Copyright © 2002 - 2011

 

 

 

An Existential Approach to Sane and Sober Living

in a Schizophregenic Society:

 

The Schizophregenic Society

 

Author: Tom Blaise Shepherd

 

NOTE: The author is also the author of Biology and Schizophrenia: Examining the Evidence and Weaving the Web of Schizophrenia and The Crime of Psychiatry.

 

As an existentialist, humanist and Buddhist, my concern is with improving the quality of life, rather than with entertaining illusions of an afterlife. My approach is inner-directed rather than other-directed. My mental energy is focused creatively rather than competitively.

 

It is my opinion that competition in the classroom is unhealthy and ultimately destroys incentive and the creative process for the most gifted individuals. Interestingly, the most gifted males, who are the most likely to neglected by teachers and bullied by classmates, are generally the slowest to mature. Their brains do not reach full maturity until the age of 25 or later.

 

It is also my opinion that the desensitization process involved in combat training, socially enforced heterosexuality and homophobia are the primary causes of violence, personality disintegration, and schizophrenic reactions.

 

Children who are reared in the Judeo-Christian tradition are taught early on in life that it is wrong to kill under any circumstances. Males are nourished in our classrooms and in our church Sunday schools to “share,” to “give to one who asks,” to “turn the other cheek,” to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and to “love and pray for one’s enemies.”

 

Yet males are also conditioned along the way in our primary and secondary public schools, in our military academies and in our state-supported institutions of higher learning to “compete,” to “intimidate,”  to “deceive,” to “exploit,” to “fight back with their fists and with other weapons” and to learn methods for killing others with bayonets, shotguns, handguns and other explosives.

 

Males are taught that if they refuse to engage in aggressive, violent and combative behavior that they are “wimps,” that they are “pansies,” that they are “faggots,” that they are “cowards,” that they are undeserving of being viewed as “men.” In the process, they develop ambivalent feelings for themselves and for others and contradictory attitudes towards violence.

 

By the time a typical American male reaches the age of 21, he is, whether or not he realizes it, a full-blown schizophrenic personality. Schizophrenia has nothing to do with experiencing so-called “auditory hallucinations.” Nor does it have anything to do with experiencing so-called “delusions.” Schizophrenia is the mental confusion one experiences as a result of having internalized mixed messages during the formal and informal educational process.

 

The voices that motivate males to compete, to intimidate, to exploit and to kill are the voices of our teachers, of our university professors, of our business leaders, of our athletic coaches – they are the voices of our military commanders.

 

Our criminal justice system thus has no business prosecuting any American armed services veteran for any crime. To even prosecute a U.S. veteran, one who has experienced institutionalized double-bind communication and institutionalized “desensitization” during his training process, is the ultimate crime. We live in a sick society. We also live in a schizophregenic society.

 

There is, in my opinion, an underlying homoerotic dimension to every individual, as all people are intrinsically ambisexual.

 

The average male possesses approximately eight times the level of testosterone that the average female possesses.

 

Contrary to popular opinion, the higher levels of testosterone that a male or female possesses, the more likely is the male or female to find homosexual behavior pleasurable, according to studies carried out by Abraham Maslow, a noted authority on human behavior.

 

Once again, contrary to popular opinion, most males are introduced to homosexual behavior by the more aggressive males in the neighborhood or at their school, typically by the varsity jocks.

 

All people are socialized by society to deny that they find homosexual behavior a pleasurable experience, thereby making homosexual experience the ultimate temptation, as it were.

 

Although the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions formally condemn homosexual relationships, Jewish, Christian and Muslim rabbis, ministers and imams typically engage in such relationships in a clandestine manner. Professional athletes are no different than others in the realm of human sexuality.

 

Because all homosapiens have a biological capacity for finding pleasure in certain types of homosexual behavior, the use of terms such as straight and gay to define individuals is absurd.

 

However, as a result of well-publicized epidemic levels of viruses spread through promiscuous sexuality, to include hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, new strains of gonorrhea and AIDS, more and more informed and intelligent individuals are today choosing celibacy as a lifestyle.

