A couple of days ago I received a letter from the mother of a post-adolescent daughter, expressing a common concern that millions of parents share. She wrote, in part,

“It seems to me that my daughter and her classmates have more depression and mood disorders than in my day (the 60s and 70s). I know at least one other parent who wonders if there’s a cause - the water, vaccines, all of the above.

“Thanks to you though I think it could be psychiatric drugs, which kids will filch from their parents’ medicine cabinets to take and share. Then they are stuck with the withdrawal syndrome.  “Looking for more of the picture. Peg”

Here was my response, which, for the purposes of this column, I have expanded upon:

“Yes Peg, your observations are correct. Our children (and us adults as well - but we aren’t developing adolescents anymore, are we?) are being forced to grow up in a junk culture, which, thanks to influences such as our powerful, corporate-controlled, profit-driven media, teaches junk values, encourages the swallowing of neurotoxic brain-altering psychiatric drugs, and forces them, during their most brain-vulnerable years, to be injected with multiple doses of highly toxic ‘vaccines’ that have been proven to damage their immune systems, harm their central nervous systems while simultaneously contributing to the alarming incidences of  chronic autoimmune disorders such as  asthma; rheumatoid arthritis; autistic spectrum disorders; Gulf War Syndrome; Guillain-Barré syndrome; systemic lupus erythematosus; multiple sclerosis; idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura; Type I and Type II diabetes mellitus; and inflammatory bowel disease; . (see http://www.discoverymedicine.com/Hedi-Orbach/2010/02/04/vaccines-and-autoimmune-diseases-of-the-adult/ and http://www.vaccinetruth.org/dr_blaylock.htm for more information on vaccine-induced autoimmune disorders.)
 
“Our American junk culture, which is highly profitable for the  amoral corporate diabetogenic, obesity-inducing food, entertainment, drug, media, fashion and sports industries, encourages the ingestion of toxic junk food, toxic carbohydrates, toxic synthetic fats and then saturates  them with crazy-making social media, brain-altering electromagnetic radiation from the ubiquitous wireless technologies that they hold so close to their brains, advertising and mindless, addicting entertainment (which makes ‘normal’  the ingestion of age-inappropriate, nightmarish gore, horror, sex and violence that disturbs sleep, personality and brain development and the ability to learn normally).
 
“If our girls and boys don’t think that they are meeting the unachievable images of Valley Girls, blonde beauty queens, vivacious big-breasted cheerleaders or star quarterback athletes (or even not enough Facebook ‘friends’) they feel that they are failing and are thus prone - in the absence of spiritual strengths like safety, freedom from violence, freedom from bullying and a feeling of love and acceptance from parental figures - to sadness and anxiety. And the profit-making amoral corporations don’t give a rip that they are doing it to them.
 
“America’s current crop of junk-cultivated children, whose brains did not have the advantage we might have had (of being nourished with organic food and no prescription drugs) now, starting at infancy, have damaged and therefore dysfunctional neurological systems that may be incapable of acting like adults when faced with troubling situations. And they may not realize that they are living in an abnormal universe that they sense is not good for them. And most of the information that they need to know is being censored out of their (and our) consciousness so that they may be doomed as long as corporations have control over their lives.  And I suppose that the most enlightened kids know that America’s ‘honorable’ corporations are wasting the planet, poisoning the soil, water and air and they may feel hopeless in the face of that trend. And they also know that America’s lawmakers – whom their Christian parents elected to office - have done very little in opposition.
 
“And yes, the virtually universal misdiagnosis of ‘mental illnesses’ (and the 98% chance that they will be prescribed untested combinations of brain-altering, neurotoxic, psychotoxic drugs) whenever they make the mistake of mentioning to their reflexively prescribing practitioners that they are being bullied, traumatized, deprived, misunderstood, humiliated and thus having normal fears, tiredness, fatigue, sleep deprivation, sadness or anxiety.

“One therapeutic thing that always helped my patients was pointing out to them that their ‘mental illness’ labels were not true. Rather, most of them were only suffering temporary emotional stress and were not permanently mentally ill at all. They only needed – and usually didn’t get - good psychotherapy, restorative sleep, healthful nutrition and thoughtful understanding from family and friends rather than mainly being prescribed combinations of synthetic brain-altering chemicals (unproven to be safe or effective long-term in human clinical trials) that were even poorly tested either short- or long term in the animal labs.

“Hope this sobering information helps somehow. Hopefully the truth will still make us free. GGK”

And here is more sobering information that gets to the roots:

Eleven Cunning Policies of the American Ruling Classes that Have Actually Promoted Violence and Criminality Among the Lower Classes

 (The following excerpts are from pp. 186 – 189 of Dr James Gilligan’s ground-breaking book, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, first paperback edition - published in 1997.

The eleven policies below have socially, psychologically and economically stimulated unnecessary, reversible, (theoretically) temporary and thus potentially curable (without the use of drugs) mental ill health symptoms - all too-often misdiagnosed as “mental illnesses of unknown origin”.

The symptoms artificially created by these cunning policies range from depression, anxiety, mania, and suicidality to aggression, psychosis, criminal behavior, and homicidality. (Ed. note: From his 1990s perspective, Dr Gilligan forgivably does not touch on the epidemic of brain malnutrition and over-vaccination of our children, new realities since he authored his book.

In the20+ years since Gilligan’s book came out, malnutrition and vaccine injuries have affected multitudes of vulnerable children in America, especially those poor or underprivileged folks who have been denied access to healthy food and also mandated to take ever increasing doses of innoculants that have contain the neurotoxins mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, unknown contaminants, viral particles and chemical adjuvants.

