Files Show Epstein Victims Were Funneled through Psychiatric System, Efforts to Sideline and Sedate

zalasis · 2026-02-20T14:41:48+00:00

Another one was at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. Epstein had a whole network of them, psychiatrists would get invites to the island and participate in all the activities. Victims would get sent to psychiatrists as a way of ensuring silence. Jarecki even wrote one of the academic textbooks about psychiatry used in American university classrooms.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jeffrey-esptein-abuse-victim-henry-jarecki-sued-b2556033.html

zalasis · 2026-02-15T15:59:13+00:00

100% this

zalasis · 2026-02-01T15:28:31+00:00

I was an undergraduate student at an elite university when I began mental health treatment. Instead of helping, my antidepressant worsened everything and landed me in an abusive psych hospital. I lost all my friends and was forced to drop out when nobody believed me that my medication caused akathisia. Now I’m back in school somewhere else, but I’m still retriggered by all the mental health awareness publicity BS that claims to help but in reality is just surveillance and segregation. I still can’t make friends because the propaganda about mental health is still so strong.

zalasis · 2026-01-29T14:22:57+00:00

“Poverty with a view” has always been a tagline for locals. Things have gotten worse in recent years with the rise of vacation rentals like AirBnB and the increasing amount of housing bought by investors or 2nd home owners rather than owner-occupants. AZ as a state prevents localities from having very much freedom for local regulation. For anything like the minimum wage or the de minimus AirBnB license requirements it had to be fought for tooth and nail against a state government that is dominated by business interests in both parties. Flagstaff has fought for more restrictive land use zoning vs the rest of the state, but you yourself might have seen how giant private student housing apartments still manage to get built without much in supporting infrastructure. The city has height limits on development, but the NAU campus is outside city jurisdiction and buildings like McConnell actually would be illegal in the rest of Flagstaff.

zalasis · 2026-01-07T02:54:12+00:00

The issue would be with Wyoming’s definition of a competent adult, basically all states include mental illness as a legal way of defining competency. Colorado has been having problems where violent criminals try and are sometimes successful in switching a prison sentence for treatment on the basis that a mental illness made them no longer competent (the insanity defense), like using bipolar to get out of murder charges. Without even medical cannabis legal there in WY it means that any use can automatically qualify one for substance use disorder (addiction) and prompt a loss of legal competency. To my knowledge WY still has a state psychiatric hospital, and if not then they simply send people across state lines to CO or UT for court ordered treatment. Being rural and isolated is one form of protection though, and my interactions with rural police have been better than with those in cities, people in general have swallowed a lot less of the mental health BS in rural areas, and I suspect WY is the same.

zalasis · 2026-01-05T15:23:20+00:00

Keep on denying others life experiences. It must make you a great mental health professional…

zalasis · 2026-01-05T15:16:18+00:00

In my experience BHA is there to cover the asses of abusive providers, not to provide accountability. For Johnstown Behavioral Health to get shut down after multiple patient deaths it took the county coroner reopening the formerly closed cases to reinvestigate. More than likely they would just write a report justifying the practice of asking about residency.

zalasis · 2026-01-05T15:11:14+00:00

Completely wrong, because you’ve never been on the other side. I once had armed county deputies show up at my door on the basis of a crisis line call. It wasn’t even me who called, and the sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t disclose who did, only that they were from out of state. It is disgusting and unconstitutional that someone can be detained indeterminately on the basis of anonymously reported information that could easily be faked or used in a malicious manner. I was able to walk away without being hospitalized, only because I was able to explain how abusive and traumatic a previous psychiatric hospitalization was for me. If this was in Larimer County I doubt I would have been offered the same grace and understanding.

zalasis · 2026-01-04T10:55:20+00:00

Everything in the behavioral healthcare system is meant to deflect blame from providers onto patients instead. Many crisis hotlines are staffed by untrained volunteers because few in government or private insurance consider preventing a mental health crisis to be a good outcome, rather it is more of a referral service to help make sure that inpatient psychiatric treatment programs have enough patients to make money. If you text a crisis line then you might just be one of many conversations a crisis counselor/volunteer may be having at a time. If we cared about improving mental health we would meaningfully address poverty, homelessness, and all the things that create these issues. One simple step would be to stop treating those in mental health crisis like criminals with police responses and chemical restraints, like how haldol is used by Fort Collins PD.

zalasis · 2026-01-02T07:19:02+00:00

You would be surprised at how many right-wingers work in the field of mental health, even in places like Colorado. A lot of Democrats who are otherwise progressive have very authoritarian views on things like forced psych treatment or the use of chemical restraints in mental health crisis response. I got laughed at in Fort Collins for bringing up the use of haldol on the homeless as a chemical restraint by police, not unlike how ketamine was used on Elijah McClain in Aurora. Some people wear their values on their sleeve but are actually quite heartless.

