Millions of Americans are in a state of horror over the fact that millions more Americans are poised to elect as president not just a scumbag, but an in-your-face scumbag. Among those millions of Americans who are horrified by Trump and his worshippers, only a small minority of them are horrified by a society that has created them.
Psychiatry’s serotonin-imbalance theory of depression, long discarded by researchers, was finally flushed down the toilet by psychiatry and the mainstream media in 2022. And psychiatrists’ primary treatments for depression—their so-called “antidepressants”—are now circling the drain. This leads to at least two questions: (1) What model of depression actually fits the facts? (2) What approach to […]
“. . . if the major media picks up on this story, they will have the chance to report on what arguably is the worst—and most harmful—scandal in American medical history”—Robert Whitaker, publisher of madinamerica.com, January 3, 2024
What spoke to me on my visit to the Debs Museum? Although I have long known many of the facts of Debs’s life, including the violence directed at him by the U.S. ruling class and its lackeys in the U.S. government, hanging out in Deb’s former home provoked a more visceral experience of just how ugly the ruling-class bastards can be when they are threatened, and how effective their violence has been.
by interviewers, I have talked about the components of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical-industrial complex, along with how psychiatry meets the political needs of the ruling class and dysfunctional families. In addition to these financial and political explanations, a fundamental cultural reason why psychiatry lives on is Western society’s worship of technology.
If one has a dark sense of humor, psychiatry’s medical model can be seen as the root cause of a comical farce in which an institution charged by society to decrease suffering actually increases it. What then is a helpful alternative to psychiatry’s medical model? The simplest answer is its complete opposite. Here, I will spell out exactly what that means.
Below is a profile on Ted Kaczynski (May 22, 1942 – June 10, 2023) excerpted from Resisting Illegitimate Authority (AK Press, 2018) from the chapter “Violent Anti-Authoritarians.” Of all the public figures I profile in this book, Ted Kaczynski’s story is, for me, the most tragic—tragic, of course, for his murder victims; tragically traumatizing for […]
In 2021, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of U.S. psychiatrists, acknowledged its history of racism. However, it is difficult to imagine how psychiatry will ever acknowledge that its entire edifice is built on a fundamental bigotry. Bigotry is defined by Merriam-Webster as: “obstinate or intolerant devotion to one’s own opinions and prejudices.” Racism […]
One need not be a Marxist to acknowledge the logic behind Karl Marx’s observation: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” It is especially important for the ruling class that the general public’s ideas about our emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances be the ideas of the ruling class. Twenty […]
How can psychiatry co-opt the psychedelic underground subculture, discard its radical anti-authoritarian message of rejecting a dehumanizing society, retake psychiatry’s lost power and authority, and make both drug companies and the ruling elite happy? To strip psychedelic use down to its chemicals is to de-radicalize its communal and anti-authoritarian roots.
