If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

For Freud, sexuality was the driving force behind human activity. Narcisso-Fascism demotes sexuality to an also-ran. In view of a 53 page report issued this week by the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, that’s a bit shocking. The report describes the long-term sexual predation by one DJ Trump and his close friend, the late Jeffrey Epstein, among many other rich and powerful people. Doesn’t that sound as though that’s all they were after? No, that was icing on the cake.

Narcisso-fascism says the primary drive of the healthy human is to form social groups; close behind that, in No. 2 position, are two related drives. The first, xenophobia or fear of strangers, is more or less the reverse of the urge to mix with familiar people. The second, the urge to dominate, can’t take form unless there are people to dominate; once the social drive has done its job by forming groups, people move to their second priority, forming hierarchies and fighting to get higher. The opposite urge, the drive to avoid domination is equally as strong but lasts longer.

These are powerful, biologically-mediated drives but they are not absolutes, they can easily be overridden if the person chooses. Sexuality is a fringe benefit of being dominant but is not itself the primary motivation for people struggling to get up the ladder. Being higher in status is inherently rewarding. It has to be otherwise doddery old men (and a lot of old women) whose sexual lives have long gone would step aside and allow someone else to be top dog, but they never do. Even in their dotage, they tenaciously hang on to power and lash out at competition like things possessed – which they are, possessed by a powerful biological urge they don’t even know exists, although they know it feels good.

The Judiciary Committee report consists of a 6 page executive summary followed by 8 pages setting out the main characters and their modus operandi. The next 22 pages give details taken from witness depositions at the enquiry, all of which is deeply disgusting but the authors are clear that the report is only a very brief and sanitised version of the material on record. It’s followed by 15 pages that shows how Trump has consistently lied about every aspect of this sordid affair and, crucially, how the Dept of Justice and FBI and others have helped him cover his crimes.

The last section blows up the repeated statements by several attorneys-general and FBI directors that there is insufficient material to justify prosecution of Trump or his enablers, or even reopening the investigation of the entire Epstein saga. They conclude that because there is little reason to believe the Trumpians will ever do their duty, “Congress must continue to use its legislative and oversight powers to pursue justice for survivors and bring an end to the Trump Administration’s shameful, bureaucratic, and political cover-up.” With luck, that threat is keeping Herr Drumpf and a few hundred other depraved individuals awake at night, but it raises a very important question: Why Trump? Why, after his first disastrous showing, did 77million apparently sane and literate people vote to give him a second bite at the cherry? I haven’t spoken to any of them but we’ll see what they say of themselves.

First thing to note is the enormous contradictions between what Trump promised during his campaign and what the voters expected or should have known. Take farmers, for example, about 85% of whom voted for Trump II. He specifically and repeatedly stated that would immediately impose tariffs on a very wide range of imported goods, including machinery. Modern farmers are very dependent on machinery. Anybody who can read would know that supply lines for manufacturing farm equipment and so on are all international. You only have to look at a John Deere tractor to know it was made in Canada, or the pumps came from China, the ploughs from Mexico and so on. Every hammer and nail is imported, every hose, the huge tyres for the trucks built from parts in three or four countries, it’s written on them.

Farmers may not have known their fertilisers came from the Persian Gulf or their diesel fuel from India but most farmers are not stupid, they should have known that tariffs go both ways: you put one on my goods and I’ll put one on yours. Farms grow stuff for export, and the people who are buying American food are not going to sit quietly if the exports they send to pay for it are taxed. And so it happened. Without Congressional approval, Trump imposed massive tariffs on everything farmers need to buy, and the people who buy their produce promptly stopped buying. Oh dear. Another important factor comes from Trump’s “war against immigrants,” i.e. the very labour force that makes things grow and harvests them. Suddenly, there aren’t the swarms of small brown people flowing through the country, keen to take any job they could get, so fruit is rotting on trees and pigs aren’t being fed. Importing countries have simply stopped buying American but, once gone, buyers never come back. Now the farmers are going broke in droves, currently hundreds a month but by March or April, it will be thousands. OMG who could possibly have predicted this? A lot of people, actually, so why did farmers vote for the man who was promising to bankrupt them? It doesn’t make any sort of rational sense. There are a lot of farmers asking themselves that question right now but the answer lies in the irrationality. It was irrational, that’s why they voted for him.

Similarly, Trump promised to end “forever wars” which always got a big cheer at his rallies. A thousand times, he said the war in Ukraine was Biden’s fault, he would end it on Day One, if he’d been president, it would never have happened yet here we are, Day 646, the Russians are continuing to advance and Ukraine is on the brink of bankruptcy. And that doesn’t count the two unprovoked and criminal wars that Trump and his BFF Bibi have launched in the Persian Gulf that look set to cause a worldwide depression.

He said he would reduce inflation but it’s now worse than when he took over and we’re only seeing the start of it. Interest rates are up, the cost of fuel has nearly doubled, food is more expensive and all the clothes from Vietnam and Bangladesh cost twice as much. He promised to get rid of his pet hate, Obamacare, which he has done, so twelve million people have now lost health cover and rate that as one of their most pressing concerns. School lunches, food stamps for the poor, all those wasteful socialist measures have been dumped, yet the bulk of people who relied on them voted for him. Trump specifically and repeatedly said he would deport people so Hispanics voted for him in bulk, first time ever, and what does he do? He deports them. You can’t make this up.

Similarly, nobody could possibly have been fooled by his lies. He is on record of lying 30,573 times first time round, starting in his inaugural address and accelerating from 6 per day to 43 times a day by the end. This time, it’s worse but at least he can now plead dementia. And let’s not forget his repeated promises to release the Epstein files, all 6 million of them; despite a specific Act of Congress, nothing has happened. He is a lying sexual predator, a known fraudster and cheat, yet tens of millions of people who would claim to be “God-fearing Christians” lined up, dutifully spat on the Democratic candidate and plumped for Trump. How come? He went on and on about the “Biden crime family” and “Hunter Biden’s lap top” and how he would clean up their corruption but now we learn that Kushner J, the First Son-in-Law, has been implicated in a fraudulent scheme of truly cosmic proportions. A book due shortly, reviewed in Vanity Fair (pay wall; also here and here), shows how several billion dollars passed from the UAE and Saudi Arabia to accounts in Azerbaijan and Israel that Kushner could operate. The purpose was to facilitate contacts with the White House. Apart from the normal operations of the arms and high tech spying industries, this is probably the most egregious example of high level corruption in US history. Not just corruption; almost certainly, it involves treason of a high order. Did Trump know about it? Of course he did, he knows all about dirty money. It’s worth mentioning that, as a “volunteer” envoy, Kushner did not have to go through the Senate vetting process, so no burrowing in his dirty linen, and does not have to comply with financial transparency or conflict of interest regulations. That’s clever, don’t you think?

You get the message: people voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party and now they’re shocked to wake up with no face: “But I didn’t think they would eat my face.” When asked why they voted for him, people say “I believed him.” What did the 80% of evangelicals who voted for him believe? Their votes made him, without them he would have crashed and burned. Obviously, they didn’t believe everything he said, only the bits that suited them, and they ignored his depravity, so what was so exciting? As I said, I haven’t spoken to any of them but we can guess: they believed him when he said he would crush their enemies. He licensed them to hate and despise as much as he manifestly hates and despises, and they loved it. They loved it so much that they managed to convince themselves that his many past failings were minor and future failings would be temporary, a small inconvenience on the path to glory. That is, they heard him say he would lift them up the hierarchy to make them feel more important and more powerful. Of course, he didn’t say he would make them personally more powerful, he made their religion more powerful, he would help it all come true via wars in the Middle East, and they swooned. He told his adoring fans to activate the second most powerful but most destructive of all human drives, the urge to be on top, to stand over all the lesser people and sneer at them. They believed him because they could tell he was speaking from the heart, which he was because hating is the only impulse that has driven him these 80 years.

Now we all like to win, we like our children to win but for most of us, it’s not oxygen. We can be very comfortable as No. 2 or No. 2,002 in the hierarchy, it’s not that important. For Trump and his millions of followers, winning is indeed oxygen because they have nothing else, no inner resources that allow them to say “I’m fine, I don’t need to win every point. Somebody else can have a go.” However, when being on top is written into the national psyche, there’s trouble. Four examples stand out. First is Britain, which used its industrial power to build an enormous navy and army in order to conquer distant tribes and princedoms. The British perfected the art of getting a toehold in some foreign place, then using that to form shifting alliances with the local panjundrums to defeat one tribe after another until they had control over the whole territory. They said it was to bring light to the benighted but that was just to fool the old ladies at home who held the family loot; the real purpose was to bleed the colonies of their natural wealth while making them dependent on British manufacturing. Nothing has changed, they’re still doing it although a touch more sophisticated than blowing away the opposition with naval guns, as Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) put it:

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim gun, and they have not.

(He also said: “Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens” p62 of The Servile State, 1912). That’s Britain. In Germany, the Nazis came to power by promising to Macht Deutschland wieder groß, Make Germany Great Again. Their appeal to racist dominance was so fundamental to everything they did that it soaked through the entire nation. The ordinary Hans and Helga loved the intoxicating idea of Deutschland über alles and they fell for it, ecstatically waving their young Heinie goodbye as he shouldered his rifle and set out to carve an empire out of the Slavic lands. That was the last they ever saw of him as the Slavs had other ideas, as all humans do. There are probably hundreds of other examples in history but that brings us to the present, where two countries with a superiority complex are making serious difficulties for everybody else. Case example No. 1 is, of course, the Good Ol’ US of A, the “greatest, most powerful, richest and most amazing country in human history,” if Mrs Rubio’s little boy is to be believed. So what? Who cares? He didn’t contribute anything to building it so why is he running around, beating his pigeon chest and playing with himself? Because he gets a surrogate thrill out of it, same as people who have never kicked a football get their jollies out of waving a flag and squealing when “their” team scores a goal.

What they’re saying is: “On my own, I’m nothing much but if I join this strong group, I’ll feel part of something powerful, I’ll feel bigger than I am.” That’s why people wear uniforms and badges, it identifies them as part of a power structure and they feel the power flow through them. The higher people go up the hierarchy, the gaudier their uniforms become. This is true of all decorations, including women’s jewellery. It simply says: Mine are better than yours. The uniform itself is actually ridiculous – imagine one of the Grenadier Guards going to the beach in his scarlet tunic and busby. What a joke. It only looks impressive when it’s one of hundreds marching along in step, radiating the sense of power that’s intended to subdue the hoi polloi. But it goes both ways. Little Jimmy can look at the Guards and think “If I joined them, I’d be big and powerful too so that’s what I’m going to do.” At the same time, the recruiters can go around saying “If you join us, sonny, you can stop being a suburban nobody and have people look up to you. Believe us, it’s so much better.” With all their flag-waving and saluting and pledges of allegiance, Americans have spread this through the nation until it’s second nature. When the Nazis did it, it was called brainwashing. Germany got over it but there’s no chance of Rubio coming out and saying: “Actually, we don’t have the moral right to invade and sanction and bomb and starve people. All we’re doing is wrecking their lives and bankrupting ourselves, so we need to tone this stuff down.” Everybody has so much invested in “Amerika über alles” that nobody dares even think that.

Where Uncle Sam has elevated the lust for superiority to a political dogma, Israel has elevated it to the level of religion. Armed with 200 nuclear weapons and backed by a superpower, Israel since inception has been busy with two related projects. The first, as anticipated by the founders of Zionism, was the physical job of clearing several million Palestinians from their traditional lands and eradicating any evidence that they once existed. In 1895, Theodore Herzl, one of the most influential of the early Zionists said:

(We must) try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

This became Plan Dalet, the program for ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Similarly, in his essay The Iron Wall from 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky (who started the movement that became Likud, Netanyahu’s party) said:

Zionist colonisation must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

The second job is ongoing. Today, something like 92% of the Israeli population, male and female, young and old, are actively in favour of destroying Gaza, South Lebanon, the West Bank and various other places, driving out the indigenous population and flattening the place in order to fulfil God’s will. This is also true of the many atheist Israelis. This attitude is hammered home through two agencies, school and army. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, sister of Miko and a renowned educator and researcher in her own right, says Israeli schools conduct “education” in Israeli superiority from Day One (here and here). This continues during military conscription, which only applies to Jewish Israelis. Formal “education” classes are a mainstay of their two year period in uniform but they are never actually out of uniform as they automatically go into the reserves and are routinely called for service. The message is beamed at them night and day:

We Jews are unique, we’re special, Jews are chosen by God, everybody else hates us and wants to destroy us, we must stick together and support each other, if we relax our guard, they’ll try again, we can only be safe here in Israel Eretz, this land is ours by divine right, anybody who opposes us is satanic and must be destroyed, by driving off the Arabs and killing them, we are doing God’s will, we can never hand back any of this land because that defies God’s will ...

Brainwashing. From birth, delivered relentlessly by a combination of heretical religion and unlimited state power and money, all designed to make little Ikie Finkelstein feel that he is a vital part of some vast and immensely powerful cosmic plan and not just a shy, snotty-nosed kid with weak eyes who hides at the back of the class. It is difficult, verging on impossible, for an ordinary person of ordinary resources to resist it. All it is doing is what absolutist (aka fascist) regimes have done since the dawn of time, using a specific technology to activate the sense of excitement that comes from being lifted up the dominance hierarchy. It is all planned, all deliberate, Israel is no different from the Hitler Jugend, the Young Pioneers in the USSR, or Korean Kids for Kim Jong Il (roughly speaking). As the Jesuits said: “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” And woman. The only difference is that Israel now has the resources of Hollywood to aid the process of turning brains into putty – and of Silicon Valley to work out who the dissidents are, not that there are many.

So to the question we started with: Why do people do stupid, irrational, self-destructive or just plain evil things? Because humans are turned on by the sense of going up the ladder. It’s just so much more exciting than being nobody, so they’ll follow anybody who says “Hey, join my movement, I’ll help you get higher so you too can look down on people.” They believe that bit because it’s so exciting and it allows them to ignore the other side of the story: “Hey, farmers, vote for me and I’ll bankrupt you,” or “Hey, Latinos, vote for me and I’ll deport you,” or “Hey, students, vote for me and I’ll have you kicked out of your school,” or “Hey, parents, vote for me and I’ll send your kids to war.”

We believe what makes us feel good, that’s why the descendents of victims of pogroms are running their own pogroms, and children of Holocaust survivors are visiting a Holocaust on their neighbours, and the West doesn’t care because the neighbours are brown. It’s all to do with power and domination, and it will be our undoing.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

When it comes to explanations, we’re all either lumpers or splitters. Splitters like to separate things into ever small categories while lumpers (I’m one) push apparently different things into ever larger groups by finding common elements. Kangaroos (large, peaceful, bipedal herbivores) look very different from small, aggressive, quadrupedal and carnivorous Tasmanian devils but, as marsupials, they’re more like each other than kangaroos are like deer or devils are like lynxes. The lumpers won that round.

In April this year, the US FDA published an executive order authorising accelerated research in hallucinogenic drugs for mental disorders, especially psilocybin (from mushrooms) for depression and methylone (related to MDMA or ecstasy) for PTSD. Politico reports this week that the Health Secretary, Mr RFK Jr, wants these drugs for mentally-troubled military veterans, of whom the US has several million among its 16million or so veterans (this is the same person who blocked research on RNA viruses). This was announced last week at a 3 day conference in New York, organised by a group of drug and health companies.

We have seen the same pressure techniques here. Veteran organisations are troubled by the excessive rates of suicide in former military members, about 18 per day in the US, nearly twice the rate of the adult civilian population. Drug companies and private psychiatric facilities tell them these drugs are verging on miraculous; they pressure their reps in Congress, especially veterans, of whom there are about 100, nearly a fifth of the total; in turn, they squeeze the administration which looks at the voting profile of the vets (mainly right wing) and approves it; and so the feeding frenzy begins. Even the Texas government has approved $50million for research although they can’t afford school lunches. Two years ago, under Biden, the FDA rejected an application for “drug assisted psychotherapy,” on the basis that the figures didn’t say which component worked (why pay for two components if only one works?). The new approach is to use the drugs alone: you want talking, buy a parrot.

This time, everybody has joined the party, including Dr Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse since 2003, a granddaughter of Leon Trotsky and fanatical supporter of the biological ethos in psychiatry. Previously, she didn’t like the idea of issuing drugs of abuse to millions of disturbed people but now she’s on the Trump bus, cheering it on (he can sack her if the fancy strikes him, no reasons needed).

Is this a good idea? It’s not that long since there was an “epidemic” of opiate abuse in just this population, urged on by a combination of unscrupulous drug companies, private pharmacy companies and pliable physicians. Sure, it started as treatment of chronic pain, a major problem among veterans, but it soon spread. Part of the trouble was that during service, anybody who complained of pain was given oxycodone, usually six months supply at a time, which they carried in their packs and used as they liked. Needless to say, there was an explosion of addiction among recently discharged veterans and tens of thousands of deaths. A few drug company executives have been convicted but only the small players. Granted, hallucinogens aren’t as toxic as opiates but they’re classed as drugs of addiction for a good reason and are routinely abused; we can only wait and see what emerges.

Two questions are worth asking. First, if military service is such a mental health hazard, wouldn’t it be better to avoid starting wars? It would. It would be better for the poorly-educated rural youths who join the military because there’s nothing else available (the ‘poverty draft’) and it would definitely be better for the unfortunates who find their country has drawn the straw to host the latest round in the Global War On Everybody. However, permanent war is a major pillar of the American economy so that’s not going to change soon.

Second question is this: if drugs that mimic psychosis are the latest hot idea, what does that say about psychiatry? Two recent, comprehensive histories, Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers [1] and Andrew Scull’s Desperate Remedies [2], recount in quite chilling detail how psychiatry lurches from one sure fire cure to another, with nothing other than enthusiasm to justify them and no apologies when they fail. As they all do. The reason they fail is the same reason you don’t walk out of your house with a shovel and start digging for gold, you have to go to where the gold is. Same with depression: you can’t say “We’re digging to find the biological cure for depression” without first showing it’s a biological kind of thing. That’s elementary but it’s never been done. People need to sit down and examine everything we know about emotions in humans and decide whether mental trouble is the sort of thing that could have a biological cause or not.

I recently mentioned Thomas Insel, former director of NIMH, who said: “… the biological model (of mental disorder) is sufficiently entrenched to ignore criticism and commit psychiatry to a new reductionist program ...” [3]. That is the exact opposite of the proper attitude in science. Nothing is beyond criticism, that’s how we get progress. The renowned astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) put it perfectly:

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most sceptical scrutiny of all the hypotheses that are served up to us and, at the same time, a great openness to new ideas. If you are only sceptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world (there is, of course, much data to support you). On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of sceptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity, then you are lost; because then it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all [4].

Psychiatry’s record is crystal clear: it is incapable of distinguishing useful ideas from worthless ones just because it’s committed to an ideology, that all mental disorder is a biological disorder of the brain. Anything that sounds remotely biological will be supported, everything else bounces off the case-hardened skulls of the Key Opinion Leaders who control research grants and appointments. There is, however, a strong reason known as the principle of parsimony why this shouldn’t happen. Briefly, the number of explanatory entities must not expand beyond the minimum that can do the job. For example, don’t invent two forces if one can account for the observations. It goes back about 700 years, or maybe to Aristotle, nobody’s quite sure, but it’s known as Occam’s razor, after William of Ockham (who didn’t actually say it).

Psychiatry needs a good pruning with the razor because, driven by diagnostic splitters, the number of entities keeps expanding. We now have 357 separate diagnoses in DSM5; according to biological doctrine, each of these must have a distinct biological cause as a defect in the genome. None of them have ever been found but that doesn’t matter, ideology is more important than facts. 357 diagnoses, 357 unseen chemical causes and no sign that anybody thinks this is too much. I do, I think it’s silly as we can replace this jostling army of phantom causes with a single one called ‘psychology.’ We can take all the separate anxiety diagnoses and lump them together under a single psychological explanation: the sufferer has perceived a threat. Anxiety is mediated by biology, of course, but that’s just the mechanism, not the cause. The perception of a threat is entirely a mental phenomenon. Similarly, all the depressive states can be explained by the single idea that the person has experienced a loss. They’re not exclusive, of course, when it comes to something like military PTSD, the veteran feels constantly threatened and ends up losing everything in a self-reinforcing cycle. It’s all a mental matter, which tells us how it’s to be managed.

Modern psychiatry doesn’t like this one little bit. They’re wedded to the idea that mental disorder is biological, although they can’t explain why they hold this idea and have no clues as to how it could be true. All they know is that if it’s mental, it isn’t scientific so don’t talk about it. As Thomas Insel said, this belief system is entrenched, meaning dug in, set in concrete, impervious to criticism or questioning. That’s the very antithesis of the scientific attitude, as Carl Sagan saw it: “Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.” That is, you could end up believing a load of deep nonsense but because you’re impervious to criticism, you can’t correct it.

If you believe you’re beyond criticism, you’ve put yourself in the class of ideologies, of religions, so it’s no surprise that psychiatry is now reaching for that old standby of shamans, hallucinogens. Do they work on mental disorder? I don’t know, where I worked, I had very little to do with them but I seriously doubt it. They won’t work any better than standard “treatments” for depression, ECT, TCMS, a range of drugs, brain surgery, dental extractions and all the other things that have been tried, meaning hardly better than no treatment while producing lots of side effects. Will this bother psychiatrists? Not in the slightest. They’re impervious to criticism as they proceed merrily on their project of splitting mental disorder into a swarm of little, unrelated bits, the better to profit from the veterans. Before they die, that is.

References:

1. Harrington A (2020). Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. New York: Norton.

2. Scull A (2022) Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry and the mysteries of mental illness. London: Penguin.

3. Insel TR, Cuthbert BN, Garvey M, et al (2010). Research Domain Criteria (RDoC): toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. Commentary. American Journal of Psychiatry, 167: 748-751.

4. Sagan C (1987) The Burden of Skepticism in Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 12, Issue 1 (Fall 1987)

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Q: “How much money has Elon Musk donated to the Republican party this election cycle?”

AI answer: “Elon Musk has contributed a total of roughly $366 million to federal Republican political committees and super PACs for the 2025–26 election cycle, including more than $276 million since July alone, according to Federal Election Commission filings.”

According to a report in Common Dreams, this includes the breath-taking sum of $158million to the Republican candidate for the Senate in Texas, former Texan attorney general and reputedly corrupt politician, Ken Paxton. His opponent, the buoyant 37yo James Talarico, said: “Elon Musk wants our land, he wants our water, he wants his very own personal United States senator. He is trying to buy Texas.” Across the Atlantic, riots have erupted in Albania over the prime minister’s plan to lease an island, part of an important national park, to the Kushners so they can build a huge and exclusive resort. Apparently, they were sailing up the Adriatic coast on Nat (now Lord) Rothchild’s superyacht when they saw it and Ivanka said it was so beautiful, she just had to have it. As you do. The fishermen who had lived there for centuries could always find another bay to anchor their miserable little boats. Meanwhile, the UN agencies providing aid to children in Gaza have had to halve their already seriously reduced services as the US refuses to support them and other countries are either marching to the Trump drum or feeling the pinch from the Trump wars.

Madam K’s performance over the island puts the ass in crass, it’s up there with “Let them eat cake.” She didn’t appear to have the slightest awareness that stealing a people’s livelihood by bribing the prime minister lacked savoir faire, nor that, post-Epstein, the idea of a luxury island where the rich and powerful can cavort far from the paparazzi might be a bit on the nose. But why should she? Isn’t social awareness just sooo middle class, so very ordinary, that the 1% simply don’t need to bother with it, or that by being even slightly aware, they might betray their own middle class origins? We’re not talking etiquette here, we’re talking about the fact that with greed at this level, the social fabric in practically every country in the world is being stretched to breaking point.

Next question: what’s greed? What motivates it, what drives it? It seems to be very much a human trait as very, very few animals show it. Many animals are territorial, they need exclusive control of a patch of land or water to survive and to breed but they only take what they can defend. Animals don’t have paid armies at their beck and call, only humans do that because the urge to dominate is written in our DNA. Greed is part of that urge but it knows no end because the drive to dominate has an on-switch but there are only two ways it can be turned off: death or total defeat.

If you look at history, all you see is groups of people trying to dominate and subdue their neighbours. This is what empire is, just a case of “Gimme gimme gimme” backed by artillery and mustard gas. It has nothing to do with bringing democracy or enlightenment or religion to the primitives, and everything to do with stripping their land and wealth from them. During its occupation of the Subcontinent, Britain extracted the equivalent of $43trillion and killed about 145million people in the process. Britannia ruled the waves but Indians (and Africans and West and East Asians and Australians) were footing the bill. Since they lost the colonies, Britain has sunk lower and lower, and there is every reason to expect that decline will continue.

The whole colonial process was simply the individual urge to dominate writ large, and greed is an integral part of it: If I have more than you, that means I’m better than you, ha ha. Britain had the money to build a powerful navy and army because the landed elite had built fortunes by pushing the peasants off the land and raising meat and wool. There were several enclosure movements but the end result was a small group of people with lots of money and a large landless class jammed into the cities who were desperate for work. Work duly arrived in the form of the industrial revolution; Britain wasn’t bothered by endless religious wars or adventurers like Napoleon stampeding over the place; the poor were kept in absolute destitution [1] and the rich got richer, so they looked overseas for further investments. All this is fairly standard economic history, the difference now is that the wealthy have written for themselves a doctrine, neoliberal economics, that justifies their greed, that removes any trace of guilt or shame from the idea of stealing somebody else’s island.

In this week’s Critical Psychiatry post, we looked at how mainstream psychiatry is slowly waking up the fact that you can’t exclude all notion of humans as creatures with minds and still make sense of mental disorder. Philosopher David Chalmers [2] pointed out that there are two problems to solve in explaining mentality, an easy problem and a hard one. The easy one is what desk calculators do all day, take an item of information and manipulate it according to a program to get a conclusion. This applies to practically everything we do as physical creatures, and to animals, including insects. Science as we know it is designed to cope with the easy problem, which it does with ease. We see something, we assess it and we calculate a response. I want to sit down; there is no spare chair; so I go to the next room and get one. The hard problem is trying to explain sensation, emotion, values, hopes and fears. Science can’t cope with things it can’t measure; all mental properties are unmeasurable; therefore the mind as such is a closed book to science. That’s why psychiatry decided to translate all mental properties into brain properties – and ran into the sand.

Economics is a bit different. It’s all about money; money is countable; therefore we can have a science of economics. Trouble is, money is inherently about values and values are forbidden territory, so economics had to come up with a way out of this dilemma. Neoliberal economics, which started in the early 1920s, said we should expel all concepts like emotions, values, hopes and so on, leaving a bare but manageable “science” (commonly known as “the dismal science” because it took all the fun out of things). Their solution was to look at humans as little rational calculators, calmly going about their business of making a living by weighing up costs and benefits and making a decision about what is best for them. This meant that everything had to be given a cash value otherwise it couldn’t be included in the calculation.

If one person got ahead, that was because he worked hard and invested wisely; virtue is rewarded by the market. Similarly, people who didn’t get ahead were obviously lazy wastrels who deserved their fate and should endure it without complaining. There was nothing wrong with people becoming wealthy, it was their just reward but it didn’t matter in the long run because they would have to invest their excess wealth, which would create jobs and the workers would be better off. Money would trickle up, then trickle down, to everybody’s benefit. The market is self-regulating; governments should not interfere with the workings of the economy because no government can know enough about people’s needs or plans to make the right decision. In linear thinking, this becomes: great wealth is a virtue and nobody is allowed to interfere with it because that interferes with the job market and will make people worse off. That means government efforts to relieve poverty and so on are misguided and will always fail. Necessarily, the best form of government is the smallest.

It’s said that 85% of economists these days are neoliberals, actively pushing the idea that the rich should be allowed to get richer because that’s the necessary preliminary step before the rich can invest their money to create jobs. Naturally enough, the rich thought this was a fantastic idea and have managed to put it in practice over most of the world. Anybody who opposes neoliberalism is mocked as a sentimental fool or a blood-thirsty socialist/communist who hates the wealthy and wants to start a class war. And as we see, things are getting worse, rapidly, everywhere including in poor, backward Albania.

