Xavier Amador is a clinical psychologist and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College of Columbia University in the City of New York. He also worked at the New York State Psychiatric Institute where they were exposed conducting human experiments without consent as is done at Harvard University too. Something about the entitlements of the elitist psychiatrists. He was research director for NAMI which is working for the drug companies. Like Obama, he says what sounds great. He wants to help you, but he is really helping himself by helping the drug industry sell more product. He spoke at The Cambridge Massachusetts Public Library to a packed auditorium promoting his book, I Am Not Sick, I Don't Need Help! How to Help Someone with Mental Illness Accept Treatment, on Tuesday October 2, 2012. Few persons of color were seen at this event. No explanation or apology was given. Is NAMI a racist organization? Does Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Chris Matthews know about this? Trouble with his wireless microphone caused a restart of the lecture. Simon of Cambridge Community Television, who was video taping the event, fixed the microphone. Amador stepped to the side and asked the audience to applaud as he walked onto the stage a second time. They obediently did so for the camera. This set the tone for the Cuban-American showman.
Amador is the son of a Cuban lawyer who worked for Castro during the revolution. He became disillusioned and helped the United States in the Bay of Pigs invasion where he allegedly died. Amador's mother moved to the United States with her sons. Perhaps that is the source of Xavier's lifelong obsession with getting his brother into psychiatric treatment. Though it was not announced by the library this event was actually a drug company sponsored promotion for their products. There were dozens of NAMI members at this event with literature tables helping to sell Amador's book. They even had some high calorie, high sugar content junk foods for consumption by their "consumer" base. Caffeine in the Dunkin Donuts coffee was also available. "Consumers" is what Amador calls patients. They are not humans with inalienable rights. They are "consumers" of psychiatric drugs and services.
Xavier Amador.
I asked one of the young ladies who sat at one of the NAMI tables, "You work for the drug companies?" She said no she works for "a small Cambridge group." I said "NAMI is all over the country lobbying for drug treatment." I told her in case she did not know "Drug companies give NAMI $11 million each year to promote their products and drug treatment." She said "We're the bottom of the handicap totem pole." Huh? One small victim group seeking sympathy from the rich white man?
The pattern promoted by Amador is to get people to admit they are mentally ill and to seek treatment. There is no standard for determining who is mentally ill or even what mental illness is. In his case before he became a psychologist, he thought that what his brother said in the United States was evidence that his brother was mentally ill. What his brother said was protected speech and no behavior was mentioned that was not protected either. It may be explained differently in more details in the book, but it is the same pattern of coercing treatment on non consenting humans.
Xavier Amador.
One essential Right in the US Constitution is the Right To Be Left Alone. Here is Xavier Amador obsessed with getting his brother to accept his diagnosis and to get treatment. Amador boasted of calling the police to have his brother incarcerated in a hospital. If police, relatives, anyone can diagnose mental illness who needs psychiatrists? Amador is a psychologist. Is he licensed to make medical diagnoses? I realize that the police do not make any distinction between a psychologist a PhD., and a MD psychiatrist, but there is a legal difference. Police love psychiatry because they do not need probable cause to take a person's freedom. It gives psychologists and psychiatrists more power than police. They do not like threats to their power as we see whenever one officer commits a heinous crime and their unions demand that there be no prosecution or accountability.
When a person is accused of a crime, he is given notice, the arraignment. He is allowed to defend himself, the trial. If dissatisfied, he has a Right to Appeal the decision. That is called Due Process. He has a Right NOT to incriminate himself. But when a person is accused of mental illness, he is seldom given notice in any formal way. He has no way to defend himself and there is no appeal from a diagnosis. Anything he says can and is used against him with no warning from the thoughtful, kindly, public spirited loving psychiatrist.
Psychologists and psychiatrists seldom know any of the laws that regulate their behavior. They believe that if a person says or does something that they do not like or do not understand that is a symptom of mental illness with all of the negative connotations it brings. People become dangerous and need supervision, drugs and incarceration. That happens a lot and when a person is in custody who will listen to him? Here you find a person in a mental hospital who says "I am not mentally ill." Visitors respond,"Yes we know dear. We'll see you next week." And so it goes.
News report of a woman stalker arrested.
All of that is done in the name of good, and love! Amador did the same. For seven years he kept telling his brother he was mentally ill. It was only when he stopped pestering his brother they were able to have a relationship. Refusal to accept the need for treatment has an exotic name, created allegedly by a Hungarian doctor in 1919. The word is "onosognosia." Amador made the distinction between denial and ignorance. Not knowing is not denial he says. Denial implies that there is a knowledge of the mental illness but a refusal to acknowledge it.
News report about Ted Kaczynski.
That same argument applies to limousine liberals at Harvard University, in Cambridge MA and at Columbia University too. At those high minded superior places of learning they deny that Black Americans can be racist. They insist that Black Americans have had their genes cleansed (like psychiatrists) of mendacity, greed and sadism. If Black people are unable to be racist that implies that they are better than White people who are so depraved they are all racists. At least all White men are racist. White women who are willing to have sex with Black men and women are not racist, you see. Are the libbies at elitist Harvard and Columbia in denial or are they ignorant?
A recruitment technique to attract more customers, consumers. See the great people, who admit they are mentally ill?
