How scientific is the DSM?

How do we judge whether a system is scientifically sound?

These questions underpin the entire critical psychiatry movement. We can answer the first one straight away: It’s not. A system of classification, or nosology, as it is known in medicine, is not itself scientific. It is the first step toward building a valid knowledge of a field, for example, classifying different types of rocks in geology. If they can’t be named so that everybody knows what is meant by “a granite outcrop” or “a breccia intrusion,” then there will be no progress. This happened in psychiatry. Psychiatrists threw around lots of big words which sounded very impressive but a study which began in 1966, the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia, showed they were using the terms more or less randomly. There was no discipline. It was like one group calling whales fish, another correctly saying they’re mammals and a third saying they’re actually water dragons.

In 1973, to great fanfare, a group of psychiatrists in St Louis, Missouri, published a set of diagnostic criteria to be used in research [1]. Called the “research diagnostic criteria” (RDC), they were intended to select “pure” cases for research projects. That way, when somebody used the term “schizophrenia” in a paper, everybody would know just what it meant. Originally, these were not intended for clinical use as they were incomplete and selected only the clearest cases, leaving the bulk of less tidy cases unnamed. Of course, nobody took any notice of that and immediately began trying to apply them in daily practice so, in 1980, the diagnostic manual was rewritten in the same style.

Very deliberately, the new DSM-III did not make any claims about the nature or origin of mental disorder. All it said was a diagnosis of, say, depression can only be made when the patient shows just these features and not others. It nominates depression as “any condition that satisfies just these criteria.” It doesn’t say anything about causes but it opened an ancient trap for psychiatry, one that depends on the difference between naming something and explaining it. Knowing something’s name doesn’t tell us anything interesting about what it is, how it came to be or, most importantly, what it’s for. Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman (1918-1988) made this point at different times in his lectures:

See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a Halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a Chung Ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird.

The point is that you cannot name something and explain it in the same speech act. Except in medicine. If I say to you “You have a carbuncle,” I have named it for you so you can tell your relatives but they’ll be none the wiser. Medically, however, I’ve gone a lot further. I’ve named it, described it and explained it (a single infection deep under the skin, usually Staph aureus, with pus pointing at several heads) because a large part of medical school is learning a million new names and what they mean. When talking to patients, I have to explain what a name means, but in talking to other physicians, I can leave that bit out because, by virtue of their training, they already know. Strictly speaking, this is an enthymeme, meaning an essential step in the argument has been left out. It’s only by exploring all the hidden premises that you can work out whether somebody is trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

Naming, describing and explaining are different speech acts. A coherent system of names is a precursor of science but it is not science itself as it has no explanatory or predictive value. Psychiatrists, however, misunderstand that bit. For the great majority who think only in biological terms, simply naming something also serves to explain it, just because they believe there is nothing else. They may be a bit fuzzy on the details (like, hopelessly fuzzy) but they assume that the act of giving a name to a condition also locates it in the biological framework, and thus serves to explain it. That assumption, however, is discreetly left out, making their argument an enthymeme. The correct response is to insist that they prove that all mental disorder is necessarily biological which, of course, they can’t do and their argument is therefore invalid [2, Chap. 2].

Another terribly important point the reader raised is this: If psychiatry can talk about mental abnormality, doesn’t that imply they have a clear understanding of mental normality, of where normal stops and abnormal takes over? This is another enthymeme: if we talk about abnormality, there is an unspoken assumption that we have a clear idea of normality. Which, in human terms, we don’t. People even refer to bad or depraved behaviour as “sick” but there’s nothing sick about it at all. There are wicked people, they exist and they are definitely not “sick.” I don’t mean there is some supernatural force called “evil” that takes control of people’s minds and makes them do bad things, I mean there are people who get a kick out of hurting or crushing or even killing other people. They know perfectly well that society prohibits it but as long as they can get away with it, they’ll do it. Trump showed this in his Access Hollywood tape: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, (women) let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” That’s not sick, it’s evil, as he knows because if somebody did it to him, he’d fall in a screaming heap and call the cops.

The problem of normal vs. abnormal is that, for two reasons, psychiatry doesn’t want to to deal with concepts of good and evil. First, it messes with their neat biological project which says: “If it’s not normal, it’s brain disease and therefore our baby.” Second, it implies that mental factors such as personality are both real and important and they have real moral values. Once that door is opened, psychiatrists have no way of limiting how much undesirable behaviour is actually psychological, not biological. In other words, they’d lose customers to, quel horreur, psychologists.

On their part, psychologists have spent a lot of time defining normal mental function. They have very elegant questionnaires that ask about your personality, and lots of tests that show how intelligent you are and where you stand in relation to everybody else. These show two critically important points that psychiatry doesn’t want to know about. First, they all show that normality is a broad range, not a point on a graph or a number on a scale. Normality and social desirability are two distinct concepts. A rowdy, impulsive person is just as abnormal as a tightly organised and super-responsible person.

Second, every measurable parameter of mental life has a dimensional distribution, i.e. normal blurs smoothly across to abnormal with no cut-off point. The idea that abnormal is a separate and distinct category from normal is simply false. But psychiatry is built on the notion of categories of abnormality, which leads to the absurd position where people end up with half a dozen or more separate diagnoses. So why bother? The answer is another unstated premise: that the ultimate goal for biological psychiatry is for each surface syndrome (depression, panic disorder, OCD, ADHD etc) to map down to a specific defect on the genome. Then pharmacologists will be able to devise a new drug for each defect and Bob’s your uncle, mental disorder is brought under control. Do they say this? No, it’s another hidden premise but the biological project in psychiatry doesn’t make sense without that one.

For these reasons, the DSM system is not in itself scientific. At best, it’s prescientific, awaiting proof of the biology. Note that after 75 years of intense biological research in psychiatry, there’s still no evidence that any true mental disorder has a biological cause. There are plenty of physical conditions that have mental complications, e.g. Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, even a broken leg, but the cause is physical. If, however, somebody were to show that some mental disorders are wholly caused by mental events in a healthy brain, then we would be forced to relabel the current DSM system as “pseudoscience.”

The reader’s next question leads to a much broader matter: “How do we judge whether a system is scientifically sound?” That’s called philosophy of science and is a very large subject in its own right. Large, fascinating and hotly contested but psychiatry quietly ignores some important rules, such as: No hidden premises. Everything has to be out in the open. There is another we’ve mentioned which psychiatry conceals: the ancient debate over good, bad and socially undesirable, i.e. morality. Psychiatrists will very quickly tell you: “We’re not in the business of making moral judgements. If you want morality, go and see a priest.” This rule comes from positivism, the philosophy that says science concerns itself only with things that can be seen and measured, not with metaphysical questions such as the meaning of life and all that [3]. Psychiatrists have to be as dispassionate as a surgeon deciding whether to operate on a convicted embezzler or child rapist. The proper attitude is objective and distant, with no emotional involvement as that is likely to bias proper diagnosis and treatment.

The problem is that that attitude itself produces bias, but hides it under “professional detachment.” Amanda A is aged 23 and is unable to work due to constantly arguing with people. From about age 5, she was fostered as her father went to prison while her mother was a drug user working as a prostitute. Through no fault of her own, Amanda was bounced between one foster setting and another, back and forth between distant relatives and strangers, losing contact with her various half-siblings and steadily becoming more and more anxious. From about 14, she began to conceal her anxiety under querulous suspicion. She sees a psychiatrist who diagnoses social phobia, panic disorder, borderline personality disorder, ADHD and type II bipolar disorder. She is told her problems are clearly genetic as a quick look at her entire family reveals unremitting disturbance. She is prescribed a range of drugs but there is never any discussion of her deep sense of loss and her fear of attachment in case she is again abandoned.

Brian B is 21 and, as he says, a total failure and oxygen thief. He has failed his university course twice and now can’t reapply but he has no work experience and doesn’t know what to do. He still lives with his parents but has few friends and says the thought of suicide is never far away. He has very little social life as he spends his nights playing games and sleeps all day. He first saw psychiatrists at age 10 when he was diagnosed with ADHD, inattentive type. Over the years, he has had various stimulant drugs but admits he never took them consistently as he sold them to buy computer games. This assessment was forced by his parents who were concerned he was actually autistic and should be granted some sort of pension and treatment rights. Slowly, reluctantly, he revealed a history of quite grotesque, non-violent sexual abuse by a neighbouring couple which started at about age 8 and continued for about five years. Apart from that, he said his home life was good but he never told anybody as he felt too guilty. The psychiatrist confirmed the diagnoses of ASD, ADHD, MDD and unspecified personality disorder. He was not referred for any sort of talk therapy.

Absolutely typical cases, we see them every day. The irremediable bias is the psychiatrist’s opinion that mental disorder is genetically determined, that psychological matters cannot influence genes, so that whatever the patient feels about his or her life amounts to nothing. This is the very antithesis of the scientific attitude, as it assumes humans are just lumps of chemicals whose course in life is not influenced by mental matters such as beliefs, emotions, hopes and so on. There is no proof of this. Instead, psychiatrists have convinced themselves they’re right and can’t possibly be wrong, that lay people are wrong and can’t possibly be right, and that any criticism is bad faith antipsychiatry, etc. Criticism of the status quo is the engine of scientific progress; without criticism, nothing changes and science degenerates into cultish or political dogma. This has happened many, many times in the past but it’s also happening now, all day, every day, in psychiatry. Their pseudo-objectivity conceals from psychiatrists themselves the fact that whatever they’re doing, it ain’t science.

References:

1. Feighner JP, Robins E, Guze SB, Woodruff RA, Winokur G, Munoz R (1972) Diagnostic criteria for use in psychiatric research. Archives of General Psychiatry. 26: 57-63

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

3. 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

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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.

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In 1987, I left the comforts of Perth, the most isolated capital city in the world, to travel to West Australia’s remote Kimberley region to set up an isolated psychiatric service. Isolated meant “no staff and no facilities” as the nearest psychiatric unit was 2,200km away. It also turned out to mean no support, no assistance and, above all, no interest of any sort from the Health Dept or the college of psychiatrists. In fact, I spent the next six years as the world’s most isolated psychiatrist covering an area of 425,000sqkm, or 165,000 sqm, nearly twice the size of the state of Victoria. The population was then about 25,000, about half white and half Aboriginal people, most of whom were still living more or less according to their traditions. The older people, especially woman, generally couldn’t speak English and young people spoke their own languages at home. My role was to stop Aboriginals being sent to the mental hospital in Perth, a bit less than the distance from London to Moscow but, for them, a much greater climatic and cultural leap. To prepare myself, I worked through a pile of textbooks of Aboriginal anthopology, which is a big topic as there was considerable interest in preliterate cultures in the 19^th Century, especially from Germany. With academic papers and so on, I eventually slogged through about 3,000 pages of material.