 

It is unfortunate indeed that so-called sophisticated and enlightened people – role models for others – still see everything in terms of black and white.

 

While I have, since my childhood, been color blind and an ongoing human rights leader and defender of the civil rights of all people, I have been a lifelong victim of the antisocial acts of women and men of every existing ethnicity and race, including my own. 

 

While serving my country in the United States Coast Guard, I was a victim of annoying sexual overtures by other males, both officers and non-officers, who were bent out of shape merely because I did not respond to their sexual invitations.

 

Homophobia, which is born out of ancient, barbaric religious rhetoric, is perhaps the root cause of virtually all forms of mental illness and is often a root cause of violence, including rape. Men who rape women are not necessarily attracted to women, nor are men who marry and father children by women. They are responding to the unwritten social code of a barbaric modern-day so-called God-fearing society that characterizes non-violent, non-aggressive male behavior – or gentlemanly behavior – not as ‘straight’ behavior, but rather as ‘queer’ behavior. That is the underlying cause of the Columbine massacre. Two perfectly straight geeks – super intelligent adolescents – were shunned by the borderline moron jocks as ‘faggots.’

 

Of course, all jocks are given grades higher than they earn. The coaches and teachers in our American high schools and colleges typically falsify grades. The school administrators encourage the system. Thus the top jocks (the borderline morons) wind up graduating with honors, while the true geniuses, the geeks, become discouraged and disgusted and quite typically rebel against the duplicity and understandably drop out. They too frequently wind up falsely imprisoned by the barbaric criminal justice system.

 

Generally speaking, psychiatrists are more insane and more unscrupulous than any of their clients. Shrinks typically deny that they indulge themselves in the same (forbidden) fantasies as their clients. Most psychiatric records, I have found, are gross distortions of truth.

 

Do I hear voices? Of course I  hear voices. Real voices! Do I believe the television set is trying to push ideas into my head? Of course, I do. Do I believe other people are trying to extract my thoughts from my mind? Of course I do. 

 

For those who are not in the know, U. S. government psychiatrists, with the aid of neurosurgeons, were actually implanting electronic monitoring devices in the heads of psychiatric patients in the early part of the Twentieth Century. That is a documented fact. Read and view Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, available in book and DVD form, from Amazon.com.

 

Most psychiatric patients are no doubt victims of legalized character assassination, as are most of those charged with criminal conduct by the criminal justice system. Most law enforcement officials, both male and female, have a passion for violence and deceit and have sealed criminal records prior to being sworn in as police officers, as do prosecuting attorneys and public defenders.

 

One of my Coast Guard assignments was to participate in the arrest of Dr. Reynolds, an American professor who was hired by the U. S. government to examine the effects of nuclear testing on the environment and who was, as a result of his investigations,  protesting nuclear testing on the Island of Kwajalein in the South Pacific.

 

The captain of the Cutter Planetree, the buoy tender to which I was assigned, was ordered by President Eisenhower to place the entire Planetree crew, himself included, at risk for radiation poisoning by entering an off-limits radioactive zone around Kwajalein in the South Pacific in order to make the arrest. I was thus perhaps exposed to radiation poisoning while I was a mere nineteen-year-old teenager. 

 

Dr. Reynolds was later acquitted of the charge of willfully and unlawfully sailing his own vessel, The Phoenix, into the atomic testing zone, which was in fact a warranted and peaceful demonstration of protest. Thanks Dr. Reynolds.

 

Ironically, our captain also hosted beer busts aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Planetree while we were anchored off-shore, when I was assaulted by an older and much heavier yet drunken shipmate while I was sleeping in a hammock on the fantail of the ship after having completed my duties as a mess cook – serving food and cleaning up after the very individual that assaulted and defiled me.

