Aside from their icy-mobster visages, Rahm Emanuel and Mike Pence have something else in common. Both, as members of presidential administrations, tried to rewrite Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pandemic guidance for political purposes. The reason why one was successful and the other was not has nothing to do with courageous CDC scientists threatening to […]
On November 28, 2006, attorney Jim Gottstein received a phone call that would change his life. It would propel Gottstein into a legal war against the giant pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, who would retaliate against him for his release of Lilly’s own documents about its drug Zyprexa. A U.S. District Court would rule that Gottstein […]
Noam Chomsky believes that it is so imperative that Trump be defeated that he will vote for Biden, while Glenn Greenwald challenges the political strategy of the lesser-of-two-evils dictum. It is difficult to imagine anyone more intellectually commanding than Chomsky, but Greenwald is no inferior. Chomsky and Greenwald are unbroken, rational warriors who apply contrasting […]
Bernie Sanders has routinely called Trump a “pathological liar.” The term pathological liar, a controversial one for psychiatrists, in common usage coveys someone who is an extraordinarily unrestrained liar. And so, Bernie knows that it is in no way radical to use this term to describe the unrelentingly self-serving Trump who unhesitatingly lies if he […]
Taking US national politics too seriously can make you hopelessly stupid, hopelessly cynical, or hopelessly suicidal. Let’s see. We had a former Black Panther, Congressman Bobby Rush, endorsing search-and-frisk Bloomberg; while Mike Will Get It Done was making AP headlines: “Bloomberg Once Blamed End of ‘Redlining’ for 2008 Collapse.” We have evangelicals adulterating my I-71 […]
When the state becomes chillingly evil—enacting a Fugitive Slave Act to criminalize those helping to free slaves, or financing prisons and wars for the benefit of sociopathic profiteers—and when dissent is impotent and defiance is required, we need the sublimely mad. For his 2013 piece “A Time for ‘Sublime Madness’” (and his 2015 book Wages […]
Getting rid of Trump means taking seriously “shit-life syndrome”—and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities.
No matter how clearly the scientific case is made that psychiatry is a pseudoscientific institution meriting no scientific authority, do you have that sinking feeling that psychiatry will continue to retain power and even grow in influence?
For most of us—excepting possibly Mussolini, Trump, and other bully boasters—the word authoritarian is a pejorative. In contrast, many of us want to define ourselves and our heroes as anti-authoritarians, and this has resulted in some curious definitions of that term.
What variable is associated with a 12 times greater likelihood of a suicide attempt—and also doubles the likelihood of cancer, heart disease, or stroke?
