How the “Brain Defect” Theory of Depression 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 […]
How Technology Worship Keeps Americans Ignorant about Depression Treatment
Technology is worshipped in U.S. culture, but when it comes to transforming depression and emotional suffering, is this predilection for technology justified? Technology worship means a reverence for machines, manipulations, and manuals designed to control. It also means valuing the objective and the quantifiable over the subjective and the non-quantifiable, and prizing the synthetic versus […]
How America’s Obsession With Money Deadens Us
A preoccupation with money is nothing new in our culture, but have Americans become even more “money-centric,” and does this deaden us, making us incapable of resisting injustices? A money-centric society is one in which money is at the center of virtually all thoughts, decisions, and activities. While capitalism certainly gives rise to money-centrism, any […]
Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill, and How This Helps America’s Illegitimate Authorities Stay in Charge
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 […]
21st Century Abolitionism: What Can Americans Do to End Student Loan Debt Servitude?
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 Why I Became a Dissident Psychologist
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 Ayn Rand Seduced Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. into an Uncaring Nation
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. . . . To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961 […]
How the Occupy Movement Has Embraced Liberation Psychology
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 […]
New CDC Report on Soaring Antidepressant Use: Can More Americans Politicize Their Despair and Take It to the Streets?
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 […]
