A friend alerted me to this article by Michael P. Lynch:

“The idea that the mind is essentially private is a central element of the Cartesian concept of the self — a concept that has been largely abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Descartes not only held that my thoughts were private, he took them to be transparent — all thoughts were conscious. Freud cured us of that. Descartes also thought that the only way to account for my special access to my thoughts was to take thoughts to be made out of a different sort of stuff than my body — to take our minds, in short, to be non-physical, distinct from the brain. Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have convinced many of us otherwise.
But while Descartes’s overall view has been rightly rejected, there is something profoundly right about the connection between privacy and the self, something that recent events should cause us to appreciate. What is right about it, in my view, is that to be an autonomous person is to be capable of having privileged access (in the two senses defined above) to information about your psychological profile — your hopes, dreams, beliefs and fears. A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.”

(…)

“But the loss of privacy doesn’t just threaten political freedom. Return for a moment to our thought experiment where I telepathically know all your thoughts whether you like it or not From my perspective, the perspective of the knower — your existence as a distinct person would begin to shrink. Our relationship would be so lopsided that there might cease to be, at least to me, anything subjective about you. As I learn what reactions you will have to stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized The connection between a loss of privacy and dehumanization is of course, a well-known and ancient fact, and one for which we don’t need to appeal to science fiction to illustrate. It is employed the world over in every prison and detention camp. It is at the root of interrogation techniques that begin by stripping a person literally and figuratively of everything they own. Our thought experiment merely shows us the logical endgame. Prisoners might hide their resentment, or bravely resist torture (at least for a time) but when we lose the very capacity to have privileged access to our psychological information — the capacity for self-knowledge, so to speak, we literally lose our selves.”

(Read the complete article here.)

This is day four in the mental institution (I’m treated in a mental institution, I’m embedded with the patients so to speak) and I met at least two people who claim that their thoughts are being manipulated by other beings.
And isn’t rational emotive behavior therapy a way to manipulate our thoughts? Aren’t we asking the psychopharmaceutical industry to control our thoughts because we are unable to do it ourselves?