Articles

Psychiatry’s Failure Crisis: Are You Moderately or Radically Enlightened?

Mad in America July 26th, 2022

Psychiatry has historically promoted dogma—not science—and dogma tends to be boring for freethinkers who can smell its odor even before they can deconstruct it. The challenge then is this: How can psychiatry be examined in a novel way that might intrigue freethinkers and critical thinkers of science, philosophy, politics, and history who would not ordinarily […]

Marx, Spinoza, and the Political Implications of Contemporary Psychiatry

CounterPunch July 7th, 2022

Simple logic tells us that those atop a societal hierarchy will provide rewards for professionals—be they clergy or psychiatrists—who promote an ideology that maintains the status quo, and that the ruling class will do everything possible to manipulate the public to believe that the social-economic-political status quo is natural. If a population believes that its […]

Psychiatry’s Medical Model: How It Traumatizes, Retraumatizes & Perverts Healing

Mad in America June 7th, 2022

Before describing how psychiatry’s medical model traumatizes and retraumatizes—both overtly and insidiously—and before distinguishing genuine healing from psychiatry’s perversion of this term, I will begin by tackling the following question: What Exactly is Psychiatry’s “Medical Model?” Psychiatry’s medical model is essentially a disease model. While there are controversies about its definition—which I will return to—in […]

Do You Still Believe in the “Chemical Imbalance Theory of Mental Illness”?

CounterPunch April 29th, 2022

It continues to come as a great surprise for many people to learn that psychiatry’s leading authorities, including the former longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have discarded the “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness”—an idea which has had a profound impact on millions of emotionally suffering people and on our […]

Why, With More Treatment, Suicides and Mental Distress Have Increased? Former NIMH Director’s New Book

CounterPunch March 23rd, 2022

Insel begins by comforting his fellow psychiatrists with his claim that current psychiatric treatments “are as effective as some of the most widely used medications in medicine,” but he then asks this unsettling question: “If treatments are so effective, why are outcomes so dire?”

Anti-Psychiatry, Szasz, Torrey, Biederman & the Death of Freethinking

Mad in America March 8th, 2022

In contemporary U.S. society, financial conflicts of interest, flip-flopping, belittling, and arrogance are no drawbacks to becoming a powerful authority—this is true today not only for national leaders but for influential psychiatry authorities (discussed later). Illegitimate authorities are often embraced when fear subverts critical thinking. Americans appear to be increasingly terrified by the possibility of […]

­The Shaming and Punishment of Whoopi Goldberg: What Does It Say About US Society?

CounterPunch February 9th, 2022

A couple of days after the public shaming and suspension punishment of Whoopi Goldberg for saying that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” I combed the Internet to see if any Jewish leader would cut her some slack. Finally, I found one, Rabbi Sharon Brous of the Ikar community in Los Angeles. She tweeted, “If what […]

Suicide, Indian Farmers, Indigenous North Americans . . . and the Shame of Shrinks

CounterPunch January 14th, 2022

Roland Chrisjohn, lead author of Dying to Please You: Indigenous Suicide in Contemporary Canada, more effectively than anyone I know, confronts this tragic denial by mental health professionals: through their medicalizing and diseasing of sociopolitically-fueled suicidality, they are enabling suffering and increasing suicide. Chrisjohn is Onyota’a:ka of the Haudenausaunee, has a doctorate in psychology, and […]

Harvard Tells Us Young Americans are Increasingly Hopeful . . . Really?

CounterPunch December 1st, 2021

Given my experience with young people’s hopelessness, I was skeptical of a Harvard Kennedy School spring 2021 poll of 18-to-29 year olds that declared “hope for America among young people is rising dramatically.” Harvard’s #1 top finding is: “In the fall of 2017, only 31% of young Americans said they were hopeful about the future […]

Psychiatry Films and Politics: Filmmakers Take Issue with my CounterPunch Review of Their Doc

CounterPunch October 6th, 2021

Owing to my speculation of establishment psychiatry pressure—which has been reported in other psychiatry films (more later on A Beautiful Mind)—the Cured filmmakers reached out to me, and we had a teleconference discussion.