 

Prior to the assault, the same individual, Seaman Lester Reed, an African-American seaman from Alabama, perhaps 50 pounds heavier than I, had repeatedly mocked me because I was a slightly built gentleman. The incident, by the way – the atrocious assault and battery – was covered up by the officers in charge, to include Lt. Commander Billy Bush. I later discovered that there was no documentation of the incident in my official records.

 

I was repeatedly mocked by shipmates merely because I chose to regularly attend church services and other social functions at various Episcopal Churches while serving my country. I was victimized by the remark “All Christians are queer,” as I was departing the Cutter Triton, homeport Corpus Christi, to attend Sunday morning services at Church of the Good Shepherd. The remark was made by shipmate Jon Patton.

 

I was repeatedly defiled, both verbally and physically by my immediate supervisor Second Class Petty Officer and Radioman David Synnott, while confined in the radio shack compartment, performing my assigned duties as a radioman. Synnott would open and read mail I had received from my then lady friend and fiancée, a law student. He would then make extremely vulgar and infuriating remarks in reference to what she had written.

 

I indeed was betrayed by my country and by the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People. During high school, as an appointed citizenship chairman and president of an interfaith youth organization, I led the integration of the schools and churches in Southwest Missouri.  I was thus murdered in cold blood by the very people whom I had sacrificed my own welfare for.

 

May my surviving cousins Van Lear Black III, Van Lear Black IV, Michael Goldwater, Barry Goldwater Jr. and Christopher J. Swift, (juris doctorate, award-winning tax specialist and general counsel for a wide network of health care corporations) and their own spouses and descendants continue to advance ideas that promote the cause of peace and equality – through an example of sober, non-violent living – for all.

 

May more people like African-American gentleman John Newman continue to set a positive, living example for other men – the example being that common courtesy and non-violence is a manly trait – and the only human trait that will enable world peace to exist.

 

May the day come when the rich and super-rich willfully rid themselves of their hoardings and thus enable a truly democratic society to exist – throughout the world. May the day come when higher education is transformed from a competitive, profit-making business into a shared commodity – when people are willing to share their own knowledge with the rest of humanity for little or no pay.

 

I repeat because it beers repeating: The well-executed pen is far mightier than the sword or gun or bomb. A class or two in home economics and drawing and typing and cyber communications would be of far more benefit to humanity than a class in marksmanship or in gridiron pushing-and-shoving. Do you hear me?

 

For the record, I myself have NEVER had a desire to harm either myself or anyone else. Like anyone else, I have merely reacted to the insensitive, mean-spirited acts of others.

 

I am a celibate man and I believe in the practice of celibacy, although I was, for many years, a victim of media brainwashing and of multiple sexual assaults -- assaults enabled and covered up by the officers in charge and by the examining psychiatrists to whom I was referred for observation, while serving my country as a teenager and afterwards, assaults also covered up by examining psychiatrists and by the barbaric criminal justice system.

 

Thomas Mitchell Blaise Shepherd, author (November 20, 2011)

 

 

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann coined the term “schizophregenic mother” to describe a mother who through double-bind communication or contradictory messages creates a child that is confused as to what is appropriate and what is inappropriate behavior (right is wrong and wrong is right). The child is thus “damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.” Dr. Fromm-Reichmann and others, including Dr. Henry Stack Sullivan and R. D. Laing, believed such communication to be at the root of what psychiatry calls schizophrenia.

 

Tom Blaise Shepherd has more broadly applied the concept of  “schizophregenic” to describe a society or culture, namely the American culture, which through its institutions reinforces double-bind communication and schizophrenic behavior.

 

What the medical profession calls mental illness or schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorder and PTSD, according to Shepherd, are normal behavioral responses to abnormal or aberrant social conditioning. The behavior is reinforced by the prevailing social order and more specifically by the military-industrial infrastructure.

 

The educational system, which is NOT democratic, tends to brainwash and indoctrinate children and adolescents rather than to educate students. Students who challenge the system are typically weeded out of the system. Such students, typically the brightest and most gifted students, become the dropouts. A few, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, are somehow able to regroup with others like themselves and make remarkable contributions to society. Others become victims of the barbaric mental health and criminal justice system, so states Dr. Shepherd.

