Surviving the Pain of an Authoritarian Demagogue Any Way We Can
Until recently, the predominant life pains that I have long seen in my psychologist day job include: abusive and neglectful parents, dysfunctional families, loveless marriages, lifelong loneliness, soul-crushing jobs, oppressive bosses, dehumanizing bureaucracies, and a variety of losses. However, the rise to power in the U.S. of an authoritarian demagogue has resulted in another major source of pain created not only by his actions but by his very being. From what I gather, many other mental health professionals are also hearing about the pains generated by him
Is Psychiatry’s Myth of Mental Health as Damaging as Its Myth of Mental Illness?
Myths include unfounded beliefs and fictional narratives used to explain frightening natural phenomena. Those of us who agree with Szasz that “mental illness” is a myth will often put quotes around the term to bring attention to its problematic nature. Should we also be bringing attention to the problematic nature of the term “mental health”?
Psychiatry’s Rightwing and Progressive Bigotries: How Each Enables the Megamachine
In the last century, whether the brand of the autonomy-stripping megamachine has been German Nazi fascism, Soviet totalitarian communism, or U.S. corporate capitalism, psychiatry has been an enabler of the megamachine—more later on psychiatry’s role in each of these systems.
Celebrating Lenny Bruce’s 100th Birthday: “The World is Sick and I’m the Doctor”
At the time of his death, Bruce was blacklisted by almost every venue in the United States, as owners feared that they too would be arrested for obscenity. One of the New York district attorneys who prosecuted Bruce’s last 1964 obscenity case, Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, later admitted, “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart. . . . We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”
How “Garbage-In-Garbage-Out” Academic Psychiatry Research Has Become Even More Ridiculous, and How Taking It Seriously Impoverishes Critical Thinkers
This deterioration from bad science to no science has created a dilemma for critical thinkers. On the one hand, society today takes psychiatry’s claims more seriously than ever, and thus many critical thinkers may feel a social obligation to debunk its claims. However, given the obvious nonscientific nature of these claims, critical thinkers who become consumed by these cla
Psychiatry Criticism Politics: When the Enemy of Your Enemy is Not Your Friend
Many people from very different groups do not like establishment psychiatry. Some of them are my friends, however, some of them belong to authoritarian groups that I dislike as much as I dislike establishment psychiatry. Who are enemies of establishment psychiatry that are not my friends? What kind of dealings—if any—does it make sense to […]
Criticisms That Establishment Psychiatry Can and Cannot Tolerate
For the institutions comprising establishment psychiatry, self-preservation means maintaining legitimacy as a branch of medicine. Thus, any criticism of establishment psychiatry—no matter how harsh—that can also be applied to medicine in general does not threaten its existential legitimacy. However, criticism that uniquely applies to establishment psychiatry but not to medicine in general does threaten its […]
Do Critics of Biological Psychiatry Have an Alternative to a Life of “Whack-A-Mole”?
“Challenging the biological model of depression feels like a game of whack-a-mole: as soon as you put one theory to bed, another one sprouts up.”—Joanna Moncrieff, Chemically Imbalanced
New Book by Courageous Psychiatrist about Her Profession’s Most Damaging Falsehood
While it is debatable as to exactly which of the many war-mongering lies told by politicians has resulted in the most disastrous outcome, when it comes to falsehoods declared by the psychiatry establishment and their Big Pharma partners, it would be difficult to find one that has created more damage than the chemical imbalance theory of depression—harming not only individual patients but society. This is the subject of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff’s recently published Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth.
