. He has not, however, occupied himself with
whatever ministerial duties he was supposed to fulfill any more
consistently than with other work. His friends, especially those
interested in the American Legion and other service organizations, have
obtained many positions for him. He is shrewd, neat in appearance, and
an excellent talker. He makes a good impression at first but always
shirks his responsibility to such an extent that it is impossible to
retain him. A few years ago he was given a place at a filling station
and seemed, surprisingly, to show considerable interest in his work for
several days. It was then discovered that he had been drawing off all
the gasoline he could and taking it to a nearby town where he sold it
and bought morphine from dope peddlers, most of which he, in turn, sold
at a tremendous profit to local addicts. He has been consistently
arrogant and aggressive toward his neighbors and acquaintances, usually
over trifling matters. After taking a few drinks, he has often
threatened others, claimed things that were not his own, and made such a
nuisance of himself that local police would be called to deal with him.
He is boastful and histrionic, more eloquently and aggressively so with
a few highballs, and much given to temper tantrums. He frequently
threatens to kill himself over some petty vexation and once offered a
pistol to his wife, urging her grandiloquently to shoot him. He has
never made an attempt, however, to harm himself, though his
opportunities have been unlimited. He has been reported as having
convulsive seizures. These developed when he was refused special
attention by physicians and seemed, according to their descriptions,
plainly and consciously designed toward obtaining various ends. This
manifestation has also been noted when he was confined to jail and
wanted to be sent to a mental hospital in order to escape charges that
had been brought against him. These so-called seizures have been
observed several times in this hospital by competent psychiatrists. They
did not in any way suggest epilepsy nor were they convincing as possible
reactions of true hysteria. The patient is unquestionably conscious and
shows that he is behaving intentionally in this way to gain a recognized
end.
Unlike a conversion phenomenon, the purpose does
not appear to be concealed from his conscious awareness.63,76 Though
occasionally confused after heavy drinking (perhaps with the addition of
drugs), he has at all other times been entirely rational, alert, shrewd,
and free from delusions and hallucinations. Early in Frank's career his
disturbance was diagnosed on several occasions as hysteria, sometimes as
both psychopathic personality and hysteria. Once he was given a
diagnosis of psychopathic personality with psychotic episodes. There was
not, however, any evidence of behavior or symptoms different from what
he has shown on other occasions. There is reason to suspect that the
real and pressing need to keep this patient hospitalized may have played
an important part in his being so classified. The genuinely irrational
and incompetent behavior, no doubt, supports the use of such a term as
psychosis, despite the lack of any additional symptoms. The irrational
behavior which has characterized him is not based on a delusional system
or on any loss of the good reasoning ability he shows on examination.
Some of his most turbulent misconduct has, of course, been exhibited
while he was intoxicated. At such times he naturally lacked his
customary shrewdness and alertness. However, this cannot conscientiously
be called a psychotic episode beyond and above his wellknown inadequacy
but rather the manifestation of inebriety. I do not mean to say that
this man is normal but only that he has none of the recognized types of
mental disorder, episodic or constant. If his drunken and wayward
episodes are to be termed psychotic, then it would seem that his state
at other times might also be termed psychotic, since it is in his
shrewd, technically sane condition that he decides to add the
picturesque touches of intoxication which he well knows will bring him
to the attention of the police. At this hospital, at the state
hospitals, and at the other institutions to which Frank was sent in
recent years, he has been considered a sane man without psychotic
episodes. The symptomatic diagnoses of drug addiction and chronic
alcoholism have been added. During all these years he has shown no
evidence of deterioration or regression, and today at 38 years of age he
is the same clever, alert person he was described as being twenty years
ago. Unlike nearly all real morphine addicts, he does not show ordinary
withdrawal symptoms or other signs of physical illness and acute
distress when, after being admitted to the hospital, he is deprived of
opportunities to obtain the drug. If the reports that he takes morphine
have any factual basis, such use must be sporadic. There is little or no
evidence that effects of the drug have regularly played any major role
in his behavior. It appears that his chief connection with drugs has
been through his part in peddling them illicitly.