 

The government, the alcoholic beverage industry and the pharmaceutical industry encourage alcohol and drug dependency as an acceptable way to socialize, relax, and medicate one’s self. Yet, those who exhibit the dysfunctional behavior directly resulting from alcohol or drug dependency are moralistically caged in either a mental institution or a jail or prison, and sometimes branded a felon and permanently stripped of their civil rights. Shepherd shuns the use of terms such as alcoholic and addict because they are arbitrarily applied, ambiguous in meaning and stigmatizing.

 

It is best to keep in mind the fact that bar or saloon operators are in business for the purpose of getting their customers intoxicated. That is how they make their profits – and at their customers’ expense.

 

Alcoholic beverages are not health foods and they should not be promoted as health foods. They are potentially dangerous psychoactive drugs. They are also carcinogens.

 

Red wine, by the way, is as much a carcinogen as are other wines and other alcoholic beverages. It is the red grape, not the fermented red grape, that is an antioxidant. Thus, if you desire to be healthy, then consume red grapes or grape juice or raisins.

 

Even low (so-called acceptable) amounts alcohol interferes with the normal functioning of the brain’s neurotransmitters, impeding the supply of tryptophan to the brain, thus reducing serotonin formation. Excessive reduction of serotonin levels increases the likelihood of an individual becoming anxious, psychotic and violent. Inadequate serotonin is also a primary cause of insomnia.

 

It is demoralizing, says Shepherd, that children and adults are brainwashed by TV alcoholic beverage commercials while watching sports events, commercials that falsely associate alcoholic beverage consumption with superior athletic ability and with a healthy lifestyle. Alcoholic beverage advertising poisons the minds of the children and adults who are exposed to the advertising. View a typical advertisement, promoting beer here.

 

Shepherd Exposes Psychiatric Fraud

Recommends Reforms

 

Shepherd attacks the “psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry” as fraudulent and exploitative―as more interested in creating drug dependent clients through mind-disabling prescription psychotropic drugs than in enabling them to be independent and self-reliant. The neuroleptic drug-dependent client is the primary source of income for unscrupulous psychiatrists and their bedfellows, the clinical psychologists and social workers. “The fact is,” says Shepherd, ”that pharmaceutical psychiatric drugs do not improve the functioning of the nervous system. They severely impair the functioning of the nervous system.”

 

Psychiatric pharmaceuticals also severely impair the immune system and thus put the patient at risk for a wide variety of forms of cancer.

 

Whereas the psychiatric industry has determined that the brain’s chemical neurotransmitters are a causative or resultant factor in schizophrenic and bipolar behavior, and since the building blocks of the neurotransmitters are the vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and amino acids found in food, it is Shepherd’s opinion that the only sane prescription for schizophrenia or bipolar behavior would be a prescription for practicing sound nutrition, not a prescription for psychotropic drugs.

 

Dopamine, according to neurologists, is the chemical neurotransmitter that when produced in superabundance as a result of stress, produces the so-called positive symptoms (paranoid delusions and hallucinations) commonly associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer and others, including William J. Walsh, PhD, also believe the body’s overproduction of adrenaline to be a factor associated with schizophrenic or bipolar behavior.

 

Serotonin, according to biologists and neurologists, is believed to be the chemical neurotransmitter that produces a calming effect. Niacin (Vitamin B-3) is believed to suppress the overproduction of adrenaline. Thus a well-balanced diet to include daily servings of foods rich in tryptophane, niacin and folic acid: poultry, fish, white meat, boiled or baked potatoes, soy beans and/or garbanzo beans, broccoli/cauliflower, fresh fruit and nuts, non-fat milk and fresh, leafy green vegetables, would seem to be the best prescription for stabilizing the nervous system. Regular exercise is also necessary in order to stimulate blood-flow to the brain.

