off the shelf old books reviewed anew

 Readers Digest, UK edition, October 2020.

I don't have great expectations for modern incarnations of once great magazines. Even less so for lefty socialisty atheisticky British versions. There's a reason the Guardian newspaper and the BBC are bankrupt, lads. Stop trying to immitate them. This was an impulse buy at an Irish bookshop for old times' sake. The cost was 5.57 Euro.

The American edition of the Readers Digest is completely separate from this one. A group of Guardian newspaper types bought what amounts to franchise rights to produce an edition in the UK. They have remade it in their own image. Dry and conformist and joyless as ditchwater.

These people need to go to church.

The current October edition does have bright moments. There's a rather agreeable article about the singer Billy Ocean. There's also a rather good photo feature idea where you get the same photo shown twice on different pages and the second time you see it from a zoomed out view and you realise what it was really about. Most of the illustrations elsewhere in the magazine are a bit fervourless, evidence of computer design taking away much of the spontaneity we might otherwise get from individual artists.

I have the same sniffiness about the Beano now being produced using computer animation.

As hinted in my opening preamble (rant) there's a rather persistent whiff of the Guardian newspaper and the Beeb and similar Stalinist era harbingers of bankrupt lefyism over everything in the brave new British edition of the Readers Digest.

An efficient, well written, well argued, and at the same time thoroughly predictable thoroughly wearisome, article about police surveillance manages to warn about the dangers of evil policemen, evil politicians, evil general publics, evil xenophobes, evil me's, and evil families obsessing about their safety without ever warning about the evils of Islamic terrorism. We're all evil apparently except for the actual criminals.

The article diminishes to nothing the dangers of Muslim Jihad (ironically shortly after it was written, Muslims beheaded Samuel Paty a teacher in France) and the attendant threat of conformist political correctness haltering public concerns about terrorism and precluding decisive action against it via the Guardian newspaper and the BBC. I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns. The article is of course written by a literate, capable, dull as ditchwater sometime Guardian contributor styled Chris Menon. Let me just say this.

Baaaannnnnnnnnnnnnkruuuuupppppppppt.

Morally and financially.

Just when I'd almost given up hope of finding any joy in this somewhat andyne version of the Readers Digest, along comes a sensation article by Canadian freelancer Lia Grainger about doctors wilfully dispensing harmful anti depressants for profit to the general public.

The article touched on brilliance without actually being brilliant. It touches on brilliance because at least she's raising the issue and most publications won't touch it, in part for fear of losing pharmaceutical company advertising. It doesn't quite attain brilliance because she's too cautious. For one thing she is writing about the dangers of anti depressants without ever actually mentioning anti depressants. She calls them benzos. Nor does address herself to the colonisation of medicine by pharmaceutical companies. Nor does she critique frankly the lie perpetrated by clinicians that mental health issues arise from brain chemistry disorders. This lie is at the heart of what has come to be known as the Opioid Epidemic.

Still the article was a marvellous breath of principled fresh air through the staid dying pages of a once great publication.

Benzos are the substances internet fans will be aware of as the source of addiction issues for the respected commentator Jordan Peterson. That is to say they've nearly killed him, mind, body and soul. Let me put my cards on the table. My personal analysis is that the substances styled by their salesmen as anti depressants and anti psychotics are poisons and none of us are saying it for fear of being sued.

But Lia Grainger's cautious legalistic heart, bound no doubt by the prerequisites of avoiding lawsuits and worse consequences routinely inflicted by pharmaceutical companies on people and publications who expose their criminality, (cf the attempted ruination of the career and reputation of Doctor Andrew Wakefield who in my view correctly exposed the connection between Mumps Measles Rubellas mass vaccination programmes and an epidemic of autism in children) her cautions notwithstanding, Lia Grainger's heart, I tells ee. is still in the right place.

She and the Readers Digest obviously know there is a problem with the mass dispensing of drug poisons to patients. She knows that doctors respond to every situation involving mental pain by putting their patients on dangerously addictive drugs which don't do what the doctors or the manufacturers claim they do. She points out that people are being put on these drugs for a lifetime when legally the drugs are not meant to be prescribed for longer than a few weeks.

There are other issues she doesn't touch.

To say that anti depressants rectify brain chemisty is to engage in mystification and voodoo. We have no test for brain chemistry. There has never been a brain chemistry test for what doctors call mental illness. We have no evidence that any major psychiatric condition is caused by irregularities in brain chamistry. Therefore no doctor on earth should tell anyone anymore ever again that their mental pain is a brain chemistry disorder.

Lia Grainger's article demonstrates an awareness of the tragedy implicit in doctors telling people that their sadness is curable with a drug when the only real cure is for the patient to address the causes of their sadness. She knows that the alliance of professional clinicians and pharmaceutical companies marketing departments is killing people and condemning even more people to a half life where their problems are never faced and where a new problem of permanant serious addiction to an anti depressant becomes the dominating aspect of their lives.

Perhaps Lia and the Digest even suspect as I do that this malign symbiosis of medicine with pharmaceutical marketing campaigns represents one of the most disgraceful scandals of our era. Editor Eva Mackevic refers to "malfeasant doctors dispensing dangerous medication" in her otherwise vapid and fluffy editorial. This is stronger language than Lia Grainger uses in the article itself. But it pleased me no end. And it only hints at the full awful awful truth. Forgive me for enthusing so heartily about an article and magazine towards which I retain such grave caveats. Amid the media induced plague of conformism, sometimes we have to celebrate the crumbs of integrity.

Here is the news.

Anti depressants do not regulate brain chemistry. They never have. They never will. They block brain function. Anti depressants and anti psychotics are damaging addictive poisonous drugs.

I went back and bought three copies of the Readers Digest, October 2020 edition on account of Lia Grainger's article. I will send them to those of my acquaintance who are currently engaged in the business of poisoning human beings for profit.