His career in the hospital has been marked by frequent paroles which are
always terminated by his failing to return, returning drunk, or being
taken up by the police for petty theft, swindling, and futile and
unprovoked disorder. Though ingratiating and outwardly cooperative when
he is trying to obtain parole or discharge, he constantly schemes to
escape or, surreptitiously, to call upon high authorities to have him
released. Once, while helping attendants on the disturbed ward, he
succeeded in turning hot water into a tub in which a psychotic patient
lay in a continuous bath. He did not try to injure the man seriously,
but merely to hurt him a little as a joke. This is a fair example of the
inane, humorless mischief that underlies the pretentious front assumed
by this former pastor. Despite his medicolegal status, which, of course,
is technically regarded as constituting sanity, those interested in
finding some practical way to protect him and his family and to cope
with the ever accumulating problems succeeded on one occasion in having
him committed by the court. Those close to the situation evidently found
in his behavior reasons for action more compelling than the abstract
criteria which stood in the way of such a step. After being held in the
hospital for several months, despite his reiterated demands for
discharge against medical advice, he called in an attorney. Frank had in
the past always found no difficulty in leaving when it suited his
purpose or his whim. In view of his well-demonstrated inability to live
in freedom, he was now, by means of the legal commitment, kept against
his wishes in order to spare his family, the community, and himself the
hardships he had brought about before and was sure to bring about again.

The attorney for the government, in attempting to resist habeas corpus
proceedings, found himself in a familiar dilemma, as the following
quotations from his letter will show:

"It is evident that the medical
staff at the hospital are using the term insane to convey the meaning of
the medical definition of the word rather than the legal definition. In
other words, the thought back of the use of the word appears to me to be
that it is the opinion of neuropsychiatrists that this man is not
suffering from a mental disease as physicians understand the term, that
he does not have a psychosis. It does appear, however, that it is their
opinion that the state of his mind due to drug addiction and also
manifested by his past antisocial behavior is such as to warrant the
conclusions that he is incompetent and that he should receive treatment
in a hospital for the cure of nervous and mental diseases. To say,
however, that he is incompetent but not insane presents a rather
inconsistent picture with which to go into court. We may be confronted
with such a question as why he needs to be in a hospital for the care of
nervous and mental diseases if he has no nervous or mental disease.
I am inclined to think that the terms insanity and
incompetency so far as their legal significance is concerned are used
interchangeably and that the important point to be considered, whether
you call a man insane or merely admit that he is incompetent, is whether
the person is incapable of administering his personal estate in the
normal manner of a prudent man and whether there is definite evidence of
a more or less prolonged departure from normal behavior as compared with
the standards of the community, such as dissipation of funds, unwise
purchases, and utter lack of appreciation of values. Because of the fact
that I anticipate some difficulty in trying to show that the man is
incompetent but not insane, I would appreciate an expression of your
views on the matter. It occurs to me also that a man ought to be
confined who is a menace to others and likely to do harm to others, even
though his mental condition may be due in part to inadequate mental
development and in part to the use of drugs. He may be just as dangerous
to himself or to others as a person suffering from a mental disease and
who, according to the purely medical definition of insanity, would be
pronounced insane."

Of course, it might be asked why these people are not
let out of the mental hospitals and left to the police. If they are
considered responsible for their misdeeds, let them be punished. This,
as a matter of fact, is what the average psychiatric hospital is nearly
always forced to do, whatever its physicians may think of the wisdom and
practicality of such a procedure. These men are studied, found free of
recognized mental disorder which might make them unaware of what they
are doing, and are sent back out into the world. They are arrested not
once but many times. Most of them seldom commit such serious crimes that
they are kept out of circulation in penal institutions for long periods.
Only rarely can they be kept for more than a few days. They do not
follow any purposive criminal life. They make a nuisance of themselves
to the community as a whole and often tragically wreck the lives of
those close to them, and all to no discernible end. The police and the
courts tire of them. Through various influences they are forced back on
the mental hospitals where they take legal action to regain their
freedom, only to begin the process again. If, as stated in the
quotations previously cited, it would be difficult to prove this man
incompetent but not insane, it would be far more difficult, by existing
definitions of psychiatry, to prove him "insane." His perfectly rational
(superficial) behavior under scrutiny, his freedom from delusions, his
shrewdness, his alertness, and his convincing plan for a normal, useful
life, in short, his plain sanity as this is ordinarily understood, make
it all but impossible for a judge or a jury to call him insane.
Psychiatrists, familiar with his long record of senseless behavior, are
able to see more reason to do so than could be brought out before a
court in terms of abstract criteria by which the decision is determined.

