"WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?"
by Phillip Day

For the past 17 years I have been researching and reporting on contentious health issues, publishing information that has been deliberately stymied or obfuscated by the political and medical establishments. My organisation is Credence, a research and publishing company with offices around the world dedicated to exposing quackery and hidden agendas within the health industry - be it the orthodox or alternative camp - which exist because of entrenched error, financial and strategic interests, quite a few of which we will examine later in this book.

As a reporter, I am interested in medical wars - situations where eminent scientists and doctors have done the unthinkable and directly challenged their own establishments over core issues of medical science. On the face of it, this seems to be a foolish move on their part, since to shut up and follow the party line would have guaranteed them the path of least resistance and a perpetuation of their enviable livelihoods and future prospects. But come out of the closet many honest men and women in the medical fraternity have done, to the great dismay of their peers, and there were those like myself ready to report the issues and agendas with which they felt compelled to unburden themselves.

Our researchers and affiliates also compile the latest data on the developing social globalisation of Earth and its strategic implications. We are not Luddites, disdaining every new advance in favour of maintaining a dogged, impractical adherence to the sentiments and traditions of the past. As has been said, 'the only constant is change', and to resist this truism is to demonstrate a naiveté completely at odds with observable reality.

OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD
Every new year brings incredible new inventions, new advances in technologies, new medicines, further discoveries in physics, chemistry and the other sciences. There are also new political challenges and military threats. News channels such as ABC, CNN, the BBC and Sky report 24 hours a day on the problems besetting this complicated, restless and fretting planet. Credence Research monitors this prodigious output; our publications division prepares reports and publishes books on these subjects. Our lecturers travel and host public meetings around the world to share this vital information.

But The Mind Game, it must be said, has been my most extraordinary and challenging project to date. I believe, after you have finished reading my new book, due out in July, that you also will agree that there are no greater or more important issues facing us as a civilisation than those under discussion in these pages. I speak to thousands of citizens a year during the course of my own touring. Almost to a man, woman or child, my audiences are worried about the world around them. They are at present known as the Silent Majority.

Author and researcher Bruce Wiseman writes: "Outside our windows, the peaceful streets of years past now harbour violence. In some neighbourhoods, gunfire pierces the night. Police helicopters fly overhead, scanning yards and alleys for runaway criminals.

We worry about our children. Once-quiet schools are now hothouses of drug-trafficking, promiscuity, and vice unimaginable in days gone by. We hear of an ever declining literacy rate, dwindling test scores, and of graduates who can't even find their home city on a map. We wonder how they will ever make it in the adult world.

In our homes, at our jobs, on our television screens, we see that the once-clear line between right and wrong has become grey and hazy. Virtue is held up to ridicule. The honest man is viewed as a fool. Criminal behaviour is now excused under the banner of 'irresistible impulse' and 'diminished capacity'.

Hardly anyone would argue with the statement that something has been eating at the moral fabric for decades now…. No one questions that there is a palpable, destructive force. In the United States, for example, people are at each other's throats over it. Liberals blame it on conservative policies, right wingers rebuke the left. Many in the religious community have held the entertainment industry accountable."

THE SILENT MAJORITY
The Silent Majority of the public sees these things, yet has remained silent up to now. These are ordinary, decent citizens who have grown exasperated with the ineffectiveness and corruption of their political system. Many have registered their protests by refusing to vote. Others are frustrated at the media for eschewing its collective responsibility to evaluate the social problems we really face. Most people, as we will learn later, have not the slightest idea which ends the press really serves. Dumbfounded, we look on as our newspapers, TV and cinemas feed us a steady, putrid fare of sex, violence, money and the shenanigans of the famous, instead of promoting the common-sense approaches that could heal our nations, restore our health services and stabilise our societies.

As I tour around the world, I meet thousands of people a year who make up this Silent Majority. They simmer as they look around them at a culture whose framework has crumbled, whose law and order precepts have been corrupted and repeatedly violated, whose mass communications media and entertainment industries have swamped them and their youth with images of senseless, gratuitous violence and pop-pornography. Many of these families lost loved ones in tragic circumstances in two World Wars which were ostensibly fought to preserve the values our society cherished. Today those values have evaporated, in spite of the sacrifice. The obscenity of where we have arrived as a society today has not gone unnoticed. The Silent Majority has begun to stir itself from its apathy, and nurture an understandable and justifiable outrage.

