Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How Anti-Authoritarianism Is Deemed a Mental Health Problem
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them […]
Will the Young Rise Up and Fight Their Indentured Servitude to the Student Loan Industry?
In October 2011, the White House announced, “Currently, more than 36 million Americans have federal student loan debt.” By the end of 2011, student loan debt had exceeded $1 trillion. Two-thirds of college seniors graduate with student loans, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. According to the The Project on Student Loan Debt, […]
7 Reasons America’s Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity
Why do some of us become dissident mental health professionals? The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research, and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children. If that sounds hyperbolic, […]
How the Occupy Movement Helped Americans Move Beyond Denial and Depression to Action
While the term liberation psychology is less commonly known in the United States than in Latin America, the spirit of liberation psychology has been embraced by U.S. Occupy participants. Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to discover […]
When the World Outlawed War: An Interview with David Swanson
David Swanson’s recently released book, When the World Outlawed War, tells the story of how the highly energized peace movement in the 1920s, supported by an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens from every level of society, was able to push politicians into something quite remarkable—the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the renunciation of war as an instrument […]
400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use: Americans Are Disempowered — Can the OWS Uprising Shake Us Out of Our Depression?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans ages 18-44. Among Americans 12 years and older, 11 percent were taking antidepressants by 2005-2008 (the […]
How Can We Rouse Police and Other Protectors of the Corporatocracy — “Guards” of
In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers. . . . They become the guards of the system, […]
How Anti-Authoritarians Can Transcend their Sense of Hopelessness and Fight Back
Critical thinking anti-authoritarians see the enormity of the military-industrial complex, the energy-industrial complex, and the financial-industrial complex. They see the overwhelming power of the U.S. ruling class. They see many Americans unaware of the true sources of their oppression or with little knowledge of the strategies and tactics necessary to overcome it. They see American […]
American Political Passivity, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Building a Base: Talk at the Military-Industrial Complex at 50 Conference
I want to begin by explaining how a clinical psychologist ends up giving the final talk at a conference on the military-industrial complex. Actually, for many years now, I’ve been writing and speaking about—and fighting against—another industrial complex, the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, specifically the psycho-pharmaceutical-industrial complex. All these industrial complexes are painful similar in their revolving […]
The Battle for Brooklyn: The Abuse of Eminent Domain
Do we really accept that Big Money—through intimidation, bribery, or some other coercion—can shove us out of our homes and obliterate our communities? Eminent domain is the government’s right to seize private property, usually with compensation, for the public good. We live in a nation, however, in which the elite—not ordinary Americans—have the power to […]