Amador cited his anecdotes about trying to get his brother to admit he was mentally ill. Then he quotes studies that are tangentially related to the issue. He focused on schizophrenia and some bipolar disorders. Huh? If I recall what Robert Whitaker (robertwhitaker.org) exhaustively reports in his books about the abuses of psychiatry especially concerning schizophrenia, Amador is making it all up. Statistics were plentiful during this presentation. Mark Twain said of statistics: "There are lies. Damn lies. And then there are statistics." This is truly a story of unrequited obsessive love of a brother for a brother. But it is a misguided love, with the requirement of submitting to psychiatric treatment. Is it the kind of love a control freak offers to the object of his love?
Ron Artest, who changed his name, went into the stands to beat fans he did not like. This is a role model for troubled youth?
This sounds like the aphorism from George Bernard Shaw, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Or the pre-Homeric Greek philosopher's, "The chief source of evil among men, is excessive good." The latter applies to psychiatry in general. There was at least one uniformed Cambridge police officer in the crowd. Was that to ensure there was no violence from anyone who dared to disagree with the omniscient Columbia psychologist?
Terry Bradshaw, regular on post football game television shows, and The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. Does he know that his image is being used by drug companies to promote more drug usage by troubled civilians?
My plan was to ask him "Why is psychiatry the only kind of 'illnesses' which require the police power of the state to enforce a diagnosis?" But after listening to his presentation l left early. Amador stomped his foot on the stage four times loud enough to make me fear him. He was using his foot stomping to show how solid the mind was that refused to yield to the psychiatrist know-it-alls and be treated properly like a good obedient child.
Ted Turner, "The Mouth of the South," is another famous, wealthy alleged mental patient. Did he approve using his image to encourage ambitious people to take psychiatric drugs?
He never discussed the denial (or ignorance) of police, prosecutors, psychiatrists and the general public that psychiatric drugs cause suicide, and violence. Even the drug-company-controlled FDA requires a black box warning label on those drugs. But that does not raise any concern from this extremist who is certain he knows the truth.
Some of the literature from the "small Cambridge group" of deep-pocketed national lobbyist front for the drug industry.
Amador boasted of his own history of mental illness. He says that Einstein's definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again and again and expecting a different outcome. That is what he did with his brother he says. So if he has a history of mental illness as journalists always report about suspects arrested and charged with crimes, why should anyone accept what he says? Can he prove he is not hallucinating all of this as he accused his brother of imagining that the CIA was after him? Does his history of mental illness give him credibility, unlike suspects?
Some of the nutritious treats for the mental patients, relatives and professional friends.
He discussed briefly confabulation, defined as replacing facts with imagination in memory. He says, "belief persists despite conflicting evidence." I thought of the US government and those who believe what the Obama administration tells them. US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, an Obama acolyte, insisted that the murder of the US Ambassador to Libya in September 2012 was caused by a lame video made in California by an amateur cast and crew. My reaction to that was, "Whenever my friends and I go out, we always bring along our rocket propelled grenade launchers. You never know when we may encounter a spontaneous protest at the local consulate." Ahem!
More printed propaganda from NAMI.
Amador presented a brief "role playing" (he called it) performance with an alleged spontaneous audience volunteer, a cute blond woman. The setting was the woman as stalker of her former husband after he obtained a restraining order. He may not have been her husband, but she believed he was in any case. She kept calling him. When she appeared at his home he called the police who came and took the lady to the mental hospital. There the psychiatrist explained her options. She could take psychiatric drugs or she could go to jail for violating a restraining order. She opted for the drugs. This is what passes for treatment. Punishment! Is this another example of confabulation? Or denial? Punishment is treatment?
A package of propaganda for the new recruits.
When Amador's brother Henry died he says he learned a lot about his brother at the memorial that he did not know. His lack of knowledge did not inhibit him from insisting that his brother get psychiatric treatment though. Isn't this typical of those control freaks like E. Fuller Torrey who demands everyone submit to psychiatry no matter what their problems are? That is when he told the audience that his brother had been run down by a bus driver who had a diabetic attack while driving the bus.
Newsletter for NAMI with Amador on the cover.
He travels the world continuing his efforts trying to get his brother to get psychiatric treatment even after his brother died. One thing you can say about this man, "He is focused." A PhD. will do that to you. He mentioned some of the most egregious crimes in recent history including but not limited to Ted Kaczynski's bombings. He did not mention that Ted Kaczynski was used as a human subject for experiments when he was a student at Harvard University. He mentioned Ted's brother David who turned him into the FBI after getting assurances that the government would not seek the death penalty. Plato's dialogue, The Euthyphro, discusses the morality of turning in a relative to the authorities for alleged wrongdoing. But there was no discussion by Amador, because Ted was "mentally ill!" Then of course as is to be expected from government liars they proceeded to seek the death penalty. His lawyer Michael Mello, described the details of the legal proceedings in the excellent book, The United States of America Versus Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber. Mello explains that Kaczynski was denied his right to defend himself. His lawyers used the excuse that they wanted to save him from execution. So they had him declared mentally ill. Amador says Kaczynski was in denial that he was mentally ill. Oh?
Still more literature from the "bottom of the handicapped totem pole."
Then he mentioned the Aurora CO theater shooter. This too was denial for Amador because the young man was in treatment. Again no mention of the role of any psychiatric drugs in causing his violent acts. But also there was no mention of him being evicted from his apartment which he wired to be blown up while he was shooting up the theater. Mental illness? Sounds more like an evil devious rational mind.
His LEAP program stands for Listen, Empathize, Agree, and Partner.
The web site is at
leapinstitute.org
Amador's site is at
http://www.xavieramador.com/
His blog is
http://xavieramador.com/wordpress/
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