Aboriginal society was an ancient, preliterate culture whose people had lived for 50,000 years in one of the harshest climates on earth, with no metals or technology other than they could make with stones and wood. It was and largely still is a patriarchal gerontocracy, where the old men hold power due to their control of religious matters. After long practice, they survived; most authorities estimate there were about 300,000 Aboriginals when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788. However, western diseases quickly devastated them. As the land is totemic, people are tied to the land of their birth so, by staying within their own boundaries, there would normally be no conflict. It also meant they couldn’t leave if they get into trouble, so they had to keep on good terms with the old men, who controlled the most valuable asset of all, the marriage market.

However, my reading soon showed something strange. I had long been interested in anthropology, having previously worked in Southern Thailand, and in ethology, the study of animal behaviour, for what it tells us about human behaviour. In those fields, one of the biggest topics is aggression, both intra- and interspecific. Normally, for humans and for other animals, the index to any textbook will contain a hundred or more references to aggression or similar topics but, when it came to Aboriginal anthropology, there were hardly any. A number of researchers I spoke to said that this was because human conflict is directed at gaining control of the primary source of wealth, meaning land. However, because it was totemic, Aboriginals couldn’t steal another tribe’s land as it would reject them, so they lived in peace within their own boundaries.

This seemed odd since a few days in the casualty department of any local hospital shows one of the striking features of Aboriginal life today is fighting. Ah, I was told, that’s due to government policy of forcing them off their land so that different tribes are mixed in the same small area, and the traditional power structures run by the old men had broken down. Also, alcohol had made everything a hundred times worse. If they were able to go back to their precontact state, i.e. as hunter-gatherers in their own, remote areas, they would be fine. That didn’t seem very realistic, as they also said they would need the flying doctor and other health services.

It seems the reason behind this omission was that early researchers and their modern counterparts wanted to believe that pre-contact Aboriginals lived in a state of Rousseauesque bliss, so they simply overlooked aggression. The clues were there, however. One eminent researcher at University of WA wrote that when they were travelling, women routinely carried all their domestic goods and the children because men had to carry their spears and be ready to use them. Hang on, use them against what? There are no large predators in Australia; crocodiles are easy to avoid, just keep out of the water, and spears are useless against them anyway. Snakes were quickly despatched by the women and ended up on the fire for supper. The only conceivable threat was other humans, and this turned out to be true. Missionary reports from the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, which were not in the academic literature, reported periodic flare-ups that involved all the men in a couple of adjoining tribes meeting on their borders in highly-ritualised “battles,” with more shouting and waving of spears than actual fighting.

There was, however, more or less constant low-grade fighting from stealing the most valuable asset of all: young women. The old men liked to keep a few young women for themselves, which meant there were always a few young men who missed out, so they snuck across to an adjoining tribe’s land to steal wives for themselves. However, that provoked payback raids so the fighting would rarely resolve. A tribe on the move was at risk of being attacked so the men had to be ready, which meant the women did all the heavy work. But before anybody says “Oh, how dreadfully primitive, they obviously needed to be pacified and taught to wear clothes,” just remember that nothing has changed. Anywhere. We terribly superior, gifted and cultured Westerners are still doing exactly the same thing, constantly invading other people’s land to steal their assets and turn them into slaves of one sort or another. In the old days, that meant physical slaves but now it means wage and monetary slaves. Much the same thing except that the modern slave driver doesn’t worry if his slave sickens and dies, he just gets another one from the queues of desperate people milling around his gate. Does it have to be this way? Definitely not.

In 1989, the financial contradictions within the USSR meant that it lost control of its satellites in Eastern Europe, and soon after of itself as the various republics snatched their independence. By 1991, “monolithic international communism” had proven to be anything but. The entire Western power elite were beside themselves with joy: “We won the Cold War,” they crowed. “We’ve proven our superiority.” Political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed: “This is the end of history, the end of social evolution. Liberal democracy is triumphant and humanity will forever owe us a debt of gratitude for our clear-sighted fortitude.” The project to develop and implement neoliberal economics went into overdrive. There was even talk of a “peace dividend,” that because the foreign threat had gone, the military budget could be diverted to good works at home.

It didn’t happen, of course, the arms manufacturers weren’t inclined to close up shop. Within a year or two, in its role as guardian of freedom and democracy, the US had pivoted to face two new “mortal enemies,” rabid jihadist Islamism and fanatical Chinese communist autocracy. A few weeks ago, Trump announced that this year’s budget for the aptly-renamed Department of War will be $1.5trillion, 50% more than last year, to meet the threat. What threat? The same threat that WJ Clinton identified in his speech to the UN General Assembly, 27^th Sept. 1993, in which he reiterated his earlier statement to Congress re the looming threat that the US would be forced to follow the same rules as everybody else:

… the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power … (to ensure) … uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.

In other words, we have the right to bomb you in order to maintain “full spectrum dominance,” absolute domination of the entire world in all possible respects, economic, military, financial, cultural, sporting, and so on. The threat for the US, the only threat, is of not being Number One. What right? The right called “might.” Macht hat Recht, as Adolf used to say. We have the power, therefore we will use it. The question then arises: Why? Why is it necessary to exert total dominance of the world for all time? If you ask this of an American with any sort of power, they just look at you blankly:

“What do you mean, why? Isnt it obvious? We’re the most powerful, smartest, most generous, most democratic and generally most amazing people in history, it is our destiny to lead the world to the sunny uplands and your role to be grateful.”

But, you object, what if we don’t want to be led? What if we’re happy down here on ground level? That gets you nowhere. Once offered the prize of la liberation americaine, there is no refusing: “This is for your benefit. Do as you’re told or we’ll bomb you.” You may then be tempted to ask: “If we can’t see the benefit, then what’s in it for you?” This brings us back to the Clinton Doctrine. Reality is, full spectrum dominance by Uncle Sam is not for the benefit of the world, it’s strictly for the benefit of the US. In particular, it’s for the entrenched power elite of that country and their dear friends in other countries, commonly known as the Epstein Class. British journalist Jonathon Cook nailed it:

Fukayama forgot that capitalism isn’t socialism. It doesn’t seek the best for everyone. It doesn’t want to share the wealth. It doesn’t prioritise dignity over profit. Its lifeblood is exploitation – of individuals and of entire peoples. He forgot that there would be resistance (Substack, 10.06.2026; emphasis added).

This is the crucial point: neoliberal capitalism isn’t in the business of looking after the people who aren’t in a position to take advantage of it. That’s not its purpose. It isn’t about catching the people who fall through the cracks, it’s about helping the front-runners get further ahead by eliminating any possible handicaps in their race to be dominant. Why be dominant? Because human nature. The urge to dominate is hard-wired into us but in such a way that we don’t see it as odd or out of place, we never question it. Dominating is fun, it feels great and we always want more. We never pause to ask how the people we’re dominating feel about it. Britain occupied the entire Subcontinent, now seven different countries, for 250 years, and when Churchill was advised India wanted independence, he got shitty: “”I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire” (Nov. 10^th 1942). This is normal. This is human, but it is not thereby desirable or rational. Invariably, the downtrodden must come to want their freedom, and to fight for it.

Insight is being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and imagine how they feel. Political maturity is not deceiving yourself over your motives. People talk about the post-war period being a “pax Americana” due to the liberal rules-based international order (the IMF, World Bank, UN agencies, WTO, etc) but it wasn’t. It was peaceful and ordered for the people who used it to rake in lots of money but chaotic for everybody else. There hasn’t been a day of peace in the world since 1945 and the US was always in the thick of the fighting, telling everybody else how they should live for the benefit of international capital. The North Koreans realised this a long time ago, as historian Alfred McCoy commented recently:

And mindful that nuclear-armed North Korea remains safe while Iran has been ravaged, even medium-sized states will undoubtedly be seeking the security of nuclear arms... (Common Dreams June 10^th, well worth reading)

A similar thing is playing out in West Asia at present. Israel’s plan for “Greater Israel” involves displacing something like 100million people from their traditional lands, to be replaced by 10million Zionist Israelis. Somewhere along the line, what started as a socialist dream of a safe national home for Europe’s Jews mated with Kabalistic Judaism to produce an endlessly expansionist clericalist-fascist state. How they expect to hold this vast area isn’t clear. Swedish-Iranian political scientist Trita Parsi said: “Israel believes that the only way it can be secure is for everybody else not to be secure.” That way lies madness as there can be no security in a landscape filled with people who hate you. Do Netanyahu and Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all the rest know this? No, they have managed to convince themselves that they can do to Palestinians what they hated when the Nazis did it to their grandparents, and that there will be no repercussions because God and the US are on their side, backed up by The Bomb. Macht hat Recht noch einmal. Might is right recycled. All this is human, none of it has anything to do with the rights or wrongs of any political or economic system, or of any religion or the superiority of any race or such like.

Now we can look at the state of Aboriginal society 200 years ago, with the population of a small modern city scattered thinly across a vast continent, and smile indulgently at their pointless squabbles and posturing “wars.” However, they had one thing that we just can’t seem to get our heads around: everybody had enough to survive but nobody had enough to dominate the neighbouring tribes. Their totemic structure forced the tribes to stay apart, to stay in their land and not try to take over the neighbour’s place. Yes, the old men were a bit greedy but don’t overlook the modern habit of old white men taking young “trophy wives.” Trump, of course, took three wives from a different tribe as well as hundreds of more or less forced dalliances on the side.

Neoliberal economics, meaning monopoly private capitalism, and the collapsing “rules based international order” were specifically designed to create inequality and cement it in place. Monopoly state capitalism, aka Stalinist socialism, does the same. There is a median path, the distributive state, that equalises opportunity while allowing a few to climb a few rungs higher in the hierarchy. Aboriginals managed it, so there’s no reason apart from greed and hubris that we can’t. That, however, is a hard sell to people who can only think in terms of domination as the be-all and end-all of human existence. We need to start before it’s too late.

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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 few weeks ago, the helpful people at Psychiatric Times reported on a new neurostimulatory device approved by the FDA for use in PTSD (May 26^th). This little widget is the Modius Spero which uses two electrodes placed behind the ears trickling low voltage DC to stimulate the vestibular nerves on each side. This nerve feeds information to the brain stem from the tiny vestibular apparatus, or semicircular canals, in the ear that control balance and orientation. According to the company release, “The at-home therapy uses skin electrodes behind both ears. Patients can read, watch TV, or engage in other activities during treatment for 30 minutes a day.” There is no explanation that I can find of how balance influences explosive fears or rages, nightmares or suicidal impulses, but the manufacturers have managed to convince the US Veterans’ Affairs Dept. that their 13million PTSD sufferers should have access to this little gizmo, at about US$1200 each. Bearing in mind that it probably costs about $100 to make (in China, of course), they could do well out of this.

In a Substack post (June 5^th), MIA’s resident psychological sleuth, Peter Simons, looked into it further, pointing out that it has simply been authorised for sale by the FDA, not approved for treatment of a named condition. Authorised means only that it’s unlikely to kill you but doesn’t say it will do the job. Since Mr RFK Jr got to work on the FDA and Dept of Health early last year, it’s quite likely that no properly qualified staff have actually looked at this thing. The same device is marketed for about $2000 as a cure for insomnia and that hardy standby, “stress.” Everything available says it hasn’t been through anything like a rigorous process of investigation. The “study” the FDA used is really an exercise in how not to investigate health claims.