 

Complementary vitamin C, niacin, calcium, magnesium and zinc supplements is also recommended by Dr. William J. Walsh, Dr. Hoffer and others, in lieu of drug therapy. However, it is Shepherd’s opinion, based on his own personal experience, that a well-balanced diet, one ample in generous daily servings of fresh vegetables and fruit, and daily exercise in the form of walking and weight lifting, is the overall best prescription for achieving optimum brain functioning. The perhaps best available comprehensive guide to nutritional therapy is Dr. Andrew Saul’s Doctor Yourself: Natural Healing That Works, published in 2003. To read what Dr. Saul has to say about the use of niacin and tryptophan in the treatment of schizophrenia and depression, check out his website www.doctoryourself.com/index.html.  Once again, getting your niacin and tryptophane from a well-balanced diet of foods rich in niacin and tryptophane is a far superior method than depending on manufactured vitamin and mineral supplement tablets.

 

Shepherd, incidentally, has been diagnosed with various forms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder over the years, beginning while he was serving with the United States Coast Guard between the ages of 18 and 21, when he was hospitalized for a schizophrenic reaction* (characterized by paranoia, ambivalence and severe ego impoverishment) and depression, following assaults and batteries and ongoing sexual harassment of him by his own shipmates, including by his supervisors, while he was trying to perform his duties.

 

Shepherd said he blames the abuse in part on the fact that the Coast Guard commanders encouraged alcohol dependency and drunkenness by operating on-base beer gardens and by distributing free beer to crewmembers while the ship he was stationed on was anchored offshore in the South Pacific. Coast Guard commanders and officers in charge also encouraged and facilitated onboard ship sexual harassment of male subordinates. Shepherd himself was repeatedly physically and verbally sexually harassed by his immediate supervisor and by others with higher rank while stationed aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Triton.

 

During boot training [spring 1957] at Cape May, New Jersey, Shepherd and his teenage classmate-recruits were subjected to a lecture in which the instructor advocated the practice of rectal intercourse as a safe method of “birth control.” The instructor, according to Shepherd, told the recruits “the rectum is the cleanest organ in the human body.” No mention was made of the fact that rectal intercourse can result, not only in rectal hemorrhaging, but that it is also a method for contracting and spreading multiple types of viral infections, including hepatitis, syphilis and gonorrhea. The AIDS epidemic was non-existent at the time.

 

It was the consensus of the recruits, at the time, that the Coast Guard instructor was indeed sanctioning or encouraging male-male rectal intercourse, which may indeed have accounted for the on-board ship sexual harassment that Shepherd witnessed.

 

On three occasions during his military service, when Shepherd summoned the Shore Patrol for assistance, after having been the victim of a crime, instead of assisting him and apprehending his assailant or assailants, they instead incarcerated him.

 

While undergoing training as a radio operator, his classmates took his uniform cap off his head and were playing catch with it while a Coast Guard instructor walked onto the scene, observing what was going on. Instead of citing the classmates who were playing catch with Shepherd’s uniform cap, he instead cited Shepherd for being “out of uniform,” and required Shepherd to get down on his knees and pick up his classmates’ cigarette butts from the ground while his classmates were in a nearby classroom receiving instruction in Morse code. Shepherd himself did not even smoke. In fact he was about the only member of his class that did not smoke.

 

While the ship he was assigned to was anchored off-shore in the South Pacific, Shepherd became a victim of an assault and battery, as another seaman, who had consumed beer at a beer party hosted by the captain following the workday, abducted Shepherd while Shepherd was sleeping in a hammock on the aft deck of the ship by grabbing hold of him, throwing him out of the hammock onto the deck, then battering him about the head, while attempting to strangle him. According to Shepherd, no mention of the assault and battery is made in his official records, as Coast Guard officials desired to cover up the crime since the captain of the ship (Commander Billy Bush) had provided the beer to the seaman that assaulted and battered Shepherd. Following the assault, Shepherd began experiencing periodic bouts of amnesia after being provided with alcoholic beverages at other Coast Guard social functions.

