What Dr. Keith Ablow Doesn’t Understand About Psychiatry

It’s as plain as day to me what Dr. Keith Ablow, the celebrated Fox News Medical A-Team psychiatrist, doesn’t understand about liberty. First, he vilified the entire life and medical career of his fellow professional, the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian, for his courageous stand on physician assisted suicide. (See Part 1) Next, he sanctimoniously declared that men ought to have the legal right to force women they impregnate to bear their children. (See Part 2)

Now, once again, in the words of the most high and pious Dr. Ablow, it is apparent not only what he doesn’t understand about liberty, but what he doesn’t understand as well about his own profession, when he asks us: “Was Jesus the First Psychiatrist?”

“Recently, many people who have e-mailed me asking whether there are parallels between God’s teachings and the field of psychiatry and psychology. In the end, I believe the two things are very nearly one…,” says Dr. Ablow, which tells us that, in his narrow mind, the practice of psychiatry is not so much a branch of medical science, but a matter of good old time religion.

Surely Dr. Ablow knows better as, up front, he does admit the obvious: “… [the]  heart and soul of psychiatry and psychology, … has always been just this: People suffer to the extent that they are removed from the truth. People are healed to the extent that they embrace it, no matter the cost.”

“The key truths that people must seek out are those elements of self that define them as individuals—who they really, truly, finally and irrevocably are, deep inside,” he continues. “And in order to do that, they must rid themselves (with the psychiatrist or psychologist’s help) of illusions about all manner of forces that have distracted them and made them afraid, including traumatic experiences from childhood that made them worry about how punishing the world can be, as well as relationships with others who convinced them to abandon their deeply held beliefs or interests.”

All well and good so far; I couldn’t agree more.

As I wrote in my own book, Authority!:

“Psychological disorders are the result of individual consciousness accepting abstract falsehoods as reality. Insanity is a major disconnect with reality in which an individual’s consciousness is deceived and permeated with conflicting Authority! Abstract monsters, demons, and gods are accepted as “reality.”

The insane mind is crippled by abstractions and lost in an Alice in Wonderland fantasy. Consciousness can lead you to jump off a roof thinking you can fly. It can drive you crazy. But you will never ever encounter a neurotic, hysterical, delusional, schizophrenic, paranoid, superstitious, or psychotic animal.

No unconscious organism has ever suffered a psychological or psychiatric problem. That is because no unconscious organism has ever used consciousness or been deceived by Authority! It is the relentless cultural promotion of deception, falsehoods, lies, and conflicts between abstractions and reality in your consciousness that makes you crazy.” 

But then Ablow veers off into a complete nonsensical psycho-babble contradiction of reality by bringing “God” and “Jesus Christ” into the picture: “They [patient’s] must, essentially, reawaken some of what they were born with—the God-given, inexplicable, ultimately undefeatable capacity to move in the direction of their own, unique interests, abilities, beliefs and dreams,” he declares.

“This is why the image of Christ on the cross is such a powerful one—in my mind—for psychiatrists and psychologists to keep in mind… The fact that Christ is resurrected is a powerful fact for anyone seeking to restore themselves to well-being—to life… You have to be willing to die to live,”  Ablow concludes.

The object, of course, of Dr. Ablow’s fallacious conclusion and ultimately deluded psychiatric advice, is to have us all be just like Jesus on the cross in the face of life’s adversities. That, in my mind, represents the thinking of a self deceived deranged pseudo scientist pointing to an abstract imaginary religious character as the ideal for human psychological thinking and behavior, and insisting that we must be: “willing to die to live.” What utter unfathomable nonsense!

“Christ doesn’t give up his core self for anything… He doesn’t surrender it even when he is in terrible pain on the cross, wondering if he is totally alone… He doesn’t pretend that those who have hated him for his beliefs are his friends… He doesn’t fool himself into thinking that they love him,” observes Dr. Ablow.

Well, not exactly, I say. The biblical version of the Crucifixion recounts that: “From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (Matt: 27) That would indicate that, at the hour of his death, the biblical Jesus, by now in a delirium, actually questioned his own faith.  

“He doesn’t down three scotches because of the gathering storm that will take his life. He doesn’t eat himself into oblivion… He doesn’t change his appearance at the plastic surgeon’s office in order to avoid his persecutors or reality… He doesn’t inject himself with heroin to kill the pain in his hands… He doesn’t Tweet nonsense about his daily routine to people who say they’ll follow him when they really won’t and never intended to, anyhow,” Dr. Ablow adds.

Well, of course not, I say. The man was supposedly nailed by his hands and feet to a wooden cross, so how on earth could he do any of those things? The analogy is ridiculous.  

“He doesn’t even let hatred for his oppressors, in the final moments of his life on earth, cloud his vision of who he is and why he has come here… This is precisely what is required of people who really want to find themselves,” Ablow continues.

“This giving up of self is what causes all the suffering. It causes us to be depressed. It causes us to be anxious and panic. It causes us to seek all manner of self-defeating distraction. It even causes us to hear voices and see visions generated by our own thoughts boomeranging back to us as hallucinations because we have denied them an audience in our conscience [sic] minds. They’re too threatening, so we disown them, and then they own us,” concludes the Dr.

Yes, I say, and I agree completely. That’s exactly what religion – the ultimate hoax -- can do within the delicate consciousness of an otherwise sane and happy human being, having been born like all other living organisms, without religion. Dr. Ablow apparently forgets, or at best ignores, that the giving up of self – self sacrifice -- is precisely what Christianity demands the most from its followers.

If that won’t make a person crazy, nothing will.