The Psychiatric Times article is simply a rehash of the company’s press release. We’d like to know, and we’re entitled to know, just how this works. Crucially, what’s their theory that justifies it? Why does it help people sleep when, attached to a child’s head, the same sort of gadget is used to “treat” ADHD? Reading that article reminded me of Dr Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), a German physician who, on being involved in a scandal in Vienna, decamped to Paris and set up treating the rich with his new technique of “animal magnetism.” Mesmer seemed to have had a fairly leisurely life, finally graduating in medicine at age 32 with a dissertation (in Latin, of course) titled: On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body. After reading Newton’s theory of how the moon and sun influence tides, he got the idea that they also influenced a tide in the body of a fluid of sorts that permeates the entire universe.

With time, Mesmer constructed an elaborate theory of how this form of natural energy maintained life forms in balance. When it flowed smoothly through the body, all was well but if it was blocked in some organ or another, disease ensued. There were, he believed, helpful people who built up stores of animal magnetism in their bodies, especially in the hands, and they could influence the sick and ailing by manipulating their disordered energy flows. By waving his hands over the afflicted organs or limbs, he claimed he could restore the energetic balances, curing the illness. In that age, medicine hardly existed so anybody who promised to cure people using a novel method was guaranteed an eager clientele. Mesmer soon had too many patients so he devised a way of spreading his energy around using a huge pot with iron bars poking out of it. That was enormously popular but the party ended when he had to leave Vienna rather suddenly.

The worldly-wise Parisiens weren’t so easily impressed. In 1784, the king appointed a commission to investigate whether Mesmer’s cosmic fluid actually existed. Members included Antoine Lavoisier, the leading chemist of his age, the new American ambassador, Ben Franklin, already famous for risking electrocution with a kite in a thunderstorm, and the eminent Dr Guillotin, after the machine of the same name. They quickly decided that there was no such fluid (although it was around for another century as the ‘luminiferous aether’) and devised a simple test for Mesmer’s “treatment.” Using blindfolds, they found that the only factor that counted was whether the patients believed they were getting the genuine hand-waving or not. In what was apparently the first case of a blinded investigation in medicine, they concluded the whole thing was imagination. They then asked the very sensible question: “Can we harness imagination to use it constructively in treating sick people?” That was academic as Mesmer was invited to leave Paris so he went back to Germany and faded out but his name lived on as “mesmerism,” now known as “hypnosis.” And we’re still asking the same questions: How does a belief state affect the physical or mental state? We know that it can, that the placebo effect is real, but what’s its mechanism? Is tickling your vestibular nerve just placebo? There is, however, a far bigger question: does this indicate we have reached “peak drugs”?

Because psychiatry doesn’t have a theory of mind or model of mental disorder, it is unusually susceptible to fads. We’re in the middle of a big one now, where everybody who wants a diagnosis can have one for the asking, or even just for a quick peek at the endlessly obliging Dr Google. Fifty years ago, people didn’t want to be labelled as mentally disturbed, it was seen as intensely humiliating, disempowering and alienating. Now, half the population want to be seen as “neurodiverse” or “transgender” or “ADHD” or “ASD” or something because it allows them to control the dialogue instead of being controlled by it. But it’s not just the “patients” who follow fads, it’s the psychiatrists. The moment some new physical investigation or form of treatment becomes available, psychiatrists grab it and try to apply it to their field. After a while, it emerges that it doesn’t work so they quietly drop it and reach for a new plaything. We’ve had decades of drugs, drugs and more drugs and now it’s becoming clear they aren’t everything people wanted them to be. A recent article on deprescribing antidepressants in the Australian Journal of General Practice puts this very clearly to the people who actually prescribe most of these drugs. That would not have happened even ten years ago but it leaves a gap: what should be done with all the people proudly walking around with their diagnoses pinned to their chests? At first glance, a diagnosis with no treatment seems rather pointless, although the social effects may be sufficient reward. Enter the device makers: Award yourself a diagnosis and buy our expensive little gewgaw to complete your wardrobe.

Most of these machines will end up gathering dust in a cupboard but a few people will swear by them, which was also true of Dr Mesmer’s clientele 250 years ago. They will be enough to keep the argument – and sales – going. The companies will use those few excited “true believers” to reinforce its argument that it is using “evidence-based practice” to sell its wares, hoping that nobody asks about placebos. The problem for genuine sufferers is this: nobody can tell the companies not to do it, that it can’t possibly work because balance has nothing to do with core beliefs. This was how they got rid of the enterprising Dr Mesmer, by showing that his supposed “fluid” didn’t, couldn’t, exist and the whole thing had to be imagination. He was probably lucky: a few years later, Lavoisier met a quick end on one of Dr Guillotin’s inventions, per order of the Committee of Public Safety, aka the Reign of Terror.

There are, however, two imaginations involved, the patient and the doctor. This raises the crucial point on which Thomas Szasz hung his ideas. Szasz said all psychiatry is a fraud. The patient pretends to be ill and the psychiatrist makes pretend diagnoses and gives pretend treatment. Each side knows the whole thing is a racket. I’ve argued that this glib approach is completely wrong as it is based on his early life experiences of being a medical fraud himself, and his historical parallels with the medieval witchcraft craze are misapplied [1]. The overwhelming majority of people who complain of mental symptoms are not imagining it. They are genuinely troubled and want somebody to do something to make them better. Psychiatrists, however, imagine they have a model of mental disorder that justifies whatever treatment they decide on. Moreover, they’re full of confidence because all doctors believe in what they’re doing, otherwise they’d do something else. It doesn’t matter what it is, they believe in it: cutting the brain; sticking electrodes in the brain; electrifying or magnetising it; total dental clearance or gall bladder removal to eradicate “foci of infection” that are poisoning the patient from within; hyperbaric therapy (high pressure oxygen); heat therapy; cold therapy; any number of diets or dietary additives; acupuncture; various sorts of massage; deep sleep; and all of the above as an exercise in self-indulgence (like this one. It must cost a packet).

Straight away, the scene is set for an exercise in self-deception. On the one hand, we have the sufferers, who are troubled and confused by what is happening to them. Mostly, they don’t know what’s gone wrong. Nothing they’ve tried seems to work; willpower and faith go nowhere, so does this mean they’re damned for life? On the other hand, we have a group of professionals who radiate confidence, who say they have a science of mental disorder that gives them the necessary “tools” (they like that word, so business-like) to sort out the patients so take a deep breath, lie back and we’ll get you on your way. “What a relief,” breathes the patient, “I thought I was doomed.” As soon as they say that, all the mysterious and frightening physical symptoms start to abate, the whirring terrors of insanity start to settle, and both patient and doctor are convinced it was the treatment wot dunnit. No, it’s not. It’s not the drugs, it’s not the ECT or the TCMS, it’s simply the relief of anxiety, aka placebo effect.

The problem is that anxiety/fear is the most powerful of all human emotions [2]. It has to be, it has to override all other emotions and sensations to do its job of saving your bacon. To this end, it is the only recursive or self-reinforcing human emotion. All other emotions such as humour, anger and grief eventually wear off but anxiety doesn’t: it gets more and more intense until you give in and do what it wants, which is to get away from the source of fear. However, if the source of your fear is one of the symptoms of anxiety itself, then you’re trapped in a self-reinforcing loop that you can not escape, any more than you can run away from your shadow. It can only get worse, leading to what is known as a panic attack.This is not a separate “illness,” it exists on a single axis ranging from “mild concern” to “mind-bending terror.” When people’s minds are bending under the strain of terror, all sorts of strange things happen. Naturally enough, they can’t sleep, so sleep deprivation becomes a real factor. They’re confused and forgetful, they experience sensory distortions up to and including active hallucinations, and they get strange ideas as they try to make sense of what is going on, usually called “delusions.”

But it’s all fear. An example from many years ago when I was working as a GP: early one Sunday morning, I was called to see a young woman whose husband was sure she was dying. She was lying in her disshevelled bed, absolutely panic-stricken, sweating, jerking, hyperventilating wildly, barely able to speak. I reached into my bag for one of the paper bags we carried for just this. After a minute of rebreathing, she sat up, clearly better and very impressed. I explained what was happening and told them what to do for further treatment. That afternoon, she called to say she needed another of my paper bags. She had accidentally torn the one I gave her and none of the bags they had at home did the job. The message is: it’s all what you believe. If you believe you will have a panic attack if you go near a frog, that’s what will happen. You’ll blame the poor little froggy, of course, but it’s actually your scary belief doing the damage: “If I go near that frog, I will feel terrible, the worst possible feeling. And here it comes, oh no, I’m about to have one of my dreadful turns. Quick, call the ambulance.” The thought of having a dreadful turn is itself the scary thought that brings on the dreadful turn. QED. Moreover, and more to today’s point, if you believe that a little electrical jigger attached to your ears will calm your agitation, that’s what will happen because anxiety is the psychological response to the perception of a threat. It is not a physical disease of the brain. Yes, there are many physical symptoms of anxiety but they’re secondary to the primary psychological cause, namely, a perception interacting with a belief state. Further, if you believe that a machine or amulet or spell or ritual or diet or exercise etc., will remove the threat, you will feel better. QED.

Psychiatry pooh-poohs anxiety as “the worried well, not a serious mental illness,” and therefore can’t see its leading role in other conditions, especially depression. Lacking a theory of mind, that part of the chain of causation of mental disturbance is a blank so psychiatry fills it with fantasied “chemical imbalances” and “genetic causes” (see Jay Joseph in this week’s MIA for another chapter in his demolition of psychiatric genetics). It would help if they had a model of mental disorder but they haven’t, just a bare ideology of biological reduction, meaning biological psychiatry is doomed to endlessly chasing after fads. It means they can never give a proper account either of the role of anxiety in mental life or of such secondary effects as the placebo effect. The biocognitive model does all this without inventing biochemical or genetic causes that can never be found, just because they aren’t there. The model specifically says that in mental disorder, the brain is normal, it is precisely following its orders. The orders are wrong, that’s all, caught in a self-reinforcing loop, which is why amulets seem to work so well.

PS For some reason, Mr RFK Jr wants people to drink raw (unpasteurised) milk. When the cost-benefit ratio comes home to roost, this isn’t always such a bright idea, as this law firm makes clear.

References:

1. McLaren N (2012). Critique of Thomas Szasz. Chaps 12-13, in The Mind-Body Problem Explained: The Biocognitive Model for Psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

2. McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story.

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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.

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Last week’s post ended ominously: “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” A reader asked:

Your conclusion about the guillotine is probably meant metaphorically, and I would like you to answer plainly: how do you think the plutocracy can be defeated? There was a time when the ruling class needed the serfs for their labour, so that was a power the people had, but that will not be the case for much longer. The middle class had their place too in administrative work, again, that is not going to last. In those terms, how can the people overthrow the 1%?

This is a huge concept, we can only start on it today but I will answer plainly: I was not speaking metaphorically. It was intended literally. The 1% will not be displaced voluntarily or politely, as the inestimable Chris Hedges noted in another of his superlative essays this week:

Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.

