How 7 Historic Figures Overcame Depression without Doctors
While Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway received extensive medical treatment for depression but tragically committed suicide, other famously depressed people—including Abraham Lincoln, William James, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sigmund Freud, William Tecumseh Sherman, Franz Kafka, and the Buddha—have taken different paths. Did those luminaries who took alternative paths and recovered really have the symptoms of major depression, […]
Behavior Modification and an Authoritarian Society
The corporatization of society requires a population that accepts control by authorities, and so when psychologists and psychiatrists began providing techniques that could control people, the corporatocracy embraced mental health professionals.
Does TV Actually Brainwash Americans?
Historically, television viewing has been used by various authorities to quiet potentially disruptive people—from kids, to psychiatric inpatients, to prison inmates. In 1992, Newsweek (“Hooking Up at the Big House”) reported, “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet.” Joe […]
How Psychologists Subvert Democratic Movements: A Talk at the 2012 Psychologists for Social Responsibility Conference
By the 1980s, as a clinical psychology graduate student, it had become apparent to me that the psychology profession was increasingly about meeting the needs of the “power structure” to maintain the status quo so as to gain social position, prestige, and other rewards for psychologists. The academic psychology that I entered as a psychology […]
To Vote or Not to Vote? Transcending the Wedge Issue That Divides Democracy Activists
Many nonvoting democracy activists argue that participating in U.S. national elections only maintains the illusion of democracy, and so voting can become a wedge issue that undermines solidarity among voting and nonvoting activists on democracy battlefields beyond electoral politics.
New Guide: A Sane Approach to Psychiatric Drugs
Millions of people believe that psychiatric medications have saved their lives, while millions of others report that their psychiatric medications were unhelpful or made things worse. All this can result in mutual disrespect for different choices. I can think of no better antidote for this polarization than the recently revised, second edition Harm Reduction Guide […]
Take a Pill, Kill Your Sex Drive? 6 Reasons Antidepressants Are Misnamed
Should a drug that produces sexual dysfunction for the majority of users and which doubles the risk of a suicide attempt be labeled as an antidepressant? No, argues a recent Scientifica article “Relabeling the Medications We Call Antidepressants.” The article’s authors, David Antonuccio, psychologist at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Nevada […]
Depression Treatment: What Works and How We Know
There are five controversial beliefs about depression treatment that I discuss in greater depth in my book Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic.
Anti-Authoritarians and Schizophrenia: Do Rebels Who Defy Treatment Do Better?
Preface: Failing in my efforts to get this article published for the general public, apparently only here can I talk about a “cool subculture of anti-authoritarians” and how the Harrow study shows medication resisters have greater recovery. While many Americans are troubled by psychiatry’s over medicating of children, and they doubt the legitimacy of some […]
How Psychiatry Stigmatizes Depression Sufferers
Viewing depression as a “brain defect” rather than a “character defect” is supposed to reduce the stigma of depression, according to the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the rest of the mental health establishment. But any defect can be stigmatizing. What if depression is the result of neither a […]
