Torture or delusion

Delusion Versus Torture

December 15, 2014

Alen J Salerian MD

    To differentiate a delusion from reality is a difficult task even for the most experienced psychiatrist. To differentiate persecutory delusions from man-made and wellengineered actions requires familiarity with both psychiatry and complex well disguised hostilities.

   Throughout history psychiatry has been abused to suppress dissent partly because of the ambiguous boundaries of free thought and delusional thinking.

  We all know of the Vatican’s infamous belief that Galileo was a lunatic for promoting insane ideas proposed by Copernicus of earth not being flat.

   Stalin’s Soviet Union and other repressive regimes have regularly abused psychiatry for political gain. Our own government generated a public delusion that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Pres. Kennedy despite the obvious forensic and scientific evidence rendered that claim invalid. Lee Harvey Oswald was quickly portrayed as a lone crazy sniper. It took half a century to realize that Oswald's behavior was consistent with his highly sensitive undercover job for the US government.

   At FMC Butner when I protested the unethical conduct of prison doctors to  promote  slave labor or torture of mental evaluees I was branded delusional by the same doctors.  What the medical staff did at FMC Butner was  lawful and it  occurred throughout the country, was the prison doctors magical explanation.

   Legal , common or fully supported by our government, torture is torture and slave labor is  slave labor. Both actions are as barbaric and inhumane today as they will be 10,000 years from now.