Mao Zedung knew this too well:

Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism, which is the entire modus operandi of the rich, is that Homo sapiens form dominance hierarchies just because the rewards of being dominant are so thrilling. Paradoxically, because the pain of oppression knows no end, each of us has two strong innate drives, one to dominate and one to resist domination. For those who, by one means or another, get to the top, the thought of going back down the ladder is intolerable. They simply cannot conceive of life “down among the riffraff,” so they will do anything open to them to resist a drop in status. That means anything, without limit, just to protect their status. Very often, they would rather die; better still, they send other people to die in their place. In the competition between their status and other people’s right, their status wins. Always. We see this in West Asia at present: with the full-blooded support of the great majority of its citizens, Israel is using genocide to cement its position as the dominant power in the entire region (for a truly disgusting display of the ecstatic joy humans get from crushing their conspecifics underfoot, see this video, starts at 0.40; that is not random, it is now institutionalised in the culture).

Purely as mammals, the thrill of defeating other people, of dominating them and making them look small so that we can feel big, is hard-wired into us. We all have it. Each and every healthy human infant comes equipped with the hardware to want to rise up the hierarchy. If we have to push somebody else down in order to do it, that is what we will do unless it is trained out of us in childhood. The urge to dominate is not a conscious thing, as in “I’ll plant a tree and watch it grow so other people can enjoy it.” It is the excitement small children display when they win a race, and the even greater excitement their parents show when their little darling wins a race. It is the pride of parents when their child graduates, ranging up to the ecstasy of fifty thousand football fans linking arms and singing as their team wins, the thunderous roars of delight from the stadium when one country gets gold at the Olympics, the drunken rampaging after a football match or an election that soon turns into violence. The urge to dominate is built into our culture but, because the joy of winning is readily amplified by bashing the other side, violence is never far away.

When it comes to the wealthy and powerful, there are two groups, inherited wealth and the self-made. Those who inherit wealth and status haven’t had to struggle to get anywhere so they believe being on top is their natural right. Being dominant becomes the basis of their sense of self-esteem, from which they believe they have rights and abilities other people don’t have. We need no better examples than Trump DJ and the Andrew formerly known as Prince. Trump was a millionaire at age eight as his father secretly transferred money to him without paying tax. Now, he boasts that by hardly ever paying tax, he proves he is smarter than those who do. When he is deposed and the investigations start, it will take decades to sort out the webs of corruption he has woven around the world. He does this because he believes he is a higher sort of person who deserves more than the common herd. Similarly, by all accounts, Andrew MBW is a selfish, dishonest and abusive little shit. His ex-wife, who seems to have disappeared into an exclusive wellness chalet in the Austrian Alps at thousands a day, was apparently no better. Fitzgerald nailed it a hundred years ago:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different (The Rich Boy, 1926).

As for the self-made, most weren’t. They had head starts you and I never knew existed. As a teenager, one William Gates, for example, had money, advantages and, above all, connections to people in the growing world of IT. Yes, he made the most of it but he remains the same person who constantly tried to nobble the competition and was intimately involved with Epstein. The self-made rich are ultracompetitive and terrible people because for them, getting ahead is the only thing that counts. Nothing else matters, certainly not relationships or other people’s rights. They fight dirty to get to the top and will fight with all their resources and dirt to stay on top. Again, look no further than Trump. For him, the idea that he could get into the White House took hold gradually. As soon as he got there, his first moves have been to disable any opposition and take revenge on anybody who opposed him in any way. These people are not called the Epstein class for nothing.

The important point is this: the 1%, and in particular, the 0.01%, do not think like ordinary human beings. They are utterly self-involved, obsessed to the point of mania with getting to the top and staying there, and determined to crush by any means necessary anybody who gets in the way. As they rise up the ladder, so their sense of entitlement grows and expands, as does their sense of grievance for long-forgotten slights and insults, and their determination to pound their perceived enemies. Trump, for example, is obsessed with Obama and Biden. They didn’t actually do anything wrong, they just beat him in a race and he is incapable of getting over the narcissistic hurt. He doesn’t see elections as a fair decision by the majority unless he wins, when it’s a case of “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” The only thing is, he’s not joking because, like so many of these people, Trump is devoid of a sense of humour. They only laugh when they’re winning and somebody else is getting hurt, as in that vile video (above) of the evil Itamar Ben Gvir.

That’s at the individual level but crucially, humans gain a sense of status by identifying with a larger, more powerful group. This is true of male humans, and especially so of adolescents and young adults. They bond just because being part of a group feels more powerful and more exciting than being a suburban nobody. They leave the family of birth and latch on to a larger group, maybe sporting, or politics, or religion or, above all, the military, and by that means, they feel stronger and more confident. That’s why they wear uniforms or club regalia, it identifies them as “one of the powerful.” They swagger around, thrilled by the buzz of power they get from people looking at them but also from seeing their mates and themselves. It’s homoerotic without necessarily being sexual, and it is very, very exciting. If for any reason, people are pushed out of the group, they fall in a hole for a long time, as seen in peacetime soldiers who are injured and discharged medically unfit. Troops injured during fighting don’t feel so bad as they know they’re seen as honourable and still part of the gang. Women can always gain self-esteem and prestige by being mothers but the important point is this: nobody willingly gives up high status to mix with the slobs down there, to become one of them.

It’s true that every group, from small tribes or gatherings to the national level, wants to feel superior to the rest but when the idea of superiority is woven into the national psyche, we’re in trouble. This was crystal clear in Nazi Germany’s concept of die Herrenvolk, the master race. At that time, the idea of a hierarchy of nations or races was accepted by everybody who had any influence, not just Germans, and avidly soaked up by everybody else who wanted to feel more powerful than they were, such as workers. The concept of social Darwinism was normal, that people who got to the top deserved to be there while those who didn’t make it had earned their fates. The upper classes genuinely believed they were a better class of humans; conversely, the poor were substandard who, if they didn’t work harder and behave better, really didn’t deserve to live. Eugenics was seen as progressive, not as distasteful and certainly not as evil.

Since the Third Reich and the horrors of World War II, people are much less likely to talk about this in public but they still believe it. Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia who recently escaped from his mausoleum for a second run at power, liked to talk about “lifters and leaners.” Lifters are the hard workers (like him) who run things and pay their taxes while leaners are the morally feckless who choose to parasitise the welfare state and be carried through life by the industrious. For the wealthy and powerful, success is seen in moral terms: “I earned my status and my wealth by hard work and self-denial. I went without to get ahead and everybody else can, too, if they make the right moral choices.” In social Darwinism, success is seen as proof of moral superiority, not genetic. Most definitely, it is never seen as structural, the result of social conditions over which people have no control, and never as luck. This is at its worst in the military, where injuries are always and only seen as moral failings. They even say it: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” If you’re a soldier who gets a back injury, don’t even bother reporting it.

Today, once more, the world is convulsed by the idea that certain nations have rights that others don’t have, that they are superior beings just by virtue of birth. Americans freely proclaim this, that they are the Leaders of the Free World, World Policeman, the Shining City on the Hill, Fount of Democracy, Most Favoured Nation, Most Powerful in History, and. They. Can. Do. What. They. Like. To anybody, anywhere, for any reason that suits them at the time. Thus, they can strangle Cuba for 67 years then tell the Cubans their government can’t provide for them and must be overthrown, preferably by invasion. Trump’s military has murdered over 200 people by blowing up boats in the Caribbean yet they indict former President Raoul Castro because in 1996, he ordered his military to shoot down some planes that, despite repeated warnings from Cuba and the US authorities to stop, kept flying over Cuba from Florida to drop leaflets. The US has over 850 military bases around the world, threatening everybody who doesn’t toe the line, yet are driven mad by Russian and Chinese listening posts in Cuba. Their hypocrisy is overwhelming but, for them, this is not hypocrisy. Their double standards come directly from believing the old, old lie: We’re better than everybody else so we can do what we like but you have to do as we tell you. As a rule, any nation that has more guns and flags than people is a menace but the cracks in Uncle Sam’s foundations are growing rapidly. International dollar-based finance, their “exorbitant privilege,” is on the way out. Their economy, carefully deindustrialised by neoliberals, is in serious trouble. More significantly, Trump and his gang of halfwits, crooks and predators are splitting the country apart. Expect more trouble as the cost of being world hegemon exceeds any possible benefits, even the wondrous benefit of thinking you’re Number One in the world.

When we come to Israel, we see the concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism at their worst. From infancy, it is drummed into Israeli children that they are special, they are chosen, God favours them and has promised them a land like no other but it was stolen by outsiders and unbelievers, so it is their proud and unwavering duty to fight to recover their divine birthright. This is the ultimate racism, there is no step beyond believing that your enemies are satanic so you can do what you like just because everything you do is already blessed by God, and any lenience toward them is defiling God’s work. So, as we see in that video above and in so many others, that is what they do. This is no accident. Israeli educator and researcher, Nurit Peled Elhanan (b. 1949) is the granddaughter of one of the signatories of their declaration of statehood; the daughter of a revered general; and elder sister of Miko, a noted peace activist and author.

Over her long lifetime, her research has shown that Israeli children are exposed to non-stop ideological indoctrination which, if it occurs in Russia or China, is known as brain-washing. Her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, from 2012, sets this out in detail but she has (very bravely) written hundreds of articles and lectures on this topic (podcast of a recent interview here, transcript here). The gist is that “Arabs” (they never use the word Palestinians) are subhuman interlopers who must be expelled by any means possible, as leaving the Promised Land in their vile hands is an unforgivable sin against God. This means that, in reclaiming Greater Israel, Jews are unable to sin because they are doing God’s will. Therefore rape, torture and genocide are not bad, and anybody who says they are is acting as an agent of the satanic sphere. This is, of course, precisely the racist dogma of the Nazis, but with God replacing the Aryan race.

Naturally enough, when anybody accuses Israelis of crimes such as sodomising the crews of the Sumud Flotilla, there is a chorus of screeches from the president down that this is just another example of the “blood libel” from the medieval era. They’re lying, of course, they know exactly what goes on in their prisons. Israel isn’t Germany during World War II. The Nazi government went to considerable lengths to keep their death camps secret because they knew the civilian population wouldn’t stand for it [1]. Yet in Israel today, e.g. “Israel Day,” May 15^th, gangs of flag-draped youths routinely rampage through Palestinian areas screaming “Death to the Arabs.” During the pogroms in the West Bank, police and military stand by to make sure Palestinians offer no resistance. This is the direct result, she says of a state-coordinated program that turns young Israelis into:

... murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olive [orchards], and poisoners of wells . . . who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. [These] children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbors, the gentiles, children who were brought up in the fear of Islam – a fear that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass murderers [2].