But according to the accepted standards of
psychiatry, his diagnosis carries with it an official and automatic
endorsement of the patient as sane and competent. No matter how strongly
impressed by real and practical evidence to the contrary, all
physicians, testifying in such a case must admit that the official
technicalities approve this paradox. Having won his case in court, the
patient was released against medical advice. Frank did not go home but
remained in the city where he at once claimed the attention of the
police. On being released after a few days in jail, he took a room at
the best hotel and annoyed other guests by various tactics, such as
trying to borrow money, sponge on them for a meal, or sell them
something useless or nonexistent. He became at times loudly boastful or
rowdy and eventually fell on the floor drunk. He refused to pay for his
room and resisted the management's attempts to remove him. He sought
loans under bold-faced pretenses, ran up debts without regard to the
possibilities of payment, and telephoned and wrote to his family,
threatening suicide unless his demands for money were promptly met.
There are indications that he was not inactive during this period in old
devices of petty thievery, shortchanging, and various types of fraud,
sharp practice, and connivance that exist, more or less, on the fringe
of organized but illegal racketeering found in any city. Nothing,
however, could be pinned on him by the law that led to his being
effectively controlled. In all issues of this sort that arose, he had
his record as a patient once legally committed and often confined to
psychiatric institutions. This record was, in his ingenious hands, of
considerable value as insurance against penal restraint. After several
arrests, the police began to call on the hospital to relieve them of
their problems with this man. They were told that nothing could be done
since he had been legally removed and the hospital was enjoined by the
court not to hold him. Soon afterward the police and various local
people began to seek advice on how to deal with him from the attorney
who had liberated this man. The patient himself soon joined in, coming
repeatedly to the attorney's office or his house, sometimes drunk and
always unreasonable, to shout about the injustices of the world, borrow
money, evade threatening penalties, and to demand diverse preposterous
services. The veteran had promised to pay the attorney's bill with bonus
money, but now it appeared that this money had already been squandered.
Hoping to collect his fee and, no doubt, from humanitarian impulses, the
attorney sought to keep in touch with his client. Those with whom he had
run up bills and floated little loans joined others swindled or
defrauded in small matters and took up their problems with the patient's
legal representative.

Soon the incessant complaints
from annoyed people, the client's own nagging or uproarious invasions
upon him at all hours, and the constant queries of the police drove him
to seek relief. The patient being again in jail, the attorney persuaded
him to agree to return to the hospital voluntarily and pled with the
physician in charge to take him back, confessing himself at fault ever
to have released such a scourge on the community and on himself.
Arrangements were made for readmission. The patient arrived in custody
of a policeman. He was still somewhat stimulated from a recent
intoxication but, though overbearing and pompous, showed no signs of
real drunkenness nor of an officially recognized psychosis. Frank took a
high-handed manner, swaggered about, and finally refused to come back
into the hospital, saying that he had no mental disease and that he
preferred to return to jail where he would soon be released to carry out
important business plans and social activities. He enjoyed the incident,
played up his role dramatically, and took a peremptory and haughty tone
with everyone. He soon obtained his freedom, but some weeks later after
running up big debts, giving several more bad checks, and participating
in a series of senseless, bawdy escapades, he was finally returned to
the hospital. Three months later he again obtained his discharge on a
writ of habeas corpus but not through the same attorney. The story in
its broad essentials was repeated. Since his last admission, following
the exploits just mentioned, he has been true to form. After varying
periods on a closed ward, parole has been given; he has lost it
repeatedly and gone back among "demented" and helpless groups with whom
he is, to say the least, not at home. He has continued at all times free
from the technical stigmata of psychosis, remaining crafty, intelligent,
and superficially cooperative while trying to gain his ends. Frank takes
advantage of every opportunity to make trouble in the hospital and is
rather restless and extremely dissatisfied. He sends frequent letters to
women in town to whom he regards himself as paying court. These are
written in a neat hand, well spelled, and well expressed and are much
better letters than would be expected from a man of his education. They
are marked with self-righteousness, extreme egotism, trite
sentimentality, and monumental falsehood. His tone is that of a lover
who regards his own passion as very high and rare. "Only God knows," he
writes, "why I wasn't left over there among the poppies with my heroic
buddies," falsely describing himself as a captain in charge of 272 men.
"My wife never understood me!" he complains in the same letter. What
does he expect of her? The question invites meditation.