The problem with neoliberalism is that humans are not calm and ordered, rational machines, anything but. Humans are essentially controlled by emotions; pretending they’re not is simply licensing the emotions to run the show. Yes, there are virtuous people but they’re not in charge they’re not causing the trouble that has forced sensible people to predict catastrophe if we don’t lift out game. The political system selects for people who want power for power’s sake. The financial system selects for people who want money for money’s sake. When the two groups get together, they quickly agree that more power and more money is not just desirable but imperative otherwise somebody may come along and knock them off their perch so, even though neoliberal economics says taxation is inherently bad, they raise taxes so they can build an army that will allow them to get more money and more power. When they look across their borders, they see their neighbours doing the same thing, so they raise the taxes to pay for a bigger army, which provokes the neighbours into doing the same, commonly known as an arms race.

All this is elementary. The fatal mistake lies in thinking that humans are rational: if humans are so rational and only ever work to better themselves, how come there are wars? How is the average American’s life improved by bombing Iran? Of course it isn’t, but the finances of the people who make the bombs and planes are greatly improved by lots of wars, and they’re the same ones who think they got to their exalted places in society by virtue of their superior moral equipment, so they don’t take any notice of the groaning poor: “Get a job!” is their scornful answer. And so things are getting worse. It used to be that things were getting worse by the year but now it’s almost by the day, just because the neoliberal system ratchets up but it can never ratchet down. The rich cannot say “We’ve got enough, let’s give our workers better pay.” That doesn’t happen because the 1% all know with delusional certainty that poor people are poor because of their character defects, and giving them more will make them lazy. Giving more to the rich, of course, rewards them for working hard so they will therefore work harder (that’s another thing about the rich, they all believe the ordinary human laws don’t apply to them).

It will be clear that the goal of building a values-free economy is doomed from the outset, because that goal is itself a value. The idea of an “efficient market” as the supreme economic good is itself value-laden: if an efficient market means poor people starve to death in the streets, then what right have the 1% to impose it on the rest of society? None, and that’s why we have revolutions, because the urge to dominate, which the 1% make no effort to control, is balanced by an equal and opposite urge to be free in the oppressed. Even poor people don’t like being treated as trash, which Mrs Kushner is finding out in Albania.

All of this was predicted by economists, forty years before Thatcherism and Reaganomics raised their ugly, slavering heads. In 1944, a Hungarian economist, Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), published a fairly short book, The Great Transformation [3], in which he argued that economics cannot be seen as separate from the people and the society that brought it about. The so-called free market is not inevitable; there are other sorts of economies, all of which have their good parts and their bad, but the neoliberal market differs from the others in that it contains within itself the seeds of its destruction. If we give everything a cash value, we will eventually destroy everything valuable, both in human society and in the natural world. Some things have an intrinsic value which cannot be reduced to money, e.g. a national park may contain valuable minerals or water or grazing rights, but the value to the people of the views and tranquility and to the natural environment itself must be taken into account when deciding whether to let miners and farmers in. I doubt he had ever heard of the concept of global warming but he was very aware of what is called the tragedy of the commons. This says that if nobody owns a property or resource, then it is in people’s interest to get as much of it as they can before everybody else. Therefore, it quickly runs out, as we see with fishing grounds, etc. We do not put a cash value on clean air; because nobody owns the atmosphere or natural environment, it is in the rational self-interest of industrialists to dump their waste in the air and water, leading to pollution and climate change. Only a government can stop them, but neoliberal governments don’t want to restrict profits in any way, so they do nothing.

Polanyi’s work had an immediate effect; a paper published in 1943 by a Polish Marxist economist working with the Ministry of Supply in Britain was initially not so lucky. Michal Kalecki (1899-1970) was equally critical of the idea of an unregulated free market economy (I’m not sure whether the term neoliberalism was used then). His brief paper entitled Political Aspects of Full Employment asked the question: Why do capitalists hate full employment? His answer: Because it weakens their power over workers. His concern, as with Polanyi, was fascism. He noted that fascism began in Germany and Italy in the setting of mass unemployment and poverty. This led people to vote for anybody who promised radical change. However, once in power, the early fascist parties ran into the problem that the wealthy, who had bankrolled them, didn’t want the state to waste its assets on the poor; they wanted the national wealth to be wasted on them. They opposed welfare services but were very happy with a rearmament program that created jobs out of nothing, because they were able to cream off the profits: “The fundamentals of capitalist ethics require that ‘you shall earn your bread in sweat’ — unless you happen to have private means.” That was the short term; in the long term, an armaments economy must lead to war. Another advantage of the arms industry is that industrialists are able to ban strikes on the basis of “national security.”

Neoliberal economics is based in the notion that people will act rationally in their self-interest and should be allowed to do so without government interference. It pretends that emotion and values can be ignored when we know that a very large part of what people do is driven wholly by blind emotion. One of the most powerful of these is the urge to dominate, which takes many forms, such as greed, the urge to gain more property as a means of lording it over the common herd.

We’ve tried the neoliberal experiment now for nearly fifty years. All it’s brought us is grief and pollution so how come we don’t have proper social programs? How is it that the very word “socialist” is anathema? The capitalists don’t want social programs because that means taxes and a workforce that isn’t scared of them, so they have managed to equate “socialism” with “Stalinism.” Stalin was the best advertisement neoliberals could have asked for. By scaring the working classes, it means they can get on with guaranteeing their profits through building gigantic arms industries and armies, all of which are inherently socialist. As Kalecki said, “In a democracy, one does not know what the next government will be like. Under fascism there is no next government.” We are reaching that stage now. Time to change, but don’t expect the 1% to hand over their power peacefully.

References:

1. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

2. Chalmers DJ (1996). The Conscious Mind: in search of a fundamental theory. Oxford: University Press.

3. Polanyi K (1944). The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon Press.

4. Kalecki Michal (1943). Political Aspects of Full Employment. Political Quarterly. At: https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-employment/

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/ (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At https://bookshop.org/

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

An article on the next DSM in this week’s Psychiatric Times asks what seems to be a startling question for psychiatrists: What makes us human? I’d say the general public would be surprised to hear that, they’d assume psychiatrists have a fairly good grip on the subject. We all know that surgeons have little interest in it (“The operation was a success but the patient died”), and psychologists are strong on “rats and stats,” but isn’t psychiatry about human feelings and all that stuff? No, not since 1980 and the release of DSM-III, emotion and values have been anathema. Psychiatry is about brain science; Thomas Insel, the former head of NIMH, even wanted psychiatrists to be seen as “clinical neuroscientists.” The ordinary technology of laboratory science, he confidently claimed, would tell us everything we need to know about mental disorder with no interesting questions unanswered: “… the biological model (of mental disorder) is sufficiently entrenched to ignore criticism and commit psychiatry to a new reductionist program ...” [1].

The three authors of this article are big names in American psychiatry – one was even president of the APA – so how come, nearly fifty years after DSM-III, they’ve just discovered there may be something to humans that scanners can’t show? Perhaps they’re taking their cue from Insel, who, after he left NIMH, said:

I spent 13yrs at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that, I realise that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs - I think $20billion - I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalisations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness (the original article on Wired has been taken down).

It seems that after 40 years of neurobiology, Insel had given up on the search for “biomarkers” of mental disorder, i.e. blood tests, scans, DNA studies and so on. He went off to Silicon Valley to make his fortune in “digital phenotypes” (sic), leaving these authors to make the unexpected admission: “The era of ‘one neurotransmitter, one gene, one drug, one disorder’ has passed.” I’ll quote their article at some length as it’s imporant and some readers may not be able to access the original. They continue:

Psychiatric trajectories emerge from interactions among genes, brain circuits, development, lifestyle, trauma, social determinants, loneliness, climate change, technology, aging, brain health, and resilience. Our diagnostic system must begin to reflect that complexity.

This is more than a bit radical. It’s not that long since a Dr Paul Appelbaum, another former pres of APA, said: “Our brains are biological organs by their very nature. Any [mental] disorder is in its essence a biological process.” Samuel Guze (1923-2000), one of the main architects of the entire biological thrust in American psychiatry, said: “There is no such thing as a psychiatry that is too biological,” yet this article says the exact opposite of Guze’s brave claim:

Psychiatry occupies a unique position in medicine. We cannot confine ourselves to an organ or laboratory value. Psychiatry inevitably enters the territories of meaning, identity, suffering, relationships, morality, freedom, and consciousness.

Are they saying that studying the brain through a microscope will not tell us what we need to know about meaning, identity, suffering and so on? Amazing. The DSM system prioritised reliability over all other considerations: as long as two psychiatrists looking at the same patient could agree on the diagnosis, all the fluffy stuff like meaning and identity could be ignored. The way they managed this was by eliminating all matters that could not seen and objectively measured. As the article says: “The DSM historically prioritized reliability over philosophy ...” That’s exactly right, and there’s a reason for it, which they don’t appear to know. 45 years ago, when DSM-III was issued, there were plenty of people who said that the entire DSM system was indeed “too biological,” and issued dire warnings about the risks of dehumanising humans. Now, it seems, those warnings are coming to pass. Modern psychiatry has lost human contact with human suffering, as the authors admit:

But something was also lost. Diagnosis increasingly became a taxonomy of observable symptoms separated from the lived context of the person experiencing them ... Clinicians can complete required checklists while missing the narrative architecture of a human life.

To put it bluntly, psychiatry has been dumbed down to the point where it requires next to no intellectual effort and certainly no emotional involvement with suffering people. This, I suggest, is the real point of their complaint: they’re not so much concerned with a dehumanised psychiatry, because we’ve had that for decades, if not centuries. However, if psychiatry is reduced to merely ticking boxes on proformas, then AI can do that much quicker, much better and, crucially, very much cheaper than psychiatrists. Panic! (I like the line from Toy Story where the toys are lost. Buzz Lightyear says sternly “This is no time to panic,” but Woody replies: “Are you kidding? We’re lost, this is a great time to panic”). If a psychiatric diagnosis becomes “primarily pattern recognition from a checklist,” something AI programs are designed to do, then the institution of psychiatry is staring into the abyss: “What,” they ask nervously, “can a human psychiatrist offer that an algorithm cannot?” Excellent question, and clearly a wonderful time for psychiatrists to wake in panic from their biological torpor to pay attention to the really difficult questions they’ve long sneered at, such as what makes us human.

A good place to start would be asking how this came about in the first place. Blind Freddy can see that humans are concerned with “... meaning, identity, suffering, relationships, morality, freedom, and consciousness,” so why did educated people such as Guze and Insel make their outlandish claims that biology will tell us everything? There’s a history here, and we can be fairly sure neither they nor the illustrious authors of the Psych Times article know it. The first part goes back a hundred years to a proclamation by a group of mathematicians, physicists and logicians at the University of Vienna, known to history as the Vienna Circle [2]. Science, they said, is empirical, meaning it can only be based in observation and direct deductions from those observations. Science cannot allow itself to be contaminated by ideas that have no basis in firm fact. It must expel all metaphysical elements, where metaphysics means more or less “everything else.” If we can’t see it and measure it, it’s not the province of science. All that stuff about values and meaning and destiny can be left to priests and poets because it just goes in circles: for every opinion in metaphysics, there’s an opposite and equally unarguable opinion, just as convincing to somebody else as yours is to you (which is what the 23yo Descartes said, 400 years ago).

This was the birth of what is called positivist science, covering essentially all scientific activity since that day in 1929. It led to the mindlessness of behaviorist psychology, to a nuclear physics divorced from morality, to the brutality of neoliberal economics, and directly to the anti-mentalist revolution of biological psychiatry, marked by the publication of DSMl-III in 1980: out with the mind, in with biology. Part of the positivist influence related to how we think about the world, summarised in their quote “one neurotransmitter, one gene, one drug, one disorder.” That is, it dictated what is called linear thinking: Event A leads to Event B which combines with Fact C to produce outcome D. Excessive force to the arm causes a fracture; reducing and immobilising it leads to healing. Infection with a bacterium produces a disease; an antibiotic cures the disease; the patient is happy. The patient cries; the patient is depressed; prescribe an antidepressant and another grateful patient rolls off the production line. So simple, so clear, humans reduced to the level of molecules bumping in the dark. Trouble is, very little in biology, and next to nothing in human affairs, is so simple. Complex fields almost always show non-linear causation, where an outcome feeds back or forward to influence subsequent steps. After decades of biological reductionism, this is now unavoidable.

The second bit of important history arrived almost fifty years ago in the form of a paper published in the prestigious journal, Science [3]. George Engel, a physician of Rochester, NY, complained that medicine had become too biological. What he termed ‘biomedicine’ paid no attention to the humanity of patients, to what makes them tick as humans and not just as biological preparations lying inertly on the examination couch or the operating table, waiting for the semi-magical physicians to do their jobs. This process, he believed, had gone too far:

(Biomedicine) assumes disease to be fully accounted for by deviations from the norm of measurable biological (somatic) variables. It leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological and behavioral dimensions of illness (p130).

Engel’s argument against biomedicine was long on passion but rather short on facts. He bemoaned the emphasis medicine, including psychiatry, placed on laboratory diagnostic procedures at the expense of taking a broad history of where the patient’s life had reached. There was nothing distinctively human about medical treatment, it worked equally well in veterinary practice. It’s important to note that in his brief historical account of biomedicine, he did not mention the Vienna Circle’s positivist revolution some 50 years before he was writing. This omission is so common as to be absolutely normal; very few psychologists or psychiatrists know why their disciplines have taken their modern, anti-mentalist form. Engel proposed that medicine needed to replace its “biomedical model” with a “biopsychosocial model” that could give account to psychological and social factors. He suggested that the principles behind Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “general theory of systems” would be a good starting point for his proposed integrative model.

At first, his paper had very little impact but after a few years, psychiatrists discovered it, especially those who weren’t thrilled with the reductive biologism (and imperialism) of DSM-III when it arrived in 1980. Essentially, this meant “anywhere but America.” It was avidly adopted by psychiatrists in the UK, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, although less so in Europe. In those countries, it was essentially taken as defining psychiatrists. There was only one problem with his “biopsychosocial model”: Engel never wrote it [4]. He specified a role for an integrative model of mind and body, he gave it a name, he suggested a possible basis for it but neither he nor any author since has offered any clue of what it actually says. After fifty years, it remains a model in name only, which brings us back to the paper on the new DSM and “What makes us human?” These authors propose that a mechanistic, reductionist psychiatry ignores critically important information in the patient’s lives but this can be taken into account in a broader definition of “biological”:

Nor should psychiatry perpetuate a false division between biology and meaning ... Human experience is biological precisely because humans are biological organisms continually interacting with their environments ... mental illness is neither only brain disease nor merely social construction. A more sophisticated formulation would integrate symptom phenomenology with neurobiology, development and neurodiversity, trauma, functional impairment, culture, relationships, social and environmental context, resilience, strengths, brain health, aging, and existential meaning ... psychiatry must distinguish psychopathology from normal suffering, existential crisis, socially produced distress, and adaptive emotional responses. A broader psychiatry should not become an excuse to medicalize the human condition.

Jolly good, totally agree with the sentiment but at the risk of being a party-pooper, Engel said exactly the same fifty years ago and nothing came of it. Damn you, history, why do you keep repeating yourself? Engel’s phantom “biopsychosocial model” was intended to fill the very same hole they identified, although they’ve gone a bit further by proposing that all psychological matters are in fact biological. Sadly for them, that’s also a dead-end; while we’ll give them an E for Effort, it’s still an F [5, Chap. 2]. So why was this article published? If I’d submitted it, it would have gone straight in the bin. Look at who wrote it and where it was published. Three Eminent Worthies, one of them a deputy editor at Psych Times, got together to pen what seems like outright lèse-majesté, challenging the underlying orthodoxy of DSM and, indeed, of all modern American psychiatry.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures embedded in relationships, cultures, histories, bodies, aspirations, and moral worlds. Suffering emerges not only from disturbed biology but also from fractured belonging, loss of purpose, humiliation, loneliness, trauma, and existential despair ... Lived experience is the needed context for the clinical decision making, not just “noise” in patient’s history.

To my cynical mind, that is a monumental admission of failure of the entire biological enterprise. It says that, oh so slowly, awareness is growing that all is not well in the halls of psychiatry, that the vast promise bestowed on biological psychiatry by highly paid luminaries such as Guze and Insel has proven to be empty. Now psychiatrists have to find a way to wriggle out of their self-made mess without losing too much face or income (and without facing a flood of lawsuits). Why was this article published? It’s what they call a feeler, a probe to see how people will react. If the reaction is bad, they’ll keep quiet but if it doesn’t provoke too much apoplexy, they’ll slowly press ahead, gently uncovering the wound they’ve caused without the patient squealing too much.

However, they’re a bit late. An integrative model of mind and body, which starts from first principles and generates models of personality, of mental disorder and of personality disorder, has already been published [6]. The biocognitive model for psychiatry does everything they need in order to supersede the dehumanising reductionism of biological psychiatry and its boring, mechanical and mostly wrong DSM system. Why then does history repeat? Because as their little essay shows, people don’t read history. They’re all so busy trying to divert attention from the mess they’ve made of psychiatry that they create another one.

References:

1. Insel TR, Cuthbert BN, Garvey M, et al (2010). Research Domain Criteria (RDoC): toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. Commentary. American Journal of Psychiatry, 167: 748-751.

2. Hahn H, Neurath O, Carnap R (1929). The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle. Ernst Mach Society, University of Vienna. ). Reprinted in: Robert Scharf and Val Dusek (Eds.) Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Second Edition. (New York: J Wiley, 2014):101-110. http://rreece.github.io/philosophy-reading-list/docs/the-scientific-conception-of-the-world-the-vienna-circle.pdf

3. Engel GL (1977). The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine. Science; 196:129-136.

4. McLaren N (1998). A critical review of the biopsychosocial model. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 32; 86-92. See also: McLaren N (2023). The Biopsychosocial Model and Scientific Deception. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 25: 106-118.doi:10.1891/EHPP-2023-0008.

5. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry.

6. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Orwell, 1984

A week ago, the US Secretary of State, Mr Marco Rubio was in Greece on official business and gave a speech with the Parthenon as the background. He started by saying that Greece was the birthplace of everything worthy in western civilisation:

Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

All this and more was absorbed by the founders of the US and guides its policies today. However, he said, the collective West has allowed itself to become fat and lazy. It has ignored its history, turned nationalism into a dirty word, exported its industries, let its schools degenerate into centres of “woke” indoctrination, felt guilty over its amazing achievements, as though they didn’t deserve their greatness and, quel horreur, “… with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies …” The West in general and Europe in particular has gone to sleep but is starting to awaken from its slumber:

Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending ... War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power. And now, there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.

His speech was grandiose, aggressive, grossly narcissistic, and endlessly dishonest in its distortions of history and current affairs. In other words, puerile. The US wants peace but war has been forced on it by ghastly fanatics like the death cult of the mullahs in Iran. The western hemisphere was an empty wilderness waiting to be tamed by noble adventurers from Europe blah blah. Apparently, many in the audience were embarrassed by this phillipic and it has been widely criticised, e.g. by Matthias Risse of the Centre for Human Rights at Harvard, and by geopolitical analyst Ben Norton, who emphasised Rubio’s main point: “We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.” Peace, obviously, means not struggling against the American jackboot pressing on your throat.

Rubio’s speechwriter took his inspiration from Pericletian Greece 2,500 years ago but overlooked more important recent developments, e.g. the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and so on. The preamble to the UN Charter states inter alia “... armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest.” Article 1 (2) states that people have the right of self-determination, specifically set out in UN GA Resolution 1514 (XV) of Dec. 14^th 1960, which says:

1. The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation.

2. All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Gaza, anybody?

All this is very noble so what went wrong? Rubio gave the clue with his statement: “We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power.” Essentially, we have the guns and the money so we’ll do what we like and the rest of you can suck it up. We see this doctrine set out clearly in two semi-official documents. The first, from 2019, comes from the Rand Corporation in California, a fabulously wealthy “think tank” (2024 income US$514million) that has been at the centre of US foreign and other policies for decades (Rand stands for ‘research and development,’ nothing to do with that evil woman). The report, Extending Russia : Competing from Advantageous Ground, is a chunky 354 pages but I won’t bore you with all the details, there is an 11 page summary which extracts the important bits:

Russia is a country in stagnation... Economic sanctions have further contributed to this decline. Russia also suffers from deep-seated anxieties about the possibility of Western-inspired regime change, loss of great-power status, and even military attack (p11) … We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, ... Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, ... causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence (p12).

It goes on: Russia conducts disinformation warfare against the West but the US has information campaigns that “helped to undermine key aspects of the (Russian government’s) claim to legitimacy.” “The Russian leadership also harbors fears (probably exaggerated) of a U.S. capacity to undermine the Russian system.” Those anxieties could be fanned by sending US nuclear submarines to patrol just off the Russian naval bases and by sending bombers close to Russian airspace. The goal is to provoke them into spending too much on their military, leading to civil unrest and, ideally, collapse of the government. Another ploy would be to provoke “regime change” in Belarus by a “colour revolution” although, unlike Russia, it says, the US does not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs. Unfortunately, “The principal limiting factor in most of these maritime strategies is that Russia could simply choose not to compete” (p18). “Russia is not seeking parity with the United States across the military spectrum, and further U.S. advances in fields of existing superiority might occasion little Russian response. For instance, Russia is not going to challenge U.S. dominance of the world’s oceans” (p21). Damned Russians, what’s wrong with them? What can we do to scare them into bankrupting themselves as we did to the USSR?

This document was not adopted as policy by the then Trump I regime but these principles have guided US policy since 1945. The point is not that the USSR/Russia actually threatens US national interests because if they have to be provoked into action, then clearly they don’t. No, it is that those bloody Tovariches have got their hands on 17.6million sqkm of very, very wealthy dirt, guarded by nearly as many nuclear weapons as the US, and they’re in no hurry to let American corporations plunder, sorry, develop it as they’ve done in Latin America. In fact, they actually want to develop it themselves and (cue meltdown) keep the profits!!!! How unAmerican can they be?

The only question their plan on undermining and destabilising Russia doesn’t answer consists of one word: “Why?” Why is it necessary to breach every possible international covenant by pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war? They don’t seem to have considered that but we actually know the answer.

Similarly, a document issued by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University outlines how the author, a retired major general and former director of IDF Intelligence, thinks the country should proceed. It hasn’t done enough to secure itself, he suggests, and the attack on October 7^th is proof. He sets out a number of points that have obviously been tossed around at great length and have very strong support from major figures in the government and society:

1. Primacy of Jewish Identity over Democracy: The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government.

2. Peace as a Means Rather Than an End: The underlying assumption is that any arrangement with Arab actors is temporary and deceptive. Peace is a naive left wing concept opposed to the rational, right wing concept of security.

3. Rejection of the Independent Existence of Arab States: ... most Arab states are not genuine nation-states, but collections of tribes and ethnic groups ... undermining their stability is viewed as a natural process, one that Israel can manage ... (and) should even encourage.

4. War as a Foundational State: War is essential to national security and cannot be replaced by a state of peace...

5. Self-Reliance and Severing Dependence on the United States ... The US is a “declining power” whose progressive values are not compatible with Jewish national identity.

6. Absolute Priority for Initiative and Offense over Defense: Preemptive, surprise strikes are viewed as the only way to achieve victory...

7. Forward Defense: ... establishing forward defense zones wherever possible becomes crucial. These ... destabilize their host states and weaken them relative to Israel. These spaces enable Israel to move the war into enemy territory as quickly as possible.

8. Internalizing the Reality of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as a Permanent Israeli-Arab Conflict:... the existence of a Palestinian national movement is an inauthentic Western narrative rooted in post-colonial guilt ... yet another Arab attempt to fight and destroy the State of Israel.

9. Settlement and Civilians as a Central Component of Security: Defence by civilians organized in ... underground militias ... (and allows) preemptive attack ... and further contributes to the destabilization of the “synthetic” Arab states.

10. Establishment of self-sufficient military industries and research.

He points out that this is consistent with current Israeli policy but has never been fully articulated and discussed. He believes that peace with Israel’s neighbours is incompatible with the idea of a land promised to the chosen people, and therefore impossible to gain, and sees the ideal as a state of permanent warfare in which every citizen is involved. He raises a number of practical questions that flow from this view of Israel’s place in West Asia and in the larger world, but is quite sure they can be overcome without risk to the survival of the Jewish state.

The Dissident, a very capable commentator said: “Leading Israeli Think Tank Publishes Psychotic Israeli ‘National Security’ Doctrine.” In fact, it’s not psychotic at all. It is a clear-sighted plan to commit major international crimes for as long as it takes to get whatever territory Israel wants by removing all inhabitants who are likely to object and by neutralising their misguided supporters, because God’s plan is that Israel will be a “light unto the nations” and anybody who opposes this is satanic by definition and has to be destroyed. That is not psychosis. That is evil incarnate. The author, one Tamir Hayman, is not mentally ill or disordered in any way. He simply believes an evil doctrine just because he wants to. He has done very well out of believing and enforcing it and wants other people to join the party and continue the mayhem.

Rubio complained that “War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power. And now, there is war again.” War for territory or resources or for anything is specifically prohibited by Article 1 of the UN Charter, which both the US and Israel have signed. There are only two countries in the world which are currently fighting aggressive wars for territory and/or resources, the US and Israel. Russia’s attack on Ukraine was to prevent it joining NATO, part of the clearly stated American plan to scare them by putting nuclear weapons on their border. For the Kremlin, that was an intolerable risk and it worked, they were very scared.

The other two are simply doing what dogs in the street do, fighting to get themselves higher up the dominance hierarchy, just because it feels so good to stand over other people and gloat. That is the answer to the question “Why?” behind all this aggression. The US in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Panama and Greenland, previously Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea and all the rest, and Israel in half a dozen countries, are textbook examples of the blind, biologically-driven human urge to dominate other humans, to get bigger and more powerful because testosterone. Not because of realistic fears of the other side or human rights or democracy or self-determination or God’s love, just power.

The object of power is power.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. https://bookshop.org/ (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At https://bookshop.org/

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

At glacial speed, mainstream psychiatry is reluctantly turning to confront the unimaginable: that its treatments don’t actually work. It may reach the point where psychiatry trainees and medical students in general are taught, not just how to put more people on more drugs for longer and to blame them for not liking the experience, but how to actually take people off them. Before that day dawns, however, there is ample scope for psychiatry’s bold and adventurous thinkers to push into new therapeutic territories. Mostly, this is driven by failure, the fact that many people do not show any benefit from their treatment or may even be worse off, and not just financially. In most fields, if you try something and it doesn’t work, you ask what you’ve done wrong. Maybe you misunderstood the task or your model doesn’t apply to that case, that has to be sorted out, but psychiatry is different. The psychiatrist is never wrong, and what is needed is more of the same but never a bit of soul-searching.

The clearest example of this is the fairly recent notion of “treatment-resistant depression” (TRD) where a person doesn’t respond to standard antidepressants. This is about one third of all people given the drugs and is much the same whether they’re given active chemicals or placebos, i.e. antidepressant drugs are hardly an improvement over inert chemicals. This has led to a whole new field, “treatment of TRD,” where ever-more heroic treatments are thrust on the miserable sufferers. ECT has been around forever, of course, and has been joined by TCMS, magnetic stimulation of the brain and its variants; by dosage with a range of hallucinogenic drugs; and a newer one called vagal stimulation, which applies electrical pulses to the vagus nerve that controls our innards. There are probably others floating around but the principle is that the cause of treatment failure is always located in the patient, never in the treatment. One reviewer noted that there are something like 155 definitions of TRD and described a trend to rename it as “... the broader, more clinically honest construct of difficult-to-treat depression.” Does this mean TRD was dishonest? Unlikely they would admit that but he gives a case example to illustrate his point:

“Ellen,” a woman in her early 60s, is referred to you with “treatment-resistant depression.” Her chart lists 4 antidepressants across 2 classes over 18 months, 2 of them stopped early for adverse effects and one abandoned without explanation. What dominates the picture is not sadness but a flat, effortful anhedonia: she moves slowly, tires within an hour of waking, and complains that her memory “isn’t there anymore.”