Her point is perfectly clear: these people will not willingly give up their power to crush their neighbours. They will keep trying to expand to fill the borders of their self-appointed “homeland” of Greater Israel, all 2million sqkm of it, until somebody does something to stop them. That may come from within, when enough voters are disgusted by what their government is doing to turf them out but don’t bet on it: 82% support expelling all Gazans by any means. More likely, it will come from the world turning against Israel and turning off their life support. Israel has essentially no natural resources. Without many hundreds of billions of dollars of support, mainly from the US and Germany, and preferential treatment in a myriad ways, their economy would collapse overnight to the level of Jordan or Lebanon. For example, at the beginning of the current round of fighting, Israel had about 1,700 combat-ready Merkava tanks, costing about $5million each (I think that’s an understatement; a new Abrams battle tank costs about $24million), plus dozens of F-35s and so on. Who paid for that? Not Israel, that’s for sure. However, the capital cost of weapons is only part of it; maintaining and arming them more than doubles the price. You don’t get that sort of weaponry by exporting oranges. People say “But Israel exports lots of software and arms.” True, but that’s all developed by American money.

Israel’s folly is that it is engaged in an imperialist, racist project that relies totally on the goodwill of foreign supporters. If that support evaporates, and it is doing so rapidly, then they’re finished. But its architects will not give up easily, their entire self-esteem and raison d’être are built on the idea that God loves them above all other people and wants them to clean all the second-class humans from His Promised Land. Take that away and they’re nobodies. It’s the same in the US. The white population of the South slept easily on the idea that they were superior to the nigras working in their fields to keep them in lives of ease. Even dirt-poor whites in the Delta could look at a black labourer and say “I may be poor but at least I’m not a nigger.” The Civil War notwithstanding, they never gave that up. That same attitude of racial/national superiority has since seeped throughout the whole country but its focus shifted, to foreigners. Even poor Americans feel superior to the rest of the world, for example, many of them believe American health services are the best in the world. Truly amazing what you can do with propaganda.

There is a point worth making. Around the world, we see a headlong Drang nach rechts, a drive to the extreme right. In the UK and in Australia, extremist right wing parties have suddenly surged to the front. In the US, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, you name it, the neonazis are out in force. I think there are two forces operating. First, as mentioned many times, is the malign influence of neoliberal economics causing explosive increases in inequality, deindustrialisation, commercialisation of education and health, lowering public standards, ever-more oppressive surveillance of workers coupled with pervasive corruption at the highest levels of society, and so on. Workers are aware something is seriously wrong with their lives, they’re just not sure what it is.

The second comes directly from Israel, which has normalised far rightist/protofascist conduct just because nobody is allowed to criticise Israel: “Anything Israel does is right and proper. Nobody is allowed to criticise us as that’s antisemitism and blood libel which are worse crimes than genocide.” Israel has colonised the extreme right wing with impunity, giving it an ersatz respectability. What Israel gets away with, the neonazis quickly copy mit größter Freude, with the greatest of delight. The huge, militarised D8 bulldozers Israel uses to flatten Gaza and south Lebanon, without a squeak of protest from the West, are also building a gigantic autobahn to a right wing hell on earth, down which are stampeding Republicans in the US, Reform in the UK, Alternatif fur Deutschland, Italy’s League, Bolsonarists in Brazil, BJP in India, One Nation in Australia and so many others. Where Israel leads, the lunatic fringe follows. As they say in QAnon: Where we go one, we go all.

That’s this week’s limit but to summarise, an attitude of superiority is not compatible with peace on the planet. However, people won’t give it up willingly. How do we force them to do that? Slowly, at the ballot box where possible, and by constant activism. But the most important thing is to know how extremists work: by terrifying normal people. The key point is to stop fearing them. We will talk more.

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One point to show you how the 1% think, or don’t think. After all the hooha about Epstein Island, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, each the offspring of convicted felons, have hit upon a fantabulous idea to invest all the money they got from Middle East potentates: they’re going to build a super-resort for the wealthy in Albania with no riffraff allowed. Very expensive and very exclusive, the wealthy will be able to let their hair down without the risk of paparazzi snapping them. Where in Albania? In a wildlife refuge. On an island. Yes folks, in a mind-numbing display of insightlessness spawned by their congenital contempt for public opinion, they plan to build another bigger, more secure Epstein Island. Don’t you just love it? We can be sure they’ll have queues of rich people dropping by for lunch, à la the lying Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary.

Fortunately, the Albanian people have worked out their prime minister has corruptly approved the development, so they threw molotov cocktails into his house. As I said, “The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they hear the squeaks and rumbles of the approaching tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine.” All power to the Albanians.

References:

1. Johnson E, Reuband K-H (2005) What we knew: terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany. London: John Murray/Hodder Headline.

2. This is referenced to: Svirsky, Gila. “Address at the 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Jerusalem, 28 December 2007”. Gila Svirsky: A Personal Website. The link has recently disappeared.

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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.

****

In addition to their weekly newsletter, Mad in America now posts on Substack. Their posts are brief comments on matters they may have dealt with in the main blog or shorter articles of interest. Two this week concerned antidepressants, essentially how they don’t actually work. The first post, by psychologist Peter Simon, looks at psychiatry’s latest fad, “precision psychiatry.” As always, this is a term pinched from mainstream medicine in the hope that it will do something to give a scientific foundation to psychiatry’s hit-or-miss approach to mental disorder. The idea is that genetic studies will reveal which group of people are likely to respond or not to antidepressants, and whether people likely to be troubled by side effects can be predicted in advance and steered to some other form of treatment. All very laudable, and it echoes what I’ve been saying for years: that as soon as mainstream medicine comes up with a new idea, psychiatry grabs it and begins applying it without any understanding of what is involved. Nothing ever comes from it and each failed fad is quickly forgotten when the next one comes along.

In the second post, MIA’s founder, science journalist and author Bob Whitaker, is drawn back to his old bête noire, the notorious and hugely expensive study called STAR*D. This was a vast, 6 year, multicentre project from 20 years ago that, from memory, cost about US$35million. It was touted as proof that antidepressants cure 70% of people, you’ve just got to try a few drugs. Mainstream psychiatry and their friends in the drug industry were delighted and wrote these results into textbooks and training programs of various sorts. They were less thrilled when a research group moved heaven and earth to get the original figures from the project managers and reanalysed them. They showed that the 12 month “cure rate” was closer to 3%, meaning that the drugs were more or less useless. Whitaker has been on the case for about 10 years now but the editors of the American Journal of Psychiatry, where the original study was published, consistently ignore calls for them to retract the paper.

This revelation was a bit of a shock to the mainstream but, as always, they coped with the bad news that what they’re doing is no help by developing a new fad. Their “precision psychiatry” is just another ploy, except that it too doesn’t work. Will that cause any angst in the professorial suites? I doubt it, they have form when it comes to ignoring bad news. It’s just on 30 years since I first locked horns with the psychiatric establishment in this country by pointing out that their favourite approach, the “biopsychosocial model,” didn’t exist [1]. From the beginning, the mainstream have done their level best to suppress this bit of bad news. Publication of the paper was delayed two years; when it appeared, it was accompanied by two highly critical commentaries that managed to miss the central point, that their chosen model was a mirage; I had never seen the commentaries before they were published and was denied the right of reply. Just six months later, they announced on the college website that modern psychiatry is driven by the biopsychosocial model, although they didn’t bother providing references because, as they knew perfectly well, there were none. Six years later, it was taken down with no discussion that I saw. This has gone back and forth for decades. From 2013-25, the college website proudly proclaimed:

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 [2]

In a letter, the then-president stated: “... the biopsychosocial model (is) ...the predominant theoretical framework underpinning contemporary psychiatry ... a relevant and useful component of training and practice ... “ (Moore, E. correspondence, Nov. 20th 2023). Typically, she refused to respond to requests to provide published material that could support her claim. Her successor also refused, saying she had “nothing to add,” i.e. nothing to add to nothing. However, something has changed. The current iteration of PS 80, from May 2025, doesn’t mention “biopsychosocial.” Once more, it’s been quietly dropped. Instead, we learn that:

Psychiatrists ... Are medical specialists who are highly qualified and able to provide psychiatric expertise founded in concepts of medical knowledge... Advances in early intervention, new medications, and therapies have improved mental health outcomes.

This is just nonsense: all medical specialists are highly qualified, that’s what specialist means. We learn that psychiatrists are highly qualified in psychiatry, and psychiatry is based in medical concepts. Which concepts? Specifically, what is the name of the model of mental disorder they are qualified in? If they haven’t got a model of mental disorder, it’s not a science, and if it’s not a science, then their “medical concepts” don’t apply. As for “improved mental health outcomes,” that’s simply not true. Every indicator is that despite huge expenditures on drugs and hospitals, outcomes are no different or worse than in the past. Here we go again, heading off in circles.

This is not accidental. This is yet another deliberate attempt to conceal the fact that, for all their bluster, psychiatrists are groping in the dark. This is precisely why we have debacles like the deceptive STAR*D report and blind poking in the genome hoping to find a reason why their drugs fail. I’ll tell you why they fail: they have never shown that mental disorder can be understood through “concepts of medical knowledge,” any more than, say, cricket can be understood through “concepts of medical knowledge.” What we call medical knowledge, aka “medical model,” is reductionist. Reductionism says we can understand complex things by reducing them to their fundamental physical elements and seeing how they interact. A proper reductionist explanation of a machine shows precisely how matter and energy flow through it, how they interact according to the laws of physics to produce their outcome. That’s fine, it works very well for things like microbes and trees and livers and cars, all of which are “just machines.” Thus, we can show why a car produces heat and exhaust gases in the process of moving, and we can also show why it can’t produce a fried egg.

When it comes to the human machine, we have an understanding at the molecular level of how everything fits together and how it uses the energy in food to produce growth and motion. We can explain how we play cricket, but what reductionism can’t explain is the WHY in human activity. The reason is very simple: mental matters, like why I went to the beach or why I was annoyed by the news, are not physical in nature. The mind is not controlled by the laws of physics, it has its own laws and they have nothing to do with gravity or chemistry. Even the laws of time don’t apply in the mental realm (fortunately). Given this, the project to explain mental disorder in terms of “concepts of medical knowledge” is doomed just because medicine’s core doctrine of reductionism doesn’t apply to the mnd. Granted there are plenty of people who are sure it does but they have never once produced a remotely plausible argument as to why it should. All we ever hear is boring, repetitious opinions. This is why we need projects like one that has just been announced by Adelaide’s Critical and Ethical Mental Health Centre (CEMH), headed by Prof. Jon Jureidini at Adelaide University:

The Not Broken Project advocates for a fundamental shift in how Australia understands and treats mental distress — away from a medication-first model, and toward the social, environmental, and developmental roots of human suffering.

Their central point is that people suffering mental troubles are not the owners of a “chemically broken brain.” In particular, the “chemical imbalance of the brain” trope “...was never supported by scientific evidence.” Instead, they propose: “Social, environmental, and developmental factors play a major role in mental distress. Drugs don’t address these roots.” As an example of their approach, they offer this little vignette of a fairly typical case:

Amy wasn’t suffering from depression caused by abandonment. Rather, she was suffering from abandonment in a way that fit the pattern of depression. Depression was the manifestation, not the explanation.