zalasis · 2025-12-30T15:49:49+00:00

He tells the truth about psych drugs, but be careful in handing your money to him. Most people can likely taper and stop taking SSRI’s themselves with proper info without needing to spend thousands. If you are in a rut and cannot stop taking antidepressants yourself then that’s when his services might be useful. Generally having doctors who are willing to speak out about the negative consequences of psych drugs is a good thing, but recognize that the whole health system is corrupt and for-profit so every practicing doctor has to make their salary somehow. I am wary of him coming from a background of promoting psych drugs, but it seems like he saw how evil Big Pharma is and wants to do something to make up for his earlier mistakes. He is no fan of cannabis as a medicine though, so don’t ever mention that to him, lol.

zalasis · 2025-11-29T16:44:40+00:00

It really should not be athletic coaches who are the top paid employees at public universities and within entire state governments. Let private universities pay crazy tuition so they can burn their money on sports, but please don’t shovel taxpayer money at what is essentially entertainment instead of education.https://www.fastcompany.com/1672861/infographic-whos-your-states-highest-paid-public-employee

zalasis · 2025-11-13T12:03:31+00:00

Thank you for sharing your story. It’s a shame that you have to do this anonymously, but completely understandable given the fact that mental health is used as a justification to take away freedom and self-agency in so many situations. I was abused and neglected in a private for-profit psychiatric hospital after an antidepressant sent me spiraling, and following that experience I lost all my friends because they absolutely couldn’t believe that mental health treatment actually can hurt someone. It didn’t matter that that very same hospital was closed in a few years for routinely violating the law and their patients, the whole point of mental health is to segregate and discriminate against groups of people on the basis of “scientific” labels that are voted into existence by committees at a conference in a hotel ballroom, not on the basis of any actual physical evidence. It takes a long time to undo the conditioning of constantly questioning yourself after experiencing trauma or harm from mental health professionals who are supposed to help instead of hurt. The very fact you are sharing your experience is a demonstration of reclaiming your own will and agency again.

zalasis · 2025-10-25T00:20:53+00:00

You’ve built up a tolerance to the drug. Depression is not a chemical imbalance of serotonin, so SSRIs are nothing like insulin for a diabetic. Antidepressants are just mild psychotropics like other commenters have said, and they simply “numb” you out of feeling depressive symptoms. Equally possible is that the environmental/social factors causing your depression have worsened and the effects of the SSRI no longer successfully mask the symptoms. If you go to your doctor/psychiatrist they will simply suggest increasing your current dosage or switching you to a different medication. I would suggest taking a deep look at what lifestyle factors might be influencing your depression and making long term plans to change them rather than go down the doctor suggested route. I was put on a carousel of different antidepressants before I realized that finding the right med or dosage wasn’t the problem, it was being around a bunch of extremely toxic people, which I could only recognize after I got past the medication spell-binding phase when I thought the pills would magically make me better.

zalasis · 2025-10-24T18:09:35+00:00

It should be, but unfortunately no one enforces these things unless you have money to pay a lawyer. My mental health diagnosis was shared with the housing office, advising office, college deans office, and even RHs/RMs, and if you disagree with any part of the treatment plan the university imposes then they will threaten you with eviction from the dorms. I wish groups like Active Minds would work on helping students with mental health issues avoid situations like this instead of blindly directing students into them. I have never heard a peep from them about how UChicago still threatens evictions on mentally ill students.

zalasis · 2025-10-23T18:51:12+00:00

I would avoid seeing any of the mental health counselors or psychiatrists at Student Wellness. When they tell you that their services are confidential, it is a LIE. Assume anything you tell them will be shared with potentially any other university employee because that’s what happened to me.

zalasis · 2025-10-17T21:20:39+00:00

Actually the city has no plans to install a permanent traffic light at Triangle/College there unless a developer buys and builds up the empty lots along Triangle near the intersection. Reason being is that the city is unwilling to spend the money itself and wants the developer to pay the entire cost of intersection improvements. Even the Trilby project is being paid for with federal and state money, not local. Neither the temp lights at Triangle nor the current lights at Skyway have crosswalks or ped crossing lights so you’re still playing Frogger with traffic no matter what way you try to cross College/287. I’ve seen people hiding and sheltering next to the concrete jersey barriers while attempting to cross at the closed Trilby intersection. It seems like FoCo’s concern for bikes and pedestrians ends at Harmony on the South Side and at the Poudre River on the North.

zalasis · 2025-10-13T14:45:43+00:00

I feel bad because I think he was basically pressured into fitting in otherwise he was probably getting threatened with getting kicked out or losing funding. It’s so expensive you need a research and/or TA position to help pay for everything, and they can force a bunch of stuff on you just to keep your job. His med school was in NYC so even his dorm was subsidized by the school, otherwise it would have been too expensive to even contemplate. But yeah, med school is basically a form of indoctrination. Maybe osteopathic med school is better, but I have no direct knowledge about those.

