In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds—a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick.
Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. That’s because Detrick, still thriving today as the Army’s principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.
To me, everything we do that doesn’t have a positive return is a bad habit. Sometimes, it’s what we don’t do that’s the bad habit. For example, I consider laziness as a bad habit.
If you’re too lazy to get out of bed in the morning, clean your house, or go to the gym; you’re not a worthless person—you simply have a bad habit that you need to get rid of.
That’s how I look at most unproductive behavior. I’m not saying that everyone has the same ideas about the meaning of life. But if you, like me, believe that the purpose of life is to be useful, you need the right habits to back that up.
Simply put, anything that prevents you from being useful is a bad habit. We all know that a lot of our behavior is bad. It doesn’t require a genius to understand that eating junk food, smoking, drinking alcohol, complaining, watching the news, browsing social media, lashing out at people, and sitting on your ass all day are bad things.
They have no positive return. No one feels good after doing those things. And yet, we keep sticking to our bad habits because we can’t break them.
uring the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.
MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."
President Trump says yes, many in the mental health community say no.
Mental illness is commonly defined as an impairment that interferes with one’s ability to make decisions based on evidence. An obvious example is delusions of imaginary worlds that do not exist. A mentally ill person says that there is a monster in the closet but the average person can look in the closet and not see the monster.
But what about ideology? Strong views on an issue can cloud people’s perception of the facts. But what about a value system that values some evidence more than others? Are there bad values that a person can have? Mental health professionals generally try to avoid such topics because they don’t want to seen as picking sides in a political debate.
A person is generally viewed as not mentally ill if they take a course of action after analyzing the pros and cons of action. Even an action that could lead to certain death or a lifetime of incarceration might be worthwhile to a suicide bomber, who sees their death as a way to get to heaven. They may have fully understood the consequences of their actions and made a rational decision based on their ideology – and therefore are not mentally ill.