This point is critical: a description is not an explanation, an elementary truth that mainstream psychiatry simply cannot grasp. We can extend this to different conditions:

Bill wasn’t suffering from the disease of alcoholism. Instead, he was anxious as a result of his disturbed childhood and learned early that alcohol calmed him and helped him cope with life.

Rachel wasn’t suffering from depression leading to an unhappy marriage. Rather, she was suffering from the unhappy marriage in a way that fit the pattern of depression. Depression was the manifestation of her distress, not the explanation.

Simon hadn’t inherited ADHD from his father. Rather, his father couldn’t hold jobs due to arguing with supervisors, so they moved frequently and Simon had fallen behind. While he was bright, he couldn’t bring himself to admit he didn’t actually know the work so he played up to distract attention from his failing.

That’s neat, except it forces us to ask: Are these people suffering “conditions” in any interesting sense of the word, or are they individuals who have to be understood in the context of their lives? Put that way, it’s a pretty dumb question. People only “suffer conditions” when we don’t know enough about them as humans to make sense of their problems. So far, I’m totally in sympathy with the Not Broken Project but, when you see what they’re up against, we can be sure it won’t achieve anything. They may say (and I agree) that mental disorder (loosely defined) has mental causes but there is a deeply entrenched and, quite frankly, ruthless opposition who say “Mental disorder is always and only the result of physical causes in the brain.” Take one mild-mannered and courteous spokesman for the biological school, who said in an interview:

Psychiatrist: ... you are depressed. That’s why you’re having trouble with intimate relationships, kids, work, finances ...

Interviewer: It’s not that your work stress is causing your depression? You’re having issues at work because you’re depressed ... a lot of people do think that depression is caused by life events.

Psychiatrist: This is the number one myth ... The depression came first ... (but the crisis in life) is not the cause (of the depression), it’s the consequence.

Here, Prof. Ian Hickie, of Sydney, was quoting their large, international genetic survey that appeared to show that having “depressive genes” predisposes people to having bad childhoods and lots of adverse events in life [3]. I don’t believe that for one minute but that’s what the Adelaide group are up against. The mainstream in psychiatry doesn’t have a model of mental disorder. Instead, they have a firmly held belief system or ideology that says it’s all physical so only physical treatments count [4, Chap.2]. Sure, they make a few polite noises about considering social and cultural factors but that’s window dressing only. With few exceptions, they believe that all mental disorder is physical and must have physical treatment (drugs, ECT etc) to the extent that any patient who disagrees will simply be detained under the mental health act and will get the treatment regardless. Their ideology overrides anything patients may know about themselves.

In this, academic and private psychiatrists are firmly backed by the immensely powerful drug industry working closely with private hospitals, presenting a united front to governments who don’t give a damn about mental people because there are no votes in being nice to the deranged. Governments can lose votes if there’s any trouble so when a well-organised lobby like psychiatry says they have all the answers, all they need is a bit more money, governments shove it at them and push them out the door. As it stands, they will not take any notice of the nice people from Adelaide who want to discard the simplistic biological model that even the dimmest legislators can grasp, in favour of something airy-fairy that starts with “Let’s be nice to the mentally-afflicted.” Let’s go to a parliamentary enquiry regarding grant allocations. Remember, there’s big money involved and lots of careers to make or break depending on the outcome. First group are the biological psychiatrists, half a dozen eminent professors in elegant suits who enter with loud and jovial greetings and firm handshakes all round. “Yes, doctor,” says the committee chairman as the professors settle like a flock of eager crows chancing upon an ailing sheep, “can you explain to us why you should get the bulk of the research funds?” The leader of the contingent takes the microphone:

We are highly qualified medical specialists whose psychiatric expertise is founded in proven scientific concepts of medical knowledge. We employ the latest scientific technology to find causes and treatments for mental disorders that arise when the brain is broken. These include molecular neurophysiology to study chemical imbalances in the brain, very large scale international genetic studies, advanced scanning techniques such as positron emission tomography and other radionuclide techniques, and so on. We are developing precision psychiatry to bring rapid advances in early intervention, new medications, and therapies to improve mental health outcomes.

“That sounds very exciting, professor,” chortles the chairman as his colleagues nod in approval. “Can you just explain what you mean by improved mental health outcomes? Will that lead to more people getting back to work and off pensions?”

“That’s not our primary goal, sir,” booms the professor. “We are clinical scientists searching for abstract knowledge but yes, that will happen. We stand on the verge of major breakthroughs in understanding mental disorder. Armed with the biomedical model and, of course, the biopsychosocial model, we 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.”

“Thank you so much,” beams the chairman, “but we’ll have to hurry. Next group are the critical psychiatrists. Ah, come in, doctors, please have a seat. Can you explain briefly your fundamental approach to mental disorder to justify getting a share of the loot? I mean funds.”

“Sentiment,” replies the group’s leader.

“Sentiment?”

“Yes,” he continues, quoting from a well-known website. “We advocate for a fundamental shift in how Australia understands and treats mental distress — away from a medication-first model, and toward the social, environmental, and developmental roots of human suffering. These factors play a major role in mental distress. Drugs don’t address these roots. And withdrawing from them can be profoundly difficult.”

“Do you have a technology to study these conditions?”

“No, we talk to people. Telling someone their brain is broken for life is stigmatising and — in most cases — scientifically false. Validation of symptoms should not become a sentence.”

“A model of mental disorder?”

“Not as such. Our goal is to change government policies to reduce the personal, social, and economic costs of ignoring what patients — and science — are telling us about how distress should be understood and treated.”

“Do you have a theory of mind? No? A theory of personality? A model of personality disorder? Well, thank you indeed, doctor. You can show yourselves out, I’m sure. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

The only way out of this impasse is to heed the rather eccentric Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), who said: “You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” OK, you say, that’s fairly easy. All we have to do is convince the government that mainstream psychiatry doesn’t have a model of mental disorder and doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. Slow down, that’s not so easy. As the saga of the biopsychosocial non-model shows, mainstream psychiatry can string this business out for decades: “Yes, we have a model, no we don’t need to produce it so don’t ask, but we’re highly qualified specialists with lots of big medical words to sway things our way.”

The people behind the Not Broken Project are genuine but after psychiatry has spent the last fifty years pushing its biological barrow, I don’t think they can swing public opinion very far. An articulated model of mental disorder that actually says mental disorder is psychological, not biological, would be a good start. I could rephrase that: Without a model of mental disorder, any attempt to dethrone the biological approach is a non-starter. For example, the biocognitive model [5] says anxiety states are wholly psychological in origin, They are caused when the normal “fight or flight response” to the perception of a threat gets caught in a recursive loop [6]. Very simple, and nothing wrong with the brain. Moreover, it says depression is the response to the perception of a loss. The most common by far is the loss of any pleasure or hope in life due to anxiety. Dealing with the anxiety relieves the depression without drugs or ECT. As an explanation, that’s easy to understand, even for politicians. Now, all we have to do is convince people to read it.

References:

1. McLaren N (1998). A critical review of the biopsychosocial model. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 32; 86-92. Revised version: McLaren N (2024).

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

3. 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-x

4. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry

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

6. McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story.

****

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 Mr Eli Groner, former director general of the office of the prime minister in Israel under Netanyahu, and intimately connected to every major endeavour by that government in the past 15 years, with a list of connections throughout the Middle East and the US and Europe and elsewhere that would fill a sizeable book, is not happy with the current state of affairs vis a vis their surprise attack on Iran, as he tweeted this week:

Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war. They will point to more extreme leadership, to the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are now the centre of gravity and to the fact that the US is blinking in the face of them. All of this is true. But there is something far more serious: Iran has proven that it is capable of instilling fear in the global economy and order through the threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s critical energy arteries. And the moment the world begins to treat iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto that policy must be managed around, the implication is that Iran is no longer just threatening the Middle East. It is actually influencing the rules of the global game.

This is a strategic victory far deeper than any point specific military achievement.

Disaster (here, at 1.30).

There’s a little rule that Master Groaner obviously failed to learn in kindergarten: Be careful what you wish for. When the illegal, immoral and unprovoked US-Israeli war of aggression was launched, Netanyahu gloated: “I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.” Well, sunshine, you’ve got it. You’ve got it good and hard and I hope it’s as painful for you as it is for all the Palestinians who are raped in your prisons – about which you know everything, by the way, and laugh about it with your mates in the lunatic fringe parties. Let’s just look at Groaner’s points in light of Narcisso-Fascism to see what they add up to:

“Many will say that Iran emerged stronger from the war.” I’d say about 99.5% of the world’s population agree with that, and every one of them is delighted. The sight of the Exceptional Nation and God’s Chosen People being demoted in the hierarchy by your actual coloured people is a delight that most of us never imagined.

“More extreme leadership.” Well, if you murder about 50 of the experienced and highly qualified people in a country, including the revered leader of their religion which venerates martyrdom, then the survivors are not going to overlook it, especially the new supreme leader who was injured in the same attack that killed his father, mother, wife and sister (see this article which calls him a “hardliner” about 20 times and only mentions the deaths of his womenfolk in the last line). What do you people expect? If somebody blew away half of Groaner’s family, would that make him more moderate? I’ll tell you what they expected. Against all the advice of professionals in the military, the diplomatic corps and academia, not to mention the more level heads in the international community, Trump and Co. expected Iranians to fall on their knees and throw flowers and kisses at their “liberators.” Truly. Now that it hasn’t happened, the militants are genuinely put out and have no idea what to do, no Plan B.

“The IRGC are now the centre of gravity.” In wartime, the people who are charged with the actual defence of the nation do tend to drift to the centre of things, yes, that’s absolutely right. Clever boys, Donny and Benny, go to the top of the class. What a pity you didn’t think about this before you unleashed the poodles of war but there you are. If the people at the top of the hierarchy are short-sighted idiots, then obviously the processes they used to get there are corrupted.

“The US is blinking in the face of them.” Can we let you in on a little secret? If you start a war, you’re actually supposed to have something called “war aims.” This is a bit more complicated than aiming at a urinal, it involves something called “planning” and even “anticipated outcome.” Yes, I know, all these big words, it’s a strain, but if you say to the bombers “Go over there and start bombing,” you’re actually supposed to know WHY, you’re supposed to have an excuse for breaking the law. A bummer indeed but the Nuremberg tribunals sorted that out 80years ago and you’ve had long enough to study it. So we ask again: WHY is the US-Zionist axis bombing a country that has not attacked another country in 300years and that poses no conceivable threat to either of them? No idea. Groaner is right: the US is indeed blinking, but it’s as in: “WTF do we do now?” They really, genuinely, don’t know what to do. All these incredibly clever, educated, self-confident, self-important and pompous people only have one way of dealing with stroppy foreigners, bomb them. Like in Afghanistan, 20 years and a few hundred thousand deaths and environmental devastation and $2trillion, all to get rid of the Taliban but the day the Yanks pulled out, the Taliban took over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

“Iran is showing it can frighten the world by squeezing its throat.” Cause and effect, dear fellow, your mother would have told you: “If you pull pussy’s tail, she’ll scratch you.” For 25 years, Iran has trumpeted to anybody who would listen that if they were attacked again, they would close the Strait of Hormuz. For 25 years they stood holding up a map and pointing to the choke point saying: “If you attack us, we will choke you right here. So don’t attack us.” Nobody believed them, nobody listened; they were attacked so they closed the Strait. QED. Actually, they didn’t. Lloyds of London closed it by cancelling all the insurance policies for the ships. So don’t any of you clever people say you weren’t warned, because you were. Don’t say you didn’t expect it, as Trump said, because only a person living in a fantasy land could fail to see that attacking another country will invite retaliation. Oh, Trump, yes well he does live in fantasy land. One Benjamin Netanhooha has provided the furniture while Eli Groaner was the delivery driver. It seems that the entire US-Zio axis had convinced themselves that the Strait could only be closed by laying thousands of sea mines, and the US Navy could prevent that. How dumb are these people? How indescribably stupid and arrogantly short-sighted? The entire Yankee-Zio military and political establishment didn’t know that missiles don’t actually have to be fired to stop ships moving, that the threat is enough to scare insurers? Jesus wept, there is seriously no hope for the human race.

