For many people I know -- especially many young people, Native Americans, and others alienated from American dominant culture -- the difference between liberals and conservatives is only in technique used to coerce conformity and gain control.

My friend Roland Chrisjohn is a psychologist and a professor in the Native...

"The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wave of evil washes not only the financial-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, the energy-industrial complex, and predatory executives at AIG, Citibank, Halliburton, Blackwater/Xe, Enron, and Exxon. The pharmaceutical-industrial complex has virtually annexed the mental health profession, whose...

The films Revolutionary Road and A Beautiful Mind both portray mathematicians turned mental patients who create havoc for their families. But the similarity ends there.

In director Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind (2001), the facts of the real-life recovery of Nobel prize winner John Nash are fabricated to create a...

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis

Psychiatry's "shock doctrine" is quite literally electroshock, and its latest victims are - I'm not kidding - young children.

On January 25, 2009, the Herald Sun, based in...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

It has been a rough year for American psychiatry. In June 2008, Congressional investigators exposed the financial relationships between drug companies and several high-profile psychiatrists. And on July 12, 2008, the New York Times reported, "Now the profession itself is under attack in Congress," as psychiatry's premier professional organization...

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...

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...

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.

Lifting the spirits of the demoralized is a craft--not a science--and a wall covered with diplomas does not translate to talent and wisdom in this area.

I have been a clinical psychologist for more than two decades and have found that most of my fellow mental health professionals talk far...

While psychiatry--similar to the Bush administration -- may want to blame its current unpopularity on the press, the corporate media is generally reluctant to challenge a powerful institution until it is already out of favor. Thus, the unpopularity of a powerful institution is usually well-earned through undeniable deceit, incompetence, corruption...

On September 14, 2007, New York Times reporters Alex Berenson and Benedict Carey foiled, at least temporarily, Big Pharma and its psychiatry allies' attempt to eliminate the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warning label about increased suicidal thoughts and behaviors in minors using antidepressants.

Berenson and Carey refuted a...