What if, despite their lofty titles, their doctorates, their honors and fancy government positions, they were, plainly and simply, nuts?
What if the loonies have taken over the biggest asylum of them all?
And what if the lunatics were crooked to boot, scamming American taxpayers with a multibillion-dollar con game, year after year, handing out grants for wild, senseless, delusional and pointless “experiments,” while US citizens are getting provably crazier and crazier, all the time?
Well, “what if” is a disturbing, terrible reality right now—draining our pockets; torturing helpless animals in pointless, useless, ridiculous tests; wasting mountains of money; and doing absolutely nothing to effectively improve our country’s mental health.
The only group happy with the NIMH’s lack of success is the pharmaceutical industry.
Welcome to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), possibly the biggest, zaniest, most expensive and most worthless carnival sideshow bureaucracy on the planet.
With a staggering budget of $2.3 billion to waste in 2023—due to climb to $2.55 billion in 2025—what do they have to show for it?
Nothing. Not a single, solitary thing.
Has NIMH, in any way, improved the mental health of Americans?
No. Far from it.
“Since 2000, American taxpayers have bankrolled over $40 billion in NIMH’s futile quest to reduce human suffering to faulty genes and brain circuits, yet suicide rates have soared,” Dr. Roger McFillin, author of The Billion Dollar Brain Myth, said.
The problem, McFillin explains, is that NIMH focuses on animal testing in a futile effort to track down a physical, biomedical cause for mental illness, rather than conducting people-focused research that might have real application—and actually help people.
Consider that, in 2011, only one in 10 adults took psychotropic drugs. By 2013, that figure had jumped to one in six. By 2021, fully one in four Americans over the age of 18 were taking such drugs, intended to treat “problems with emotions, nerves or mental health.”
This is progress?
Whatever NIMH is supposed to be doing with their mind-boggling expenditures, it’s time to admit: It just isn’t working. In fact, mental health is getting worse the more they do it.
The only group happy with the NIMH’s lack of success is the pharmaceutical industry; in 2020, a whopping 45.2 million Americans took antidepressants, ringing up a $15.6 billion profit for the delighted legal drug dealers.
“The biological paradigm hasn’t just failed—it has actively harmed by teaching people their suffering is a brain defect rather than a meaningful response to life experiences,” McFillin said.
The NIMH blew another $1,107,534 on a 15-year study of fat rats.
Even the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) weighed in on the research disaster known as the NIMH, calling for it to “shift away from the use of animal experiments and expand human-based research. The Institute’s continued support for the use of animals as basic experimental systems to investigate human disease mechanisms fails to recognize the numerous scientific and ethical limitations of such research.”
Just look at some of the wacky studies the NIMH has been involved in—on your dime.
- The NIMH spent $1.14 million for a study that involved placing anaesthetic ointment on the penises of rhesus monkeys and guinea pigs.
- A 21-year grant totaling $1,631,035 was issued to study the “electronic chirping” of electric fish.
- The NIMH blew another $1,107,534 on a 15-year study of fat rats.
- $333,000 was wasted studying the sexual behavior of castrated quail, and $1.76 million to study the sexual behavior of Asian male monkeys.
- A Yale study spent close to $4 million in NIMH funds to implant electrodes into monkeys’ brains and study what happens when they look at each other.
- At Northwestern University, they attached virtual reality goggles to mice and made them run in terror on a treadmill, trying to escape a fake video of a pursuing owl. Cost? A mere $5 million or so.
- California Institute of Technology received $3 million to study autism in zebrafish.
You just can’t make this stuff up. It’s too insane. Nobody would believe you. But it’s all true.
Why do they do it? Simple: It’s a way for so-called “scientists” to make a living from grants, while satisfying their idle curiosity on studies that have nothing to do with human mental health.
Dr. Thomas Insel, former director of NIMH, admitted, “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that, I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”
Doesn’t it make you feel good, knowing that billions—literally billions—of your tax dollars were flushed down the bureaucratic toilet so that researchers could have their scientific fun doing “cool” experiments, writing “cool” research papers and accomplishing absolutely nothing of value—by their own admission?
No. It doesn’t. Frankly, to paraphrase the film Network, it makes us mad as hell and determined that we’re “not going to take it anymore.”
We need accountability, and the PCRM agrees, writing that the NIMH needs to “demonstrate greater transparency by showing funding allocations broken down by human or animal-based experimental systems.”
Jan Eastgate, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, wrote: “An in-depth investigation is needed into taxpayer dollars spent on bizarre research of animals, fish and insects in a failed attempt to understand human behavior and improve mental health.”
It’s time for taxpayers to insist on a full accounting of costs and demand to know why this outrageous feeding at the government pork trough—without measurable benefit to the mentally suffering—is being allowed.
Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, put it this way: “It’s time to part the veil of secrecy and esoteric semantics surrounding some of the NIMH grants and let taxpayers know what kind of wacky, even sinister science-fair experiments they’re paying for.
“We want NIMH on a very, very short leash.”