“One of the world’s critical energy arteries.” Probably a good idea to look at a map before you launch a war, then check what goes where. I admit I wasn’t aware of just how much of the world’s fertilisers come from the Persian Gulf but I knew it was a lot and I knew it would have an effect on the northern growing season, and that the Arab Spring came from rising bread prices. Et cetera.

“If the world treats Iran’s ability to close Hormuz as a veto to be managed...” Welcome to the new reality, junior. The people who have had guns pointed at their heads for the last few hundred years have realised they’ve got a few guns of their own. The world has had enough of Exceptional Nations and Chosen People wrecking the place. Also, if you’re all so clever and exceptional, what about you turn your minds to working out how to live in peace for a change? The US has been at war for all but eight of its 250 years of existence, and Zionism was built on the notion that the indigenous people of Palestine would never accept being pushed off their traditional lands, so war was the only option, as Gen. Moshe Dayan admitted:

The Israeli army is called a “defense force” but it is not a defensive army. … The Sinai campaign (1956), the reprisal acts and the raids across the border were purely offensive operations, and were of decisive value. … Not only the actions which were actually carried out but also the IDF’s prevailing conception is offensive … the IDF is a characteristically offensive army as regards theory, planning and execution, in body and spirit … Israel must be like a mad dog. Too dangerous to bother.

Compare that with Iran which, remarkably, has won this war by non-lethal means. What we’re seeing is the colllapse of the unipolar world, dominated by the US and its vassal states (including Australia), and the emergence of a multipolar world where various power centres have to negotiate on equal terms to balance their interests. Simply issuing diktats, punitive financial “sanctions” or sending gunboats has had its day. The US-Zionist-British-French imperialist buccaneers have finally driven the rest of the world to create a new world order, where a relatively unitary Eurasian land mass acts as a counter-balance to the peripheral empires of the US, UK, France, Japan and so on.

“Iran is actually influencing the rules of the global game.” They’re what? How dare they? It would be easy to mock this brazenly inane comment but the matter is too serious – the voiceless dead of Gaza plead for recognition. This is an admission by a person who is connected to everybody who is anybody in the world of international power politics, finance and the high crimes that flow from them, that their old game has run out of steam. The old game, the one developed by Spain in the Inca empires, France in North and West Africa and SE Asia, the Netherlands in Indonesia, Portugal here and there, and Britain and the US everywhere, is at an end. Party’s over, boys. Time to pick up your guns and your booze and drugs, your suitcases full of cash and your high class prostitutes and head home, where life just won’t be quite as much fun as it used to be. Look at seedy Britain, slowly sinking into the mud; their Victorian splendour was kept aloft by the breathtaking fortunes they were extracting from their colonies. Now that the colonies have closed the door, Britain is looking for a comfortable old people’s home. Get used to it because the world’s poor people have realised they have power and will not be giving it up again.

Groaner is right: there’s a new game in town. The old one was called “The rules-based international order,” which everybody knew meant “We make the rules and you obey the orders.” It was a racket from beginning to end, in which the gun and the shackles of slavery were replaced with the IMF loan and the tied grants and the preferential trade deals that benefited the West. This kept the darkies in their place in the bush where they could dig and quarry and harvest but they could never escape the shackles of monetary slavery and the omnipresent threat of “Step out of line, nigra, an’ we’ll stage a coup. An’ send you the bill.” So what else has Herr Groaner had to say?

“This is a strategic victory.” Insight dawns! Yessir, you’re absolutely right. You have indeed been dealt a humiliating defeat. You’ve lost the battle but you’ve also lost the far more important war for public sympathy. Finally, neoliberals and zionists stand exposed for what they are, greedy, brutal and utterly callous colonists who are intent on spreading chaos through a large part of the world just for their own enrichment, as WJ Clinton told the UN GA:

…the United States is entitled to resort to the unilateral use of military power … (to ensure)…uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources (27^th Sept. 1993; various references).

Essentially, he meant “We clever Westerners have the guns to do what we like and you coloureds can’t stop us.” In fact, the whole Zionist idea is just a plan to get people’s land without paying for it, but Iran just said: “No you can’t, and here’s proof.” We, the innocent but interested bystanders in all this mayhem can only hope the message sinks in but Trump being Trump and his puppet master in Tel Aviv being who he is, I suspect they will need a further pummeling before they really understand what “NO” means.

“Disaster.” So were the ludicrously-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and a dozen others. The only success the US has achieved since World War II (and bear in mind it was actually the USSR that won that war) has been in stringing out wars indefinitely at great profit to the arms manufacturers and their good friends in Wall St. Other than that, disaster all round. Will they learn? Probably not, because the entire political process in the West has been suborned by neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is a socio-economic doctrine specifically designed to favour the power elite, to amplify their wealth so they can then invest it and create jobs for the hoi polloi. This is called “trickle down” economics and, so far, it has been staggeringly successful in its first part, sucking money out of the working and middle classes and handing it to the 1%. We’re waiting for them to invest it in creative jobs, except we now find all the jobs and all the money have gone offshore (see figures here from Robert Reich) .

Politics used to be about service; generally people had a career and then entered politics after they had been watched for decades and were then judged fit to roam the corridors of power. Now, it’s a career, in fact an impassioned vocation, which usually starts in high school and then only gets worse. Every young aspiring pollie needs a sponsor, and sponsors aren’t doing it out of love. Sponsors are investing, and they expect a return. They expect favourable laws and access to contracts and tax benefits, and that’s what they get. Everything is tilted in their favour. For example, the US is using its fleet of B2 bombers against Iran. The original plan was to build 160 of these but it stopped in 1996 after producing 21 as they were too expensive to build and run. Total cost then was $44.7 billion (equivalent to $92 billion in 2025), an average cost of $2.13 billion per plane (equivalent to $4.37billion in 2025), plus about $15million each per year to maintain. Meantime, Trump says the US can’t afford day care for children as it has wars to run. Wars that kill foreign children are more important than caring for your own.

Societies are inherently hierarchical but neoliberalism drives the process to extremes. It rewards political manipulation to the extent that conspiracy trumps policy (conspiracy is where two or more people meet in secret to organise something they could not achieve if it were known to the public). Neoliberalism favours the interests of one billionaire over a billion children’s interests, that’s what it’s intended to do and that’s what it does. But with this unbelievably stupid, unplanned, unauthorised, illegal, immoral and downright evil, unprovoked war of aggression, it seems the target has found a way to hit back. Good. Let’s hope it’s painful and causes governments to topple. Trouble is, the first people to feel the pain are the poor in India who can’t get cooking gas and the peasant farmers in Thailand who can’t fertilise their rice and the poor of Egypt who can’t afford bread. Poverty exists not because we can’t provide for the poor. It exists because it’s impossible to satisfy the rich. The doctrine behind Narcisso-Fascism says the wealthy and powerful never willingly surrender their wealth and power. The plutocracy sipping champers on their superyachts won’t give a bugger about the poor until they can hear the rumbling tumbrils and the homely thunk of the guillotine. Bring it on.

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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.

****

Last week, I mentioned the risks of people not keeping up with their diphtheria immunisation, or even opposing it, as appears to be the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) case with RFK Jr, US Secretary for Health. Almost on cue came reports of an outbreak of this deadly disease among inadequately immunised people in remote communities in the Northern Territory, one third of them children. Diphtheria is lethal and preventable. Tetanus is lethal and preventable, as are polio, measles, whooping cough, Covid and so on. Practically all immunisations in this country are free because they should be but also because the cost of successfully treating one case of pulmonary diphtheria would pay for at least 5,000 immunisations. For the family, the cost of failed treatment is immeasurable.

Recently, and as he had repeatedly promised, Mr K has turned his attention to psychiatric drugs, especially in childhood. Now it has to be remembered that on a cost-benefit analysis, psychiatric treatment isn’t in the same class as mass immunisation, even though we now spend vastly more on psychiatric drugs than we do on immunity. Assume that 15% of Australians over 16 take the drugs; that’s 3.3million; a dozen scripts each per year at $20 per script gives the princely sum of nearly $800million a year (it’s probably a lot more). That’s a lot of money but are there other costs? Yes, there are many other costs, mainly weight gain and other metabolic disturbances, neurologic side effects such as akathisia and tardive dyskinesia, the risks of a manic attack, and the intangible cost of losing sexual interest and drive.

After all that expense, what’s the benefit of so many people taking all these drugs? This is where the problems start because the answer is: precious little. Are people better off for being fat and sexually inert, do they function better, are there fewer suicides and so on? More to the point, could we get by without them? Could people do something different to get a better outcome? The answer is yes, they would but there’s one problem that stands in the way. It’s called psychiatry. Predictably, psychiatrists have reacted badly to the suggestion that they are “overprescribing, overmedicating, overmedicalising” and so on, even though the evidence is very clear. Trouble is, it threatens their business model which is based on putting ever more people on ever more powerful and expensive drugs for longer and longer. When the drugs are of a type that induces dependency, then their business model is a winner. But is it science? When it comes to the class of stimulant drugs handed out for alleged ADHD, about 600,000 people are taking them, over ten times as many as 20 years ago (brand name Ritalin costs about $100 for 60x10mg tablets, $500 a year, $300million a year and rising fast; in the US, it’s 3-5 times as much). Is that science? Well, we know one thing: trying to prevent people questioning this, trying to suppress open debate, as mainstream psychiatry routinely does, is most definitely not science.

It didn’t take long for the mainstream to react to Mr Kennedy. Coincidently, a major opinion piece surfaced in the British Journal of Psychiatry, reporting on about a year’s work on deprescribing in affective disorder, meaning depression and bipolar disorder [1]. Using what is called a Delphi study, some 45 carefully selected experts offered their views on how and when people should be taken off psychiatric drugs. The Delphi process circulates a series of questions to the group and, after several rounds, assembles a group opinion that they can all agree with. They concluded that most people should stay on their drugs in the long term but a few could be gingerly reduced as an experiment. Given that the people they chose were all absolutely convinced that drugs are the only way to go, and given their conflicts of interest, they were never going to say anything else.

