Educational Foundation
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President Thomas M. Shepherd (a/k/a author Tom Blaise Shepherd) is an alumnus of the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Mexico, Crowder College, the University of Missouri, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the Graduate College of the University of Oklahoma. He is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and the U. S. Coast Guard and is an advocate for the rights of mental health clients.
Shepherd is the founder-chancellor of the Shepherd-Montessori Institute. He is the author of An Existential Approach to Sane and Sober Living and other publications. See The Xandex Press or Amazon.com to read reviews of books by Tom Blaise Shepherd. Read more biographical info about Tom Blaise Shepherd here. View Tom Shepherd's Books here
Shepherd Center for Sane Living
Home Page The Evergreen Post
Objectives:
(1) To examine those ideas that are the most conducive for enabling democracy to exist, ideas that promote peace and social and economic equality.
(2) To examine causes of mental illness and treatment methods employed by public and private mental health agencies. Individuals treated without drug therapy stand a better chance of coping with stress than those who are treated with drug therapy, according to the latest research of leading scientists.
(3) To examine the criminal justice system in America and recommend reforms. Operant psychological conditioning methods utilized by the military to induce inductees to kill is recognized as a cause of anti-social behavior in those individuals exposed to such conditioning. Unjust laws that reinforce social and economic inequality and human exploitation and fail to provide for a more equitable distribution of the wealth is a primary cause of alienation, violence and crime.
The following reforms are recommended: (a) the abolishment of capital punishment, (b) the conversion of jails and prisons into behavioral learning centers and universities, (c) a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit denying civil rights to individuals convicted of a felony, and (d) prohibition of three-strikes laws.
(4) To reform land, housing, and finance policies to assure affordable home ownership to all citizens, including the disabled and elderly single.
(5) To recognize The Torah (The "Voice of God" as reported by Moses), The New Testament,, and the Koran (The "Voice of God" as reported by Muhammad) as historical doctrines that have justified fascism (ethnic supremacy), slavery, perpetual war, violence, sexism and masochism, through a barbaric, superstitious belief system which is the enemy of reason, freedom and true democracy. American tax dollars and American Gentiles are being used to fight a perpetual war between Arabs and Israelites, based on the philosophy of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
The Torah: Exodus 21:20 -- "And if a man beats his male or female servant with a rod . . . he shall not be punished, for he/she is his property." A justification for slavery, cruelty to others.
The Torah: Exodus 22:25 -- "If you lend money to any of My people (Jews) who are poor among you, you shall not be like a money lender to him, you shall not charge him interest." Anti-Gentilism
The Torah: Exodus 34:12-13 -- "Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it be a snare in our midst . . . you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images." Anti-Gentilism
The Torah: Leviticus 25:43-45 --" You may buy male and female slaves from the nations around you. You may buy the children; they shall be your permanent slaves, but regarding your brethren, the children of Israel, you shall not rule over one another with rigor." The law of Israeli supremacy & slavery.
The New Testament:1 Peter 2:18-- "Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, for to this you were called . . . because Christ suffered you should also suffer. The rite of masochism.
The Koran:Al-Nisa:4:34-- "Men have authority over women because God has made one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them . . beat them." A justification for sexism, wife beating.
The Koran:Al-Ma'Idah-- "If they observe the Torah, they shall enjoy abundance. . . Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends. . . Because the Israelites broke their covenant, we laid on them our curse . . . Unbelievers are those who say 'God is the Messiah, the Son of Mary.' _________________________________________________________________________
"It is only when our relationships with one another are fully mutual and egalitarian that we become fully free and balanced human beings." --Thomas M. Shepherd
The Fiction of Tom Blaise
three short short stories
and more
Online at The Shepherd Chronicle
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Existentialism, Schizophrenia & Psychiatry
by Thomas Blaise Shepherd
READ
Reviewed by Tom Blaise Shepherd
Published in 1999, the Book of the Brain is a collection of essays on the brain, based on scientific studies by leading scientists. One chapter, The Criminal Element, written by W. Wayte Gibbs, reports that the most frequently reported biological correlative of violent behavior is a low level of serotonin. Environment reportedly plays a role. S10,udies show that serotonin often fluctuates with the pecking order, dropping in animals when they are threatened and rising when they assume a dominant status. Behavioral programs that concentrate on teaching job skills and reward prosocial attitudes are believed to cut rearrest rate to 35 percent. "Scared straight" and boot camp programs, on the other hand, tend to increase recidivism, according to the research.