If you, the reader, are one of these ranks, then my new book is for you. Today, in the first of the excerpts, we will trace together the cause of these disasters and identify the perpetrators who are summarily guilty, by the evidence which follows, of introducing, through gross deception, their font of destructive ideologies, and of carrying out a calculated attack on the very fabric of our nations and their cultures.

As we will learn, the 18th and 19th centuries brought with them more than just the technical allure of an industrial revolution. Man himself became restless for a spiritual, as well as a physical change in the way he had traditionally regarded himself and his place in the cosmos. New sciences emerged, such as evolution, psychology, psychiatry and the mental health and hygiene movements. Their impacts on our future society were to have fundamental, far-reaching and ultimately tragic consequences in the decades that followed their introduction and broad acceptance by the public at large.

PSYCHIATRY
Psychiatry is one science in particular that comes under scrutiny in my book. At first glance, most would not even acknowledge the incredible changes psychiatric and psychological theories have had on our world. Yet we shall see that they have permeated our courts, our police, our hospitals, our movies and TV, our schoolyards, our governments and even our homes. Who would consider for one moment that psychiatry could have played such a fundamental role in the development of politics, education, entertainment, war and medicine?

OFF THE RAILS?
Many have concluded that mankind itself must be going insane. Indeed, we are told, at no other time in human history has a greater segment of society been diagnosed 'mentally ill' than today. Our nations' governments, schools and courts appreciate this, which is why they are veritably aswarm with armies of politically correct legislators, administrators and the inevitable battalions of psychologists, psychiatrists and other 'mental health' experts. One could expect that with such an impressive arsenal of professional expertise on call, victory itself would be assured. Who would possibly consider for a moment, in their right mind, that these might conceivably be the very same armies responsible for all the chaos?

THOMAS SZASZ
Dr Thomas Szasz is an interesting individual. He is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York at Syracuse and Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Although reaching the pinnacle of his profession, Dr Szasz has repeatedly denounced psychiatry as "…probably the single most destructive force that has affected American society within the last fifty years." An author of 23 books, including The Myth of Mental Illness, described by Science magazine as "bold and often brilliant", the Hungarian-born specialist has covered, in his writings, every type of abuse carried out by his profession. Szasz pronounces psychiatry guilty, not only of gross abuses of power and human rights over its patients, but also for the far-reaching, deleterious effects its philosophies have had on society throughout the world:

"Psychiatry is a part of the general liberal ethos…. Everybody is a victim, everybody has special rights, no responsibilities. This psychiatric view has so completely infiltrated [global thinking], people don't even think of it as psychiatry."

THE MIND GAME MISSION
This book traces the origins of psychiatry - this 'science of the mind' - and lays bare the startling and unsettling history of the Trojan Horse that has taken up residence in our midst. Part 1 of my book deals with psychiatry itself, while Part 2 examines the major 'mental disorders' from their true and vital standpoint. And it is here that the good news about our predicament is truly seen. Is there really such a thing as 'mental disease', or is the reality for us and our societies altogether more straightforward and, most importantly, manageable?

There is great news here for those concerned about Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ADD/ADHD, schizophrenia, anorexia, multiple sclerosis and a host of other disorders. For the millions who wrestle with these problems and issues daily, help is at hand. My task in the pages to follow is to report to you the leading research on these issues from the mouths of the specialists themselves, so the reader may make up their own mind on how to proceed from here.

For those unsettled and perplexed by the predicaments of the modern world and why seemingly nothing is being done about them, the journey we will shortly take will explain the nature of Wiseman's "palpable, destructive force", and how it has gained so much power over us. More to the point, my new book will discuss measures whereby the public may retake control over much of what has been given up or taken away. If you are sympathetic to the mission of this book, then take heart, for there are millions of people who think the same way you do. I believe, if we are to pass on to our children a future world that contains any legacy at all of decency, honesty and a moral compass, then we must discuss and resolve the answers to the ultimate question that faces our world today:

"What on Earth is Going On?"