 

In another incident a few weeks later, a 1^st class boatswain mate and supervisor persuaded Shepherd to participate in a chug-a-lug contest aboard ship just prior to attending another ship’s party hosted by the captain of the ship at a nightclub in Yukoshka, Japan. After Shepherd compliantly attempted to chug-a-lug a small bottle of Sake in order to be a good sport, the boatswain himself backed out of the agreement. About an hour later, Shepherd collapsed onto the floor of the nightclub. After being revived by officers, he was later apprehended by the Shore Patrol (while in the company of the same Boatswain) for unknown reasons, while in an apparent state of alcohol-induced amnesia. At the time, Shepherd was only nineteen years old.

 

On another occasion, about a year later, Shepherd was bludgeoned over the head by a drunken female civilian stranger in a Washington, D. C. club designated as a safe place for military personnel to socialize. Although the Shore Patrol took Shepherd to a Navy infirmary for surgical repair of his forehead wound, they failed to apprehend his assailant, who was in an out-of-control state of drunkenness when the Shore Patrol arrived on the scene. The woman had initially approached Shepherd in an attempt to solicit him for drinks and for a lewd act with her male companion. After Shepherd walked away from the two of them, the woman approached him again in order to verbally humiliate him and batter him merely because he had repeatedly asked her and her male companion to stay away from him.

 

Shepherd was not accustomed to drinking on a regular basis and prior to and after that particular Coast Guard hosted event Shepherd attempted to avoid socializing with his shipmates while off duty, only to be further harassed both sexually and otherwise while performing his duties aboard ship. The sexual harassment included both demoralizing verbal remarks or innuendos and demoralizing physical aggressions against Shepherd.

 

*Shepherd blames his so-called schizophrenic reaction and seizures on the fact that the Coast Guard authorities not only encouraged and facilitated alcohol dependency, but also repeatedly humiliated, punished and confined him, in lieu of his assailants, when it was clearly evident to officers in charge that he was a victim of robbery, of demoralizing sexual harassment (including sexual assault) and of aggravated battery by his male shipmates and by female civilian hustlers. It was also evident to the police and the shore patrol that he suffered from mental confusion, invariably triggered by alcohol.

 

Shepherd claims that the long-term psychotropic drug treatment to which he was subjected against his expressed wishes was of no benefit to him whatsoever, and that it in fact impaired his psychomotor reflexes, diminished his ability to concentrate, impaired his judgment, significantly destabilized his blood pressure and his heart rate and damaged his nervous system. Prescribed neuroleptic drugs, although categorized as tranquilizers, frequently cause an ongoing feeling of restlessness, as do so-called anti-depressant drugs, according to Eliot Valenstein and leading neuro-biologists.

 

Shepherd has always maintained that he experienced a severe form of alienation, as well as despondency, a reaction to the intolerable living and working environment that he experienced during and after his military service, beginning with high school Army ROTC and exacerbated during his service with the Marine Corps Reserve and with the United States Coast Guard during his developmental teenage years.

 

NOTE: What the average civilian psychiatrist and clinical psychologist and layperson fails to consider or understand is that men confined together aboard Merchant Marine, Navy and Coast Guard vessels for days, weeks and months at a time are thus deprived of customary outlets for  psychosexual socialization.

 

Enlisted men – non-commissioned officers – are berthed together in tightly-confined sleeping compartments aboard ship, while each officer commonly is assigned a private stateroom, plus a male military ‘cabin boy’ to attend to his needs.

 

Thus, the more aggressive males – and often the higher ranking males – are apt to seek out other less aggressive or more compliant males  -- especially the more attractive males – as sexual partners. Thus, less aggressive and lower ranking, yet attractive, males are more likely to experience psychosexual conflicts in dealing with the physical and verbal sexual aggressions or advances of other males. Such situations are typically at the root of mental breakdowns, according to U. S. Public Health Service psychiatrist James Finkelstein.