This article is trying to make the case that this type of depression is due to excessive inflammatory chemicals floating around in the blood stream. In this view, depression is a case of “neuroinflammation acting on reward circuitry” of the brain, which means more blood tests and scans and more specific drugs. Just on the skimpy history, we can diagnose the problem in psychiatry. It’s highly likely that she is obese, that the obesity causes the high levels of inflammatory chemicals, and that she needs to be checked for Type II diabetes, thyroid problems and possible early cognitive decline. However, more telling is the peculiar comment in the next sentence:

Buried in her intake and easy to skim past is a history of early-life trauma, a childhood of chronic adversity and fear, that no prior note has connected to the adult in front of you.

Hang on, what do you mean nobody has taken notice of her early life experiences? That’s like saying “I didn’t notice that the patient had to be wheeled into my office a ventilator.” But this is the point: they’re not interested in her early life experiences, they don’t want to know about it. In fact, they’re so disinterested that the psychiatrist doesn’t even take a history. That’s left to a busy nurse somewhere in the process who quickly goes through a proforma and ticks boxes – or just leaves them blank. The psychiatrist then flicks through it, asks one or two questions more, writes a prescription and leaves. And, surprise surprise, the patient doesn’t get better, but that’s because she’s got “difficult to treat depression,” DTD, not because there’s anything wrong with their system.

A video in Psychiatric Times expands on this while talking about a new field called “interventional psychiatry.” It seems that prescribing drugs no longer counts as an intervention in a patient’s life, that’s reserved for more active treatments, mainly those listed above (ECT, TCMS etc). The rationale remains the same: the patient didn’t respond to treatment so let’s bring out the big guns. The video is long (about 45mins) and says precisely nothing but is revealing in what it doesn’t say: the complete absence of anything like a formal justification of what psychiatrists do to patients. Remember that this is a video of two senior psychiatrists talking for the benefit of other psychiatrists, this is the actual inner workings of the trade, not their propaganda:

I still find it tough to explain to patients how ECT works (at 7.33) ... TCMS is FDA approved for treatment resistant depression and the target is the dorsalateral prefrontal cortex. This is where we think is sort of like the traffic light that sort of like directs the signals around where where where the brain is (at 28.35; that’s how they talk).

(Interviewer speaking, at 43.40): I think artificial intelligence is the future because we are not diagnosticians, we do a very poor job of diagnosing patients and until we can get the correct diagnosis, we throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks because that’s how we cycle through medications. We don’t have precision medicine. Is neuromodulation better spaghetti than pharmarmacology? (Psychiatrist): I don’t know. I don’t know ... but I do believe that it’s AI that is going to help us become better diagnosticians (44.35) ... (Interviewer): Okay. What a good note to end on. We’ve covered so much. I hope we talked about interventional psychiatry in the midst of this lofty conversation about what are the targets of treatment and really what are we doing inside the brain that we hope is going to make things better and how do we decide about persisting with the treatment versus backing away ... (fades out).

It is indeed difficult to explain what ECT does because, even after 90 years, nobody knows. I say it doesn’t actually work [1] but it’s very lucrative so we’re probably stuck with it for a while. And traffic lights in the brain? The model of brain function that these people are using is more like one of those fancy model train sets where the trains whizz around through tunnels and over bridges. But the revealing line is this: “We do a very poor job of diagnosing patients.” That’s pretty scary, it says: “We can’t diagnose them but we know what the treatment is.” The notion that depression is due to inflammation of the brain’s reward (“pleasure”) centres is simply fanciful. Now that the serotonin notion has gone to a well-deserved grave [2], they need something so paralysis of the pleasure centres sounds like it will do the job (the job being psychiatrists fooling themselves that they know what’s going on so they can fool everybody else).

Two problems arise, the first physiological. The inflammatory chemical they’re talking about, C-Reactive Protein (CRP), is found in the blood during a variety of inflammatory processes. It’s secreted by the liver on instructions (interleukins) released by the inflammatory cells known as macrophages (science-speak for ‘big eaters’) which gobble up damaged cells and foreign bacteria. They instruct the liver to release CRP which prowls around and fixes itself on damaged cells or bacteria, which then attracts the local macrophages. Inflammation and immunity are fascinating but incredibly complicated processes in the body, the more is discovered, it seems the more there is to know. The immune process can and does go wrong in a variety of ways but the idea that, for no reason, one specific part of the brain suddenly becomes inflamed and switches off, to be cured by antidepressants, ECT and magic mushrooms, cannot be taken seriously. Obesity is a far more important cause of high CRP because that chemical is also released by healthy fat cells. Oh dear, didn’t think of that. High levels then lead to coronary artery disease and insulin resistance, which helps explain why obesity causes heart trouble and diabetes in a self-reinforcing loop.

The second reason why they shouldn’t talk of “paralysis of the pleasure centres” is because that’s already been claimed, by a psychological theory of depression, in fact. Oh dear again. As we discussed last week, the biocognitive model says that anxiety must be seen as the normal response to the perception of a threat [3]. A threat triggers a mixed psychological and physical response, which becomes a problem when the physical component is subsequently seen as a separate threat, i.e. the person is stuck in a vicious circle. Using the same model, depression is to be seen as the response to the perception of a loss. The awareness of a loss triggers a mixed psychological and physical response, mediated by paralysis of the putative “pleasure centres” in the brain. That’s all. Every time the person thinks of the loss, it sends another barrage of signals to the emotional centres of the brain, forcing them to shut down for a while, meaning nothing pleasurable can be experienced. With a severe loss, the signals are more or less continuous and the person is unable to experience any joy in life, i.e. what the paper called “not sadness but a flat, effortful anhedonia.”

With long term problems, the two most common being chronic anxiety and chronic pain, people sit daily on the edge of despair, sometimes slipping over for a while before they slowly manage to drag themselves out. One day, however, they get pushed a bit too far and decide: “This is how it’s always been, it’ll never be any different, I wish I could just die.” We call that depression but it is not an illness in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a realistic response to a life of more or less permanent suffering. It is definitely not caused by inflammation of the brain. The brain is perfectly healthy and is responding correctly to the signals it is getting, it’s just getting too many bad signals for any one person to bear. But what a damning thing to say for senior psychiatrists to say about themselves:

I think artificial intelligence is the future because we are not diagnosticians, we do a very poor job of diagnosing patients and until we can get the correct diagnosis, we throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.

In any other field but psychiatry, that would prompt a very serious bout of self-criticism, such as “Hey, why don’t we try taking a proper history? Then we won’t overlook the terrible events in her childhood.” No, as fast as they lose one skyhook, they find another: Serotonin is dead, AI to the rescue. Wow, let’s see how long we can string this one out.

References:

1. McLaren N (2017). Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Critical Perspective. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 19: 91-104.

2. Moncrieff J et al (2022). The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry (2023) 28:3243–3256; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0

3. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder:

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Some quotes:

“ ... the United States is a mortal enemy of China” (Prof. John Mearsheimer, at 33.20).

“A woman’s worth is determined by her ability to please and satisfy a man” (Andrew Tate).

“America is the greatest and most powerful nation in the history of mankind” (US Sec. of State Marco Rubio).

“A beastly people with a beastly religion” (Winston Churchill, speaking of Indians).

“If we have to use force it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future” (fmr US Sec. of State Madeline Albright)

“Will I annihilate Iran and do it quickly?” Trump.

What do these all have in common? They show the urge to dominate, a critically important part of what we can call human nature. Modern social sciences, including psychology and psychiatry, don’t like to talk about human nature, they see it as a primitive idea, hardly better than talking about spirits and tree nymphs but it depends on how it’s defined. It should be restricted to what humans are likely to do rather than what we are compelled to do. For example, we don’t normally include breathing, eating and drinking and seeking shelter as “human nature,” it is reserved for what we’re likely to do, our inclinations or proclivities rather than absolutes.

The first and most obvious feature is that we are social animals, we like to be with our kind and it’s fairly easy to imagine an evolutionary basis for this. The early protohuman who liked to wander off alone would have been eliminated from the gene pool in short order. Hanging around and bonding with other people feels good and is probably related to the hormone oxytocin, which has wide effects throughout the body, male and female. As soon as we form a bonded social group, two other factors become important, fear and dislike of outsiders and strangers, and the urge to dominate, within the group and over other groups. Oxytocin seems to incline people to want to support their group and at the same time, inclines them to dislike outsiders and push them away. These are not fixed reactions, they are heavily influenced by individual psychological factors but they’re always there, lurking in the background.

The urge to dominate, as explained in Narcisso-Fascism, is largely mediated by the male hormone, testosterone. This has an intense “feel good” effect so people seek it in a myriad ways in daily life. Going up the dominance hierarchy causes surges of testosterone whereas being pushed down or excluded suppresses it. People with high levels feel fantastic, while the people they are suppressing feel useless and despairing. The effects are so strong that people fight to get to the top but, at the same time, everybody else fights to resist being oppressed. Each of us has wired into our DNA the urge to dominate and the urge to resist domination, sometimes known as the paradox of hierarchy. This is inherently destabilising, which means that without some system of laws and enforcement, human society is by nature unstable, disorganised and often chaotic, as Thomas Hobbes described in his epic work, Leviathan (1651):

In such condition (of no authority offering protection against violence) there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Ch 13).

He wrote that just 375 years ago; nothing has changed. Mearsheimer’s thesis is that international relations are anarchic just because there is no “higher authority” keeping the peace. Therefore nations must strive to exert local dominance because if they don’t, somebody else will take over and life for the losers will be worse. That is, he licenses aggression, he justifies the preemptive attack. This leads to constant struggle which regularly spills over into violence. Currently, Mearsheimer says, the US is engaged in a life-or-death battle to “contain” China, to prevent its rise as a “superpower.” In fact, it’s not just China, it’s everywhere. To Mr Rubio’s open delight, Cuba is being strangled; Venezuela has been emasculated and its oil shipped to the US; Iran, of course, is the eighth Muslim country to be attacked in 20 years; Russia is the eternal enemy; and everybody else must keep their heads down or have them kicked in.

My view is that international relations are chaotic just because the US is insistent on being dominant in every respect and accepts no limits on its conduct, anywhere for any reason. Why is China a “mortal enemy”? What have the Chinese done to deserve that dire prize? What is the rational reason for the US to decide that it has to box China in with military bases, impose punitive financial sanctions, attack the country that provides most of China’s oil and generally make life as difficult as possible for one sixth of the world’s population? Answer: there is no rational reason. The US is simply doing as a country what the despicable Andrew Tate does as an individual, trying to dominate for domination’s sake. In fact, Mrs Tate’s little boy and the Gifted Leader of the Free World are good mates, as he regularly boasts:

And I’m very close to the Trump family. I know them well. And I spoke to Barron after the incident and I look forward to once I am free being with Donald Trump in person and reminding him that he’s a bulletproof badass (here, at 2.44).

It takes one to know one. An academic analysis [1] of Tate’s utterances over the years shows how he inserts the message of dominance in everything he does: what he wears, what he drives, where he goes, who he is seen with, his sport, how to treat women and gays, on and on. Everything comes back to one point: I’m fantastic, everybody else is a dog and you can be like me if you try hard. And as we see, this has appeal. He had huge followings on Twitter/X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and everything else and was making a lot of money from selling pornography and many other crimes. The message of domination is wildly exciting and irresistible, anything can be sold if it’s tied to the single idea: “This will get you up the hierarchy.” At the same time, it is dangerous and wantonly destructive. Nazi doctrine said:

We’re superior, the Slavs are inferior. We have hardly any land which means we can’t assume out rightful place in the world. They have vast areas of land that they don’t know how to use, therefore we have the right to take it from them, eliminate half of them and build an empire to last a thousand years.

As a result, they launched their attack on the USSR, killing anything up to 35million people in the process and destroying all industry and agriculture over huge parts of Eastern Europe. Hitler had no trouble selling this to the German public; they weren’t keen on his move against Czechoslovakia but once the victories started to roll in, they joyously jumped on the bandwagon. Similarly, Rubio is comfortable pushing the idea that broke Cuba (pop. 9million) is an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed US (pop. 350million) and has to be throttled.

You can always sell the idea of dominance, even if you have to tell a few lies to do it. In July, the US State Dept. issued a 100 page report entitled: Cuba: the Capital of 21^st Century Communism (not Beijing? They’ll be so disappointed). From beginning to end, it’s a pack of lies so juvenile that its authors must have been laughing as they wrote it but Rubio approved it and critics have been labelled “front groups and fellow travellers.” It has nothing to do with the reality of Cuban politics or intentions, and everything to do with the rage of a man who would kick a puppy to death because it wet on the floor. There is no reason or rationality in any of what we see going on in the world today. The boiling chaos is not, as Mearsheimer claims, due to individual countries trying to exert control in order to calm their neighbourhoods. Instead, it is entirely due to one country and a few of its vassals trying to dominate the world just because they like the idea.

Next question: Why do they want to? Why is it so important to be Number One in everything? Let’s assume they get their wish and one day, we have a universal pax americana where we all walk around in jeans, eating hot dogs and moaning along with Tammy Wynette. What then? How will everybody’s lives be improved? Will there be better novels, better music, better food? Will everybody be healthier with better education and longer holidays? I don’t think so. If the standard of living of the ordinary American is anything to go on, the rich will be richer but we, the common herd, will all be worse off. They should look at the example of Japan, which decided it would push the whitefellas out to build a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Fifteen years and 20 million deaths later, they realised it wasn’t possible so they got to work and quickly became the world’s second largest economy. Same thing happened to the Germans, they did very well once they got over their Aryan obsession. Why doesn’t domination work? Because while a few people want to be dominant, everybody else doesn’t want to be dominated and will fight to be free. That’s elementary but the idea of winning is woven into the very fabric of our lives, it colours everything we do. It starts very early in life, in kindergarten or even with “beautiful baby” competitions, and although it contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, it never stops voluntarily. Just ask the Germans and Japanese.

Will there ever be a world kept in quiet order by the self-appointed World Policeman, Uncle Sam? No, I don’t think that will ever happen, for two reasons. First, the other 97% of the world aren’t going to accept a subordinate role. That path leads to and creates the anarchy that Mearsheimer described as inevitable. Second point is that the present world order is teetering on the brink. The US economy is heading downhill fast. With his tariffs, Trump has nearly bankrupted their agriculture, and Chinese retaliation means their high tech industry is running into the sand. Don’t be fooled by all the activity building data centres, the equipment they need to put inside them comes from China and they’re not playing the game. Across in the Gulf, the petromonarchies are in serious financial trouble and are under deadly warning that if the US resumes its attacks, Iran will destroy their water and power supplies. If that happens, the monarchies will be overthrown in a few days. In Europe, Ukraine is a lost cause; German industry is on the ropes; France and Italy are in more financial trouble than usual and Britain continues its post-imperial decline. Meantime, the Japanese economy has just been bailed out by the US but it’s not getting any better; Pakistan is sliding toward civil war; Bangladesh can’t afford fuel to run its power grid; in Indonesia, the deeply corrupt and criminal president, Prabowo, son-in-law to the late dictator, Suharto, is spending far more than the country earns ... So much for the rules-based international order. When people don’t follow the rules, disorder follows, just as Hobbes said.

Is there a simple solution to all these woes? No. Is there any solution? Yes, we need to get rid of the notion that we can’t be happy unless we’re Number One. The world is now too small for any person or group or nation to strut around saying: “We’re the boss, you have to do as we say.” Changing that requires that people understand the urge to dominate is driven by mindless hormones, that it has no rational basis and, left unchecked, is most likely to lead us to catastrophe. The Doomsday Clock sits at 85 seconds to midnight but do you think people like Trump and Musk and Tate and Netanyahu and all the gang give a shit about that? No, all they can think of is, as Tate said, if you’re not No. One, you’re nobody. The researchers who studied Tate’s influence over social media concluded:

These findings underscore the oft-unspoken reality that patriarchy is not just about men’s control of women and non-binary persons, but men’s control over other men.

I don’t know why they doubted that: international behaviour is simply individual psychology writ large. Dominance is in our nature, and it starts with getting rid of the competition.

Reference:

1. Love TP, Prskalo E, Maloney ME (2025). Hatespeech or Tatespeech? Andrew Tate and the rise of the radical misogynist. New Media & Society 28(9) 4860-4881. DOI: 10.1177/14614448251374158

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. at https://bookshop.org/ (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At https://bookshop.org/

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Last Saturday afternoon, I was busy in the kitchen when I heard our resident butcherbirds giving their alarm call. We live in the semi-rural outskirts of Brisbane, on a 1ha block (2.5ac) that slopes down to dense scrub and trees along a creek. The butcherbirds, which are one of the world’s great songbirds, like to perch on the verandah railing so they can find grasshoppers and skinks in the gardens and lawns below. With the warmer weather, this is snake season so I went out to check. Sure enough, they were all looking down and squawking at a large eastern brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis) mooching around near a retaining wall. This is regarded as the second most venomous snake in the world so I grabbed my boots and my snake pole and ran downstairs. It had moved into a small garden alcove about 5mx2m with high walls on three sides, so it was neatly penned in but it was aware there was no cover and was trying to get out. While my daughter rang the snake catcher from her vantage point on the verandah, I managed to convince it to go to the back wall but it was agitated and kept darting this way and that, adopting a strike pose or trying to scale the sheer brick walls. Finally, it went into a clump of ferns and coiled up, obviously aware I was there and a threat to it but prepared to wait.

After half an hour of watching it tasting the air, the snake catcher arrived and quickly grabbed it. He caught it by a head hold which I thought was exceedingly dangerous, about on a par with juggling a chainsaw blindfolded, but he soon had it bagged. Just then, the butcherbirds started up again; my daughter went to check and called out: “There’s another one.” Sure enough, there was another about the same size. While the snake man was getting his gear, I managed to head it off but it darted across the lawn. He caught it by the tail and held it up at arm’s length with its head resting on the ground. He was tall so it was close to 1.8m (6ft) long and very annoyed. He explained there must be a female nearby attracting them; he soon found the ideal place for her to hide, in a seepage drain that extends under the house. Apparently, the males can detect the pheromones up to 500m away, which is why I’ve seen 3 or 4 in the same spot over the past few years. We’ll trap her and take her to a nice spot up in the hills; I like the pythons and other friendly snakes at our place but eastern browns are seriously dangerous creatures to have loose in your garden.

I mention this because a recent drug company handout was on anxiety [1]; strangely, of ten papers reviewed by the psychiatrist-editor, nine did not involve drugs. One (with 29 authors) described educating psychiatrists about, of all things, an evolutionary approach to anxiety. I was immediately interested: in 2007, my first book had a chapter on the evolutionary approach to anxiety [1, Chap. 15]. I’ve given that chapter as background reading to many hundreds of people since then, which they found very helpful, much more so than talk about genes and brain chemicals. What is called anxiety is correctly seen as the standard human threat response that has slipped out of control, not as a “disease state.”

So on Saturday afternoon, we had a case demonstration of three unrelated species showing their differing threat responses, birds, reptile and mammals. When birds are alarmed, they fly to a nearby branch and call loudly; interestingly, other species recognise each other’s alarm call and come to investigate. A passing goshawk can expect to be mobbed by magpies, butcherbirds, miners and crows, all responding to a call from a single bird. The snake’s response was first to freeze and check the environment by tasting the air but this species also has good eyesight so they lift their heads like a periscope and look around. For humans, the alarm response is to become mentally alert and quickly scan the environment. The heart rate increases to pump extra blood flow to muscles and heart, muscles may start to tremble slightly, skin a bit sweaty, stomach churning, bit short of breath, etc. All this is very familiar.

The role of the alerting or “fight or flight” response is to prepare the animal to deal with the threat. Every species on earth has a specific threat response: snails withdraw into their shells, sea slugs exude a sticky slime, rabbits bolt to their burrows, dogs stand and snarl ... If an animal doesn’t respond to a threat, it won’t survive to pass on its genes. The threat response has a very strong biological basis; we can control it with training but it never goes away, it is never disabled unless by drugs. It is not in any meaningful sense of the word a disease but, like other safety mechanisms such as blood clotting or the immune response, it can get out of control by becoming stuck in a negative feedback loop. We may then call it a disease but in the case of anxiety, it is in fact the body doing exactly what it is told to do, to respond to a threat. For anxious people, the core of the problem is that they see too many threats, they misclassify events as dangerous and respond accordingly. That’s the definition of an anxious personality: a person who responds to neutral events in the environment as though they were a threat. Mainstream psychiatry doesn’t acknowledge the anxious personality as such, they give them silly names such as Dependent PD or Schizotypal or Obsessive-Compulsive or Alcohol or Drugs or whatever. The underlying mechanism of self-perpetuating anxiety is the same in each case, all that changes is how the sufferers try to control the unpleasant emotion.

Some important points to remember about the threat response, commonly known as anxiety in Homo sapiens. First, it’s universal. Every living creature from nematodes up has some sort of standard reaction to threats. Biologically and behaviourally, ours is more or less the same as the other great apes. Second, anxiety is far and away the most powerful emotion, the only emotion with no upper limit. We can only laugh for so long, then it becomes painful; anger wears off eventually, grief slowly fades and so on. Only anxiety builds up and up until you do what it wants, which is get away from the threat. A full-blown panic attack is said to be the worst experience a human can have and still survive, and I’d say it’s true. Third, it’s the only recursive emotion, meaning it acts back to reinforce itself, which is the basis of human anxiety states. Finally, all other animals need a direct awareness of the threat – sight, scent, sound and so on – but humans can perceive and react to a threat purely by information about a future state that hasn’t yet happened. This is the basis of the two-step process that is our undoing.

We may start to get nervous when we realise that something big is on tomorrow, which is Step One in generating a pathological state of fear. Step Two is that we can then panic over our own panic response. For example, people look at the clock, realise they may miss the bus and start to get anxious. Some however will notice that their heart is beating faster or they’re starting to shake and so they panic over that: “Oh dear, I’m going to have one of my dreadful turns.” That is, and just because it is so bad, they panic over their own panic reaction, and so the vicious circle closes on them. This is true of all of what is called “generalised anxiety disorder” and the specific phobias, such as frogs, snakes and public speaking. People who are scared of frogs are not scared of frogs per se as frogs are the most harmless creatures on earth. They’re scared of how they’ll feel when they go near a frog because they know from long experience that how they’ll feel is terrible beyond words.

Anticipating a scary event causes agitation, which then causes more agitation in a step-wise, self-reinforcing process. I one saw a woman in her early 40s who’d had about 25yrs of failed treatment for depression. I asked her why she was feeling sad: “Oh,” she replied, “it’s my depression, it always does it.” The history showed she was actually severely anxious. I showed her the list of symptoms and fears and explained the reason the antidepressants and ECT and hospitals hadn’t worked was because she had a severe anxiety state. “Anxiety?” she shrieked, clutching her throat. “Oh no, that’s terrifying.” True, it is, but it’s better not to panic over it.

None of this is rocket science. Every one of hundreds and hundreds of patients who read this chapter could understand it and felt better from knowing it, so why are psychiatrists so far behind the times? How come it’s taken them at least 80 years to start to realise all their talk of “anxiety genes” has no substance? The answer is again straightforward: mainstream psychiatry is an ideology (n: a strongly held set of beliefs and values that determines how the individual interprets the total environment). They refuse to allow the possibility that a mental disorder can have a mental cause; for them, all mental disorder must have a physical cause in some sort of brain pathology. This is what defines psychiatry and distinguishes it from psychology and other disciplines, this is how they justify their jobs and money.

This is why the recent drug handout is so different: the mere existence of a handout on anxiety that doesn’t mention drugs is an admission that the biological approach is finally reaching its use-by date. Rephrase that: psychiatrists are finally, reluctantly, being forced to acknowledge that they’ve spent decades and billions pushing a theory they couldn’t justify. Hundreds of millions of people have been subjected to dangerous and addictive drugs and a lot worse with no formal justification. Effective treatment must be based in a formal theory of mind and an articulated model of mental disorder. The reductionist biological approach to mental disorder is not a model as they’ve never written it; if they tried, they would realise they can’t do it. The proper approach to anxiety is a mix of evolution and comparative biology: every living creature has an alarm response. Mostly, it’s activated in response to the direct perception of a threat but after one or two exposures, most animals can learn that a threat is on the way. Twice a year, our family cat is grabbed at breakfast and put in her carrier. On the way to the vet, she knows what’s coming and shows her displeasure (actually, it’s the rectal thermometer that she doesn’t like, gets very indignant). Because of our capacity for language, humans can become anxious in anticipation of an event even if they have no experience of it.

The model of anxiety outlined above can account for all the phenomena of the huge cluster of anxiety problems that plague humanity. The machinery of anxiety is hard-wired into us, just as it is in baboons and rats. Do they feel anxious in the same way we do? Mainstream biology sneers at that sort of question, animals have no mental life, they scoff, so don’t anthropomorphise them. They don’t? There are four objections to that statement:

1. Can you prove animals are zombies while other humans are not? (they can’t).

2. Animals show the same sort of anxiety-driven behaviour as humans.

3. Animals have the same physiology as humans; most basic research on the neurophysiology of anxiety is done on animals.

4. Evolution builds on what went before; it is risible to suggest that, entirely without precedent, human mental lives were suddenly switched on with the birth of the first little H. sapiens.

I have no problem with the idea that animals have mental lives. I do have a problem with species-supremacist humans who assert, with no evidence, that they don’t. Putting that aside, what would a formal, reductionist biological model of anxiety look like? For all their braying and posturing, mainstream psychiatrists have never written one, so can we do it for them? The short answer is No, we can’t. The neurophysiology of arousal is fairly well understood; we can all agree that its normal structure and function is under tight genetic control, just as with every other organ of the body. However, as mentioned, it has no upper limit, which leads to the well-known Yerkes-Dodson curve. This says that too much arousal is bad for you (that’s not a very enlightening statement; too much of anything is bad for you because that’s what ‘too much’ means). An over-aroused person starts to malfunction, they make mistakes, drop things and misperceive the environment (especially other people’s intentions). Crucially, the mistakes and misperceptions can cause further arousal.

Over-arousal thus becomes self-reinforcing as a psychological phenomenon, and that’s what biological psychiatry can’t accept, but there is no conceivable non-cognitive model of anxiety that can account for this fact. In particular, the measures people take to reduce their anxiety are the product of their early life experiences. One person decides to retreat and hide while the next comes out swinging; one decides that the only way to deal with a scary environment is to be perfect at everything while another works out early that alcohol or drugs will do the trick. There’s no limit, and it’s also true that most anxious people try different ways of dealing with it, depending on what’s happening and how they’re feeling. Trying to account for this using genetics would be like trying to give a genetic explanation for the language a person speaks. Genetics gives each of us the machinery of language; experience determines what we say and in what language. Likewise, genetics gives each of us the machinery of anxiety; experience determines how bad it is and what we will do to control it.

A psychological approach to anxiety, such as the biocognitive model, is far simpler than the almost impossible “genetic” approach. It says humans are different from other animals in that we can scare ourselves but not so different: remember that if we invoke genetic “diseases” to explain human mental disorder, we’d then have to explain why no other species on earth suffers the same problem. Better still, the biocognitive model leads directly to effective treatment without using addictive drugs. Oh, and it’s free because it didn’t involve 29 authors or any government grants. Also, it tells you what to do when you come across a venomous snake: don’t panic, because anxiety is the most communicable of emotions, even from humans to animals.

Reference:

1. Psychiatry Research Review Issue 106 Anxiety focus https://www.researchreview.com.au/publications/psychiatry-research-review-issue-106-anxiety-focus

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

About 20 years ago, I met a Polish chap who, naturally enough, was keen to talk politics. Of the opening days of World War II, he said: “The Poles aren’t the only people who used cavalry to attack tanks. However, they were surely the only ones who thought they could win” (it turns out that was a myth). However, the one lesson we learn from history is that nobody ever learns from history: it seems the Europeans have decided there isn’t enough chaos in the world today and are getting ready for another bout of tilting at tanks. In a recent interview on Pascal Lottaz’s excellent channel, Neutrality Studies, Norwegian professor Glenn Diesen described what at first glance is a bad attack of war fever spreading across the continent. However, it now seems to be little more than panic among the power elite of the EU that they’ve been exposed as chumps. As Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour makes the previously unthinkable idea of an American withdrawal from Europe seem very thinkable, the von der Leyen clique that controls the EU is running around saying war with Russia is inevitable within five years. Diesen reports that the insufferable Jacob Rees Mogg has even said that Britons need to prepare themselves for the chance to die for Britain (at 09.25):

... but now something has happened. (the European leaders) have taken it over completely. They are in full ownership of this warmongering. Even now that the US pulling back (from confronting Russia, the) Europeans are quite eager to continue. So what has happened to them? I think some of it’s just human nature, when humans going to war, some basic impulse kicks in... 04.32.