Poor people are being humiliated by having to live in “food deserts” – thus being denied access to healthy non-junk food (not to mention access to affordable or accessible dental and [non-toxic] health care). Increasingly, the poor and uninformed only eat high carb, sugary, highly processed, high transfat, artificially flavored and colored, synthetic junk food that, along with the ubiquitous synthetic prescription drugs in the medicine cabinet (and the immunotoxic and neurotoxic vaccines that are given during the years in which their brains are most actively developing), are slowly sickening the bodies and brains of the children who represent the future of humanity and our dying planet.

Here is Gilligan’s brilliant assessment of what has caused America’s high rates of violence and criminality:

“It is in the political interest of the political parties that represent the very rich to foster as high a rate of crime as possible, and even to exaggerate what the crime rate is, to foment fear and panic about violent crime far beyond what is realistically appropriate. For the more that people are worried about crime and violence, the more the middle class will focus its anger and fear on the poor and members of certain minority groups (for most of the violence that is labeled as “crime” is committed by people from those groups).

The nonviolent and noncriminal poor will be angry at those other poor people who are violent criminals; and both those classes will be too distracted by their anger at the lower-class criminals to notice that they have much better reasons to be angry at the very rich, and the (political) party that represents the interests of the rich, than at all the violent criminals put together.

Ironically, when crime is at its maximum, the party of the rich can even represent itself as the savior of everybody, by promising to “get tough on crime” and by declaring its “war on crime” (which, as I have said, is really a war on the poor - that social class which is seen, in this mystification, as being the ultimate source of most crime and violence), thus distracting attention from the fact that the ultimate source of most crime and violence is actually the upper class – or rather, the class system.

Thus, it is not surprising at all – indeed, it is only to be expected – that those who identify with the interests of the ruling class would be likely to pursue those policies that lead to an increase in the rate of what is legally defined as crime and violence. Such policies include the following:

1) Punishing more and more people (criminals) more and more harshly, by means of more and harsher prisons, capital punishment, and so on. Nothing stimulates crime as powerfully and as effectively as punishment does (since punishment stimulates shame and diminishes guilt, and shame stimulates violence, especially when it is not inhibited by guilt).

2) Outlawing those drugs that inhibit violence (such as marijuana and heroin), while legalizing and advertising those that stimulate violence and cause physical injury and death (such as alcohol and tobacco – and prescription psychostimulants and antidepressants – Ed. note); and criminalizing those drugs that have no demonstrable direct (pharmacological) effect on violent behavior (such as cocaine), thus spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars to stimulate crime and violence by providing an enormous publicly funded subsidy for those organized crime groups who profit from the fact that the smaller the supply of these drugs, the higher their price; and then misinforming the public (via the corporate-controlled mainstream media – Ed. note) about the relationship between drugs, crime and violence, as though crime and violence were caused by illicit drugs (which they are not) rather than by enormously profitable legal drugs such as alcohol (…which has been shown to stimulate violence), all of which distracts the public from noticing that the real cause of violence is not (illicit – Ed. note) drugs. The real cause of violence is the “war on drugs” (and the social and economic inequities which the “war on drugs” is designed to distract attention from).

3) Manipulating the tax laws and other economic policies so as to increase the disparity in income and wealth between the rich and the poor, for that also stimulates crime and violence, by maximizing the degree to which the poor are subjected to experiences and feelings of being shamed, humiliated, and made to feel inferior.

4) Depriving the poor of access to education (especially if they are in prison), for nothing decreases the rate of crime and violence as powerfully and effectively as does education. We know that the single most effective factor which reduces the rate of recidivism in the prison population is education, and yet education in the prisons is the first item to be cut when an administration “gets tough on crime.” Educational achievement provides prisoners in need of rehabilitation with a nonviolent source of self-esteem or pride; it protects them against the vulnerability to shame, and the injuries of structural violence (poverty) that motivate criminal violence.

5) Perpetuating the caste divisions of society that usually fall along racial lines. The poor and members of minority racial and ethnic groups are regularly subjected to maximal degrees of shame, humiliation, and feelings of inferiority by being told that they are innately and inherently stupid and intellectually inferior; that is then turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy by depriving them of the education they would need in order to develop their actual intellectual potential.

6) Exposing the public to entertainment that glorifies violence and holds it out as a (bogus – Ed. note) source of pride, honor, and masculine self-esteem.

7) Making lethal weapons easily available to the general public. (Which makes trivial and transient anger at being shamed more likely to become lethal, especially if the victim of the shaming is under the influence of – or intoxicated by - violence-inducing psychotropic drugs or alcohol – Ed. note).

8) Maximizing the polarization and asymmetry of the social roles of men and women. Nothing stimulates crime and violence more than the division of males and females into the roles of violence object and sex object, respectively.

9) Encouraging the prejudice against homosexuality, by striving to keep homosexuals out of the military, and from positions of leadership within religious institutions. Nothing stimulates violence more powerfully and effectively than homophobia, just as nothing would prevent  it more effectively than a more relaxed, tolerant, and respectful attitude toward homosexuality (but what would the raison d’etre of the military be without violence?).

10) Perpetuating and legitimizing the exposure of children and youth to violence such as corporal discipline in school and at home (or in the mean streets and in basic military training – Ed. note), injuries that would be considered assault and battery if inflicted on those who are more mature, and yet are regularly declared legitimate by our highest courts.

11) Regulating the economy so as to ensure that unemployment will never be abolished or even fall below a high enough minimum (for maintaining high unemployment rates makes desperate, under-employed workers willing to work for next to nothing, thus ensuring low hiring costs for the amoral corporations that are legally obligated by capitalistic norms and their governing boards to do anything and everything to maintain high profits and thus high share prices – Ed. note).

Dr Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic mental health care for the last decade of his career. He is also a peace and justice advocate and writes a weekly column for the Reader Weekly, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. The last three years of Dr Kohls’ columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn.