Just How Corrupted Has American Medicine Become?
“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” – Jonathan Swift After reading “The Neurontin Legacy — Marketing through Misinformation and Manipulation” in the January 8, 2009 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, one may conclude that (1) America’s prisons would be put to better […]
“Fundamentalist Consumerism” Kills Us Quickly and Slowly
While fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Moslems are singularly attached to their literal interpretations of particular texts, fundamentalist consumerists are singularly attached to cheap stuff. All fundamentalists decry, deny, or ignore the multiple dimensions of life that fall outside their particular theologies and ideologies. Fundamentalist consumerists could not care less about workers’ rights, human-scale business, environmental […]
NPR Embarrassed by Psychiatrist Host: Bad Apple or Bad Barrel?
National Public Radio announced on November 21, 2008 that it had fired psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin and would be terminating his program “The Infinite Mind.” Goodwin was released after NPR learned that he had received at least $1.3 million from drug companies between 2000 and 2007. In the 2008 ongoing Congressional investigation of psychiatry, Goodwin is […]
Can Voters and Nonvoters Battling Against Despair Respect Each Other?
There is a faction of Americans who believe that it is their civic duty to vote, and there is another faction who believe it is their civic duty to reject the pseudo-democratic voting ritual, and these two groups routinely engage in mutual mocking of one another. However, I have found that within both groups there […]
Thinking Critically About Scientology, Psychiatry, and Their Feud
For many Americans who gain their information solely from television, all critics of psychiatry are Scientologists, exemplified by Tom Cruise spewing at Matt Lauer, “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. . . . Matt, you’re so glib.” The mass media has been highly successful in convincing Americans to associate criticism of psychiatry with anti-drug […]
Lost Common Sense about Depression: Relationships
Both research and experience have long informed mental health professionals of a strong link between depression and relationship dissatisfaction. So why is psychiatry losing that awareness? One major reason is the disappearance in psychiatry of psychotherapy (talk therapy), in which it becomes obvious just how important our significant relationships are to our mental health. According […]
Depressed Lawyers: A Little Help For My Friends
Among the lawyers whom I have known, it occurs to me that the only ones I’ve liked have had bouts of depression. So when Dan Lukasik, lawyer and depression sufferer, invited me to write a piece for his lawyerswithdepression.com, I gladly agreed. In Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, I explain how depression is neither a character […]
A Blue Ohio: Democrats and the Blue-Collar Blues
I have been a clinical psychologist in private practice for more than two decades in southwestern Ohio, a Republican stronghold in the state that broke Democrats’ hearts in 2004. Three years later, it appears that most of the “blue team” remembers Ohio only for voter fraud, but I remember how Democratic candidate John Kerry failed […]
Why I Don’t “Disease” Depression
If forced to choose between labeling immobilizing depression as either a character weakness or a disease, it’s understandable that disease would be the preference. But there is a third choice, one that normalizes depression and which — for people such as myself — feels more respectful and better reduces suffering. I regularly do battle with […]