 

There is, indeed, a homosexual dimension to every male, a dimension that society-in-general commonly tends to deny the existence thereof. Adolescent males, while confined aboard marine vessels, may suddenly become aware of quite normal male behavioral characteristics or patterns they did not have to deal with while growing up in co-educational environments, according to Finkelstein.

 

 

Psychodynamic theorists, to include Silvano Arieti, M. D., would diagnose the condition that results from extremely aberrant psychological conditioning by parents and surrogate parents (teachers, coaches, and military drill instructors) as borderline schizophrenia, a condition in which the individual has extreme difficulty in coping with difficult others – moreso than the average individual.

 

Others, to include R. D. Laing and Tom Blaise Shepherd, consider the psychiatric labeling process to be a form of fraud, designed to silence, disenfranchise and exploit those individuals so labeled – many of whom are amongst the most gifted members of society.

 

Because Sbepherd had no father for the first eleven years of his life and because his highly distressed mom had to go to work before he was even weaned, there was no close, consistent maternal and paternal bonding during his early developmental years. He also had no father or male mentor to explain the facts of life to him – especially regarding male sexuality – the fact that there is a well-guarded homoerotic side to every male.

 

As a result, Shepherd not only experienced excessive teasing, but he also had extreme difficulty in dealing with the sexual advances or overtures of other males during his adolescence and adult years.

 

Shepherd was also born with a partial cryptorchidism. Although the condition was partially corrected through surgery at the age of eight, the condition nevertheless resulted in severe psychological complications – ongoing self-consciousness and resultant anxiety in being required to disrobe himself in the presence of other males in gymnasium shower facilities and while closely confined with other males during military duty and in the presence of females he was married to. The ongoing humiliation he experienced, primarily by males – jealous males – who were knowledgeable of his condition, contributed to low self-esteem, ongoing anxiety and paranoia – a tendency to avoid entering into close relationships with others throughout his adult life.

 

Mr. Shepherd’s military and employment medical records were invariably tainted with documentation of his cryptorchidism and the surgical procedure (orchipexy) he underwent at age eight, as well as his multiple psychiatric hospitalizations, beginning at age 20 while serving with the Coast Guard.

 

Shepherd has repeatedly presented a damage claim (seeking retroactive payments in excess of $1 million and continued service-connected disability payments of $2,000 a month) to the U.S. government for having been victimized on several occasions by assaults and batteries by his own shipmates while serving his country and for the fact that the Coast Guard encouraged and facilitated alcohol dependency. His claims have been repeatedly denied as a result of what Shepherd claims to be concerted and criminal efforts by U.S. government agents, including Coast Guard officials and Veterans Administration physicians, social workers and claims examiners, to suppress evidence. Shepherd claims he was threatened and intimidated by Dr. Thomas A. Grieder, a psychiatrist connected with the West Los Angeles Veterans Hospital, merely for speaking out about the nature of abuse he endured by a Coast Guard Training School instructor-petty officer, who wrongly cited and punished him for being out of uniform, when it was evident that the reason he was out of uniform was that his classmates had taken the uniform cap off his head and were playing catch with it.

 

“What Sunday school taught me during my early formative years to be right, the military taught me during my adolescence to be wrong. Right was wrong and wrong was right. That’s called double-bind communication. That is the primary cause of behavior that is typically characterized as mental illness by psychiatry,” comments Shepherd.

 

“As a result of the stigma of merely having been hospitalized for psychiatric observation during military service and the stigma of having been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, I was thus denied many career opportunities, placing me in a checkmate situation that ultimately reduced me to poverty, “ says Shepherd.

 

 

Shepherd Characterizes Mainstream Religions as Barbaric:

They Are Incompatible With Sane and Sober Living

 

Shepherd also focuses on the schizophregenic Jewish/Christian/Islamic heritage that dogmatically teaches citizens to not kill and to love and forgive their enemies, yet simultaneously teaches citizens methods for systematically killing their enemies in armed combat or through weapons of mass destruction. He also focuses on the unforgiving, un-Christian American criminal justice system that is more punitive than rehabilitative and that resultantly reinforces criminal behavior and recidivism.

