The proliferation of diagnoses, conditions, treatments, and cures for “mental health conditions” among younger Americans needs no elaboration. The “mental health crisis” that has been pointed to by so-called experts is responsible for an epidemic of loneliness (especially amongst men) and a 25% increase in hospitalizations for suicide attempts and self-harm amongst children. At the same time, the amount of identities that one can adopt and mutilating surgeries children can choose from also has proliferated, with seemingly little pushback from the same medical experts who despair for youth mental health. Indeed, children and adolescents today are seeing therapists at record rates for their mental-health problems; so much so that there is a shortage of psychologists. Yet the same medical establishment, exalts child sex change surgeries as a fix-all for depressed kids, citing the “comprehensive body of medical and psychological; research supporting the positive impact of such treatments.” Most conservatives and those still living in reality point to the Left’s takeover of institutions like the American Psychological Association as the most logical explanation for this sudden woke-ification of mental healthcare. However, mental healthcare has long been used as a cudgel by ruling elites to enforce a dominant culture, to the detriment of those that actually suffer from mental health problems.

The fusing of mental healthcare and elite power has a long history. In the Soviet Union, as a way to isolate and eventually purge regime enemies, psychologists and other mental health professionals would be tasked by the state to “cure” supposedly deranged individuals. Being sentenced to one of these psychiatric hospitals known as Psikhushka, meant being condemned to years of physical and mental torture designed to break dissidents and render them shells of their formal selves. In these facilities, most of the time run by the KGB, prisoners were diagnosed with an array of mental conditions designed to discredit them throughout society and to preserve the Party’s grip on power. Detainees at these hospitals were frequently diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia”, which only affects an individual’s social behavior. The use of psikhushka proliferated under the leadership of General Secretary Yuri Andropov, a geriatric whose frail health impeded his ability to lead the USSR and whose tenure lasted only from 1982 to 1984.

In the Soviet Union, opposing socialism was seen as evidence of a mental condition. Survivors of Communism today point to several instances where psychiatry and mental healthcare are increasingly being weaponized. Dr. Ryszard Legutko, a former samizdat editor, has written about the Left’s rediscovery and harnessing of this old Soviet practice in his 2016 book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. However, the expansion of mental healthcare in America to other parts of society in order to isolate and divide the populace, while also absorbing more educated professionals into the federal government’s health industrial complex, is a point that is not emphasized enough. What Americans are seeing now is the partial, but not complete, absorption of the mental healthcare apparatus into the federal government’s power structure. That explains why legitimate mental health concerns can be diagnosed and treated, while the same mental healthcare superstructure can champion niche Left causes in the mental health arena to the detriment of actual patients.

Just a partial takeover is enough to damage the credibility of the mental healthcare establishment. It’s no wonder then that those who champion (real) healthy habits that can build mental resilience like regular exercise and lifting weights with friends are seen as a mental-health risk. Despite the fact that obese Americans (i.e. the majority of the country) are at an increased risk of developing mental health problems, championing regular exercise is now seen as a far-right fad. For women, if you object to a grown man undressing in your locker room as Paula Scanlan did at the University of Pennsylvania, you are told to “seek therapy” to address your inherent bigotry. Indeed, therapy today is championed as a method to “dismantle oppression.” Separating out those Americans that commit, in Nikita Khrushchev’s words, “offenses that are characteristic of people with abnormal minds” is a natural extension of the feminization of higher education and professional organizations. No longer will psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals focus on pursuing truth and curing patients; instead the “art” of diagnoses and relativist nonsense rules are substituted as best practices in mental healthcare.

The Soviet Union’s best-known psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky personifies the state’s diagnosis strategy: identifying the dissenter’s own behavior and showing how it clashes with the state’s interpretation of what is “normal” behavior. After all, it was the official Communist Party line that those who opposed socialism were illogical. Why else would these dissidents abandon their families, destroy their own happiness, incinerate their careers, and brave prison to oppose the Soviet system that everyone else believed in? This is the exact same lens through which young, fit, religiously faithful, family-oriented Americans with great physiognomy, are diagnosed as having “toxic” masculinity and promoting harmful stereotypes about women. The state’s view of normalcy undergirds its own legitimacy. Who could forget the words of Vaclav Havel in The Power of the Powerless when he decries the “dictatorship of ritual…routines of power” that push aside individuals and “select people lacking individual will for the power structure.” In America today, if you’re an individual that asks questions, pursues truth, and takes care of your health, you may be crazy and require treatment, simply because your supposed craziness disrupts “that huge backdrop to daily life” that Havel rightly saw as upholding the rotten socialist system.

