Psychiatric Marginalization of Anti-Authoritarians – Excerpt from New Book
For several years, I’ve been thinking about writing Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian―Strategies, Tools, and Models, a book about anti-authoritarians and for them. Authoritarian is routinely defined as “favoring blind submission to authority.” In contrast, anti-authoritarians reject—for themselves and for others—an unquestioning obedience to authority, and they believe in challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. […]
Vital Ignored Truths in Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies
Psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) was deeply affected by Nazi atrocities, so when his early 1960s research on Americans revealed an unexpectedly high rate of obedience to authority commanding subjects to commit cruel actions, this very much troubled him. Milgram’s studies revealed other truths—not as widely known—that are crucial to fighting authoritarianism. One ignored finding is […]
Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” Shows Democrats’ Complicity in Electing Trump
The substance of Fahrenheit 11/9 challenges his fans to go beyond their easy contempt for the obnoxious Trump. Moore pushes his audience to consider how the corporatist blue team — an authoritarian Democratic National Party, a clueless self-serving Hillary Clinton, a slickly betraying Barack Obama and an ultimately pathetic Bernie Sanders — helped elect Trump […]
Another Sad October for Reds Fans
I have long studied legitimate and illegitimate authorities, which exist in all walks of life. Illegitimate authorities include dishonest or exploitative ones but also include those which are incompetent. The fact that 1.6 million fans attended Reds games in 2018 compared to nearly 2.5 million in 2013 is not about Reds fans’ disloyalty, but about loyal […]
“Mutual Aid” Excerpt from Resisting Illegitimate Authority, Titled by Yes!: “Why Alcoholics Can’t Be Forced to Stop Drinking”
The following excerpt is from the subchapter “Mutual Aid” and which Yes! has titled “Why Alcoholics Can’t Be Forced to Stop Drinking.”
When Bernie Sold Out His Hero, Anti-Authoritarians Paid
Bernie Sanders, in his thirties, wrote and directed the documentary Eugene V. Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary (1979), and a picture of Debs is on Sanders’s office wall. But the arc of Sanders’s political career has moved in the opposite direction from the arc of his hero. Debs moved from polite dissent to courageously […]
“Don’t Be Stupid, Be a Smarty”: Why Anti-Authoritarian Doctors Are So Rare
n the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012, Alessandra Colaianni reports “More than 7% of all German physicians became members of the Nazi SS during World War II, compared with less than 1% of the general population. . . . By 1945, half of all German physicians had joined the Nazi party, 6% before Adolf Hitler gained power.” Colaianni points out, “Physicians joined the Nazi party and the killing operations not at gunpoint, not by force, but of their own volition.”
Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services
Political, cultural, and financial forces have made many mental health professionals so unaware about the reality of trauma and adversity that they often harm instead of help. In her recently published book Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), clinical psychologist Noël Hunter offers an insightful critique of mental health’s diagnostic and […]
Politics and Psychiatry: The Cost of the Trauma Cover-Up.
Despite increased spending on mental health treatment, mental illness disability and suicide rates have skyrocketed. “Perhaps more disturbingly,” notes clinical psychologist Noël Hunter, “recent evidence has demonstrated that as contact with psychiatric intervention increases, so too does completed suicide, suggesting the possibility that the current mental health system may be creating the very problems it […]
Another Reason Young Americans Don’t Revolt Against Being Screwed
“8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance” was originally published in 2011, then republished on several Internet sites, and has become one of my most viewed articles. The eight reasons include: student-loan debt; various pacifying effects of standard schooling; the psychopathologizing and medicating of noncompliance; surveillance; television; and fundamentalist […]
