Dr. Bruce Levine

Occupy Wall Street insider Jonathan Smucker’s recently published Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (AK Press, 2017) is the post-Occupy guide for how to be smarter about politics. Smucker, a long-time grassroots organizer, does not dismiss what Occupy did right but is honest about its...

Suicide rates in the US have surged to a 30-year high at the same time that US antidepressant use has skyrocketed. While correlation is not the same as causation, this concurrence naturally raises questions from people comfortable challenging authorities—including mental health authorities. Does...

The issue of control is front and center of “CRAZY,” Lise Zumwalt’s new documentary.  “I’ve always been interested in stories where there is a tension between social policy and law and individual rights—and mental illness is a great lens to look at that tension,” says Zumwalt, who has produced,...

It should not be surprising that cynicism is increasingly the U.S. national pastime, as we regularly observe top-dog bankers avoiding criminal prosecution for crimes they preside over, and we see prominent professionals—including psychiatrists—gaining career advancement after disgraceful actions...

“Humiliation porn” is much about transforming the shame and pain of victimization and powerlessness into some kind of sexual pleasure. If mainstream institutions ignore a large number of people who feel powerless, victimized and angry, that’s easy pickings for a demagogue, who knows that a...

In any society that prioritizes economic efficiency, productivity and order above life and all of life’s varieties, people experiencing altered and extreme emotional states will be seen as defective and as burdens—monkey wrenches that disturb the societal assembly line.

To be clear,...

Stripped of the false realities of democracy, legitimate media authorities, and American exceptionalism, U.S. society is having a “psychotic break” of sorts. What many Americans have previously believed to be “reality” is disintegrating.

Science provides us with no monolithic explanation...

“Adults in the U.S. living with serious mental illness die on average 25 years earlier than others, largely due to treatable medical conditions,” according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. This is not controversial, as establishment psychiatry and its critics agree.

What is...

In the current issue of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Australian dissident psychiatrist Niall McLaren titles his article, “Psychiatry as Bullshit” and makes a case for just that.

The great controversies in psychiatry are no longer about its chemical-imbalance theory...

Alternatives to mainstream mental health are now being taken seriously by the mainstream media, as evidenced by the New York Times August 2016 article, “An Alternative Form of Mental Health Care Gains a Foothold.” The recently published book Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness (...

Back in 2000, when the evangelical, chicken hawk, smirking frat boy—another rich kid, spoiled brat—grabbed the presidency, the Democrats blamed (and never forgave) Ralph Nader and the Green Party. If Trump wins, a similar scapegoating will not work, not if we remember the unequivocal realities...

Abolishing First-Order Psychiatry—which includes the American Psychiatric Association and its Big Pharma partners—as a legitimate authority in determining “mental illness” as well as abolishing First-Order Psychiatry’s “treatment” and control dominion are primarily political struggles.

In...

It has become increasingly mainstream to criticize psychiatry for its corruption by drug companies, invalid diagnoses, lack of long-term treatment effectiveness, and other scientific failings. The recently published book Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness reminds us that...

Bruce E. Levine

In Part One, I discussed how the Rehumanizing Resistance has been winning scientific battles but losing the war against the expansion of influence of First-Order Psychiatry (which includes the American Psychiatric Association and Big Pharma), and how this is due in large...

In the political struggle between First-Order Psychiatry (which includes the American Psychiatric Association and Big Pharma) and the Rehumanizing Resistance (which includes many in the Mad in America community), the Resistance continues to win key scientific victories  (including the First-...

Who doesn’t laugh at drug commercials with their before-and-after scenes of life-changing improvements accompanied by numerous terrifying side effects? But these drug ads continue because they work. Beyond the overt manipulations, there are more covert ones—including techniques that diminish the...

Depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing people can beat themselves up for being defective. And psychiatrists and psychologists routinely validate and intensify their sense of defectiveness by telling them that they have, for example, a chemical-imbalance defect, a genetic defect, or a...

The soon-to-be released documentary Healing Voices goes a long way to healing our fear of people commonly labeled as “schizophrenic,” “bipolar,” and “psychotic.” The message of this film is that understanding and love—not fear and stigmatizing labels—are what people who have experienced these...

Psychiatrists and psychologists have been used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to facilitate mind control and torture in Project MKUltra and in the American Psychological Association bolstered CIA torture program. Psychiatric political abuses in nations that are U.S. enemies have...

What does psychiatry have in common with the U.S. Congress? “Institutional corruption,” concludes Psychiatry Under the Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which investigates how drug company money and psychiatry’s own guild interests have corrupted psychiatry during the past 35 years.

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On April 26, 2015, Jeffrey Lieberman, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, stirred up controversy by calling investigative journalist Robert Whitaker a “menace to society” on CBC radio because Whitaker, in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, had challenged the long-term...

Regaining power over our own health—power that has been taken from us by uncaring bureaucracies and arrogant authorities—was the goal of Ivan Illich’s 1976 book Medical Nemesis, which detailed an epidemic of physician-caused death and illness. Unfortunately, this epidemic continues, and so does...

For nearly two decades, Big Pharma commercials have falsely told Americans that mental illness is associated with a chemical brain imbalance, but the truth is that depression and suicidality are associated with poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration. And the truth is that American society...