OK, Barbara, if you really had the sincerity to have read it down to
here, I give you my secret belief:
Frank *might* be one of the anti-social personalities, Hubbard was
talking about. Right?
Now, what do you think, how many of these people are there out on the
street. Three of a hundred?
Not so! Right? And hanging them? Err.

steff

PS The next story is Anna! That's a nice one!
So well mannered!

-- If there ever was an apple, Hubbard was the worm. Es ist leichter,
hinter einer Sache zu stehen, als vor ihr. Only plain text emails are
accepted.

cathyb" <cathybeesley@optusnet.com.au> wrote:> john wrote:

By the *gang*.

LOL!

Back to the truth.

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=18809

Fombonne's autism research is dangerously inaccurate
Medical Studies/Trials
Published: Tuesday, 11-Jul-2006

Dr. Eric Fombonne's new Quebec study will soon be published in the July
2006 issue of Pediatrics. Fombonne, a thimerosal litigation expert witness
on behalf of various pharmaceutical companies, will reportedly state that
it is "very clear" there is no relationship between mercury-based
thimerosal and the onset of autism.

According to the research group SafeMinds, Fombonne's research is
dangerously inaccurate:

   * The study looked at 27,749 students in grades kindergarten through
12th grade in a Montreal school district and found 187 cases of autism.
   * The vast majority of these cases (more than 90%) were born in years
in which thimerosal vaccines were widely used for infants in Quebec, as
they were in the US.
   * Only a tiny fraction of the autism students were born when
thimerosal-free DTP and Hib vaccines were given, and these students may
have been exposed to thimerosal from the Hepatitis B vaccine newly
recommended for infants of foreign-born parents, which made up over one
fourth of the greater Montreal population.
   * Dr. Fombonne wrongfully claims that large-population studies in the
United States, England and Denmark also disprove a link between mercury and
autism.
   * Although multiple respected researchers state otherwise, Dr. Fombonne
maintains the radical conclusion "there is no autism epidemic."
   * He conveniently ignores the vast body of scientific evidence, which
has shown that environmental factors such as mercury may have caused the
increased number of autism diagnoses in the US and other countries.
   * Dr. Fombonne's actions have historically been in the best interest of
various pharmaceutical companies, not families with autism. Fombonne has
also declared himself an expert witness in thimerosal-related litigation.

SafeMinds states, "Thimerosal is a serious poison that is harmful via
inhalation, ingestion or contact with skin. Furthermore,
thimerosal-containing vaccines elevate mercury levels in the body to a
level where adverse neurological outcomes are known to occur. It is
irresponsible for any pediatric doctor to justify injecting our children
with mercury.

"The prevalence of all autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has risen to 1 in
166 children in the past 20 years. Several independent federal agencies and
respected scientists and researchers have received federal funds to
investigate the autism epidemic and the biological plausibility of a link
between mercury and ASDs. Multiple studies have indicated that there is a
connection between childhood vaccines containing thimerosal and the
incidence of autism. No conclusions have been made rejecting a link between
mercury and autism."

The National Autism Association (NAA), along with multiple advocacy groups
and researchers, hope that Fombonne's conflicts of interest will be
disclosed in Pediatrics. "These significantly weak conclusions certainly
work to Dr. Fombonne's benefit. It is only appropriate that his partnership
with pharmaceutical companies be revealed," says Claire Bothwell, Board
Chair of NAA.

For more information, visit www.nationalautism.org or www.safeminds.org.

http://www.nationalautismassociation.org