He repeats this several times: “... the problem is that there’s an instinct also in human nature which is when you face an external threat, you seek internal solidarity.” At about 22.00 (paraphrased): “If enough people are chanting Let’s go to war, go to war, they will eventually internalize this and they will begin to pursue it. It’s human nature ... it’s incredibly dangerous. ... I don’t even think they can control the narrative anymore.”

The question then arises: Why? What’s going on? Wasn’t the EU formed to make reruns of the World Wars impossible? Yet here they are pushing the (very unwilling) populace into accepting the idea that a gigantic and ultra-high tech war with a vast and immensely wealthy, nuclear-armed country that has all the resources to conduct war that Europe doesn’t have is not just necessary but inevitable and, above all, joyously exciting. Are the Europeans completely mad? Despite the mind-bending risks, and for all his undoubted scholarship, Dr Diesen doesn’t have an answer beyond “Well, that’s human nature.” Financially, Europe is in deep trouble. Since the US blew up the Nordstream II gas pipeline providing cheap Russian natural gas to power Europe’s energy-hungry industrial base, the problems have multiplied.

It was also the US that forced Europe to stop using the cheap and extremely good IT and telecoms technology supplied by China’s Huawei and others, replacing it with American products that favour the American tech giants and their branches in the CIA; and the US that attacked Iran who closed the vital Strait of Hormuz that supplied 60% of Europe’s liquid fuels; and the US-, Israeli- and UK-backed Saudi regime that attacked Yemen’s Ansar Allah who promptly closed the Red Sea which provided most of the rest, forcing Europe to buy US natural gas and oil at grossly inflated prices ... With friends like America, you would wonder why Europe thinks they need to make an enemy of Russia, the same Russia that offered peace if Europe stopped trying to integrate Ukraine into NATO because, as everybody knew, that meant NATO nuclear-armed bombers on permanent high alert sitting on runways a few km from the Russian border. Unfortunately, Dr Diesen can only shrug and say “Well, that’s human nature.”

If that’s not enough trouble, the well-known commentator, Prof. John Mearsheimer of Chicago University reports that a similar game is playing out on the other side of the planet. The rise of China from broken-down third world country to global super-power in barely 45 years is truly remarkable. It totally eclipses Germany’s post-WWII Wirtschaftswunder, its economic miracle that has since run into the sand. While 90% of the world’s population are enormously impressed with China’s example, it hasn’t gone down well with the American power elite. Dr Mearsheimer reports that, in 2017, the US under Trump began to implement a policy of containment, to prevent China reaching equal or even superior status to the US in any respect. To this end, maintaining support for Taiwan as a separate political entity became paramount: without Taiwan, he says, containment of China would be impossible (here, at 26.45). He continues:

As I tried to make clear, the United States is a mortal enemy of China. Since 2017, an intense security competition has set in between the United States and China (28:34) ... When the Trump administration decided to adopt the policy of containment in 2017 (31:22) ... and the United States is a mortal enemy of China (33.20).

This has immediate significance in Today’s Fantabulous Theme, the AI explosion: “The United States is working overtime to see if they can gain an advantage over the Chinese in terms of developing AI” (35:06). Even though he has the technological sophistication of a five year old, Trump himself is 110% behind the AI drive, totally ignoring dire warnings from insiders that AI has the ability to destroy all human life within ten years, or even five years. No, says Herr Drumpf, the AI industry can supervise themselves. Unlike those terrible non-violent demonstrators in the streets, our wonderful Tech Bros don’t need government restrictions, do you Elon? Of course not. How come? Because China. The crafty tech bros have whispered in Trump’s right ear (the same one that doesn’t show any evidence of a bullet hole) that if China gets ahead in the AI race, then it’s goodnight America, those godless commie Chinks will use it to isolate and crush and deindustrialise God-fearing America. So the pleasantries of Pres. Xi’s recent trip to DC notwithstanding, Mearsheimer says, the US actually sees itself locked in an existential war with China:

As we move forward, what is likely to happen is that President Trump’s relationship with the Chinese, with Xi Xinping, and the American relationship with China, if anything, is likely to deteriorate over time ... where the United States and President Trump in particular, have friendly relations with the Chinese on the surface, is going to be seen as an anomaly ... and the present situation where the rhetoric is quite friendly, certainly on the American side, that’s likely to disappear (52:37).

This is not encouraging. The significance, as he says, is that despite the very real risks, there is no will to cooperate on restraining AI development. In international relations, Prof. Mearsheimer is probably the leading theoretician in the school of “offensive realism” so we have to listen to what he says, even as gloomy as this. However, when we look for explanation, it isn’t forthcoming. Why, for example, does the US regard China as its “mortal enemy”? Mearsheimer’s thesis is that international relations are anarchic, therefore nations have to struggle to exert local hegemony in order to protect their interests. The current dispute with China is just another example of the same concept playing out, a case of dominate or be dominated.

Now technical optimists may be inclined to dismiss Mearsheimer’s concerns, saying “We went through all this angst with nuclear weapons in the Cold War and we survived, AI is just another version of worrying about the end of the world.” There is an element of truth in that, just enough for the cavaliers to grab hold of and think it’s enough to let them swim against the tide but the nuclear arms race and the AI race are not in the same class. The crucial difference is that nuclear weapons couldn’t switch themselves on one night, change their programming and decide to launch themselves on a defenceless city just to watch the fireworks. AI can do exactly that. It is technically feasible for an AI program to take control of a biological laboratory, develop a lethal virus against which humans could have no defence, and release it. That’s not science fiction. That’s why AI has to be brought under control immediately, but the people who are running it, the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Bezos’ and Altmans and Thiels and all the other emotionally palsied psychopathic misfits, can only smell money and power. Despite anything they say, AI is not being developed for the betterment of you and me.

AI exists for military and surveillance purposes, and for cyberwarfare; that’s where the money comes from and that’s where the trillions will be made. Any talk of AI being useful for spotty schoolboys to write their essays is to deflect attention. Autonomous vehicles aren’t being developed to make cheaper taxis and delivery trucks and so on, the technology exists for the battlefield and aerial and marine drones; all the talk of a robotic taxi that will come to your door is pure PR. When it comes for an explanation of this, the eminent theoretician, Dr Mearsheimer has nothing to say. He correctly notes that international relations are anarchic but he doesn’t say WHY. His concept of offensive realism is therefore not a theory. It is pure description with no explanatory value at all (strictly speaking, that probably means he isn’t a theoretician but we’ll leave that to the academics to fight over). To turn it into a formal theory, he needs something like Dr Diesen’s dream of “human nature,” the one he regularly invokes but for which he offers nothing beyond “Boys will be boys.” That is, two of the most widely-regarded authorities in international relations are unable to offer an explanation of humanity’s self-destructive folly.

All of the swirling madness and wickedness they describe can be explained by a single human factor, the drive to dominate, coupled with its counterpart, the urge to avoid being dominated. Those twin urges are hardwired into each and every human being but some people never learn to control them, do they, Donald? All the international problems today, and many national problems, come down to this point alone: one group is trying to dominate another, and the other side is resisting. That’s it. So simple. So the correct explanation of Prof. Mearsheimer’s doctrine of offensive realism is the reverse of what he says: international relations are anarchic just because nations keep struggling to exert hegemony over their neighbours, and the neighbours aren’t having a bar of it. The US and Israel had no grounds whatsoever to attack Iran. Moreover, they haven’t offered any; all talk of an Iranian nuclear weapons program is total bullshit, as the US Director of National Security and everybody else said. The attack was just because Iran stood between them and total domination of West Asia. And don’t doubt for one moment that if Iran had been broken apart as Libya and Syria and Iraq were, Egypt and Türkiye were next on the list.

Trump says this over and over again: “We have to be Number One.” It’s called full spectrum dominance and that is what they mean: total control of all humans and their activities at all times in all places forever. China is not the mortal enemy of the US. Chinese as a whole are quite sympathetic to the US because of the assistance they were given in the war against Japan. Likewise, the average Joe Bloggs in the US doesn’t hold any resentment against China or Chinese, just keep those excellent TV screens coming. No, all talk of “mortal enemies” is simply the power elite in the US, the political-military-industrial-financial-academic and fascist religious elite, who can’t stomach the idea that Good Ol’ Uncle Sam has had his day and needs to step aside.

Similarly, the gaping hole that Prof. Diesen identifies in the explanation of world affairs, the bit he leaves blank as “Human Nature,” is fully explained by the principles behind the concept of Narcisso-Fascism: like every other animal studied – birds, mammals, reptiles and even fish – human group behaviour is controlled by the hormonally-determined drive to dominate and avoid domination. In evolutionary terms, this started as a breeding strategy: testosterone induces dominance behaviour, and the dominant male gets to leave more offspring than the submissive, but what was once a routine biological fact now has human behaviour in its grip. Crucially, the people who are doing it don’t know this. They, all the immensely clever and rich and powerful people in the cabinet rooms and board rooms and war rooms and research labs, they think they’re being just sooo rational and aware and up to the minute when they’re acting like a pack of dogs in the street, leading the world to destruction. They say AI has 10% chance of ending human life in ten years? Did you hear that? These people are out of their minds, except they’re not, they’re very sane and dangerous idiots. An idiot is a person who, confronted by evidence that contradicts his opinion, discards the evidence and keeps his opinion. When the big tech clowns are faced with the choice of coming second in the AI race or a 10% chance letting an agent loose that can develop lethal viruses, they say “Bugger the risk, full greed ahead to make sure those slippery little Chinks don’t beat us.” Yes, it oozes racism but racism is just one variant of the dominance drive.

It all goes back to biology, to the universal testosterone economy. Mearsheimer doesn’t know this, Diesen doesn’t know it, Musk would laugh and say “All power to my dick,” Trump is too stupid, Albanese couldn’t spell ‘testosterone,’ and Netanyahu would say “Of course, God has told us we’re meant to be Number One so we’re killing all these Arab vermin to do His will.” I think Xi Xinping would be concerned to know about this, all he can see is that America wants to throttle his country whereas he thinks China is entitled to its natural role in the world. Putin would understand it, he knows all about foreigners trying to invade and crush his country and, having issued a thousand warnings, isn’t going to stand for it.

So why is Europe pushing the idea of War, Glorious War? I think they’re caught in a trap of their own making. The US hates Russia as a competitor and because Russia won’t allow them to pillage the country as they do everywhere else; therefore, Russia had to be lured into a war in Ukraine to bankrupt it; Europe wanted to convince the US they were loyal vassals so they beat the drums and sent lots of money and weapons to Ukraine; then the US did the dirty on them, as it does on everybody (just ask the Kurds) and lost interest so, instead of admitting they were fooled by Obama and Trump and Biden and the rest of the Potomac Chorus, to prove they’re adults who need to be taken seriously and not just a pack of pampered poodles snarling from a fat American lap, they announced they’re going to take over and wallop those subhuman Russians.

What these clowns hope to achieve is nowhere stated, let alone how they think they’ll achieve it. The fantasied delight of forcing the Russians to a grovelling surrender drowns any questions about how they can do it, what it will cost and, above all, what happens when the Tovariches send them packing, as they have done to so many invaders. If Afghanistan was the Great Imperial Game, invading Russia is the Great Western Delusion. No doubt Europe’s leaders are now down at the barrack stables, quivering with excitement as they watch the cavalry being led out by troops in their finery. “This time,” they pant to each other as they gulp their champers, “mark our words, this time we’ll send those Russian tanks straight back across their border. They’ll be sorry.”

No, we’ll be sorry. The rich will escape to their mountain or island retreats but the poor pick up the bits, as with this 23yo Yemeni man who sent a brief video to a Greek journalist (start watching at 26.00minutes for a bit of background). All this noble young man is saying is: Leave us alone. That’s not just humanitarian, that’s biological, that’s why he will not be defeated, and all power to him. Unfortunately, our so-called leaders and experts just don’t get that vital point.

If any of the things that we value are to survive, the problem must be solved. How it can be solved is clear; the difficulty is to persuade the human race to acquiesce in its own survival. I cannot believe that this task is impossible (Bertrand Russell, The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War, in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Oct 1946; emphasis added).

For a rather bitter laugh, watch this 10min video: Lords of War: Meet America’s War Profiteers.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. https://bookshop.org/

(this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At https://bookshop.org/

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

.Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

.The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

A fairly lengthy article in reputable journal a few years ago looked at the much-neglected topic of paranoid thinking in personality disorders [1] (as much as I don’t like the abbreviation PD, I have to use it otherwise this would be too long). This was a “scoping review” which, unfortunately, used the term ‘paranoia,’ which had been dumped even when I was training. A scoping review sounds impressive but it means only a preliminary study of a field to try to work out what’s what and where to go. There’s now an established procedure to follow [2] and, in this paper, they kept to the procedure but seemed to miss a singularly important point. Just for context, the other types of reviews are literature reviews, which are often regularly updated as new material emerges, and systematic reviews, which survey the professional literature to answer one or a few specific questions, e.g. does drug X work?

The authors are psychologists, which means they come at the topic from a particular point of view but, as is often complained, psychology seems to be very much under the thumb of institutional psychiatry these days. They use the classification of personality disorders from the DSM system, i.e. they accept that personality disorder falls into distinct categories. There is a brief mention of the Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (p1216) but this wasn’t accepted in DSM-5 so they left it alone. Their preliminary survey of databases pulled up 4,433 papers which talked about paranoid symptoms in personality disorders but they quickly screened out nearly 99% of them, which tells us something.

The remaining 47 papers were analysed and showed that paranoid symptoms are common in, unsurprisingly, paranoid (PPD), but also in borderline (BPD) and schizotypal (STPD) personality types. What they described as “milder forms of paranoia” are quite common in avoidant (APD), narcissitic (NPD) and antisocial (ASPD) types but are almost never mentioned in schizoid (SPD), histrionic (HPD), dependent (DPD) or obsessive-compulsive (OCPD) personalities. To set the scene, they asked “What defines paranoia?” Oddly enough, they used the Freudian concept of projection, which is exactly what the DSM system was intended to replace. However, they qualify this by pointing out that we are all, to some extent, paranoid in the sense that we have to learn early to keep out wits about us because not everybody can be trusted: “... paranoid thoughts are quite common in the general population, with prevalence rates ranging from about 2% to 42%” (p1216), ranging from mild to severe and all-pervasive. I’d say that’s a major understatement caused by not asking the right questions but points out that it’s OK to be paranoid, just learn to keep it under control. After a foray into the mechanics of selecting their papers, they describe four “dimensions of paranoia”:

Doubts about others’ intentions (i.e. suspicion and mistrust);

Ideas of reference, i.e. attaching special significance to random or irrelevant events (for some reason, they included “the feeling of being observed by others”);

Paranoid beliefs (essentially, that other people have malign intentions); and

Persecutory delusions and beliefs.

This is a bit strange. A delusion is a belief, but it’s a psychotic belief. It’s not clear why they included it in a paper on non-psychotic states but we’ll come back to this point. Suspicion and ideas of reference go hand-in-hand; you can’t claim the TV is talking about you without suspecting some sort of malice somewhere. Now they get to the nitty-gritty: being good psychogists, they worked out the incidence of each of the four “dimensions” in each of a dozen personality types, giving pages of statistical analysis that only the determined would bother reading. After further pages of minute discussion, they conclude that paranoid thinking is most common in paranoid personalities, followed by schizotypal and then borderline types but, they warn...

This gap makes it difficult to set the boundary between paranoia as a symptom, a personality trait, a personality structure or a syndrome ... Where is the threshold between psychotic and nonpsychotic paranoid expressions remains open to scientific debate and may broadly depend on distress, conviction and frequency of paranoid manifestations, as well as cultural factors ... it is possible that suspiciousness may arise from these trauma-related mechanisms... (p1225). This is a bit alarming, admitting that they have no cut-off points for normal vs. abnormal, but they continue:

As to the remaining PDs, our synthesis suggests either negligible associations with paranoia (e.g., as for histrionic, dependent, obsessive-compulsive and schizoid personalities) or a serious lack of empirical interest in their relationship with paranoid presentations (p1225) ... It is worth mentioning that most studies used measures of paranoia whose validity and reliability have been questioned ... The present review suggests a lack of systematic studies on the link between personality disorders and paranoid presentations (p1228).

We had to wait until practically the last line to get to the juicy bit but we’ll try to be methodical. First, they assume that the DSM system of separate categories of personality disorder is valid, which is unexpected for psychologists because the entire history of psychology says it’s not. Second, they clearly have no concept of what personality actually is, which is fairly elementary, e.g. if you’re going to talk about traffic accidents, you need to know what traffic is. This is why they say (p1225) they can’t distinguish between normal paranoid thinking, a trait, a personality structure, a culture, a traumatic state or a disease syndrome. It’s not a strong start.

Next, why talk about delusions? Delusions mean psychosis, which means “not personality disorder.” That’s just further evidence that they’re floundering. Then, having said that some degree of paranoid thinking is normal, they are forced to admit that they can’t find evidence for it in many types of PD. Does that mean it doesn’t happen? But if it’s part of the normal personality, it must, so the only conclusion is that nobody’s interested enough to bother asking, and we know why: there’s no money in it. Finally, they point out that most of the studies used unreliable measures “whose validity and reliability have been questioned,” which suggests this is a case of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

All this points to the singularly important error hidden in the verbiage and stats of their “scoping study,” namely, the fact that they really don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s not entirely their fault, because if they’d said openly and honestly: “The whole field of personality and personality disorder in psychiatry is a cock-up,” which it is, they wouldn’t get published. Similarly, they have no control over the quality of the studies that are available, many of which are quite old and sub-standard. They could have said: “We need to start all this again,” but that wouldn’t work because it would only be more of the same: more money spent on dim-witted surveys by people who are only doing it because they need to publish something to get up the academic ladder.

The problem is psychiatry, its total failure to do the hard work of developing a theory of mind and a theory of personality, then using these to build models of mental disorder and personality disorder. Psychiatry has locked itself into a biological approach, in the mistaken belief that “science” can’t talk about minds and mental events. They want all mental disorder to be brain disorder but where does that leave personality disorder? As the study authors concede right at the beginning, some degree of paranoid thinking is normal. It can be pushed to extremes by a neglectful childhood or by traumatic events at any age, by culture, by drugs and by alcohol. Complicating matters, it gets worse under pressure or even through lack of sleep, further evidence it’s not a brain disease. Psychiatry’s way of fudging around this question was to write the criteria for each PD so that they seem separate and distinct when they certainly are not [3].

To make sense of it, they need a theory that sees beliefs as real things, able to work on the real, physical world, but without slipping into fantasy or magical thinking. The biocognitive model says the mind is real and everything we do or feel comes from the interaction of our belief state with external reality. There is no such thing as a free-floating belief, every belief we have is nested in a prior belief, and that in an even more basic belief, all the way back to the most fundamental of all: as Descartes said, I think, therefore I exist. The mere fact of asking “Do I exist?” proves that I do, and there’s nothing anybody can do to prove I don’t. On that foundation and with experiences gained over time, we build a vast, interlocking system of beliefs, about ourselves and our place in the world. Personality just is my unique set of beliefs and rules about life. Compare some elementary beliefs about stealing:

I believe people shouldn’t steal, and that also applies to me at all times even if it’s inconvenient. Knowing that people think I’m a decent person is more important than a free apple.

I believe I’ve had a terrible time and I’ve missed out on so much, and these people have got everything and never had to suffer, so they owe me something, and they won’t miss it anyway.

I believe I’m a really clever person and I can prove it by tricking these dumbos into handing over their lunch, and they’re too fat anyway.

If all my beliefs about myself and the world are reasonable and mesh together smoothly and with the rules of society, then life will cruise ahead, if not always smoothly then manageably. If my beliefs are self-contradictory and transgress society’s rules, they’ll cause me distress and friction with the world. The former represents normal personality, the latter personality disorder. The paranoid stance is simply a set of beliefs about the world, mainly the human part of it, based in a fundamental belief that says something like: “Look out, it’s a dog eat dog world, you can’t trust anybody or anything unless you’ve got it in your pocket, and then somebody will try to steal it.” As the study notes, this takes different forms, although I prefer my set to theirs. Traditionally, there are five elements to the paranoid stance, five forms it can take but there’s no limit to the number of beliefs people can have under each heading:

An intense preoccupation with matters of right and wrong and justice;

An intense level of suspicion, including jealousy;

An intense preoccupation with conspiracies;

An intense preoccupation with the supernatural;

An intense sense of persecution.

Intense means intense, it means dominating and controlling life to the exclusion of normal activity and relationships. It doesn’t mean “a fair bit, more than me.” I also prefer to add grandiosity to these because the central element in all of them is Me, as in: “You’re all looking at Me, you’re all thinking bad about Me, I know what’s right and you’re wrong, I understand the universe and you’re all out to get Me because I’m so important. In fact, I’m so important that even God talks to Me so there.” For the paranoid personality, there is an important belief right down near the belief “I exist.” This one says: “I’m never wrong.” Trump shows this brilliantly, as do most of the people in his orbit. If somebody points out that he’s wrong, he simply launches an attack on them until they’re silenced. Classic paranoid ploy.

How does all this come about? Well, it doesn’t come about because the child was valued as a person by happy, caring people in a safe and ordered environment. Anything less can result in a warped perspective, a distorted self-image and a view of the world as a dangerous, unpredictable place so that life becomes a constant battle for survival. Needless to say, mainstream psychiatry and psychology want to see personality disorders as genetic (e.g. the work of psychologist Robert Plomin) but after a hundred years of trying, they haven’t proven anything. In particular, the so-called gold standard of twin studies has completely failed to deliver the prize [4]. In my view, the reason is clear: one’s adult personality is heavily influenced by life experiences, and crucially, which the mainstream has never considered, we can do it ourselves.

That sounds completely crazy: how can we change our personalities? If it’s genetic then naturally enough, we can’t, we’re at the mercy of our genes, but if personality is purely a psychological state, then we can, quite easily. In fact, we do it all the time. We routinely tighten the screws as we go through life. We deliberately make ourselves tidier and more responsible for details or we resolve to be more suspicious of smooth talkers. In the main, we act to make ourselves safer, to reduce the risk of something going wrong in the future. We make ourselves more obsessional and rule-abiding because we see that’s the way to get ahead; also the best way of avoiding trouble. We soon learn we can use our obsessionality to push people around so it becomes even more fun. But above all other personality factors, suspicion feeds on itself and grows to take control of life. People get more paranoid as they get older, even though nothing much has gone wrong. By the time they’re running the show, they’re at their worst, which is why so many politicians and businessmen come across as overtly paranoid. Most of the time, of course, they conceal it but it spills out, often as aggressive grandiosity, e.g. Trump’s bizarre speech to the UNGA last week where he threatened everybody who didn’t do as he says. Similarly, tech bro Peter Thiel’s preoccupation with the “antichrist” qualifies him as psychotic.

Needless to say, the paranoid like to surround themselves with people who agree with them, which isn’t so difficult as normal people are driven away. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is seriously paranoid while his press secretaries have all been practically off the guage. Recently departed Caroline Leavitt routinely attacked anybody who asked difficult questions, showing zero insight into her behaviour (look at her cold and contemptuous demeanour). But they’re not born like this and none of them can say they were mistreated as children (Trump himself was emotionally neglected and was specifically trained to be a greedy and self-righteous prick [5]). They mould themselves so they can get higher up the ladder and dominate more people just because domination is sooo reinforcing (i.e. ‘feels so good’).

So back to that study of paranoid ideas in personality disorder: Yes, we’re all paranoid to some extent, but it’s a personality dimension, not an all-or-none trait; only the paranoid survive, as they say. No, most of us can’t blame our parents; no, siblings don’t have equal emotional environments, the eldest gets to push the younger ones around, the youngest is protected as the baby and the middle ones are told to stop whining. Yes, life teaches us to be self-protective but my self-protection comes across to you as suspicion; and most important is the insidious effect of a paranoid culture. Most commonly, this is openly and deliberately subcultural, where people are trained to be paranoid, as in the military, a political party or in police services. If you want to get ahead, you have to know who the enemy is and you don’t question it. There are paranoid religions where people are told to see the devil lurking behind every minor upset, paranoid political cultures such as the Q-Anon movement in the US and, naturally enough, paranoid criminal subcultures. These are self-reinforcing in that people choose to join and choose to stay; in order to get ahead, they have to repeat the message and embellish it. This is also true of mainstream politics in most countries, which probably explains why the study on paranoid personality disorders concluded:

The present review suggests a lack of systematic studies on the link between personality disorders and paranoid presentations (p1228).

If, against all the evidence, you believe in genetically-determined categories of personality disorder, then you’re not going to start examining your own culture because it might turn out to be seriously embarrassing. The last thing they want to know is that we are taught to be paranoid.

References:

1. Fanti E, Di Samo M & Di Pierro R (2023). In search of hidden threats: A scoping review on paranoid presentations in personality disorders. Clin Psychol Psychother. 30:1215–1233. DOI: 10.1002/cpp.2913

2. Mak S, Thomas A (2022) Steps for Conducting a Scoping Review. J Grad Med Ed. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-22-00621.1

3. McLaren N (2007). The categorical system of diagnosis: Personality Disorder. Chapter 8 in Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences.; Ann Arbor, Mi.: Future Psychiatry Press.

4. Joseph J (2014) The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. New York: Routledge.

5. Trump ML (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. London: Simon and Shuster.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. https://bookshop.org/. (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At https://bookshop.org/

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

.Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At https://bookshop.org/

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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In Shenzhen, China, Hui Ka Yan, 67, the former chairman of Evergrande, a bankrupt property company and, having once had $43billion to his name, briefly the richest man in Asia, was sentenced to life in prison and confiscation of his entire assets for massive corruption. In China, corrupt businessmen get life; in the US, they get the keys to the White House where they launch criminal and hopelessly incompetent wars of aggression. Meantime, in Germany, after two recent state elections, the political scene is in turmoil. In Saxony-Anhalt, formerly in East Germany, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came first with 44% of the vote while in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern it took 38%. AfD is strongly anti-gay but still manages to be led by a lesbian mother of two who doesn’t even live in Germany. The right wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has ruled Germany for 53 of the past 77 years, was wiped out, joining the Social Democrats in electoral oblivion and allowing Die Linke, the far-left heirs of communism, to prosper. Votes for the extremes are coming from people under 35; their parents are still voting for the old parties of their youth.

In France, the far-right Marine le Pen is close to winning next year’s presidential election, same as Brazil where the son of imprisoned insurrectionist and former president Jair Bolsonario is neck and neck with the elderly socialist, Lula da Silva. Javier Milei, far-right neoliberal president of Argentina, is doing what he can to move the balance using the implausibly corrupt Fernando Cerimedo (a detailed video from Ben Norton here, definitely worth watching). In Pakistan, the brutal and corrupt military dictatorship has taken to arresting women in their 70s as “threats to stability.”

Are these incidents connected? Yes, I believe they are, and it’s important to understand just how they’re connected, otherwise we get overwhelmed by the chaos and are tempted to join one or other extremist strongman (or woman) who promises to sort out the mess by kicking out foreigners. Unfortunately, the topic is vast and people tend to work on bits of it rather than tackle what is a very complex “big picture.” Can a mere shrink throw some light on the scene? Let’s see. We’ll start in France in 1798 where a child was born in the tumult of the late Revolution and grew up obsessed with the idea of putting society on a stable footing. By the time he died in 1857, Auguste Comte had built a formidable reputation as a scholar and curmudgeon as the founder of sociology and of an atheistic world religion.

Driven by its quest for truth, society, Comte said, evolves through recognisable stages. The first is the theological, where society is structured around God as the source of authority and revelation as the source of knowledge. The inhabitants, most of whom are little better than slaves, live in a universe of magic and believe whatever they’re told by the divinely-appointed king and his ever-alert enforcers, the priesthood. Life is strictly ordered in hierarchies such that power flows from the palace, through the priestly and secular aristocracies and down to the unfortunates at the bottom of the pile who end up with just enough to prevent them thinking about causing trouble.

