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.
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
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 an epidemic of physician-caused anger, despair and crazy-appearing behaviors.
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 has now become so especially oppressive for young people that an embarrassingly large number of American teenagers and young adults are depressed and suicidal.
“What’s a guy gotta do around here to lose a little credibility?” asked ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger in a 2012 piece about top Wall Street executives who created the financial meltdown but who remain top Wall Street executives, continue to sit on corporate and nonprofit boards, serve as regulators, and whose opinions are sought out by prominent op-ed pages and talk shows. Wall Street is not the only arena that one can be completely wrong and still retain powerful influence.
“What’s a guy gotta do around here to lose a little credibility?” asked ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger in a 2012 piece about top Wall Street executives who created the financial meltdown but who remain top Wall Street executives, continue to sit on corporate and nonprofit boards, serve as regulators, and whose opinions are sought out by prominent op-ed pages and talk shows. Wall Street is not the only arena that one can be completely wrong and still retain powerful influence.
On November 16, 1989 in El Salvador, liberation psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baró, together with five colleagues, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, were forced into a courtyard on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, where they were then murdered by the Salvadoran government’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, a “counter-insurgency unit” created at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas in 1980. The massacre is detailed in the Report of the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador.
Mad in America’s International Film Festival will encourage us to think anew about the nature of what is commonly called “mental illness” and its treatments. The festival will run from October 9-12, 2014, in Arlington, Massachusetts (Boston vicinity).
Have progressives made a mistake lumping all conservatives together and fueling their political energies into hating them? Or are there what Ralph Nader calls “anti-corporatist conservatives,” who loathe undeclared, endless wars as much as progressives? And should progressives seek alliances with these anti-corporatist conservatives to oppose unnecessary wars, corporate welfare, NSA violations of our privacy, and many other issues where there is what Nader calls “convergence”?
Before Michael Pollan gained well-deserved respect and influence authoring five bestselling books about food, he got my attention in the late 1990s writing articles about American illegal-legal psychotropic drug hypocrisy. For those of us who appreciate what Pollan later accomplished for the local food and real food movements, it’s probably been a good idea that since 1999 he has stopped writing articles about drug hypocrisy, otherwise he may never have become so well-received.
