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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 voted them in. You caused [...]

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, second edition Harm Reduction Guide [...]

Originally published by AlterNet

We are increasingly marketing drugs that essentially "cure" anti-authoritarians.
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by 1) [...]

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: Do we really accept that Big Money — through [...]

Police, teachers, the corporate press, mental health professionals — the guards of the system — are given small rewards to pacify and control the population.
October 20, 2011 |

“In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to [...]

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 crap for too long, we [...]

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" who attended Alternatives 2010 Conference (September 29 [...]

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. Army [...]

Since 1955, mental illness disability rates in the U.S. have increased six-fold. At the same time, psychiatric drug use greatly increased in the 1950s and 1960s, then skyrocketed after 1988 when Prozac hit the market, so now antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs alone gross more than $25 billion annually in the U.S. But Whitaker knew that "correlation isn't causation," and that this parallel rise of mental illness disability and psychiatric drug use doesn't necessarily prove anything.