In time, this type of society develops and becomes richer, eventually giving way to what he called the metaphysical stage in which divine power seeps away, replaced by the power of thought. With wealth and stability, centres of learning become more important, the ancient ways are questioned and authority starts to vest in reasoned arguments rather than the headsman’s axe. The concept of human rights, above and beyond those granted by church or state, grows and takes hold of the increasingly sophisticated and wealthy urban middle classes. Education is readily available; people have the time, the money and, importantly, the technology to travel; and books are much cheaper so ideas can spread more easily. None of this is absolute: there were great centres of learning in some theocratic societies, and the wealth of many metaphysical societies was built on slavery and extractive colonisation; as they say “Nobody’s perfect.”

Finally, society matures into a rational or scientific stage where reason and research prevail over myth reinforced by naked power or high-sounding bromides. Scientific societies are able to isolate their own problems and devise solutions that suit themselves, using positively-established proofs rather than relying on magical or metaphysical speculation, hence the term ‘positivism.’ Philosophy and science are to be stripped of all irrational or unprovable metaphysical elements, leaving only a spare but reality-based system of knowledge advancing toward some ideal future. The universe is seen as a real, rule-governed place which, by diligent application of our intellect, we can understand and work on to satisfy our needs. In particular, all proof rests on observation: if something can’t be seen and measured, then it’s either irrelevant or meaningless. While these ideas may sound a little grandiose today, Comte has had a singularly profound impact on life today: modern science just is positivist science. However, there is also a direct connection between his utopian ideals and the spreading chaos today, although he would certainly be horrified at the paths societies have taken since his death.

While there were many streams to the development of positivist thought, they were all focussed on one element: eliminating fanciful thinking and replacing it with reality-based observation. Science and society had to be built on proven, established facts, not on whimsical daydreams such as religion or “forces of nature” and so on. Reliable knowledge can only come from direct observations through our senses, not from studying ancient texts in a turret or gazing at the stars while stoned on mushrooms. This approach is known as empiricism, the notion that we cannot know anything about the world unless we have seen it and measured it. While this idea had been gaining strength throughout the 19^th Century, it was given an enormous boost by the horrors of the Great War of 1914-19. What value was religion if it couldn’t prevent untold millions of deaths and vast destruction? Romantic dreams of imperial glory died in the mud. Humans had to do better, and the proper path was to discard sentiment and other mushy notions, replacing them with rational ideas only.

Starting early in the 1920s, a group of economists centred in Vienna proposed that economics had to be seen as a science in its own right, to be studied empirically like any other mainstream science. All metaphysical notions such as value, sympathy, welfare and so on had to be discarded in favour of seeing the market as a dispassionate, self-correcting means of creating and distributing wealth. The market, they believed, is a mechanism for encouraging efficient distribution of resources and discouraging waste and inefficiency. Only a free market can do this as it alone has all the information needed to function smoothly. Mere humans, working either alone or as a group, cannot possibly know enough to tell the market what to do, therefore any form of government regulation or interference was anathema to them. Government’s role was to pass laws on crime and corruption and to guard the borders but, that apart, the only good government was a very small one sitting on its hands while facing away from the economy.

This group of economists didn’t get much air time over the next few decades. The Great Depresssion threw the world into chaos, for which direct government intervention was seen as the only chance of survival. Fascism developed and grew and, in 20 short years, the world was at war again. After 1945, governments continued their involvement in economies, setting up huge social welfare systems, directing research and investment, and using taxes to redistribute national wealth so everybody had a fair go. This was the golden age for workers as company CEOs earned about twenty times the median worker’s salary. In the scornful words of Harold MacMillan, Britain’s multimillionaire prime minister, the workers had never had it so good. Yes, it was good, far better than the misery of the depression or the brutality of the laissez faire capitalism that Friedrich Engels described in 1843 [1]. In fact, it was so good that the CEOs and the rich shareholders wondered why they couldn’t have a little bit more icing on their share of the national cake.

After a bit of casting around, they came across the ageing Vienna economists and their students, who were working on what they called neoliberal economics. They were delighted: it was everything a grasping capitalist could ask for, all neatly wrapped up in technical jargon that most of them didn’t bother to read because the intros said it all: Get rid of unprovable fantasies such as social justice, equality, social value, community, and mutual interdependence, give everything a cash value, let the dogs loose to eat each other and may the best dog win. That and that alone will stimulate the market to produce real wealth which will come first to the owners of capital and then trickle down to benefit the workers. As the owners and managers accumulate more wealth, they will have to reinvest it which will create more jobs and thus a bigger economy which will benefit everybody. Whoopee, they said, bring it on, get rid of the tender-hearted socialist free-loaders, cut the government out of it and soon we will all arrive at capitalist paradise. And as their reward for making life so much better for everybody, the owners of capital should get a bigger share, thank you. Yes, even when CEOs get over 300 times the median worker’s salary, that’s not overdoing it because without capitalists and managers, there would be no jobs at all (if Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg and the other tech oligarchs are included, it’s nearly 400 times as much).

Politicians didn’t need much pushing to join the gravy train; in no time, the capitalists had their men and women elected to power, Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US, and many others. The idea that society existed for the benefit of all its members was swept away, replaced with the idea that only people who worked hard and contributed had any rights. Social projects were measured on a cost-benefit balance and dumped if they didn’t generate enough revenue. Education had to be directed at what paid, not what was good for society since, as Thatcher screeched, “There is no such thing as society.” What we thought was society is in fact just a collection of detached and unemotional inviduals going about their business of rationally weighing costs and making economic decisions in their own interest, unaffected by sentiment and false notions such as good and evil. If it paid, it was ipso facto good, if it didn’t, out with the garbage.

In no time, even before neoliberalism’s full implications became clear, the economic basis of most Western countries and many others was turned upside down. In practice, neoliberalism is a social program masquerading as a science of economics, which licenses and rewards greed above all other human attributes. It says it removes values and other metaphysics from the equation but it can’t eliminate greed and dishonesty and, above all, doesn’t try. There’s no limit: anybody who stops to help a sick or troubled person by the roadside loses his place in the stampede. In an echo of Dickensian workhouses, people have to be encouraged to work by making unemployment so shameful and so unpleasant that they have no choice but to take any job on offer, at the price the employer chooses:

Positivist science says: “If we can’t see it and measure it, it isn’t the province of science.” This soon morphed to “If we can’t see it and measure it, it doesn’t exist and anybody who says it does is an idiot and will be ignored and preferably lose funding.”

Neoliberal economics says: “Only the market knows the cash value of anything; if the market doesn’t assign a cash value to it, it doesn’t exist and anybody who says it does is an idiot and will be ignored and preferably lose funding.”

It’s the same principle applied to different fields: eliminate all emotion and pretend that objectivity will explain everything we need to know. Psychiatry says: “We can’t measure feelings so we’ll ignore them and talk only about neurotransmitters and genes and drugs, with a side of ECT.” Games theorists apply this to nuclear war, quite forgetting that war is very destructive but the people who make all the money from it are the same people who make the decisions about launching wars and who won’t be doing the fighting. Economists pretend that if global warming is real, the market will price it in. Yes, the market may put a carbon price on fossil fuels but by then it will be too late: markets are mindless, remember? They can’t look ahead and say: “Hmm, I wonder what’s best for my great grandchildren and the koalas? OK, even if it costs me, that’s what we’ll do.”

This was forecast in 1944 by a Hungarian economist called Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), the same year that one of the most influential of neolibs, Friedrich Hayek, published a widely-quoted polemic, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argued that any form of central planning would inevitably lead to economic inefficiency, with loss of freedom and, in due course, reduction of workers to serfs: socialism, he said, necessarily leads to Nazism (he also said Hitler was a fool for alienating and expelling Germany’s Jews because many of them were confirmed totalitarians in the German mould – as we see in Israel today). Polanyi disagreed. He believed the entire notion of the self-regulating market was false as it was built on false assumptions, while assigning a cash value to everything would inevitably lead to the destruction of the very society the market was supposed to serve:

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting (i.e. free) market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness (p3) ... It is all too easily assumed by economic liberals that economic rulers tend to be beneficial, while political rulers do not (p165).

The most dangerous false assumption in neoliberalism comes directly from its positivist roots: that if we can’t see and measure human psychology, we can safely ignore it and let the market sort it out. Neoliberalism is a theory of human behaviour, specifically measurable human economic behaviour. However, it’s not built on a theory of mind, it simply hangs from a skyhook called “observable behaviour,” unsupported by any concept of what goes on in human heads that generates the observable behaviour. It doesn’t ask why, for example, people support charities. Instead, it works out how much people will give each year, and deducts that from the tax bill that the rich have to pay – to the delight of the rich, of course, as GBS noted: “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” Where there should be a foundation for neoliberalism derived from a theory of mind, there is simply a black hole.

Neolibs assumed that people would automatically follow the rules, that they would be on their best behaviour and not try to take the last bit of bread from the widows and orphans. The part of their theory that should have said “Play fair, no biting, kneeing or thieving” was left blank, a void, just because it was moral and moral values have no cash value. Into that void galloped all the cheats, liars, thieves, scoundrels, political and religious fanatics and assorted rapists, paedophiles and mass murderers who had been kept at arm’s length by the welfare state. Now they could loot to their black hearts’ content, there was nothing to stop them because the more people have, the more they feel they’re entitled to, as Nobel winner Paul Krugman commented:

With great wealth comes both great power and a separation from the concerns of ordinary citizens. What the very rich want, they often get; but what they want is often harmful to the rest of the nation.

So we see that the grandmotherly Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has just been exposed as being the centre of a ring of corruption involving government contracts. No doubt her defence will be “It wasn’t actually illegal and everybody else was doing it, so why not?” Chris Hedges gives a very brief summary of Trump’s endless corruption, with the warning that he is well on the way to bankrupting the US just as he cheated and bankrupted his casinos. Trump, Hedges says, is a typical mafia extortionist. How did he get the keys to the White House? Because there was nothing in neoliberalism to stop him. Its architects saw to that: “Strip away the morality, assign everything cash value and we will soon reach economic nirvana.” No, not so. It’s as Lord Acton said 150 years ago: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.” That’s not quite right: Trump doesn’t have the mentality of a gangster, he is a gangster, and always has been [2]. He lied to get the job and then threw the doors to the treasury open to all his evil Epstein mates. Trump is not an aberration, he is the logical conclusion of the neoliberal experiment.

The world today is lumbering into new territory, it will never be the same. I’m not suggesting it has always been nice for all its occupants but it’s certainly getting worse by the day and we have no idea where this ends. For this, we can thank the neoliberal economists who took their cues from positivist scientists, who were following the dictates of Auguste Comte. What a pity they didn’t finish with Comte’s concept of a universal, atheistic religion, but then religion has no cash value, does it? Well, it does, it can be very profitable but only if the central message is ignored:

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24).

Boring, forget that bit. Pass me the caviar, James, and could you tell those hungry people outside to stop making all that fuss? If the market wants them to eat, it will provide food.

Be careful, lady, there may come a day when they eat the rich.

****

References:

1. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

2. Trump ML (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. London: Simon and Shuster.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

In 1486, a book was published in Germany that, for nearly 300 years, had a major effect on life throughout Europe, especially for women. The Malleus Maleficarum or “Hammer of the Witches” was written by one Heinrich Kramer (1430-1505), a Dominican priest who was renowned as a fiery preacher with a bizarre obsession with female sexuality. In about 1484, he had been booted out of Innsbruck as “senile and crazy” and the book is widely regarded as his form of revenge. However, it took off and long outlived him. He advanced the case that witches are real because the devil is real; witches are mostly women because women are lustful and weak-minded; and they are recruited by the devil to advance his cause and bring about the ruination of Christendom. Or something, that bit’s not clear but he was very clear on one point: taking his cue from Exodus 22:18 (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”), he believed they had to be exterminated, preferably by burning. They could have a trial but the more they protested their innocence, even under torture, the more likely they were to be clever witches who were even more dangerous. Similarly, people who claimed there were no such things as witches were clearly agents of the devil and needed the same fate.

Regardless of anything various popes and other leaders had to say, the witchcraft craze took control of society. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in about 1450 certainly was a major factor in its spread as books travelled much faster and influenced far more people than itinerate preachers could manage. In German-speaking regions, there was a particular obsession with midwives. If a baby was born weak, sickly or deformed, which was very common then, the family often claimed that the midwife had swapped their healthy baby for a weakling or Wechselkind and would use their child as a sacrifice or for cannibalism. As a result, by mid-16^th Century, there were practically no midwives left alive in the entire region which, or course, meant more children were born deformed or injured.

While there had always been a low-grade belief in sorceresses, women who could manipulate spirits and other forces into doing what they wanted, they were not generally regarded as a threat to society itself. The basis of the witchcraft mania was that they were no longer seen as people who could get things done (for a fee) but as agents of the satanic force to delay the Second Coming. The point is that the belief becomes self-sustaining, it creates its own evidence. Thus, a woman who was being tortured who cursed the priests and their helpers was obviously evil because God would never permit an innocent person to be convicted of witchcraft. Many priests (and popes) had children on the side, or choirboys who conveniently didn’t get pregnant, but people who accused them of acting out their sexual obsessions were obviously evil agents of the devil and were given a ticket to the bonfires.

History shows that what starts as one person’s bizarre obsession or delusion quickly spreads and becomes a moral panic. The British author Stanley Cohen described how panics develop. People are made aware of some threat to the fundamental basis of society, coming from within the society itself, not outside, so that it is largely invisible and can’t be denied on factual grounds. It is therefore easily manipulated and amplified by people who stand to gain in some sense from building a crusade to oppose it. These days, people scoff at these historical cases: “Hohoho, look at how those primitives acted. We’re far too modern and sophisticated to fall for that nonsense.” Don’t believe it. The Red Scare of McCarthyism was a classic example of how the population can be frightened into supporting actions they would normally not endorse. The current anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim “global war on terror” is just the latest in a long and sordid history of such panics in which people are told that society is in danger and they have to employ extraordinary measures to prevent its collapse. The American socialist, Eugene Debs (1855-1926) said:

For in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the people.

If he were speaking today, he would say “the cloak of patriotism or religion or health or all three to deceive and overawe the people and convince them to hand over their savings.”

All this comes to mind because of an announcement by a group calling themselves the American Professional Society of ADHD and Related Disorders (APSARD) are on the verge of releasing their Guidelines for Adult ADHD. This will “ ... provide comprehensive, evidence-informed recommendations for the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults.” Everything you need to know in a snappy edition of “multiple hundreds of pages” to manage the 6.8% of adults [1] who have the disorder (that’s up from zero a few years ago). That will no doubt make it easier for the swarms of private psychiatrists who are charging $3000 or more to hand the diagnosis to anybody who walks through their doors and asks for it.

My attention is wandering at the mere thought of it but the question remains: How can what was promoted as a childhood disorder suddenly afflict 6.8% of adults? There is a sense in which it could because if, as mainstream psychiatry claims, all mental disorder is genetic, then it isn’t going to suddenly get better just because the “patient” turns 18. Illness is never so obliging but we can be sure that with the looming publication of their “guidelines,” the rate of diagnosis will go through the roof. Just as publication of the Malleus 540 years ago meant that people suddenly started seeing witches lurking in every corner, the diagnosis of “ADHD” has all the features of a moral panic. First, the threat is to our children and then to struggling adults: if we don’t do the right thing by them, they’ll fail in life and it will be our fault because we didn’t listen to the experts. The threat is genetic, it’s in us so it’s not like Covid, which we could prevent by drinking bleach or shining UV light down our gullets (he wasn’t joking; he has no sense of humour).

The threat is always invisible, intangible, moving among us and thus the more dangerous as it adds a sense of betrayal, which triggers rage. The witch was the querulous woman next door; the communist was the smiling worker at the next bench or desk; the Islamist terrorist is the helpful man in the fruit shop plotting to hide a hand grenade in your potatoes. In the case of ADHD, the danger is our DNA, silent, unseen until it explodes and takes control of our children’s lives. It possesses them, you could say. That’s pretty threatening but the hidden threat is easily massaged and amplified by what are called moral entrepreneurs, people who double as heralds and saviours, the Dominicans half a milllenium ago, psychiatrists today: “We know the problem and we can fix it. Trust us, hand us your money and all will be well.” Their proposal is to change the entire moral basis of the society to suit their ends. For example, medieval society was convinced that burning women, even your own mother, was no longer abhorrent but was doing God’s will. In the 1950s and again today, societies are being convinced to surrender basic human and civil rights in order to counter the “extraordinary threats” of “monolithic international communism” or “terrorism” or, latest cab off the rank, “antisemitism.” Similarly, psychiatry wants the society to regard drugging children as normal, or failure to drug them as a moral failing.

A moral panic is broad-based and long-term, and is urged along by people who believe firmly in it but who also stand to gain from the movement. It’s not the same as what used to be called “mass hysteria” or “epidemic anxiety,” e.g. Royal Free Disease, from London in the mid-1950s (now claimed by the CFS/ME crowd). That’s the rapid spread of anxiety largely among young people over some unseen threat that triggers somatic symptoms but quickly settles, e.g. a scare of gas near a school, etc.

The current rapid spread of ADHD under its various labels has all the features of a moral panic, not of a valid scientific entity. It has become a vast and self-sustaining industry in its own right, endlessly productive and ever-alert to attack anybody who challenges it. The idea behind a set of guides hundreds of pages long is not to set out the evidence for a confirmed diagnosis but to crush any potential opposition from the beginning. Courts, schools, parliaments, police, welfare officers and public guardians are incapable of reading the sort of pseudoscientific claptrap that pours forth these days to justify drugging children and deciding which parent will or will not have custody or access. They’re swayed, meaning over-awed, by “the weight of evidence,” not by the facts set out in the evidence. A huge book by hundreds of people making millions from the diagnosis invariably overwhelms a report by a single practitioner. Historian and lawyer Eric Dean said:

This impression of scientific certitude in the midst of substantial and potentially crippling problems is a tribute to the ability of psychologists and the psychiatric profession to acquire and wield power ... the salient point is that the mental health professions have a track record of advancing diagnostic categories that lack clear underlying unity based on scientific evidence, but that, nonetheless, have the effect of responding to popular needs and aggrandizing the power and authority of mental health professionals [2, pp200-202].

I am utterly unconvinced that there is a valid diagnosis of ADHD which can reliably be recognised by psychiatrists (and psychologists and social workers and schools and everybody else on the gravy train) and for which treatment with addictive drugs is essential. My primary school in the country in West Australia many years ago had about 400 children. We all knew each other, saw each other all the time, knew where everybody lived and their families; that’s normal in country towns. There was one boy with severe epilepsy who was eventually sent to a special school in the city, one with cardiac disease who died, some who were barely able to read but stayed because there was nothing else, but not one child ever showed the features now thought to afflict up to 20% of children. You did not speak out of turn, you did not get up from your desk without permission and bothering other children meant a trip to the headmaster’s office. Same in high school, except the 30% of kids who didn’t want to be at school left after Year 9 and started work, and life got a bit dull for the rest of us.

In the medieval witch hunts, the burden of proof was reversed: once the allegation was made, it was up to the victim to prove it wasn’t true, that she was not a satanic agent. Needless to say, that was impossible. The point is germane: there is no evidence any person can produce to prove that the so-called “ADHD epidemic” is not a moral panic. The burden of proving that it is not simply another moral panic rests on those who claim it is a valid clinical entity: it is not my job to prove that it is a panicky fad, but theirs to prove it is not. Until that not insignificant point is cleared up, we should not be exposing our children to toxic and addictive drugs [1], just as psychiatrists should not have been allowed to cut people’s brains but convinced society and themselves that they knew what they were doing. However, as Upton Sinclair commented, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

References:

1. Oliva HNP et al (2026). Pharmacotherapies for Co-Occurring Stimulant Use Disorder and ADHD: a network meta-analysis. J Clin. Psychiat. 87(4): 26r16478.

2. Dean ET. Shook over hell: Post-traumatic stress, Vietnam and the Civil War. Harvard: University Press, 1997.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

With anthropogenic climate change accelerating daily, how will the biosphere collapse? Slowly, then suddenly. Collapse is like a ship capsizing: once it starts, the process becomes self-sustaining and can’t be stopped. A paper published recently looks at a critically important environmental question, the natural limits of human population. The international group of authors compare two vitally important but oft-blurred statistics for any organism in any environment: the maximum carrying capacity and the maximum sustainable carrying capacity. They’re different, as we see regularly in agriculture. People come across some new land so they let their animals loose, which breed happily, the flocks grow and everybody’s happy. With time, the land starts to deteriorate. The flocks thin, the productivity of wool or milk or meat declines and misery stalks the land. Maximum carrying capacity is always far beyond the natural limits the land can bear. The title of this paper leaves no doubt that has happened to H. sapiens: Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity [1; a short article here]. After a fairly dense statistical analysis, they conclude:

... it is clear that Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources ... The tragedy is that human endeavor has short-circuited the ultimately inevitable corrective feedback loops carrying capacity imposes, without replacing them with humane and environmentally friendly corrective feedbacks.

Current world population is about 8.3billion, rising by 0.83% pa and on track to reach about 12billion by 2070. That’s well within the lifespan of many of our readers; all that remains to decide is the quality of life that the majority would experience. On our present course, of consuming far more than the world can provide in the long term and dumping the waste in the air, water and land, only the very wealthy would think they had a good deal. The other 11.9billion (99%) would not be happy with their lot, and for good reason: there simply isn’t enough to go around. Certainly, in countries like the US and Australia, the average level of consumption and waste production is far above sustainability. The authors cite various studies that indicate the maximum sustainable human population of the planet at a reasonable standard of living is about 2.5billion, or about 70% less than today. In order to achieve that by the end of the century, the great majority of people alive today would not be able to have children. That’s pretty frightening but I can’t see anything wrong with their figures (unlike psychiatry, where the figures are always suspect). I have no problem with the idea that if we continue on our present course, we’re headed for disaster. Two questions immediately arise:

What are the forces keeping us on our present course?

What would a sustainable lifestyle be like?

The forces keeping us on our present course are wholly political. They are not forces of nature or of metaphysics, indeed, they aren’t even forces at all. Our current trajectory is determined by small groups of powerful people who are convinced that they and they alone should make the big decisions, and their decision is “Full greed ahead.” Anybody who tries to interfere with this will be neutralised in one way or another. Are the power elite smart enough to understand the worrying message in that paper? Yes, they most certainly are. Even where a leader arises who is too stupid to understand it himself, he has immediate access to very clever and well-educated people who can answer any dumb question he asks or counter any of his braindead objections. All the power elite have to do is ask, but they don’t. The reason they don’t ask is because they don’t want to hear the answers. The answer is crystal clear: What you people are doing is taking us to hell on a hang glider, so we want change, now.

If the power elite are smart enough to drive a car (note that Trump can’t drive), then they are smart enough to understand that elementary point, so why don’t they do something about it? The answer is that they are not driven by their cognitive capacities, they are driven by something far more primitive than that: hormones. Their intelligence is the servant of their hormones, not the other way around. The urge to dominate is built into every human being. For many people, probably the majority, early life experiences push the domination drive into a small box where it remains for the rest of their lives. Very early, they learn to keep quiet, don’t rock the boat, don’t stand out or the world will come down on them, hard. Their aims are limited, their horizons narrow and they try to build a life with few goals that other people can frustrate. Others aren’t so restricted, they can exert themselves and get ahead but again, they’re happy with what fortune throws at them. They can get their dominance kicks in the local football club (bad pun), at home, in a government job or as a teacher or prison officer (they were much the same when I went to school).

However, a small group have big ideas that get bigger and bigger as they push their way up the hierarchy. They want to be on top and they want everybody to know it. Very quickly, they forget that they’re supposed to be looking after everybody lower in the pile and they fix their eyes on the competition, the people over the border who are busy building an even bigger pile. Then the race is on. They stop competing against the other people in their town, business, country or whatever and compete against each other. We see this on full, open display among the Tech Bros, the bunch of grossly narcissistic, utterly selfish and profoundly psychopathic people who dominate the world of high tech. They are all caught in a mad rush to be the first to develop superintelligent AI, regardless of the risks involved. Why do they want to? Because Homo sapiens, that’s what humans do. As they scramble up the ladder, their sense of entitlement grows and grows, as does their rage at anybody who tries to stop them. Anybody who tugs at their sleeve and ventures: “Is this wise?” will be shoved aside, if not dumped in the river, as French economist, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), noted 180 years ago:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it (Economic Sophisms).

Insiders are saying that there is at least 10% risk that a rogue AI program could lead to human extinction within ten years but they are being ignored from the top. Trump himself has said that the US will not put restrictions on AI development because all it needs is a “high IQ president.” Where he will find one isn’t clear but in fact, he is deliberately enabling the intramural race among the Tech Bros, cheering them on in the hope they can beat China. Why do they have to beat China? He hasn’ got to that bit yet but for a truly chilling account of this race to destruction, read this post from the very sober and well-connected Jonathon Cook. They’re like a dog chasing a bus: if he caught it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it.

What we are seeing is the summation of a number of socio-political trends. The first is the mad rush to be Tech Bro. No. 1, with the usual dangerously bizarre runners: Musk, Bezos, Altman, Karp, Thiel, Huang, Zuckerberg and the rest of the gang of super heroes lolloping along. Close behind and urging them on is the finance industry which can smell the wealth of Croesus coming down the highway. Beside them and egging each other on are the politicians whose goal is to crush China, to make sure that the US remains dominant come what may, with the arms industry and the military handing them water and stimulants as they all run madly along a track whose end point is hidden behind a small hill. When challenged, they angrily exclaim: “What are you complaining about? We haven’t stumbled yet.” Governments govern with the consent of the governed. That assumes we know what they’re doing, which explains why they lie so much.

AI dominance is needed to maintain world dominance. In West Asia, the goal of the US, in conjunction with or subservience to the zionists, is to reduce Iran to the sort of failed state they managed in Libya, in Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Iraq. Once that’s done, the US will turn its full attention to China and Russia, the goal being to topple their uncooperative governments, to turn them into smoking ruins that can be looted at leisure. Is this declared or even undeclared policy? No, they don’t say that, they just say things like the Speaker of the House, the gleefully devious Mike Johnson, who said: “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American.” A real and present threat to Joe Bloggs of Great Bend, Kansas? That’s not delusional, that’s acculturation, commonly known as brain-washing (although in Johnson’s case, a light rinse would have sufficed). The 1% and their lackeys don’t actually have to talk about this, they’re all in agreement. They’re like a pack of dogs in the street sorting themselves into a hierarchy: none of them say anything but they get all the information they need from sniffing each other’s bums. No offence to dogs, of course, and apparently nobody needs to sniff Trump’s, they can smell it across the room. On that note, we turn to the next point:

Question 2: What would a sustainable life be like? It would be different in many respects and much the same in others. The first major difference is that there would be no military forces, no arms industries and no wars. As far as anybody can work out, militarism costs us about $19trillion a year. Direct costs are something like $2.8trillion but they don’t include all the deaths, injuries, damage or destruction of infrastructure and farmland, and loss of production which make up the other $16trillion. That’s a lot of money, equivalent to about $2,250 pa for every living human, which is far more than about half the world lives on now. That money is enough to provide food, water, housing and infrastructure for every person within about ten years but instead, it’s burned and blown away by armies. Without them, there would be a lot of unemployed people looking for jobs as builders, teachers, farmers and so on, but they wouldn’t be out of work long as the money would be available. At this stage, that’s a dream only.

What else? The gigantic tourism industry would more or less come to a halt: “Tourism contributed US$11.6 trillion to global GDP in 2025, representing roughly 9.8% of the world economy.” It supports something like 370million jobs or one job in nine across the globe. Amazing, I had no idea it’s that big. I’m not sure if that includes two notorious rackets, professional and business conferences, probably not. However, the distribution of consumption of the tourism trade follows a very typical power curve: at most, 20% of the world’s population consume at least 80% of the product, while 50% of people get next to nothing, maybe a crowded train trip every now and then. The idea that we can jump on a plane in Melbourne to go to a cousin’s wedding in the UK or swan around the Adriatic on a $500million private yacht (today’s version of “let them eat cake”) has to go. One way around it would be to issue everybody on earth with a limited number of carbon credits for non-essential travel. Rich people who want to jet about the place would have to buy them at auction from poor people, reducing travel and transferring money from rich to poor. There’s not much chance of getting the US to agree to that due to their abhorrence of “world government,” unless they’re doing the governing. Can we live without buzzing around the world all the time? People used to, they might have had one Grand Tour in their lives but that apart, it was where they could get on a horse or a sailboat. I can cope. Maybe airships would come back, they’re cheap and clean.

