Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

"To be a hero," says Philip Zimbardo in his talk The Psychology of Evil, "you have to learn to be a deviant, because you're always...

After the American Psychiatric Association (APA) approved the latest version of its diagnostic bible, the DSM-5, psychiatrist Allen Frances, the former chair of the DSM-IV taskforce and currently professor emeritus at Duke, announced, "This is the saddest moment in my 45-year career of practicing, studying and teaching psychiatry"...

I don't vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, 'If you don't vote, you have no right to complain,' but where's the logic in that? ... You...

Millions of people believe that psychiatric medications have saved their lives, while millions of others report that their psychiatric medications were unhelpful or made things worse. All this can result in mutual disrespect for different choices. I can think of no better antidote for this polarization than the recently revised,...

David Swanson, since serving as press secretary in Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, has emerged as one of the leading anti-war activists in the United States. Swanson is not satisfied with just stopping current U.S. wars. In his previous book War is a Lie, Swanson made the case for the...

While the term liberation psychology is less commonly known in the United States than in Latin America, the spirit of liberation psychology has been embraced by U.S. Occupy participants.

Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices....

The 2011 Oscar documentaries short list is in, and the good news is that Battle for Brooklyn -- snubbed earlier this year by many major film festivals -- is on that list. The Occupy movement has made Battle for Brooklyn impossible to ignore.

Battle for Brooklyn asks:...

Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies and oppression don't set people free to take action. But as a clinical psychologist who has worked with abused people for more than 25 years, it does not surprise me to see that when we as individuals or as a society eat...

Polls show that on the major issues of our time -- the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Wall Street bailouts and health insurance -- the opinion of We the People has been ignored on a national level for quite some time. While the corporate media repeats the myth that the United...

In the 1960s, singer/songwriter/revolutionary Phil Ochs was sometimes described as "Tom Paine with a guitar." Without regard for political correctness, both Paine and Ochs confronted all illegitimate authorities and hypocrisy. America paid them both back by marginalizing them at the end of their lives and ignoring them for decades following...

"Webster's Dictionary" defines bigot as "a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion." Despite the success of alternative mental health treatments for many people, there still exists bigotry against these approaches.

For many self-defined "ex-mental health patients," "mental health treatment consumers," and "psychiatric survivors"...

While U.S. military psychiatrists are prescribing increasing amounts of chill pills, America's psychologists are teaching soldiers how to think more positively about their tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever else they are next ordered to kill the bad guys and win the hearts and minds of everyone else.

The U.S....

Children covered by Medicaid are far more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs than children covered by private insurance, and Medicaid-covered kids have a higher likelihood of being prescribed antipsychotics even if they have no psychotic symptoms. This is reported in the May19, 2010 Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA)...

Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Crown Publishers, April 2010) is the most important book on psychiatric treatment in a generation. I have been in practice for over 25 years and have read hundreds of...

One in six service members is now taking at least one psychiatric drug, according to the Navy Times, with many soldiers taking "drug cocktail" combinations. Soldiers and military health care providers told the Military Times that psychiatric drugs are "being prescribed, consumed, shared and traded in combat zones."...

President Obama appears to have a serious case of demoralization induced by the financial power of the insurance industry. Obama has trapped himself with the same kind of thinking that initially demoralized his hero Abraham Lincoln, who ultimately rejected that kind of thinking, regained his morale, and fought against what...

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...