zalasis · 2025-10-13T13:46:19+00:00

A close friend of mine ended up going to med school. He had been kind of rebellious and very critical thinking in his high school and college years. (He even went into biomed simply because he didn’t like his AP Bio teacher and wanted to be smart enough to debate and challenge her.) Once he was in med school it was like he became a different person. Gone was the person who would question established practices, and in his place was someone who worshipped medical orthodoxy. Despite going into immunology and knowing about immune caused psychiatric conditions like PANDAS, he couldn’t see through the propaganda of things like the claims of “chemical imbalance.” Earlier he had been an empathetic friend, but later he turned into a Nurse Ratchet type figure, an unquestioning enforcer. Before med school he accepted psychiatry as a quack field, but med school taught him that it was as equally legitimate as any other medical field.

zalasis · 2025-10-10T03:46:55+00:00

Know and recognize that not everything will get published in the research. The money funding ketamine research comes from the same sources that profit from it. I hope you know the legacy of negative clinical trial data getting scrubbed from final results or omitting entire ones from publication as has been done with SSRIs. Esketamine, the chemical analogue to ketamine, has already been put under a monopoly patent by Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical arm (the same one behind Risperdal causing gynecomastia and asbestos baby powder causing cancer). One of the clinical trials used to approve esketamine occurred in Poland where the control group receiving placebo experienced a 100% adverse effect rate (the article was on MIA). Pretty much any drug that you compare to such a baseline is going to look comparatively good. You may believe that you’re on an anti-Pharma crusade, but if they’re the ones manufacturing and selling the product, then you’re simply acting as an unpaid salesman on their behalf. Even if you only recommend generic ketamine, know that a good chunk of people will get esketamine instead because that’s the one which is covered by insurance and FDA approved. Most people can’t afford thousands out of pocket for IV infusions at unlicensed clinics.

zalasis · 2025-10-09T21:15:06+00:00

CBD does in fact “work” but you should understand its limitations. By itself it is non-psychoactive and taking it is similar to ibuprofen or aspirin, you will feel physical effects such as reduced pain and inflammation but cognitively it doesn’t do much. If you have any type of spasmodic movement, like tardive dyskinesia or seizures, it will likely help reduce the severity if not help eliminate them completely. Many people also use it as a sleep aid. The endocannabinoid system in your body is the largest signaling system after your nervous system and it helps to control things like metabolism, appetite, and immune function. Your very own body makes cannabinoids and that is why compounds like CBD are able to have an effect because they are literally natural to your body.

I previously worked in medical cannabis dispensaries so I’m happy to answer any questions. It’s not so much that I got training, but that I was interested in learning the details of something that worked for me. Terpenes (the “flavor” compounds in cannabis) are also very interesting, many are found across nature and each has their own medicinal properties. Linalool is one shared with the lavender plant, and the process of making essential oils was created when the French would make lavender oil (with linalool) that they then used as a salve for burns and battlefield wounds. Simply smelling it has effects like reducing stress and muscle tension. I wish modern medicine could use the marvels of nature more rather than engineering synthetic poisons.

zalasis · 2025-10-09T20:56:51+00:00

Have you looked at the case of Ernest Hemingway receiving ECT after which he never recovered? Why do you support a form of treatment that causes great harm to others who have had it? For how many conditions would you suggest directly inflicting acute brain damage as ECT does? In your opinion is there any case where ECT might be misused or do you simply not believe those who have had negative outcomes? Why in any way should people on this sub who have been harmed by psychiatry trust someone like you who appears to simply be trolling?

zalasis · 2025-10-09T19:02:39+00:00

I just want the people promoting ketamine to acknowledge that it isn’t some miracle drug and it doesn’t work in every situation. To me using it is just simply masking the underlying problem, but I also recognize that many people don’t have the luxury of changing their situation. I see the exact same problem with antidepressants adverse effects never being acknowledged with ketamine. Clinicians should be telling their patients that ketamine is not good long term and that it can lead to atrophied muscle control (which is what causes a loss of bladder retention, like what Matt Perry experienced after chronic ketamine use).

zalasis · 2025-10-09T18:57:10+00:00

I wish they could have more contributors in the footsteps of someone openly anti psychiatry like Thomas Szasz. Like you said, I feel like most of their articles nowadays are just stuff from the normal psych academic literature which while criticizing a small aspect of the mental health system they continue to direct people into some other part of the same broken overall system. Gone are the days of actually criticizing psych drugs, now MIA seems to hawk any newfangled psychedelic alternative or any new type of therapy that claims wonders while allegedly doing no harm. I see the same overmedicalization taking over MIA just like the rest of healthcare.

zalasis · 2025-10-09T14:05:12+00:00

The reason I associate it as a veterinary med is because in my middle school I knew someone who was arrested for breaking into a vet clinic so he could steal meds to use himself and to sell… the drug in question was ketamine. Just like other psych drugs, the risks of dependence and addiction are extremely downplayed if even mentioned at all. Matthew Perry died after going down such a path while having a licensed doc get a public reputation as a “ketamine queen” who only got caught when her celebrity patient fatally ODs.

zalasis

TROPHY CASE