Commercial sport. Yes, a monumental waste of resources and only ever causes trouble so we’ll give that the flick as well. They say the EU has 1.8million people employed full-time in sport and such like, 0.9% of the work force and increasing by 8% pa. I’d say it’s higher than that, I don’t think they’ve included all the people who work on golf courses, race tracks, betting shops and so on. The Olympics and World Cup we definitely don’t need, they’re now just badly-disguised nationalism. F1 racing would be among the first to go, total waste of money and fuel. In fact, if we got rid of the idea that sport is something ordinary people watch professionals doing, that would be a good start. Sport and exercise are for everybody but the rot starts early. From primary school, sports teachers push the idea that only the elite should try, the rest of the herd are just there to clap and cheer (we had a teacher who scornfully referred to kids who kept dropping the ball or falling on the hurdles as “motor morons”). Every person should exercise every day, outside and in company when possible, but as exercise, not as competition. It should be as normal as cleaning your teeth.

Hospitals. Get rid of hospitals? Are you crazy? No, but they need to be brought under control. Hospitals are prodigiously wasteful of resources, including staff, plastics, power, water, laundry, chemicals, sterilisation and so on. We can dramatically reduce health costs by a proper national health service set up to detect and remedy illness before it gets out of control. If we provide accessible outreach services coupled with regular free screening, levels of illness and disability in the community quickly fall. I don’t mean screening as where schools give every child a questionnaire to diagnose “ADHD” and send them for “the tablets.” That’s a separate matter but it points to the destructive effect of private practice on the health industry, especially my pet hate, private psychiatric hospitals, which are just a racket. And, of course, a total ban on tobacco (New Zealand had the right idea, they were going to ban it for people born after 2010 or something but the right wing nobbled that plan).

There are so many other areas that need change, e.g. fuel is too cheap, allowing people to roar around in their souped-up cars making nuisances of themselves or drive to the shops for just one item. Alcohol is a major social problem but the younger generations aren’t drinking as much so that may solve itself. Meantime, vast amounts of prime agricultural land are devoted to growing the feedstock of the various booze industries. If we reduce that wastage and start growing food, we reduce the pressure to clear native forests. But if we restrict alcohol, doesn’t that just push people toward illegal drugs? To an extent it does, so management of addictive drugs has to become a priority and not just a political football to be dragged out for elections. Similarly, we need to make serious efforts to look at how people get on a criminal career path in life because once they’re on it, it’s very difficult for them to get off.

A sustainable life would be just as fulfilling and a lot less worrying but behind all of these matters stands the glowering façade of the neoliberal state, the one that says “As long as I can make more money, I don’t care whether you starve.” All of this is part of the same fundamental human drive, the urge to dominate others regardless of the cost to them. Dominating feels so good that we don’t stop to think what the downtrodden feel about it. This is why the US plan for “full spectrum dominance” is doomed to failure. The other 97% of the world’s population don’t want to be dominated. They don’t like it and will eventually fight back. In time, the US will go the way of the Romanovs and so many others who thought they were so important and so far-seeing that other people would welcome the chance to play second fiddle to them for ever. It doesn’t work like that.

We’re going to hell on a hang glider and already, its fabric is smoking. If we don’t soon have a total change of the power elite, the Epstein class, it will be too late.

Reference:

1. Bradshaw CJ et al (2026). Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity. Environ. Res. Lett. 21 064023. DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aa. At: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae51aa.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

The subject matter of mainstream psychiatry is the mind and its discontents, yet it has no articulated and publicly available theory of mind and no model of mental disorder, nor a theory of personality or a model of personality disorder. Modern psychiatry therefore has no formal basis in science. At best, it is a protoscience; at worst, pseudoscience.

I have repeatedly said this but apparently need to keep saying because nobody with influence in psychiatry is listening. The caring people at Psychiatric Times are “people with influence,” and have just published an article, the first in two, on what used to be called psychopathic personality, so let’s see if they can prove me wrong. The title indicates their approach: Neurobiology of Aggression in Antisocial Behavior, Part 1: Foundations and Early-Life Risk [1]. They start by pointing out that the term “antisocial behaviour” covers a very wide range, from violence to theft, deceitfulness and general rule-breaking. Two types are immediately seen: the impulsive, explosive and violent type, previously known as the aggressive psychopath who typically ends up in prison, and the calm, emotionally-detached type, the creative psychopath who carefully plans crimes and thrives on cheating people. They have in common a disregard for the rules of society, emotional detachment from people, lack of remorse, a reluctance to admit wrong and an intense self-centredness. Traditionally, there was another type known as the inadequate psychopath who was a bit of both mixed with alcohol and drugs but fell to bits when anything went wrong and became a pathetic, weepy mess.

That classification worked well until the DSM-III committee was getting busy in the 1970s. As we know, they hoped to write a theory-free system of classification for psychiatry in which every mental patient could be slotted into a labelled box or category and everybody would know what the label meant. When it came to personality disorders, they ran into a couple of major problems. First, it had long been known that personality disorders don’t fit neatly into boxes, they sprawl untidily across the landscape. Their answer to this was to rephrase all the diagnostic criteria for each category so that they seemed separate and distinct, even though it was crystal clear to everybody that they weren’t. Thus, one group showed a reluctance to become emotionally involved with others while the next group were distant and detached from people. Same thing but it allowed them to get away with the fiction that personality disorders were unique categories [2].

Why would anybody bother, you ask. Indeed, and the answer was another subterfuge, another fudging of the basic idea of psychiatry: they were determined to write a classification that would set the scene for the biologisation of psychiatry. Each distinct surface syndrome would then map down to the genome with a unique genetic error for each mental disorder. In the fullness of time, their friends in the drug industry would then devise a specific drug to rectify that error and Bob’s your uncle, say goodbye to mental disorder. The categorical system of psychiatric diagnoses makes sense if and only if mental disorder is biological in nature. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. I say it isn’t but we’ll come back to that point.

The second big problem for the DSM-III committee came when they looked at the description of the creative psychopath. This was a person, traditionally seen as male although there’s never been a shortage of female psychopaths, who was charming, manipulative, lied as easily as he breathed, who planned crimes and carried them out in such a way that if a scheme failed, somebody else would get the blame. These people are remorseless, utterly self-centred, grandiose in their sense of entitlement and fixated on getting what they want by any means necessary. Other people’s interests or lives mean nothing to them, everything is transactional, as in: “What’s in it for me, what can I get out of this?” If they can win and at the same time humiliate their enemies, that’s even better.

Trouble is, that more or less describes about 90% of the American power elite: politics, finance, industry, military, academia, sport, entertainment and definitely religion, all these fields were colonised by psychopaths who, don’t ever forget, are always pleased to help each other in their machinations. Psychopaths are remarkably good at recognising each other, far better than ordinary people. And don’t think it’s restricted to the US, it’s everywhere although with neoliberal economics, they have perfected a system that selects for and benefits the charming, flint-hearted and remorseless marauder. That was all a bit embarrassing for the committee so they dumped the term psychopath and replaced it with sociopath, defined so as to exclude all their naughty friends. Sociopaths were people who used drugs and got into fights and had been to jail; only bad people from the wrong side of the track ended up in prison, so all the high class scoundrels now known as the Epstein class got a “get out of jail free” card. For life. And for their ghastly children. Anyway, nearly half a century later, psychopathy remains a problem, as the authors acknowledge:

... financial costs associated with the behavioral traits of psychopathic individuals in the United States have been estimated at approximately $400 billion annually, highlighting the urgent need for effective identification, management, and treatment strategies for this challenging population ...

Note that that figure doesn’t include the costs of all the pointless wars started by the psychopaths in government. Putting that aside, the idea of effective “treatment” runs into two major but entirely predictable problems. The first one is that the people doing the real damage aren’t out there in the suburbs causing mayhem or sitting sullenly in prisons waiting for the day they can get out and get even, no, they’re small bickies as we say, they hardly rate. The real psychopaths are the Jeffrey Epsteins and Ghislaine Maxwells and the Bernard Madoffs and the Peter Mandelsons and the Henry Kissingers and Elizabeth Holmes of this world (check that brief video that shows she has learned nothing; she makes my skin crawl and always has), not to overlook all the sharp crooks and dim-witted goons surrounding Trump, especially his son-in-law. These are the people who twist and manipulate entire financial systems, overthrow governments and start wars, just to serve their own purposes. US presidential advisor and ultraneocon Karl Rove put it precisely:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

We do what we like and you just suck it up. That’s as psychopathic as it gets: the idea of history’s actors comes straight from Mein Kampf. So that’s problem No. 1: beware the charming, entirely plausible psychopath in Armani. Problem No. 2 is as the authors state is quite simple: When it comes to psychopathy, we don’t know what we’re doing: “... the underlying etiology and pathophysiology of antisocial behavior remain incompletely understood ...” (my emphasis). That’s a euphemism beloved of academic psychiatrists on the hunt for grants. It means “haven’t got an effing clue.” However, even in the absence of clues, they’re happy to steer research in a particular direction: “While environmental and social factors are influential, growing evidence points to the role of neurobiological contributors in the development and expression of antisocial traits.” In order to come to grips with it, they announce that there are two sorts of aggression, proactive and reactive:

Proactive aggression is deliberate, goal-oriented, and often used as a means to achieve personal gain. It is typically unemotional in nature and associated with low physiological arousal. In contrast, reactive aggression is impulsive and affectively driven, emerging in response to perceived provocation or threat. It is characterized by heightened anger and increased sympathetic nervous system activation ...

What they call proactive is the person calmly making illegal plans to disadvantage another person in order to gain a benefit for himself or his group. It may be one person deciding to cheat or harm another, or it may be two people conspiring together to plan a criminal outcome. Here is a brief but very clear description of soldiers acting in a wholly psychopathic manner without a hint of personal agitation or concern for the other person. It is critically important to understand that these people are not mentally disturbed or disordered in any way whatsoever. They are intelligent and well-educated, in full control, they are not affectively disturbed, with no hallucinations or delusions. The authors of the Psych Times article, however, have decided in advance that such people have biological disturbances of brain function: “Proactive aggression is associated with impairments in goal clarification, accessing appropriate responses, and decision-making...” That’s news to me: my understanding is that they’re very good at making decisions. We just don’t like the decisions they make.

What they call reactive aggression was the defining feature of the aggressive psychopath: Bill Smith is going about his day when something small goes wrong. Immediately, he flies into a rage, shouting and throwing tools and punches, then starts drinking, gets into a fight, jumps in his car and runs into a tree, gets pulled out but wants to fight the police and ambulance officers and so on. If he’s not doing that, he’s dominating his family, controlling them with constant threats and just enough violence to make them know not to step out of line. They drink and use drugs, they gamble, have endless affairs, cheat, steal and tell lies when it suits them and clearly don’t give a damn about the mental welfare of any other person, including their children: “reactive aggression,” say the authors, “is linked to difficulties in cue encoding and interpretation.” They then launch into biological speculation about the role of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in the different types, without once mentioning the defining feature: explosive high arousal.

How does personality disorder come about? Of course they invoke genetic factors even though the evidence is exceedingly weak, and mention other neurobiological factors such as the mother’s health and mental state during pregnancy. Maternal drug and alcohol use always gets a lot of air time and they bring in dietary deficiencies, maternal “stress” and lead poisoning before finally coming to what seems obvious: “... adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have consistently been associated with increased risk of antisocial behaviors.” They point to violence, neglect and sexual abuse as major factors as “Early brain development is particularly sensitive to environmental stressors ...” Brain development? Do we have any proof of that? No, we don’t. So far as we know, the overwhelming majority of people with this personality disorder have absolutely nothing wrong with their brains. Indeed, some of them are very, very clever, so what’s going on? Tucked coyly in the second last paragraph is the clue, suitably disguised under biologisms:

Taken together, chronic exposure to childhood stress may lead to maladaptive neurobiological changes. Specifically, persistent stress may trigger a down-regulation of the stress response system as an adaptive mechanism to avoid chronic arousal, potentially disrupting neurobiological signaling and contributing to long-term pathophysiological outcomes associated with antisocial behavior.

That is, an adverse environment in early life may lead people to learn how to keep calm by ignoring all the madness going on around them. In that state, they quickly realise they can cheat people and get away with it. That is, after all their talk about brain centres, the authors offer a non-biological explanation: the creative psychopath is wholly a psychological phenomenon, a matter of personality but not of genes or neurotransmitters. Similarly, people who have had a violent or abusive childhood grow up hyper-alert to any sign of trouble or conflict. They react violently because that’s how everybody acted around them. They learned early that the world is a cruel and dangerous place, and humans will pounce on you at the drop of a hat so don’t trust them. That is, they never had the opportunity or need to learn otherwise. Treatment isn’t easy because they are deeply suspicious of the world, fully expecting somebody to hurt them every moment of the day, and ready to explode defensively.

Creative psychopaths are almost always the product of emotional deprivation but not of overt abuse. There is no better description than psychologist Mary Trump’s account of her uncle’s quite appalling childhood [3], although being a millionaire at eight probably made up for some of it. Donald Trump was not beaten or screwed until he became a psychopath, he was trained and he does it because he loves it. As were the soldiers mentioned above, who enjoy the killing as it allows them to get in touch with their inner Eichmann.

You cannot have an explanatory model of personality disorder until you have a theory of personality which, in turn, depends on a theory of mind. Thus, a project to explain psychopathy in biological terms ends up invoking psychology to complete the chain of causation. We find this all the time because it could not be otherwise: there are dozens of examples in philosophy where writers had to invent a non-biological “self” to complete their biological account of mind [4]. Why does this elementary mistake keep happening? Because biological psychiatry is not a science of mental disorder, it is an ideology, a belief firmly held and constantly reinforced in an echo chamber by a powerful group who have never done the groundwork of explaining just how mental matters can be explained by physics. If they tried, they would realise it can’t be done but that would be too threatening to their careers so they keep quiet and just keep parroting the party line: “The underlying etiology and pathophysiology of antisocial behavior remain incompletely understood but we’re convinced the answer lies in the neurobiology so we won’t look elsewhere.” This is entirely consistent with an observation by no less than the Lord Lister (1827-1912) from about 1876:

I remember at an early period of my own life showing to a man of high reputation as a teacher some matters which I happened to have observed. And I was very much struck and grieved to find that, while all the facts lay equally clear before him, only those that squared with his previous theories seemed to affect his organs of vision.

Nearly two hundred years ago, the French philosopher and “father” of sociology, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) provided the answer to their dilemma:

If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theories. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part, we could not even perceive them.

Mainstream psychiatry has no theory of personality and no model of personality disorder. Therefore, psychiatrists are unable to see facts when they stand clearly in front of them (I’ll send this to the authors of that article but they won’t respond).

(PS: an excellent article on suicide and antidepressants by Peter Gotzche in this week’s Mad in America. The mainstream gets away with their pseudoscience just because they make sure nobody questions their “biomedical model of mental disorder,” the same one they’ve never written. That’s pretty psychopathic).

References:

1. Neurobiology of Aggression in Antisocial Behavior, Part 1: Foundations and Early-Life Risk.https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/neurobiology-of-aggression-in-antisocial-behavior-part-1-foundations-and-early-life-risk.

2. McLaren N (2007). The categorical system of diagnosis: Personality Disorder. Chapter 8 in Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences.; Ann Arbor, Mi.: Future Psychiatry Press.

3. Trump ML (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. London: Simon and Shuster.

4. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry. See below.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Another week, another couple of reports telling us we’re well down the road to climate collapse. The first comes from that notorious nest of lefties and weirdo greenies, the UK Office of National Security Assessments, with the alarmist title: Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security. Their starting point is: “Nature is a foundation of national security ... Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).” Oh dear, who could have expected this?

After digging through the statistics, they conclude that the UK is at high risk from global ecosystem degradation as it will seriously impact their food supplies. Due to their soggy climate and over-population, the UK can’t feed itself and probably hasn’t done so since about Henry VIII. Mostly, that didn’t bother the English as they simply stole food from the Scots and Irish but that no longer works. Instead, refugees from Africa and West Asia are now looking to Britain for food. They give the example of how climate change in Central America is reducing coffee harvests, which forces people to abandon their farms and try to move to the US. That’s only going to increase and we’re likely to get a rehearsal over the next two years as the consequences of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran play out on a background of major climate impacts from El Niño. Generally speaking, we can cope with one natural disaster, e.g. a single major earthquake or cyclone or floods or bushfires. However, when disasters come one on top of the other, they’re magnified, as Yeats said:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... (Second Coming)

The centre cannot hold. Over the next 6-12 months, we can expect ... major floods on the west coasts of Nth and Sth America, with loss of food production; continuing drought in the south west of USA with major reduction of water supplies and hydropower; drought in grain producing areas of Sth America, Africa and Australia; drought in Europe with major loss of hydropower and reduction in river transport due to low water levels; near-total loss of Ukrainian and Russian grain exports due to war (they are the two biggest grain exporters in the world); reduction of food production throughout Asia and Africa due to loss of fertiliser exports from Persian Gulf producers; major cost increases in fuel and other inputs for food producers everywhere due to wars, and so on. The centre is under serious strain at present, the question is whether it can hold as things get worse. Which they are going to do.

The other big report comes from UN Environment Program, the one Trump defunded. The UK report is 14 pages; the UNEP one is 10 times bigger and stuffed with stats but it has a neat executive summary starting on page 2 (I wonder about executive summaries: does that mean they can’t read?). This one is titled: Limiting Overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return. In two sentences, it says: “The target of a maximum of 1.5C rise in global temperatures will be exceeded shortly. We now have to start planning for what was previously seen as untenable, 1.8C rise.” Some of their major points include:

Pt 7: ... the world must adopt proactive approaches that deploy flexible, multi-level governance, particularly when it comes to adaptation (p5).

Pt 9. Equity and justice must be the core of effective strategies to protect the vulnerable, create a just transition for communities and workforces, and secure a liveable future for coming generations ... (However,) Reversing global warming will be a slow and difficult process. Approximately 220 GtCO₂ of cumulative net-negative emissions are required to lower global temperatures by around 0.1°C (p19).

OK, that’s all fairly clear, clear enough for even Kissinger’s “dumb, stupid animals” in the military to grasp. In the US, the Navy is very well aware of the risks. Their vast base at Norfolk, VA, largest naval base in the world by far, has about 6.5 km of waterfront and 18 km of pier and wharf space sprawling along the edge of the harbour. None of it is more than a metre above sea level, and large parts are built on landfill. Over the last century, sea levels have risen about 450mm (18”) and are expected to continue for the foreseeable future. The real risk is not a slow, steady rise like a lake inundating the huge areas of workshops, storage, admin and living quarters for the 75,000 naval and civilian employees of the base (and their dependents, and the 1.8million who live in the region). Instead, the risk comes from increasingly violent storms driving a storm surge to wash away roads and services such as hospitals, fire brigades, power stations and so on (see recent storms at Long Beach, also a naval base). To counter this very real risk, the Navy decided to start using mixes of biofuels on their ships and their many planes and vehicles but the House Committee of Underhand Ways and Shifty Means blocked that on instructions from Herr Drumpf.

We are teetering on the brink. The unavoidable fact is that the planet simply cannot sustain a population of nearly 9billion. Various models predict that about 2.5billion is the maximum sustainable population, i.e. a quarter of where it will be in 20 years. Four times too many people: how come our politicians and the rest of the power elite can’t see this? I can’t answer that as I’ve never spoken to any of them (and they wouldn’t speak to me anyway), but we can hazard some guesses. It will come down to two things, money and power which, as Trump has shown, are pretty much the same thing. That is, it will come down to matters of individual human psychology, essentially personality: who are the people who get themselves into positions of power and influence, what drives them? Lord Acton said we can’t assume people in high positions are decent just by virtue of their achievements: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control” (1887). Does anybody doubt that today? George Orwell didn’t:

…no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power (1984).

Is this cynical? I don’t believe it is: for a lot of people, power is the only game in town. There is an example in Mary Trump’s biography of her uncle. Her father had already died by the time her grandfather died. Ordinarily, Mary’s father’s share of the huge estate (at least half a billion) would have gone to his children but they got nothing. It all went to the other four siblings who could have agreed to a fairer sharing but they didn’t. Eventually, after much legal brawling and huge animosity, she got about $2.7million, a few percent of what her aunts and uncles got. The rich and powerful always want more, they are never satisfied because the object of wealth is more wealth.

As wealth and power go up, so too does the sense of entitlement. Bezos is worth about $275billion (his huge yacht alone is worth $500million) but he personally sets targets for workers in his warehouses that mean they can’t take toilet breaks and have to pee into a bottle. The rich are all the same, every last one of them, and (with precious few examples) so too are their wives. The wife of Conrad Black, convicted press baron and defrocked peer, said: “My extravagance knows no bounds.” Former prince Andrew we know about; his wife, Sarah Ferguson what was and is again, was just the same, greedy, corrupt and took her daughters to see Epstein after he got out of jail.

All of this is old news; at present, we see two political trends across the world. Last week in Germany, AfD won a state election, their first. In West Australia, One Nation, an equally toxic far right mob, has just snatched a seat from the governing Labor party. In India, Modi’s BJP has just taken control of West Bengal which used to be a marxist stronghold and there are plenty of other examples. What’s going on? On the one hand, we have the clearest evidence that the planet is roaring along a path to cataclysm, and yet everywhere, people are voting for parties and governments that openly say they intend to continue the policies to make it worse. Are people that stupid? Unfortunately, yes, they are. They’re easily fooled by lies, and the elite tell lies so they can gain more power and more money. We are caught in a vortex of lies and corruption in which the power elite tell lies to scare people to vote for them, then they tell more lies to stay in power which attracts more extreme people from out of the woodwork who whip up the fears while looting the treasury behind the scenes. A small example from this weekend illustrates the self-reinforcing nature of the process.

On Saturday, Israel announced that several of their desalination plants had shut down. The country gets about 83% of its fresh water by this process (using natual gas, not solar power). Immediately they blamed Iranian hackers and promised retribution. Turns out it was an algal bloom along their coast caused by all the untreated sewage flowing into the ocean from Gaza after Israel destroyed their sewage treatment plants. Good, pigeons come home to roost. Across the Atlantic, the Trump sons are making hay while their father’s fitful sun is still above the horizon and J Kushner is raking in billions from his voluntary job as negotiator in chief. Why is he volunteering? Because that way, he didn’t need a security clearance. He can have access to practically every secret in the country and use it to make money and nobody except his dementing pa-in-law can stop him.

Why are things so bad, why has this happened? I don’t think things have ever been perfect but it’s getting worse and as part of that, it’s out in the open, they’ve stopped pretending. Trump freely says that companies who pay him $100,000 a month can have early access to his postings on his “Mistruths Social,” meaning they get warnings of his announcements that will move the markets. However, insider trading has been with us forever, that’s how the Rothschilds got their start and they haven’t looked back. A hundred years ago, a retired US Marine General, Smedley Butler, wrote a short outburst titled War is a Racket, in which he showed how the US military was little more than an enforcement racket for Wall Street’s greedy bankers. But it’s rapidly getting worse now, driven by a force bigger than any single political party or hack.

It’s not just naked greed as when the Nazis looked at the USSR or when the zionists looked at Palestine and said: “We want your land and we’re going to take it.” No, it’s a force that rises above mere bourgeois morality. By the simple expedient of declaring itself beyond the reach of such petty considerations as right and wrong, it touts itself as rational, universal and untainted by human lusts and needs. It is, of course, neoliberalism, the doctrine that humans are the servants of something called the market which alone can make the correct decisions on how to allocate and price resources. It says humans are little automatons who go about their business calmly and rationally deciding what they need and what they’re prepared to pay for it. There is no emotion or morality in the theory because those vague mental constructs can’t be pinned down, they get in the way of their equations so they had to go.

If we look at international affairs from the moral point of view, then launching unprovoked attacks on another country is wicked and has to stop immediately. From the neoliberal point of view, however, in the version known as offensive realism, it makes perfect sense to build up a big arms industry to arm large military forces and then use them to subdue the other side before they do the same to you. Once the weapons industries and the military exist, they acquire a life of their own and no politician who wants to get up the ladder will say a word against them – and what pollie doesn’t want to slither higher? When you want to get richer or more powerful, morals get in the way so a doctrine that says morality is foolish sentimentality is made to order.

There is not a direct or linear relationship between some political event today and a social or economic event in 40 or 50 years. Instead, there is a huge swirling mess of social pressures, political forces, economic demands, human drives, and resources both natural and human. Everything is related although we often don’t know how: somebody drops a bomb in the Persian Gulf and a year later, a small child dies of malaria in Eastern Congo because the raw materials for the drug couldn’t get from Qatar to India and then back to Congo for WHO to dispense. The real danger comes when risks summate, as they are doing now, but everybody is too involved in rational wars or rationally making money to be bothered with some matter on the far side of the globe.

The biggest risk is the notion that we can guide human affairs dispassionately, that we don’t need a theory of psychology because we’re so so sensible and we’re above all that sort of thing. As you will recognise, that just is a theory of psychology, but it happens to be a very bad one. All it does is open the door of the treasury to the crooks and scoundrels. The US is now a mafia state. Israel has been one since it began.

We are tied together on a raft in space. The rich and powerful think they’re too clever to be bothered with what happens to the poor, that there are too many of them, anyway. They’re so locked into gathering more money and more power for themselves and hammering their enemies that they don’t think about nonsense like El Niño. By the time somebody like Trump or Albanese or any of the others realise it has to be taken seriously, it’ll be too late. As they say, there’s no Planet B so we’ll just have to have a revolution and chuck all the scoundrels out. Let’s get started.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

A recent brief paper in the Brit J Psychiatry Bulletin by Speyer et al offered a mild and oblique criticism of what are called practice guidelines [1]. These days, every college or professional association issues advice on how each condition should be treated. For the colleges, these are a big deal, with dozens of people meeting regularly for months to churn through the literature and knock up what they agree amounts to best practice. It then has to be reviewed and revised by half a dozen committees before it is adopted. These missives are advisory only but their proud parents tend to forget that there are people, like lawyers and insurance companies and other pond life, who take them as gospel. If it’s in written form, it’s law, which works in general medicine and surgery, but not so well in psychiatry for an obvious reason. However, any psychiatrist who doesn’t follow the guidelines to the letter will be hung out to dry.

As the paper’s authors point out, there’s a world of difference between what we might call the hard sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology, and the squishy human topics including psychiatry. The standard sciences are able to use what is called linear thinking to reach their conclusions. This means they have a clear set of laws (physics, chemistry, etc) that work in one direction only and can have just one outcome: A + B = C and nothing else. Thus, given the starting conditions (of an experiment, a building collapse, a trip to the moon), only one outcome is possible. This rigidity is not an accident. The goal of the doctrine of positivism was to strip all uncertainty from science in order to build a reliable body of scientific knowledge. Everything had to be related in a stepwise manner to what had gone before. There was nothing more uncertain than human emotion, values, wishes, likes and dislikes, so all of it had to go. Science can only be concerned with what can be seen and measured: values are mental constructs; mental constructs can’t be measured; therefore mental constructs have no place in science. QED.

However, as the various sciences developed, it became clear that, very often, equations were far more complex than the simple A + B = C model. Nuclear physicists, then chemists, then biologists, found they were dealing with dozens of factors, all changing and depending on a myriad other factors. These were highly complex but still rational and well-behaved; they just needed far more computing power than even a dozen human brains could provide. Eventually, a theory of complex systems developed that could handle these using immensely powerful supercomputers.

That’s all pretty clear and uncluttered, mainstream science has made enormous progress but what about the “science of mental life”? Psychiatry and psychology are only about mental constructs, so what can we do about them? And it’s not just psychiatry, what about all the other fields where values have to be taken into account, such as social services, town planning, custodial services, budget allocations and so on? How can anybody hope to solve these very complex matters when linear thinking simply fails just because it wasn’t designed for them? As I’ve outlined, psychology tried to convert itself into a “hard science” with behaviorism [2], dispensing with the mind altogether but this failed. For its part, psychiatry has tried convincing itself that the mind is really only the brain, so biology will tell us everything we need to know.