Commentary: Employees who are repeatedly humiliated or harassed by their bosses, as a result of the stress will also suffer from reduced serotonin levels . Young people like Eric Harris, Andrew Williams and other mass murderers apparently suffered from low self-esteem or severe ego impoverishment, also known as clinical depression (characterized by low serotonin levels) as a result of being rejected and verbally abused by their peers, a/k/a bullying by others. As a result of feelings of rejection, the repressed anger became unbearable, at which point they lashed out in a revengeful manner at a world that they perceived to be overwhelmingly hostile and cruel. Interestingly, both of these boys were also the sons of career military men, who were themselves professionally desensitized to violence and trained to use weapons as an acceptable method for solving problems.
How to Become a Schizophrenic:
The Case Against Biological Psychiatry
by John Modrow
reviewed by Tom Blaise Shepherd
John Modrow was diagnosed and treated for schizophrenia. He tells his own story, beginning when his mother took him to a psychiatrist a the age of six. Modrow presents his own belief, supported by Theodore Lidz, M.D., Yale Psychiatric Institute; Thomas Szasz, M.D. author of Cruel Compassion; and Henry Stack Sullivan, pioneer psychotherapist, that schizophrenia is not an inherited disease, but a severe emotional disturbance as a result of intolerably cruel behavior towards the child by his/her parents. Children who become schizophrenic, according to Modrow, a well as Sullivan, distort reality in accordance with their parents needs rather than their own, and in so doing they become stripped of ego defenses vital to maintaining their own sanity.
Modrow reexamines and rejects as inconclusive the evidence used to support the "medical model," that schizophrenics suffer from (a) a brain defect; (b) a biochemical defect; and (c) a genetic defect. Although Modrow recognizes that biological changes take place as a reaction to the stress that the child/adolescent suffers, he concludes that the changes are not biologically caused, but environmentally caused. Therefore "milieu" therapy rather than drug therapy is the only sane treatment method.
Modrow supports theories previously advanced by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Theodore Lidz, M.D. (Yale Psychiatric Institute) that schizophrenia develops as a result of a schizophregenic family. According to Lidz there are two patterns, "schizmatic" and "skewed," which characterize schizophregenic families.
The "schizmatic" model views parents of schizophrenics as chronic failures in achieving complementary of purpose or role reciprocity. Each parent largely ignores the needs of the other, infuriorating each other, and failing to support the emotional needs of each other. In trying to please either parent the child is rebuffed and rejected by the other.
The "skewed" model views an "egocentric" mother who is impervious to the needs of other family members as separate individuals. Typically, the mother has serious difficulties in being close and maternal to her son when he is an infant. However, as the son develops into adolescence, she becomes meddlesome and seeks completion of her own life through her son, having him live his life as an extension of herself. This obviously produces identity confusion. The father in such a family typically fails to provide necessary adequate role modeling, affection nd emotional support for his son.
In the case of girls who become schizophrenic, it can be the mother and father who are rejecting in infancy, then a middlesome father during her adolescence seeks completion of his life through his daughter, having her live her life as an extension of himself, thus producing an identity crisis for her. The lack of an emotionally supportive mother (and role model) for the female child/adolescent to replace the missing affection from the father induces the eventual schizophrenic break.
The actual schizophrenic breakdown usually takes place when the adolescent leaves home to attend college or begin a career and finds himself/herself unable to develop satisfactory interpersonal relationships with others.
Forward is written by Bertram P. Karon, Ph.D. author of Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia. Karon himself warns that most, if not all, neuroleptic medications used to treat schziophrenia are neurotoxic. According to Karon, recent MRI studies show intracellular damage from neuroleptic medication. According to Modrow, schizophrenia has a significantly better prognosis with Lidz-style psychotherapy, than with drug therapy. However, due to economic expediency, modernday psychiatrists tend to prefer drug therapy in lieu of psychtherapy, to the detriment of the patient's welfare.
