Bruce Levine

Bruce Levine

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 […]

Audio Podcast: Resisting Illegitimate Authority on “ADHD is Over!” with Roman Wyden

January 17th, 2022

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 […]