That hasn’t worked well, as this paper points out. Trying to control daily practice by adopting rigid “guidelines” removes the human element entirely. For example, if a patient stops taking the drugs due to side effects, that’s deemed “non-compliance” and the dose is given by injection under duress. If a person wants to believe that lizard people have taken over the government, who are psychiatrists to decide that that means insanity which means brain disease which means disabling treatment for life, which will therefore be shorter? The authors didn’t say it, but the reductionist biological approach to psychiatry automatically puts psychiatrists in a paternal role at best and, at worst, as oppressors. Granted, there are plenty of psychiatrists who feel quite comfortable in that role and aren’t in any hurry to change it but the paper suggests that in opting for compulsory treatment, there are many human considerations that don’t fit in the simple world envisaged by the guidelines. Yes, the drugs may suppress hallucinations making life easier for the patient’s relatives, but if the cost to the patient is loss of sex life, whose interests and values should prevail? In order to answer these difficult questions (which, overwhelmingly, are simply ignored by psychiatrists), the paper offers a suggestion from a totally different field from fifty years ago.

Town planning is very much a hybrid field, with all sorts of complex material and legal questions that can be solved with a computer, but there’s also the human element, which can’t. It may make perfect sense to put a highway straight through a small swamp but that will inflame the swamp-lovers (of whom I’m one). NIMBY, it’s called, “not in my backyard,” and they (we) are the bane of town planners and air traffic controllers and a host of other well-meaning technicians who simply don’t understand that ducks and possums have rights, too. In a paper from 1973, Rittel and Webber, two academic town planners, suggested we should distinguish between “tame problems,” both simple and complex, and what they called “wicked problems” [3]. It’s not a good word but it emphasises that these are profoundly different in that technical issues are deeply entangled with values and judgements: human wishes as distinct from human needs. There is no single solution to a wicked problem, only a balancing of conflicting interests, the matter is resolved rather than solved. For all its braying about being a rational science of mental disorder, psychiatry slots straight into this group. Rittel and Webber saw ten features that distinguish wicked problems from tame:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem; different people will see it from different angles.

2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule, no clear solution, so one can always try to do better.

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad, i.e. it’s all about values so don’t try to kid yourself.

4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem, especially as solutions have unintended consquences.

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.

6. Wicked problems do not have fixed set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.

7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.

8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem (i.e. causes are undefined due to lack of a model).

9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution ... There is no rule or procedure to determine the “correct” explanation or combination of them.

10. The planner has no right to be wrong but will be punished by one group or another who disagree with the outcome.

The last one is important, as they point out: “... the aim is not to find the truth, but to improve some characteristics of the world where people live. Planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate; the effects can matter a great deal to those people that are touched by those actions” [3, p167]. How true this is of psychiatry. For all their efforts to reduce psychiatry to the status of a biological science (psychiatrists as “clinical neuroscientists,” in the words of Thomas Insel), to convert its “wicked problems” of emotions and values into “tame” ones of neurotransmitters, the fundamental question of how to incorporate a sufferer’s values refuses to go away. With its DSM tick-a-box approach, psychiatry tries to reduce depression, for example, to a “chemical imbalance of the brain.” This has been widely deplored as “imperial psychiatry,” converting normal emotions into “diseases,” as Horwitz and Wakefield pointed out 20 years ago in their important but widely ignored study, The Loss of Sadness [4]. More to the daily point, it fails. 15% of the adult population take antidepressants and the suicide rate just keeps climbing, as the ever-polite British psychiatrist, Joanna Moncreiff, points out:

Although the discovery of a specific antidepressant agent in the future cannot be ruled out, it is possible that we misunderstand the nature of depression, and that regarding it as a discrete and universal disorder may have raised false hopes about the chance of a generally applicable ‘cure’ or treatment. The alternative view of depression as part of the spectrum of meaningful human responses to the world suggests that drugs will only dull the experience. In the end, the situation that provoked the negative emotion needs to be addressed. Depression is a signal that change is needed in some aspect of life [5].

In fact, depression is a signal that some important aspect of life has been lost, it is the universal reaction to a loss. Awareness that “change is needed in some aspect of life” causes the universal reaction to a threat, known as the “flight of fight reaction,” aka anxiety. Early in their paper, Speyer and partners [1] opine that clinical guidelines have been very helpful but aren’t perfect:

Although this format works well and has greatly improved quality of care in some situations (p1) ... guidelines developed solely within professional and academic communities embed a particular epistemic standpoint as the authoritative standard ... Addressing complex wickedness therefore requires that service users, carers, clinicians and researchers participate as genuine co-producers. Finally, meaningful deliberation presupposes equal access to knowledge ... a matter of epistemic justice, a prerequisite for ensuring that all stakeholders can engage as informed participants in the decisions that govern their care (p3).

Stripped of the jargon, what psychiatry likes to portray as its professionalism turns out to be dressed-up amateurism. And it’s everywhere. Take the first sentence in that quote: “Although this format works well and has greatly improved quality of care in some situations...” This is false. Clinical guidelines have not “greatly improved care.” Nothing has changed but the statement is a classic motte and bailey defence, which needs a bit of explanation. In feudal times, the local lords and princelings spent their days raiding each other, which the peasants and villagers found somewhat irksome. Farmland, known as the motte, isn’t easy to defend so they often built a fort on a hilltop, the keep or bailey (hence Old Bailey in London) to which they could retreat while the raiders stole their cows and chickens. When the raiding party had gone, the peasants came out and started cleaning up again.

In philosophy, it applies to a person who makes extravagant claims about something but when questioned, retreats to a much smaller, defensible position. Politicians do this all the time, esp. one DJ Trump, who uses the extreme version. Today, he spouts some bit of nonsense but when questioned by reporters tomorrow, he says “I didn’t say that, that’s fake noos.” Has psychiatric care “greatly improved”? If having more people on more drugs for longer is an improvement, possibly, but not if the side effects are taken into account.

Moving on, “... guidelines developed solely within professional and academic communities embed a particular epistemic standpoint as the authoritative standard.” True. You can’t argue with a psychiatrist. While psychiatric committees and tribunals generally have a “consumer representative” these days, they don’t have critics who will poke holes in their “authority” or ask embarrassing questions. My experience is that the lay people who get appointed to these committees and so on are almost always relatives of somebody who died by suicide, and they’re convinced that if there had been more treatment and more incarceration, not less, then Johnny would still be alive. Nobody asks Johnny but he would only give personal opinions anyway, whereas we’re scientists and aren’t moved by personal values (they forget that that statement is itself a personal value, and are deeply offended when this is pointed out). We see this in the concept of “risk management.” It used to mean the relative risk to the patient of treatment vs. no treatment, but now it is only ever taken to mean “risk to the hospital and psychiatrist,” as in: “If we don’t follow the guidelines strictly, can we get into trouble? OK, lock him up and jab him.”

“Addressing complex wickedness therefore requires that service users, carers, clinicians and researchers participate as genuine co-producers.” Forget that. Do you seriously imagine that one of those powerful professors on the guidelines committee is going to listen while some nervous soul stutters that psychiatric drugs have lots of side effects, like massive weight gain and so on? Professors don’t listen to crazy people (even when the patient is a physician, as in this case in MIA), they should just control themselves and stop eating so much.

“Finally, meaningful deliberation presupposes equal access to knowledge...” The whole edifice of modern psychiatry is built on people not knowing the truth behind psychiatry’s extravagant claims. For example, the biopsychosocial model. For 12 years from 2013, the RANZCP had on their website Position Statement No. 80 which stated:

Medical expertise: Psychiatrists apply their medical knowledge, specialist clinical skills and acumen in the provision of person-centred care. They understand the impact of ‘biological’, ‘psychological’ and ‘social’ factors on mental health and the causation of mental illness. This ‘bio-psycho-social’ model is a holistic approach that recognises the impact of social adversity and physical health on mental well-being [6].

This was completely false and after yet another scratchy argument, was quietly removed and not replaced. Psychiatrists are now physicians trained in psychiatry who use their expertise in psychiatry to treat mental disorders. Very enlightening but we’ll keep going.

“... a matter of epistemic justice, a prerequisite for ensuring that all stakeholders can engage as informed participants in the decisions that govern their care.” That sounds impressive but it never happens. Philosopher Amanda Fricker defined epistemic injustice in her 1998 book Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. What happens is that some socially privileged groups are deemed authorities by what they know whereas others are deemed incompetent in comparison, and the powerful group takes control of the process. The inferior group suffer an injustice when what they know is dismissed because of who they are, not what they have to say. A person taking half a dozen psychiatric drugs who complains of being unable to sit or lie still is not regarded as an expert on his or her own body and is simply ordered to take more tablets, even though the drugs are causing the problem (akathisia).

The conflict of interests arises just because psychiatry prides itself on discarding all personal values in order to reduce the cosmic complexity of the human mind to something that can be seen in a scanner. They forgot, or more likely refused to know, that in order to do that, you actually must have a theory of the topic (in this case, the mind) and a model of what you want to study (mental disorder). They don’t have either of those things so rather than admit their failure, they keep issuing “clinical guidelines” that pretend the “wicked” or highly complex, value-laden problems of humanity can be reduced to “tame” problems of biology, suitable for solving with linear thinking (depression + antidepressants = cure). This approach is incapable of dealing with what are called recursive or self-reinforcing problems in life, of which the classic example is anxiety states. A person becomes anxious about an appointment tomorrow. This makes the heart race, which makes them think a heart attack is on its way, so they become more anxious and start to sweat and tremble, which convinces them they need to cancel the appointment, which makes them feel like a failure.

It makes perfect sense but linear thinking can’t deal with this sort of problem. Clinical guidelines only make the problem worse by convincing people that psychiatry’s a pushover, just keep adding drugs until the patient stops complaining. From that point of view, yes, it is easy but somehow, we need to make sure the patient’s voice is heard, even or especially when the psychiatrist doesn’t want to hear it.

References:

1. Speyer H et al (2026) Clinical guidelines addressing complex and ‘wicked’ problems. BJPsych Bulletin doi:10.1192/bjb.2026.10271

2. McLaren N (2024). Behaviorism: Not Sleeping, Just Dead. Chapter 4 in Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

3. Rittel HWJ, Webber MM. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sci 1973; 4: 155–69.

4. Horwitz AV, Wakefield JC (2007). The Loss of Sadness: how psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into Depressive Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press.

5. Moncrieff J (2018) Against the stream: Antidepressants are not antidepressants – an alternative approach to drug action and implications for the use of antidepressants. BJPsych Bulletin 42, 42–44, doi:10.1192/bjb.2017.11

6. RANZCP (2013). Position Statement No. 80: The role of the psychiatrist in Australia and New Zealand. RANZCP Website. Accessed Nov 3rd 2023, deleted April 2025.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

It has to be remembered that that’s only the direct production of gases, it’s only planes taking off, bombs exploding and all the minor stuff. The real damage is concealed because it’s scattered over practically the entire world. It’s huge mines in the Pilbara region of West Australia digging up iron ore for export through Port Hedland, one of the world’s busiest ports by tonnage, 580million tonnes last financial year. Shipping every one of those tonnes to Asia produces about 2 tonnes of CO₂. It’s ore processed by coal dug up in enormous opencut mines in Queensland and New South Wales (the biggest coal port in the world is Newcastle, NSW). It’s gigantic ships travelling empty from Asia and Europe to faraway Australia to collect vast loads and send it back, belching sulphurous gases every inch of the way. It’s huge railways hauling minerals and chemicals to be processed and then hauled further to be made into bombs and tanks which are then shipped around the world to be blown up.

That’s part of it. The rest is the vast “defence establishment,” the hundreds of millions of people whose entire careers are devoted to burning money. I regularly drive past an army base here in Brisbane. It consists of a hundred or more large buildings sprawled over hundreds of acres with several thousand people and many hundreds of mostly large vehicles, all marching and buzzing around militarily, all achieving precisely nothing. A farmer produces crops and livestock, a fisherman brings in fish, a nurse cares for sick people, a teacher teaches and so on but the military and their swarms of civilian employees and all the millions of industrial workers and transport drivers and people building ships to carry ore to make tanks to be blown up, they consume prodigiously but produce nothing except greenhouse gases and toxic waste. Consume baby consume. They’re parasites on the productive world.

The Stockholm Institute of Peace (SIPRI) estimates the total cash cost of militarism each year, in wages, cost of materials, cost of replacing damaged structures, farmland destroyed and so on, is of the order $19trillion a year or nearly one sixth of world GDP. That’s the direct cost but what is called the opportunity cost of this titanic effort is incalculable. Consider a simple but routine example. There is a house standing on a street with an empty block next door. One morning, a gang of men arrive in a truck laden with building materials which they unload on the empty block and start building another house. It takes a couple of months and we can calculate the total cost in cash and in environmental terms but at the end, we have two houses to show for it. Consider another scenario, same house standing on the street. One day, the same truckload of men arrive, this time dressed in military uniforms with a tank and guns and explosives and they blow it up. End result, no houses and a lot of black smoke. Same energy consumption but one path produces two houses compared with no houses by the other. By diverting productive capacity to militarism, the opportunity to do something constructive is lost as well as the direct losses. That is the opportunity cost of militarism, the cost of foregone production. Every soldier on duty isn’t ploughing a field or building a house or nursing a sick person or teaching a child. Every civilian employed by the Defence Dept. isn’t doing something constructive. It is probably twice the direct cost, giving a total of nearly $60trillion per year, every year, that we pay just to have lots of fireworks and cemetaries.

In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat, a French economist, introduced the idea of opportunity cost in a parable of broken windows. Consider a small village: one day, somebody breaks a window, so the glazier comes to repair it. The glazier is better off as a result, as is the man who brought the glass to the glazier in his wagon, as is the man who makes wagons and so on. Soon, the villagers work out that if they smash all the windows in the village, everybody will be better off. Needless to say, they aren’t as the money could have been spent on constructive things, like repairing the bridge, fixing the school and so on. Nowadays we laugh at people who could make such a simple mistake: destruction and the money spent recovering from destruction is never a net benefit to society. Laugh, but we’re doing it all the time (see here, 9.50).

The effect is very real. China doesn’t spend anywhere near as much on its military as the US so it hasn’t had 80 years of continuously losing wars, and their civil infrastructure is roaring ahead. Since 2008, they have built over 50,000km of high speed rail; the US has lots of bombers and aircraft carriers but no high-speed trains. That is not a coincidence. They talk about building one in California but don’t actually have any agreed plans so if they started today, it would be a minimum of ten years before the first train pulled out. By 2035, China expects to have another 20,000km. This is not trivial as railways are a good investment, they last a very long time. On the other side, the destruction of Gaza has produced many millions of tonnes of rubble, mostly concrete, production of which released perhaps 100million tonnes of greenhouse gases. Currently, the rubble is being removed in diesel powered trucks and the displaced Palestinians will need somewhere to live, which will produce more gases.

On the face of it, this is blind stupidity. These three years 2024-26 are the hottest on record and everything says it’s going to get hotter still. Instead of burning things down, we should be using the same energy (actually a lot less) to build an economy that will last in the long term. In the DDN interview, Abby Martin asks:

Unless we understand why this has happened, who’s responsible and how it needs to stop, how the US military is enforcing this unsustainable, insane fossil fuel infrastructure ... we’re never going to solve the problem (at 4.00).

Later, she talks to senior military officers but is dumbfounded when she realises that they talk about the need for the US to be dominant but have no idea why it should be: “Some of them have never even thought about these things (i.e. that US must be dominant) or questioned their motives...” (8.30). The psychopathic Henry Kissinger said: “Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” What he meant was that if they start asking sensible questions, the whole military thing falls apart. Give them enough wars to keep them busy and they won’t question what they’re doing, as the writer Thomas Pynchon observed: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” As long as they’re asking each other: “What’s the best way to bomb Tehran?” they’re not asking: “Should we really be doing this?” But back to Martin’s question: Why has this happened? Who’s responsible and how are we to stop it?

The core thesis of narcisso-fascism is that humans just are aggressive. People often ask why there are no Neanderthals left, why they died out. My suggestion is that they were killed off by Homo sapiens just because Neanderthals were gentle souls lacking the innate drive to dominate the mob in the next valley. They used their limited aggressive urges hunting mammoths in the snow and couldn’t be bothered picking a quarrel with the neighbours. And then we arrived. Trouble is, as Martin indicates, we don’t even recognise how aggressive we are, it’s second nature and we don’t question it. For us, a person who doesn’t want to be king of the castle is the odd one, probably ASD or something. Kissinger didn’t ask: “Why are we in Vietnam in the first place?” Had he been asked, he would have said: “To stop the communists.” He would not have asked: “What are the conditions in Vietnam that make communism attractive?” because the answer was: Western colonialist capitalism. The last thing he wanted was generals with their eyes wide open, as happened to Marine General Smedley Butler in South America early last century. When he retired, Butler wrote a short book called War is a Racket, in he which he slammed the entire idea:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes (1935, p1).

And a lot of people end up dead. Nothing has changed. Trump kidnaps the Venezuelan president, killing a hundred people in the process, and gloats how he has got his hands on 65billion barrels of their oil, plus billions of dollars in a Qatari bank. They were mismanaging it, he says, so we had to take over, overlooking the fact that their oilfields were built using American machinery to provide the dense oil to US Gulf coast refineries, and when the first “sanctions” were imposed years ago, they couldn’t get spare parts to service or repair the machinery, so their production went down and down. First strangle them, then blame them for not breathing properly.

“Why has this happened?” The answer to Martin’s question is perfectly clear: because Homo sapiens. The urge to dominate is blind to the consequences, it doesn’t want to know about consequences, it thinks only of the next few minutes. The joint US-Israeli urge to dominate the 93million Iranians didn’t consider the possibility that the Iranians might not want to be dominated and might hit back. If anybody were to tell Trump or Netanyahu about the millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases they have released, they’d say: “Piss off and stop wasting my time, I’m got more important things to deal with.”

“Who’s responsible?” We all are. We could blame the 77million Americans who recently voted for a convicted thief and unconvicted child molester who told everybody well in advance that he would be a dictator but don’t forget that the execrable Nigel Farage was just re-elected to Parliament in the UK on a similar program, and the totally PHONy Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party just won a state election in West Australia, same reason. France, Germany, Italy, India, Israel, you name it, the message is: “We’re the best, we should be in charge and we’ll smash anybody who disagrees.”

“How are we to stop it?” Ah well, that’s the more difficult part because the people running the show have set it up so that anybody who disagrees with them is heading for the slammer for a long time. Protestors at an ICE facility in Prairieland, Texas scored up to 100 years inside, including 30 years for moving a pile of books. Same in the UK with the Filton protestors; fortunately, a defendant in Australia won his appeal over so-called terrorism charges. As Gen. Butler saw nearly a century ago, a small group of people make a shitload of money from militarism, so they’ll stop at nothing to keep the party going. And they certainly don’t care who gets killed in the process.

Militarism and global heat catastrophe go hand in hand. Militarism is by far the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gases but it’s hard to calculate as the causes are buried deep inside a million other accounts. The crucial decisions concerning the future of the world are being made by a small coterie of profoundly corrupt people, such as a dementing 80yo man who wants to name the Strait of Hormuz after himself, and a psychopathic politico-religious fanatic surrounded by immeasurably evil people who wants to build his own version of the Third Reich in West Asia (watch the first minute of this video for a late night fright).

If we continue on our present course, the world is finished. We need a total change of leadership, which will only come when the electorate realises that all the talk of “We need to be world leaders” or “The communists/Islamists/terrorists etc. are coming” is a gigantic assemblage of lies and propaganda designed to stop us asking the right questions. They use fear to convince us to hand power to their small group and let them get on with raping the planet. We are not in a clash of civilisations or a battle for freedom or a war for democracy or a crusade for God or any of that claptrap. We are in the grip of a clique of power-hungry idiots who believe they know everything that counts, who refuse to consider that they could be wrong and are more than happy to kill you to prove how right they are.

Unless we get the military parasites off our backs, there’s no chance. That’s all you need to know.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

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An acquaintance sent a commentary on free will, with the comment: “This gives me a headache.” He’s not the first. The notion that we humans are responsible for our actions is absolutely fundamental to all known societies. People are rewarded or punished according to their actions and I can’t imagine society otherwise. Even if a society were designed where everybody followed rules all the time (and no, we’re not there yet although they’re working on it), that would still be the result of somebody’s free choice. There are two conflicting definitions involved:

Free will says: Regardless of how I acted one minute ago, I could have acted differently.

Determinism says: Everything that happens now was determined by the state of affairs one minute ago.

While the idea of free will seems consistent with everything we know about ourselves, it runs into enough problems to make people look elsewhere. The problem is the ancient curse of minds, they can’t be pinned down in any scientific way. Whatever I say about my mind may seem completely wrong to you, and crazy to somebody else. As a guide, introspection is totally unreliable which is why people have looked for certainty elsewhere. Determinism is based on the idea either that minds don’t exist or they do but don’t count. For a determinist, everything that exists is the outcome of matter-energy interactions in the time-space universe as governed by physical laws and nothing else, just because there is nothing else. Essentially, what happens today anywhere in the universe was set in motion by the events of the Big Bang, or very shortly thereafter. All events within the universe can occur only in one possible way. If we had a complete knowledge of the physical state of the universe right now and of all the physical laws, we could correctly predict the future. There are no exceptions: even our sense of being in control of our lives is an illusion, governed by events billions of years ago. Determinism has been around for a long time but has always required adjustment to make space for an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent deity. Gods are a bit out of fashion these days so people talk about something called compatibilism, which says that this is a determinist universe but we also have free will. If you want a headache, tracing that tangled history is a good place to start. The reason it’s popular today is just because the idea of minds is so unfashionable, as philosopher Daniel Stoljar said: “We live in an overwhelmingly physicalist age...”

Even though it seems counter-intuitive, determinism’s appeal is that people don’t have to talk about the mind. They can sound terribly scientific and rational and not be led astray by sentiment and other squishy stuff. They talk sternly of humans as marionettes dangling from their strings which, in turn, are connected to some bigger cosmic machinery that hums along blindly. The mind as we experience it reduces to the physical brain with no loose ends and it’s only a matter of time until we clever scientists sort out the last few details. Theirs is a humdrum world with no souls, spirits, ghosts or divine forces floating around that we can’t account for. That’s the idea behind determinism; making sense of it has been a major headache for millennia. Even though physics and neurosciences have made gigantic advances over recent years, I don’t think we are any closer to a remotely plausible account of physical determinism. There are other versions, of course, there always are. Psychiatrists like genetic determination, that we’re simply the products of our genes. Prof. Ian Hickie, of Sydney Brain and Mind Centre, announced a while ago that our genes don’t just control our emotions, they control what we experience in life [1].

That has never made any sense to me. Years ago, I studied 250 military veterans, 200 from World War II who fought in New Guinea, and 50 from Vietnam. The fighting in New Guinea in 1944-45 was generally regarded as among the worst of the entire war, equal to Stalingrad and other horrors, so there were many casualties. The only question that needed an answer was: Does this veteran have a mental disorder or not? (Alzheimer’s disease was excluded, they went elsewhere). I had access to their full service records and verified they were all healthy when they enlisted. The study looked at five factors: Family background; pre-service adjustment (school, work, contact with police, fighting, drinking etc); duration of exposure to combat; perceived stress of combat; and presence of debilitating physical illnesses (malaria, dysentery, hepatitis etc.). A police record of any sort excluded them from service in infantry. The WWII veterans were eighteen when they enlisted (drinking age was 21) and they couldn’t afford to drink anyway. Drugs were not a problem before the Vietnam War.

It was immediately clear that family background and pre-service adjustment were irrelevant to the outcome. There was no difference between those who were given a psychiatric diagnosis and those who weren’t. When it came to psychiatric diagnoses, the other factors were highly significant. The outcome depended on how long the troops had been involved in actual combat, how bad it was for them, and their physical health at the time. The physical conditions in northern New Guinea were appalling. The troops had to crawl through mountains covered with dense jungle, soaking wet and bitten by every imaginable insect, but the Japanese were cut off by the island-hopping US Navy and could not retreat. They were not getting any supplies and were also indoctrinated to die for the emperor, preferably taking an enemy soldier with them. It was known that they were resorting to cannibalism to survive long enough to keep fighting, because surrender was unthinkable.

The veterans I saw had been selected from the available pool of recruits and were highly motivated to get in an infantry unit and stay there. Mostly they were from rural areas, areas I knew well. Needless to say, they had no idea what was going to happen to them. Most of them could put their finger on a particular day when they said everything changed, they “lost it” as people now say, and this was confirmed by their service records. Within a few days of a particularly bad incident, they began getting disciplinary charges which were recorded in red ink. A clear record suddenly started to show patches of red, mostly for trivial incidents but always getting worse. Their outcome had nothing to do with their genetic status and everything to do with what they had experienced. That is, their later mental state was determined by choices and events they experienced as adults, not by physics or genetics or early life experiences, which is what determinist theories claim.

So what has this to do with free will? It says: daily experience tells us that what we choose and what happens to us are major factors in life, so why would anybody think otherwise? The answer is that nobody has been able to devise a theory of psychology that allows free will that isn’t either (a) indistinguishable from magic or (b) doesn’t break the laws of physics. It has always seemed that if we try to escape the clutches of the physicists, we end up mired in magic but any non-magical theory will be pummeled by physics. Impasse: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The biocognitive model offers a path out of this trap. It says: the mind is real, unlocalised, insubstantial and therefore not subject to the laws of physics. However, it is causally effective in that it can organise to do things in the real world like open the window. On the face of it, that’s a recipe for a magical soul or spirit but it isn’t magical. The mind is a natural phenomenon that arises from brain function in a predictable way. That seems contradictory, how can something be both real and natural but have no substance? In his Consciousness Explained from 1991, the late Daniel Dennett said that the final account of consciousness or mind will be counter-intuitive, just because we’ve tried all the obvious ones. That’s a reasonable comment but I don’t believe Dennett explained anything with that work or with his later output [2, Chap. 8 for details]. After endless twists and turns trying to avoid an insubstantial mind, he invoked something called a “virtual machine” to complete his program, even though he didn’t give any clues as to how it would arise. Sadly for him, a virtual machine just is unlocalised, insubstantial and not subject to the laws of physics, i.e. it meets the “design criteria” of the very thing he was trying to avoid.

This means the biocognitive model is still in the race: the idea of a natural (non-magical) but immaterial mind is sufficiently counter-intuitive to pass his test because those features seem incompatible. In fact, they’re not. The world today is full of natural, insubstantial but effective machines, but we don’t call them that, we call them information. Using its prodigious computational capacity, the brain generates an informational state (aka virtual machine) which does all the things we want a mind to do. That’s why the biocognitive model says the mind is natural: it is utterly dependent on the integrated function of the healthy brain. There is no more magic involved in the emergence of the mind than the emergence of something like an online bank or a service like eBay.

Information is the medium of mind and answers the question of free will: Yes, we have free will but No, determinism is wrong. It is wrong because it is based on the wrong argument. People are only attracted to it because the idea of a functioning, insubstantial mind is so difficult to grasp, so they give up. They say something like: “If a rock or a tree had free will, that would breach the laws of thermodynamics. Therefore if a physical brain has free will, that also breaks those laws.” The error lies in how they look at brains. They just look at the physical thing: if a brain in a pathologist’s bottle had free will, that would clearly break lots of laws. However, only a living brain is in the race to have free will, and living brains are very active things, consuming lots of oxygen and other nutrients to do a job.

If all the neurons in the brain are discharging at their normal leisurely rate but completely randomly, then obviously there would be no coherent mental activity. The owner of the brain would be in a coma, completely inert and unresponsive to the world. When he woke, he would have no memory of that time. On the other hand, if all those neurons were active in the coordinated manner dictated by the brain’s data-processing calculus, he would be awake and going about his daily life normally. That is, there is zero difference in the energy consumption of a non-functioning brain with no free will and one which is fully compos mentis, of sound mind making choices every second. This is crucial: in thermodynamic terms, free will is a free ride. A person in a vegetative state is still alive, that’s not in doubt, and so are trees. A tree consumes energy but, same as our peacefully sleeping subject, it has no data-processing capacity and therefore no free will. Converting our comatose subject to an alert person making decisions requires no further energy. The standard argument against free will, that it breaches the laws of thermodynamics, is wrong. Therefore the most powerful case for determinism falls in a heap, quickly followed by the whole physicalist program.

