Media Image of Disability

The psychiatric industry tarnished its pristine image by promoting too many fake illnesses. Its corporate drug industry PR flacks conducted a new campaign to repair the image. "Mental illness are a result of chemical imbalances in the brain," they said. Journalists obediently and without skepticism reported this fantasy as if it was scientific fact.

Doctors, lawyers, judges, police and ordinary citizens accepted this fantasy into their propaganda filled brains, and repeated it. As German philosopher Josef Goebbels observed, this fantasy became accepted as truth.

In 2003 a group of persons accused of mental illness conducted a hunger strike. They demanded the American Psychiatric Association provide evidence of "a chemical imbalance" as the basis for mental illness. They were unable to do that.

[link to brief story]
http://www.freedom-center.org/hunger-strike-freedom-psychiatry

Logically it does not make sense. Psychiatric industry PR flacks said a chemical imbalance indicates mental illness. But how did they know that? They said, "We have pictures of the brain." But photographic images are not chemistry.

No one did an examination of brain matter drilling holes in people's heads and then testing the brain matter. No one. But even if they did, they had no chemical balance against which to measure.

It was a successful marketing campaign based on pure wind. George Orwell said, "Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." How is psychiatric language different from political language?

[Press release]
Harvard University's Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) student organization on International Higher Education and Disability (IHED) is hosting a symposium entitled The Power of Portrayal: A Panel Discussion on the Image of People with Disabilities in the Media. The panel will address the impact of media images of disability on the educational, psychological, and social development of students. As students with disabilities are increasingly included in classrooms with non-disabled peers, the need for a candid conversation on the influence of media and popular culture on students’ perception of disability becomes increasingly necessary. We are excited to explore this important topic with a panel of distinguished guests.

Panelists will include:

DR. TOM HEHIR, Pascucci Professor of Practice in Learning Differences at HGSE
PROFESSOR JOE BLATT, Senior Lecturer in Education and Director of the Technology in Education Program at HGSE
DEAN TOM FIEDLER, Dean of the College of Communications at Boston University
DANTE DI LORETO, Executive Producer of the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning television show GLEE

The panel will take place on Friday, April 13 [2012] at 2pm in the Eliot Lyman Room in Longfellow Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education.