The book is well worth the price. Judge for yourself. An excellent used paperback copy can be purchased from Amazon.com.
Schizophrenia Without Antipsychotic Drugs
& The Legacy of Loren Mosher
More Book Reviews At Evergreen Post ~ Psychiatry
reviews and commentaries by Tom Miguel Blaise Shepherd
reviews of books authored by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D., Joel Norris, Ph. D., Robert Keppel and others
subjects: Ted Bundy - Gary Heidnick - Charles Manson
Affirmative Action: The institution of "affirmative action" is legalized discrimination, which institutionalizes racism and encourages social and economic genocide of non-Black, non Hispanic males. It is neither just, nor democratic.
Enemies of Freedom: Individuals who profit from or encourage the distribution of alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and recreational drugs are the enemies of freedom and democracy. Alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs do not free people. They debilitate and enslave people!
Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder and PTSD are terms used to delineate varying degrees of neurological disfunctioning of individuals as a result of environmental, social and psychological trauma, and contradictory and inauthentic models of conduct, often associated with violence, and reinforced by those with parental, military or police authority in any society. Although commonly characterized by alienation, withdrawal, and "delusions," the labels are stigmatizing and fail to recognize evidence that the brain is plastic, not static, and that psychiatric symptoms are situational responses and neurological adaptations to abnormal and stressful situations. Experience itself, according to Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., can modify brain anatomy.
Did you know?
Without exception, drugs used to TREAT psychiatric symptoms and brain disorders result in either sensitization or tolerance to the drugs and can actually CAUSE additional brain pathology, as well as cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, kidney failure, and testosterone deficiency.
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Suggested reading: (See Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com)
1. Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health by Eliot S.Valenstein Ph.D.
2. The Myth of Psychotherapy by Thomas Szasz, M.D.
3. How to Become a Schizophrenic: the case against biological psychiatry by John Modrow
4. The Testosterone Syndrome by Eugene Shippen, M.D. and William Fryer.
5. Serial Killers (the psychobiology of episodic violence) by Joel Norris, Ph.D.
6. The Killers Next Door by Joel Norris, Ph.D.
7. Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted by Thomas Szasz, M.D.
8. A Psychiatric Study of Jesus by Albert Schweitzer
9. My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding by David Duke
10. Why the Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager and Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
[According to Prager and Telushkin, Jews have the highest income of any ethnic group in the United States. Why? The Jewish community provides interest-free loans to their own people for college and for establishing themselves as business proprietors and as professionals.]
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Most Egalitarian, Most Prosperous, Most Peaceful
The Nordic countries are overall the best countries to live in the world, according to the Human Devleopment report which is published annually by the United Nations. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland figure among the top countries on the UN index because of their high levels of education, democracy, income and public health, and because of their low birth rate
and low level of crime.
Nordic people solve their problems with tools, not with fists, guns or bombs.
They value self-reliance and cooperation over competition
Note: the word Nordic was coined by the French
who migrated to Scandinavia
To learn more about the Nordic culture
enter here
INDEX
1. The Creation of Israel: A Brief History
2. The Saintly Faces of Evil & other fiction by Tom Blaise
3. American Gentile Anti-Defamation League pro-democracy
4. The Good Earth News: Sex & Sanity: A Sociocultural View of Human Sexuality
5. Thomas M. Shepherd Online - Commentaries Amazon.com Search
6. The Joplin-Carthage Times* Veteran Affairs
7. Shepherd Research Center - Science of Killology by Col. Grossman
8. The Shepherd-Montessori Institute
9. The Egalitarian Times
10. Tom Widmark Life Center Nordic Humanist Episcopal Fellowship
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books, articles and commentaries authored by Tom Blaise Shepherd
and others on the subject of psychiatry, existential philosophy, existential psychology, criminology, psychotropic drugs, alcohol/drug dependency, sexuality and meditation
are available for the on-line viewer to read - to study.