We live in a dualist universe, one where a material universe governed by the laws of physics exists simultaneously with a universe of information, which is not governed by physics. There is no magic involved at any stage. The mind is not supernatural, i.e. free of any sort of rules, it is very strictly rule-governed, they just are the rules of the brain’s codes or calculus, and nothing to do with gravity. I can think of Uluru, the largest rock in this country, and my head doesn’t get any heavier. In an instant, I can think of some of the spectacular photos of deep space from Hubble, and then flick straight to an image of atoms from an electron microscope, all without jarring my neck. The mind exists, it is real, it is insubstantial, unlocalised and we can choose our paths in life. I believe this argument applies to all creatures with minds, even tiny minds like jumping spiders (fascinating video if you have half an hour), but that would take a bit of elaboration.

I think we can settle the debate now and solve my colleague’s headache: Free will exists with no magic involved. Daniel Dennett could have reached this conclusion but he couldn’t free himself of his physicalist and determinist view of the world: by believing in determinism, he became trapped by it. However, the real counter-intuitive blast comes from trying to grasp the vertiginous idea that we ourselves are just an informational state. Yes, we have a physical body with all that that entails but the big change is to see ourselves as floating in a sea of information, a node that moves around sucking in information, manipulating it and putting it into practice in our movements. Today, one eye is looking at the far reaches of the universe while the other is focussed on subatomic particles. It’s been said we’re positioned halfway between the macro and micro universes, able to conceive of both, which is an interesting way to look at it.

For ourselves, for my Self, as they say, it is just streams of information flowing in from the world to interact with layers upon layers of information, some that I don’t even know exist, to generate our knowledge state including freedom of action. It also generates the vivid, multimodal sensory experience of being a living being, although that may be a mystery too far for us. The emergence of the conscious, aware mind depends on some very, very sophisticated data processing, not on raw computing power. I think it’s likely that we may never know exactly how it’s done. We can easily duplicate decision-making in our information processors but creating the conscious experience as we and many other animals have it may be forever beyond us. Hope this solves your headache.

PS. I’m saying all the physicalist philosophers and determinist psychologists and so on in history got it wrong. American science fiction writer David Brin said:

If an outsider perceives ‘something wrong’ with a core scientific model, the humble and justified response of that curious outsider should be to ask ‘what mistake am I making?’ before assuming 100% of the experts are wrong.

The question now goes to the voting public (that’s you) for a decision. We have free will, we can choose how to act and how to conduct ourselves. This is not academic. Many people have said, and I agree, that we have to act as though this planet is the only place in the known universe where the phenomenon of mind exists. At present, we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire biosphere several hundred times over, and complete idiots with their fingers on the big red button. They are exercising their free will to terrorise the planet, if not push it to oblivion, but we need to exercise our free will to get rid of them damned quick before they do some real damage.

References:

1. Crouse J et al (2024). Patterns of stressful life events and polygenic scores for five mental disorders and neuroticism among adults with depression. Molecular Psychiatry (2024) 29:2765–2773; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02492-x2

2. McLaren N (2024). Dennett’s dysfunctional Functionalism. Chapter 8 in Theories in Psychiatry (see below).

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

A book published a few months ago created quite a stir but now appears to be settling, lost in the general uproar that surrounds the book’s subject, one Donald Trump. Regime Change, subtitled Inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump [1; an interview with DropSite News here] details the machinations that allowed Trump to get back into power and what he has done with it since. The story starts with the 2024 election and continues until Feb. 28^th this year, when Trump announced via his “Truth Social” (which means antisocial lies) that the US and Israel had launched a massive attack on Iran under cover of peace negotiations. That is, the crime of aggressive war was compounded by perfidy, or treachery, the second time in 8 months.

I find the book most unpleasant. There’s nothing new in it and it doesn’t give any background apart from a few thumbnail sketches of some of the more disgusting characters it charts. It is just a catalogue of conversations and plots between a crowd of truly objectionable people, none of whom should ever have been allowed to run a suburban garden club, let alone a nuclear power. Practically every one of the several hundred people mentioned shows a major personality disorder, the great majority seriously paranoid and psychopathic. At the top of the pile, or at the bottom of the pit, sits DJT, the overweight, dementing, incalculably greedy, cruel and dishonest sexual pervert who managed to fool 37% of the population to vote for him. But everybody around him takes their cues from him. The recently departed WH press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, for example, lied as easily as she breathes but was also paranoid to the point of losing touch with reality. The only thing that saved her was her dishonesty: somewhere, she knew she was lying. Trump’s offspring are hugely corrupt but embarrassingly hopeless at concealing it, which isn’t true of his son-in-law. Herr Kushner is even more corrupt than Dumb and Dumber but quite good at concealing it although such is his contempt for the human race that often he doesn’t even bother. If you really feel the need for a gloomy weekend, this is the book for you. But if you want to know what makes Trump tick, the best book is the exposé by his niece, Mary Trump, which gives all the dirt in excrutiating detail.

Mary is now 61, a PhD psychologist and author. She is the daughter of Donald’s older brother, Freddy (1938-1991), who died of heart disease accelerated by alcoholism, smoking and despair when Mary was aged 16. He had been pushed out of the line of inheritance by Donald and their father, Fred Snr. In 2020, Mary published Too Much and Never Enough [2], her detailed account of the family psychopathology, and there’s heaps. Again, it is troubling to read but she writes well, a light touch uncluttered by jargon or moralising. Her grandfather, Fred Snr (1904-1999), was an appalling character, utterly unburdened by any human feelings, who pushed Fred Jr aside and put all his efforts and money into Donald. Mary shows how Donald grew from being an almost uncontrollable child to an adult who feels not the slightest need to control himself as he knows he can lie his way out of any trouble:

Over time, that attitude – that he knew better – would become even more entrenched: as his knowledge base has decreased, (particularly in areas of governing), his claims to know everything have increased in direct proportion to his insecurity, which is where we are now.

Anybody with an interest in psychology or psychiatry should read it as it does two things very well. First, it sets out how characters are formed in the crucible of the family. This should kill forever the widespread idea that siblings have essentially the same environment: they don’t, at all. If they do, it’s luck because the undercurrents are so strong. Second, she shows how to write meaningfully without trying to impress the reader: it’s impressive for that reason.

What’s the point? These two books show how people who are attracted to power are entirely the wrong people to be wielding it. This is also true of money, because money is so effective in buying power although the genuinely wealthy often have little interest in day-to-day politics, partly because they can’t stand rubbing shoulders with commoners but mainly because they know they can get what they want with a phone call. Mary describes how her aunt Maryanne, Donald’s older sister, was promoted to the Federal judiciary by one phone call to the Reagan attorney general from Donald’s evil lawyer, Roy Cohn. How much easier is that than listening to loudmouths in a committee? She also charts how, as people go up the power hierarchy, their sense of power and entitlement grows.

When Trump first moved into the White House in January, 2017, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. They hadn’t expected to win so nothing was ready, and it showed. His appointments were mostly ill-considered (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state, was appointed because he looked the part; he despised Trump and didn’t stay long) and they actually had no plans. Second time round was different. Four years in power showed him all the fun he could have and all the business opportunities lying around, then four years which weren’t fun but which convinced him that revenge is best served flaming hot.

So, after running on a no-war platform, he launches one of the dumbest wars in history, just because he can. Now that it’s clear the US and Israel have been defeated, he lashes out again with an economic “D-Day.” Granted the news of this new economic blockade was announced by the secretary for the Treasury, Scott Bessent, but the grandiosity comes directly from Trump himself: “Nobody can escape our reach, we will punish anybody who doesn’t do as we say blah blah.” That is, “We tell the world to jump and y’all ask How high?”

We often see comments like “They’re sick, they’re all insane.” Anybody who reads these books and watches the news has to ask: Are these people sane or have they all slipped into insanity? They calmly plan and commit major crimes against humanity then violently attack anybody who criticises them. Are they incapable of seeing that what they are doing in so many parts of the world is wrong, criminal, evil and wicked in every sense? No, they’re perfectly capable but they’re happily following Trump’s life script which says: “Take it if you want it. If you get it, crow how smart you are but if you don’t, blame everybody else.”

Didn’t anybody realise this before he was elected? Didn’t they look at his appalling business record and check his social contacts? Some did but the American system allows somebody with piles of money and absolutely no experience of government to elbow his way into the selection process and snatch the prize. Simply by lying and openly appealing to all the worst instincts in the electorate, he pulled off the coup. Second time round, they were much more organised but that raises an important question: why does the electorate have “worst instincts” for him to manipulate so easily? There are two sides to this question, human psychology and American sociology.

From the psychological point of view, there is what is normally called psychobiology and also personality. The biocognitive model says humans are programmed to form social groups then to try to dominate the others in the group and other groups. Our drive to dominate is very powerful but, unlike the need to breathe or eat or drink, it’s not absolute. It’s optional but we like it, being on top is a joy whereas being underfoot becomes unendurable. The worst instinct soon exerts itself: humans form dominance hierarchies and then spend the rest of their time either trying to push themselves higher or pulling others down. This applies on the very small scale, even a few people or a family, as well as on the level of mass psychology. A mass of humans is just lots of people going about their business. If, however, they all agree on the same item of business, they get excited and urge each other on, even to the point of doing stupid things. A person who calls out “No, stop this, it’s stupid,” will quickly be shoved down the hierarchy, to be replaced by somebody who wants to push ahead. People don’t want to go back down the hierarchy so even if they think it’s stupid, mostly they’ll stay quiet and simply go along with the crowd. So who urges the crowd on? The most excitable and least restrained of all. Mob behaviour levels down to the lowest common denominator. The process selects for idiots, and there’s no shortage of them, which brings us to the question of personality.

As psychology, if Mary Trump’s account of her appalling family life does anything, it shows the folly of thinking that all personality is due to genetic factors. The biocognitive model says personality is a set of rules. It is not a lump in your head or a cluster on your genes, it is simply the rules and beliefs you have acquired on your journey through life. A large part of them are soaked up early in life, even preverbally and thus without any words attached to them but they’re still very powerful. They’re not written neatly in your head like the rules of golf, they’re a jumble of explicit and implicit likes and dislikes, trustings and mistrusts. Complicating matters, how you’re feeling on the day often makes different ones rise to the top. If they tend to work together fairly smoothly and harmonise with the larger society, we call that normal personality. If they’re a mess of contradictions and lead to distress and friction with society, we call that personality disorder.

Underneath all these rules is a foundation called “self-esteem,” the basic sense of being a worthwhile person or, all too often, of being no good. Asked “How do you rate yourself as a person?” a lot of people will say: “I’m a piece of shit, a useless oxygen thief. I can’t do anything right and nobody could possibly like me.” This comes directly from early life experiences although it’s easily exaggerated by intense experiences in teenage or young adult years. Donald Trump has a most grotesquely disordered personality but he doesn’t actually hate himself. He is simply lacking any sense of self-worth and has replaced it with the idea that if he has his name on lots of things and is surrounded by lots of fawning people and gold, he must be the greatest. That’s so much better than thinking he doesn’t amount to anything in the world. Take those things away and he wouldn’t fall to bits, he’d simply sit in the corner gazing around vacantly. He also has no regard for any other human being or any animal or any thing unless it comes with power or money. Money, as Mary makes absolutely clear, is all that counts to him. And getting revenge for slights.

Behaviorally, as Mary shows, he learned very early that bluff and bluster usually win, that people want to be fooled and he’s the man to do it. A bold, confident lie usually wins but if all else fails, steal it or blame everybody else. He has no sense of honesty or integrity, words are simply tools to get what he wants and what he wants is to feel he’s the most important and dominant person of all. That fills the empty spaces inside. In order to get further up the ladder, he has attracted and surrounded himself by people of similar nature, flatterers and sycophants who are on the make. There are no decent people in his entire entourage because no decent person could have anything to do with him. That applies to all his cabinet and staff, to all his friends in business and politics, all the people who swarm to Mar-a-Lago and all the hangers-on, urgers, pushers, crooks both petty and grand, everybody. Not even his youngest son escapes. If you want to know what’s wrong with capitalism, it’s this: at age twenty, with no qualifications to his name and no work experience, Barron Trump is worth $150million. Money has been shovelled his way and he accepts it as his due because as people go up the hierarchy, their sense of entitlement grows and grows.

As for American sociology, this very ordinary chap says “We were raised to believe in American exceptionalism” (here, at 2.20). He is most emphatically not alone. Ask any Americans which is the most exceptional nation, and they will all smile and say it’s them. Now exceptionalism can go two ways. It could be read as noblesse oblige, the idea that being exceptional confers exceptional duties and high moral standards, or it could mean “We can do what we like and we’ll destroy anybody who disagrees.” Maybe the Founding Fathers had noble intentions but that hasn’t aged well. It doesn’t matter how high-minded a politician is at the beginning of his career, he has to play to the masses. Since the masses get their little erections over the idea of crushing any and every possible opponent, that’s what the politician tells them, just as Trump tells his dumb supporters at his rallies. People love it. A comforting lie is so much more fun than knowing they don’t count in the world.

Put these two features together, a political system that selects for people who love power and a social system that encourages people to believe that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by a B52, and there’s trouble. Malignant self-regard and the urge to dominate melt and run together in the concept of narcisso-fascism. The inherent impetus is that this must intensify to the point where it has now become a cult. Nobody dares say “Enough, let’s stop this and go home.” There is practically nobody in the US power elite who is prepared to tell Trump to drop dead and no outside forces that can stop the process. It either has to burn itself out, people have to become disgusted by themselves, or it must be crushed by outside forces. There’s no outside force can stop the US so it has to come from within. People have to become immiserated to the extent that they see they’ve been cheated, they allowed themselves to be fooled, and push the extremists out of government.

That’s why it’s good that the farmers who voted for Trump are going broke, that small businesses can’t get workers or supplies, the big manufacturers can’t get the raw materials or equipment they need, schools and hospitals are closing and so on. People in a cult have to hurt before they’ll admit they’re wrong. Because the megawealthy have a megasense of entitlement, they have to hurt very, very much before they’ll take their hands off the workers’ throats. The worse it gets in America, the better it is for the rest of the world – as long as they don’t do a Samson and try to pull the whole shebang down. Would Trump start a nuclear war rather than be pushed out of office? If he can’t get what he wants, would he destroy everything so that nobody else got it? I think that’s a very real risk because once people have sucked on the teats of the beast of fascism, everything else is tasteless. Remember what Marshall Gyorgy Zhukov said as he surveyed the wreckage of Berlin: “We liberated Europe from Fascism and they will never forgive us.”

References:

1. Haberman M, Swan J (2026). Regime Change: inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. New York: Simon and Shuster.

2. Trump ML (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. London: Simon and Shuster.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

There was an unusual incident some years ago at an estate in (I think) France. People arrived for a weekend party and enjoyed the owner’s expansive wine cellars. When it was time to leave, a couple could not be found. People searched everywhere but there was no sign of them. Three days later, they were found in a small room deep in the cellars that nobody had checked, both dead. The door was not locked. It seemed they had snuck in for a quickie but heard the door click shut and thought they were trapped, so they tried digging their way out of the wall, with no luck. Before long, they ran out of oxygen. However, if they had pushed on the door, they could have survived.

This isn’t surprising. If people think something can’t be done, they won’t try. If the larger society says something is impossible, people will actually prevent anybody trying to do it (religions specialise in that). I may have mentioned the eminent British physicist Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) who, in 1895, pronounced that heavier than air flying machines were impossible. I don’t know how he accounted for large birds like swans, which are decidedly heavier than air but remarkably graceful in flight. But before we laugh at such folly, just remember that psychiatry resolutely refuses to push on the door marked “This way to non-biological treatments.” The received view is that all mental disorder is biological, so that’s where all the research money goes and nobody so much as glances behind that door to see what’s going on in the world of mentality.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean that modern psychology equates with the concept of the mind as a mental entity. The entire industry of behaviorist psychology was built on the idea that we can’t talk about minds as such. Burrhus F Skinner, for example, the most influential psychologist of the last century, never quite made up his mind (sic). Sometimes he said minds exist but we can’t talk about them, other times that they exist but are irrelevant to a science of psychology, and the rest he sneered and said they don’t exist.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett was even more contemptuous, scorning mentalist talk as medieval nonsense. “Somehow,” he puffed, “the brain must be the mind.” After about 65 years, his research program completely failed because, to make sense of it, he inserted something called a “virtual machine” that did everything minds do [1, Chap. 8]. Nor do I mean that psychology equals that dumbed-down procedure called “CBT” which treats the complexity of human mentality as a pocket calculator. I mean a theory that says mental troubles have mental causes that have to be uncovered by careful digging. Trouble is, mainstream psychiatry is determined to prove that mental problems have physical causes, so that’s where all the effort goes. A couple of papers this week show that.

The first one is a report on a trial [2] where anxious people were given a single dose of LSD (100mcg, usual party dose is 2-5 times as much) . This produced “... a significant and lasting reduction in anxiety symptoms ... with benefits emerging within days of dosing and holding through the 12-week trial period.” A control group given a placebo didn’t show much change, although it’s not clear how they were supposed not to know they hadn’t been given LSD. The trial has produced great excitement and the drug has been given “... FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation for Generalised Anxiety Disorder.”

I have to say I seriously doubt these results: if LSD reduced anxiety so quickly and effectively, Timothy Leary would have yelled it from the rooftops and not got himself arrested 36 times. We’ll have to wait and see but the real question is: If anxiety is so effectively treated by modern SSRIs and benzos, why are we going back to the 1950s for the latest hot research? Answer is they’re not effective, they don’t work and they’re actually dangerous. There is clear evidence that they can increase the risks of suicide and/or homicide, as well as being seriously unpleasant. There is a major homicide trial in the US at present which, on the face of it, could be drug-induced but it’s definitely not the only issue.

A paper from Finland [3] reported that high and prolonged use of benzos results in higher than expected mortality, meaning a shorter life span. We know that’s true of antipsychotic drugs but benzos? Aren’t they supposed to be harmless? Finnish statistics are very good, they have enviable national data bases and are accomplished number crunchers. They showed a dose-related curve, i.e. the higher the dose, the greater the risk of premature death, including suicides and accidents. Taking more than one benzo or combining them with other drugs greatly increased the risk whereas people taking low doses had little or no added risk of falling off their perches. This is real: in the US and UK, about one adult in eight is taking these drugs, often in the long to very long term, and mostly the more addictive ones such as alprazolam and lorazepam. It’s also true that there’s a huge black market in them, especially among people abusing opiates and amphetamines, all of which increases the risks.

Antidepressants, of course, are widely prescribed for anxiety but they control symptoms, they’re not seen as curative. An anxious person having a bad spell may take them for a while then try to stop them when things improve, only to discover a new problem called drug withdrawal. Drug manufacturers and mainstream psychiatrists prefer to say “discontinuation symptoms” because drug withdrawal smacks of addiction, and nobody wants to mention psych drugs and addiction in the same sentence. However, they meet all criteria for addiction except one: they don’t normally induce euphoria, but then nor does tobacco, one of the most addictive drugs known.

Trouble is, they’re easy to prescribe and take, they don’t interfere with life like regular visits to a psychologist, and they generate vast sums of money. They have a further, powerful benefit in that they allow people to avoid personal responsibility for their mental troubles: “There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just my brain playing up again.” Psychologist Fritz Perls (1893-1970), a big wheel in the gestalt therapy world, used to say that many people didn’t go to therapy in order to change, they just wanted to feel better about their neuroses. This is a fortiori true of taking prescribed psychiatric drugs.

The main problem, of course, is that psychiatry doesn’t have any idea of what anxiety actually is: if it’s abnormal and unpleasant, it’s a mental illness and needs drugs, end of story. That doesn’t explain anything. The proper explanation for anxiety is at the level of psychology, meaning as a function of mental life. Anxiety is a normal human mental function, an emotion of the same order as humour, anger, sadness and so on. It’s perfectly normal to get a bit anxious from time to time. It’s only abnormal if people become anxious too often, too intensely, for too long or over the wrong things. Even the very word “anxiety” implies some sort of deviance. If we give it it’s proper name, the threat response, we can see it for what it is: a normal reaction to life events that has got out of control. People commonly refer to it as an adrenaline rush, because that’s what it is: a sudden blast of the alerting hormone.

Every animal on earth has some sort of threat response. That’s not news, if they didn’t, they’d end up as somebody’s breakfast. We humans are no different, we all react to threats with a stereotyped response: the mental perception of the threat comes first, the reaction is second. In humans, the reaction has two clear parts. First, there is the very obvious physical effect which takes the form of shaking, sweating, pounding heart, shortness of breath, churning stomach, dry mouth, stumbling over speech etc. The mental component consists of racing thoughts, poor concentration and memory, and mental confusion. Together, these are commonly known as the “fight or flight” reaction, meaning the state of heightened arousal that allows somebody to deal with a threat. A threat is always coming at you, it’s always in the future, looming and scary. We can’t be scared of the past. The only way we differ from other animals is that we can anticipate threats long before there is any actual sign of them. We can worry about tomorrow whereas animals don’t have that bother. If, however, the looming threat just is part of the anxiety response, then we’re trapped in a vicious circle, as in:

I have to give a talk tomorrow but I’m scared I’ll shake and sweat and dribble and they’ll think I’m an idiot, and that thought is scaring me right now so I’m starting to shake and sweat and dribble and I think I’d better cancel.

Anticipating a disabling anxiety response is a self-fulfilling prophecy in a normal brain. This is the mechanism of all anxiety states, including phobias and panic states. They are not separate categories of “mental disease,” i.e. distinct, genetically-determined, “chemical imbalances” of the brain, they are simply variations on a common theme. Anxious people are accidentally switching on their threat response and then maintaining it by fearing their response itself. This is a purely mentalist explanation with no basis in physiology at all and tells us how to treat it. However, that door is permanently closed to mainstream psychiatry. They’re all trying to push through the door marked “This way to biology” because wafting out of that door is the enticing aroma of piles of cash.

If that’s all, why not use a drug to calm the shaking and racing heart? One class of drugs, beta-adrenergic blockers, does just that. If you read the standard psychiatric literature, you will be told that the main one, propranolol, has a weak and unpredictable effect on anxiety, including phobias and panic attacks. It is not recommended for anxiety, either by itself or in combination as it has too many side effects, including causing depression. That’s a bit strange because a survey of symphony musicians and other performers found that a quarter of them used propranolol to calm their “stage nerves” before the show. For people with isolated fears, like public speaking, flying and so on, taking one non-sedating, non-addicting tablet an hour before the show transforms their lives. In fact, it’s not strange because beta blockers are off patent, and drug companies have a very powerful vested interest in making sure cheap drugs are never marketed. Moreover, their captive academic psychiatrists work to ensure nobody ever looks behind the door marked “psychology.” Their ideology says all mental disorder is biological so a drug that works via its psychological effect is anathema.

This I know full well as I probably prescribed more beta blockers for anxiety states than anybody else, certainly in this country and possibly in the world. Over about 40years, I would have accumulated well over 5,000 cases, many of whom were almost tearfully grateful. One case was a young policeman whose wife was about 8 months pregnant with their first baby. He was attacked at work and thought he was going to die. During the assault, his only concern was that he wouldn’t live to see their baby born; after, he was left with major post-traumatic anxiety. He was admitted to hospitals twice under renowned professors and was recommended for ECT which, he knew, meant he would be discharged from the police, so he insisted on a third opinion and got me. He was prescribed propranolol at the first interview and after a week, said his life was transformed: “I’ve spent five months in those big hospitals seeing all those bigwig psychiatrists, and one bloke who doesn’t even wear a tie fixed it all with a $10 bottle of pills.”

This is normal. If the patients are selected after a proper assessment, then beta blockers can be almost magical but it must be combined with cognitive psychotherapy. By using these drugs in a veterans’ hospital, we were able to reduce the admission rate and the bed occupancy by about 50%, eventually closing a ward (for which the medical superintendent was also almost tearfully grateful). The drugs are ideal for situational anxiety. The policeman was fine on his rostered days off but got anxious the night before returning to duty and couldn’t sleep, then it was on.

Similarly, a young anaesthetist at my hospital requested a private consultation as he was frightened he would be referred to the medical board for drug addiction (in the old days, that was a real problem with anaesthetists). He had to take several small doses of diazepam per day otherwise he started to “withdraw.” Between operations, operating theatres are quite busy, people rushing about cleaning floors, nurses dropping things or gossiping, trolleys coming in and out. Then the patient is wheeled in and everybody goes quiet and watches the anaesthetist insert the cannulae. He was working in the cardiac unit so there were several complex procedures that only he could do. That was the bit he couldn’t handle: if he made a mistake, everybody would see and laugh at him.

That was a big deal. He was first generation immigrant from a war-torn country and his family had sacrificed a lot to get him to medical school. If he were suspended for drug use, he would lose everything. In fact, it was classic situational anxiety. Public humiliation was a big deal in his culture (and in Australian male culture), so the thought of making a mistake made him anxious and shaky, which greatly increased the risks of making a mess of the various cannulae. He was told he wasn’t addicted as he didn’t take the drugs on weekends or holidays; a week of propranolol convinced him, and so another grateful patient rolled off the production line at a total cost of a few hundred dollars.

I had thousands of such cases which was the reason I prescribed antidepressants in no more than about 2% of new cases. The average in this country is about 60%. Also, I never used ECT and beta blockers were a major factor in that. However, I was never able to get these figures published. As a solo practitioner in remote areas, I didn’t have the resources to organise the sort of research project editors demanded, and never even bothered applying for grants as I knew what would happen. Compounding it, I found that psychiatrists who were losing work to my practice were telling patients and general practitioners that propranolol was ineffective and one was actually saying it was dangerous. What was his evidence? He had none.

They will, however, be happy to see another paper from a few years ago which analysed propranolol in suicides [4]. Of nearly 4,500 suicides in England, Wales and Nthn Ireland, 297 or 6.6% involved propranolol. In most of these it was not the main drug, either something the patient was taking at the time, or something within reach. Typically, a considerable number had not been prescribed the drug. It is common for people who find it effective to give some to their friends who, unsurprisingly, don’t find it as helpful. My experience was that after proper assessment and with carefully supervised brief cognitive therapy, overdoses were not just uncommon but rare, perhaps one person in a thousand, mainly people with a record of impulsive overdoses following minor social upsets. There were no suicides of people taking propranolol, so the answer is: drugs should only be prescribed after careful assessment, and should be followed closely. If beta blockers are given indiscriminately, it won’t work. The old “Take these and come back in a month” story is simply inviting trouble.

What’s the moral of the story? As long as psychiatrists who profit from the “biomedical model” story are running the show, there is no prospect of psychiatry pushing open the door marked “Here for psychology,” to explore its options. General practitioner and historian Robert Youngson summarised it pithily:

The whole history of science, right up to the present, is a story of refusal to accept fundamental new ideas; of determined adherence to the status quo; of the invention of acceptable explanations, however ridiculous, for uncomfortable facts; of older people of scientific eminence dying in confirmed possession of their life-long beliefs; and of painful readjustment of younger people to new concepts [5, p293].

Science progresses, one funeral at a time. We can hope.

References:

1. McLaren N (2024). Dennett’s dysfunctional Functionalism. Chap 8 in Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. See below.

2. Duerr H-A. DT120 (Lysergide) Shows Rapid, Lasting Relief for Generalized Anxiety in Phase 3 Trial. Psychiatric Times, Aug 12^th 2026.

3. Särkilä H et al (2026). Benzodiazepine Use and Mortality Risk: A Nationwide Cohort Study on New Benzodiazepine Users With a 5-Year Follow-Up. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2026; 0:1–10. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acps.70121

4. Gorton HC et al (2024). Involvement of propranolol in suicides: crosssectional study using coroner-reported data. BJPsych Open, 10: e127, 1–7. doi: 10.1192/bjo.2024.714

5. Youngson R (1998). Scientific Blunders. London: Robinson.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.