 

Shepherd, who was selected by his teachers and the Joplin Rotary Club to be a delegate to Missouri Boys State during his junior year of high school and who was selected to be president of a Missouri Council of Churches interdenominational youth council, has since become a teacher of philosophy and religion. It is his conclusion that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are barbaric, fascist ideologies that have served the purpose of reinforcing sexism, racism and slavery in its various forms and that such ideologies are incompatible with sane and sober living and with true democracy. True democracy, according to Shepherd, cannot exist without 100 percent egalitarianism.

 

It is Shepherd’s further conclusion that Christianity in particular, with its ritualistic use of wine as a representation of the blood of Christ during the rite of Holy Eucharist, actually reinforces alcohol dependency among those reared in the Christian faith.

 

Shepherd recommends transcendental meditation (TM), a process of altering one’s consciousness by relaxing one’s breathing process in a quiet place where one is alone. Interestingly, TM has been proven to be an effective method for mental and physical relaxation and for the reduction of blood pressure to normal levels.

 

Following his studies in the International School of Philosophy and Letters at the National University of Mexico in Mexico City, where he enrolled following his graduation from high school in 1956, Shepherd received a B.A. degree from the college of Arts and Science of the University of Oklahoma. He continued his studies in sociology, political science, police administration and regional and city planning at the OU Graduate College, and in psychology, alcohol-drug studies and counseling in the Los Angeles area, where he completed an internship in counseling. He has continued independent studies and research in existential psychology, psychiatry and nutrition.

 

Shepherd also took classes in architecture and hands-on building construction technology at Crowder Community College in Missouri. He designed and hand-built his own 1000 sq. ft. cabin-home many years ago, although he was compelled to sell his house two years later after suffering a foot injury that disabled him for months, during which time he was unable to work as a self-employed deck builder and contractor. His foot was crushed by a Pakistani goumet restaurant manager merely for complaining about and refusing to pay a bill for food and service he did not order.

 

Shepherd ordered two full-course small filet steak dinners, one for his guest, the mother of an Episcopal Church priest, and one for himself. The dinners were advertised in the newspaper  for $6.95 back in 1979. However, they were billed for two T-Bone Specials which were listed on the menu for $16.95. Thus, when Shepherd refused to pay any more than the advertised price in the newspaper, the manager crushed his foot, then phoned the police in an attempt to charge Shepherd with “defrauding an inn keeper.”

 

After Shepherd reluctantly agreed to pay the $35.00 bill in order to avoid arrest, the manager, in the presence of the police officer, refused to provide Shepherd with an itemized receipt.  However, when Shepherd got home and realized his foot and ankle were badly swollen, he phoned the police department, apprising the chief of internal affairs of the situation.

 

The following week the restaurant, known as Jamils, was raided by the police and closed down for multiple violations of city, county, state and Federal regulations. Although raid made newspaper headlines, Shepherd was never awarded compensatory or punitive damages for his injury, which incapacitated him for months.

 

Shepherd later learned that the same restaurant had a habit of attempting to defraud other customers in the same manner over a period of several years.

 

 

Mr. Shepherd is also the founder of the Shepherd-Montessori Institute for Classical and Technical Education.

 

Shepherd Outlines His Platform for a Sane Society

 

Shepherd’s agenda includes:

 

(1)         His opposition to the promotion of neuroleptic and antidepressant drugs in the treatment of psychiatric problems and his opposition to the promotion of alcoholic beverages.

 

(2) His advocacy for sweeping changes in the American criminal justice system in which (a) education would replace corporal punishment and in which jails and prisons would be converted into learning and behavioral research centers and (b) all civil rights would automatically be fully restored to anyone previously convicted of a felony.

 

(3) His advocacy for land reform policies that would greatly expand homesteading.

 

(4) His advocacy for housing reform policies that would rapidly facilitate the expansion of government-subsidized rental housing and economical, environmentally feasible owner-built and owner-occupied housing.