As anyone who has traversed through the labyrinth of academia knows, the type of person that enters into graduate school, medical school, or achieves a PhD or medical degree, requires an attitude and behaviors that prioritize compliance with authorities. Through years of degree-chasing and fulfilling residency requirements, mental-health professionals are some of the most obedient professionals across any industry anywhere in the world. Acting out and questioning authority, even when that authority could be wrong, could spell the end of your medical career. These shrinks are extremely compliant and deferential to the authorities. If the APA says that child sex change surgeries are now a form of healthcare, every shrink in America will fall in line. It’s no wonder then that Dr. Ethan Heim  is now facing federal charges and up to 10 years in federal prison, simply for labeling his colleagues who were performing sex changes on children as “wanting to play God” in a whistleblower complaint. The regime must maintain the façade that sex changes for children are normal and those in opposition are the crazy ones.

Today, mental illnesses are most prevalent among homos and other members of the Alphabet Mafia. However, the cultural currency that these mental illnesses bestow upon them in the public square facilitates their spread throughout American institutions. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and more become not only a social currency for our disability and minority privilege regime, but also a way to instill discipline within the Longhouse-Alphabet United Front. A perfect example of this would be the video that went viral on Right Twitter of the sudden bonding, followed by effeminate squeals of a white woman and her ghey guest when they both found out they were on the same anti-anxiety medication. These illnesses act as both a way to ensure unity within the mentally-ill herd, while showcasing to outsiders how much glee and support these communities have for one another. An open invitation to join, as long as one has either a real or imagined mental illness makes these communities appealing, especially to men who face a society that browbeats them as toxic, broken, and the source of all the world’s sin. Opposing this regime of state-approved mental illnesses that have evolved into identities is a way to show the drones of society that it is you, not the gender-confused children, who are “of abnormal mind.” Astroturfing a plethora of mental afflictions and made-up disabilities not only becomes a popular way to stand out and show how “strong” you are, but also succeeds in hiding the afflictions of those who truly are suffering.

Those that continue to suffer from real mental-health problems need to be able to rely on their communities and families, rather than a corrupted medical establishment. Ensuring that communities and local governments are able to take care of their own citizenry is the first step towards making sure real America begins to escape the flood of deaths of despair. As for the professional organizations like the APA and the American Medical Association (AMA), they need to be completely overhauled and purged of all Leftists. This can be accomplished by litigation targeting these organizations and the individual doctors that participate in mutilation of children. Lobotomies after all, are not banned by U.S. federal law. It is the threat of litigation by bloodthirsty trial lawyers that keep psychopathic medical practitioners in line. The same needs to be the case for child sex changes. Overall, medical practitioners, especially psychiatrists and psychologists need to be regulated based on whether their patients can be cured and not dependent on drugs, rather than just managing disorders. Eliminating the bureaucrats that influence the medical accreditation process would also allow doctors focused on outcomes instead of proliferating cultural Marxism to have the ability to run these accreditation boards.

If government cultural programming isn’t removed wholesale, mental healthcare will just become an American version of the horrors practiced in the Serbsky Institute. Real Americans whose mental health is being attacked daily by the regime are encouraged towards alcohol, drugs, and complete withdrawal from society. Meanwhile, a suicidal empathy exhibited by a feminized healthcare ecosystem and a culture that celebrates otherness and weakness allows medical procedures to be used to create more mentally-ill citizens by carving them up for gender affirmation. Much like being addicted to drugs, once you are a part of the transitioned transgender movement, you will be mentally broken and hooked on medications for the rest of your life. Shattering the cultural currency of mental illness, while bringing down the institutions that facilitate modern-day psikhushka  will enable the leaders of our movement to begin to help those truly suffering from mental illness to their feet.

Tail Gunner Joe (TGJ) is a Writer based in the Washington, D.C. area. TGJ has written for The American Mind, The American Postliberal, and Man’s World Online.