Another psychiatrist whose response to the MAHA move was very predictable writes regularly for Psychiatric Times and has his own blog. Awais Aftab was at Tufts Medical School in Boston, also the home of Ronald Pies, the long-term editor in chief of Psych Times, but has recently moved to Ohio. As far as I know, his background was Pakistani but he writes in English better than most which may explain why reporters commonly seek his opinion on such matters as the MAHA position on overprescribing. However, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t matter how well you write, you will not get a job with Psych Times by criticising mainstream psychiatry, because the mainstream and its affiliated drug industry pay the bills. Thus when he saw Kennedy’s opening shots against psychiatric drug, he was fairly sure that it was the result of an unholy alliance with various “antipsychiatry” elements, particularly Bob Whitaker (also in Boston) and Joanna Moncrieff, in London, conspiring to push a false picture of psychiatry as dehumanising.

Aftab has published a fairly long article on this point, attracting a response from Bob Whitaker, but unless you know the people involved and their particular points of view, it’s not very enlightening. The real issue is the vision of psychiatry that Aftab presents. Critics of psychiatry, he says, have drawn a phony picture of mainstream psychiatry as brutal and demeaning, when the reality is completely different. The false picture of psychiatry put about by critics is that psychiatry thinks all mental disorder is due to a physical disorder of the brain that can only be treated by drugs and physical methods such as ECT. “Untrue,” he cries, “psychiatry is far more subtle than that.” The medical model, he argues, is not a rigid reductionist approach that labels people, assigns them a particular chemical imbalance of the brain and then prescribes physical treatment. Instead, the real medical model is broad-based in biology, psychology and sociology, and physicians take all these factors into account when planning treatment. Psychiatry does the same, he says. It has its biopsychosocial model but also uses …

Various strands of explanatory and methodological pluralism and theoretical developments like embodied cognition, enactivism, complex dynamic systems, phenomenological psychopathology, psychodynamic psychiatry, social determinants of health, etc… They are scientifically grounded, neuroscientifically and psychologically informed, philosophically aware, humanistically oriented, and deeply skeptical of reductionism.

Therefore, he says, critics are wrong to say psychiatry is dehumanising and, by wanting to reduce the rates of diagnosis and prescription, Kennedy is being led astray by a false model fed to him by bad actors. Per Aftab, psychiatrists are really nice, aware people who use the latest science to help people and wouldn’t hurt a fly. However, we should be careful before we take this on board. One of the leading propagandists of the last century made this very clear:

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward…. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively… The broad masses of the people are … but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another [2, p119, 120].

The soft-focus picture of a caring, sensitive psychiatry that Aftab paints is just propaganda. Adolf would applaud. I’ve actually been in the hospital in Boston where he worked and it was the same as all the rest. There may be a few “philosophically aware, humanistically oriented” psychiatrists around but the great bulk are impatient technicians, totally committed to the line that “mental disorder is brain disorder, a genetically determined chemical imbalance of the brain, nothing to do with life experiences, take these and come back in a month.” Well may Aftab expostulate: “Psychiatric conditions have simultaneous neurophysiological, experiential, existential, and sociocultural dimensions. We know this!” but the grim reality is tablets, tablets and more tablets. As the distilled opinions of the 45 “experts on affective disorder” confirmed. Similarly, the great bulk of research in psychiatry is biological in nature: genes, neurotransmitters, scans and the like. Psychological and social factors rarely get a mention, as acknowledged by Thomas Insel after he finished as director of NIMH:

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 [3].

Is mental trouble an “illness” in any realistic sense of the word? If it is then fine, “treatment” in the medical sense may be appropriate, that would need to be investigated, but if it’s not, then we need to stop and take a long, critical look at the whole field. Even the very term “mental illness” begs the question, i.e. it assumes the truth of the point that needs to be proven. Trouble is, the defenders of current mainstream psychiatry are not dispassionate students of human affairs, they are committed to an ideology of mental disorder that tells them what to see, what to study and what to do. But it also tells them what to tell the general public, how to keep them quiet: “Yes, psychiatry is guided by a very liberal medical model and also by the biopsychosocial model… a humanist science, we like to think.” That is absolutely false. There is no such thing as a medical or biomedical model in psychiatry. George Engel never wrote his “biopsychosocial model.” He named a space for one and said it would be a good idea but that’s all he did (amazingly, he ate out on his “non-model” for years and was essentially beatified but I think that was because it put no intellectual demands on the shrinks). These are just words thrown around to keep critics quiet and make psychiatrists think they’re really cool.

Psychiatry as it exists today has no basis in an articulated, publically-available model of mental disorder that has been subject to the usual criticism. Anybody who disagrees, including Dr Aftab, can send me a copy of an article or book where one or other or both of those models is set out in a recognisable scientific form. Until that’s done, psychiatry’s critics are on strong grounds and Mr Kennedy may even be on to something important. That doesn’t say he’s actually thought about it, it’s just that his weirdo health ideas got into bed with his mania for proving everybody wrong but just by chance, he may have hit a bullseye. However, don’t put too much hope on it. The drug companies and their captive academics are experts in dealing with difficult politicians. They know they only have to string this out for a while and Mr RFK Jr will be out on his ear, either because he offended somebody important or an election upends the whole Trumpian shemozzle. For myself, I think it’s possible some good may come from it but the risk is that if and when the political climate in Washington changes, Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry will come roaring back to claim what they believe is their territory. Amply lubricated by money, they are in the grip of Big Idea on the nature of mental disorder. It’s all biology, they keep repeating, anything else is fairy tales. Granted, the nature of mental disorder is very complex but, as Henry Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Reductive biological psychiatry is “clear, simple, and wrong.”

The slogan that “mental illness is brain illness” is leading huge numbers of people to take expensive, addictive and troublesome drugs that don’t address the problem. The most common cause of a persistent or recurrent depressive state is not genes or wobbly brain chemistry but an unsuspected anxiety state. It’s unsuspected because psychiatrists think anxiety is trivial, just the “worried well,” and can’t conceive of how a serious biological disorder like depression could have a trivial cause like anxiety. Their model doesn’t allow the concept of recursion, that mental problems can amplify themselves, so they don’t ask. But being anxious is terrible, it wrecks people’s lives and eventually, they reach the point where they can’t go on. That we can call depression and it may become so bad that they can’t get out of it. Tablets and other things may help for a while but they don’t address the cause, the anxiety, so, after a while, the misery comes back. And back. That’s why depression seems hard to treat and convinces psychiatrists (who don’t need much convincing) that it’s all biological, whereas treating anxiety is straightforward. Unfortunately, due to decades of propaganda on biological causes of mental problems, a lot of people now will not accept the idea it may be psychological in origin. They see anxiety as a moral failing, so they’re happy to take drugs for a geneticc defect. Then they get addicted. If Kennedy can do something about that, all power to him.

References:

1. Goldberg JF et al (2026). The American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP) task force on the deprescribing of psychotropic medications for mood disorders: Delphi expert consensus. British Journal of Psychiatry doi: 10.1192/bjp.2026.10580.

2. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda Books.

3. Rogers A (2017). Wired Science May 11 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/05/star-neuroscientist-tom-insel-leaves-google-spawned-verily-startup/ (this link a bit dicky).

****

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 neoliberal economic ideology says that individual freedom is a virtue and government interference a vice. As rational creatures, it continues, humans know what is best for them and should therefore be left to their own devices as the free market will provide efficiently for all. If this produces inequities of wealth, so be it as the market is self-correcting in that it rewards industry and punishes sloth; ergo poverty equals sloth. Accumulations of wealth are not bad as they must be invested which will produce jobs for all except the lazy, thereby lifting the community’s standards of living. Governments should stand back and let this happen; any interference must reduce economic efficiency to the detriment of all. The ideal government is therefore the smallest government that is needed to look after the jobs that nobody wants or can manage, but if nobody wants them, why bother with them? In essence, more money for rich encourages them to work harder, whereas more money for the poor encourages them to sit down and expect to be kept by the state.

The concepts behind Narcisso-Fascism say this is all wrong: humans are not invariably rational. A very large part of human behaviour is driven by the irrational urge to dominate others in any way possible, just because domination is biologically self-reinforcing. While most people are mostly motivated by a sense of fair play and constrained by a sense of decency, there are plenty of ratbags who see the opportunities for self-enrichment provided by neoliberalism and take over. Neoliberalism licenses this. It provides intellectual and moral cover for scoundrels whose arguments are deliberately at the level of: “If you oppose the free market, you oppose personal freedom and you therefore want a Stalinist dictatorship.” This tends to leave their (decent) opponents speechless so scoundrels of various degrees have taken over most of the world’s governments. That doesn’t say there weren’t scoundrels before the rise of neoliberalism, there have always been crooks but they have never been able to wield an economic argument justifying greed.

Neoliberalism started with a small group of economists in Vienna but soon transplanted to the US where it appealed to people who had a lot of money and wanted more. They were able to influence generations of economists although the Depression also left its mark. In turn, the economists influenced politicians to turn away from the post-war welfare state consensus, with its powerful unions, stringent regulation, high taxation and widespread government involvement in business and public services. Starting with Thatcher and Reagan, governments began divesting of their many and varied commercial enterprises such as airlines, railways, water and power utilities, etc. In practice, this meant selling them at knock-down prices to their mates and then getting a job on the board post-retirement. Unions were essentially broken, restrictive regulations shoved aside, welfare programs curtailed and so on. The goal was to free the market to work its magic on the economy. People were free to participate or not as they saw fit, but they couldn’t expect the government to pick them up if they sat and moaned about their lot. If they chose to starve or die of preventable diseases, well, whose fault was that?

The US was ground zero for the neoliberal experiment, although neoliberals object bitterly to that label. “Look at all the scientific research,” they bluster. “There has never been such a carefully controlled application of science to the economy.” Yes, there are indeed terabytes of data produced each day telling us how wonderful things are and how we should apply for another credit card and sit back to enjoy the ride. But data aren’t information, information isn’t knowledge, knowledge isn’t wisdom and wisdom isn’t painless.

I mentioned last week how neoliberal ideology is based on a false human psychology, essentially no psychology at all. When we look at the people involved, it starts to become clear that they weren’t exploring economics dispassionately. All too often, they started with a particular social-psychological viewpoint and then spent their careers trying to prove it right. We see the same thing in psychiatry, of course. Too many shrinks start their careers convinced mental disorder is biological and then shape their research to prove this point rather than let the results tell them what to believe. For economists, who like to think of themselves as sober, rational sorts, an economics without a psychology means they’re not at risk of being exposed as weirdos or ideologues: just sit there crunching the numbers and don’t take any notice of all those poor people in the street. They’re poor because they chose to be or they’re inferior beings who will be culled by the great Darwinian scythe. Buried under the prejudices economists bring to their research, we find the paradox of hierarchy, the fact that built into all of us is an urge to dominate and an opposite drive to avoid being dominated.

For neoliberal capitalists, the urge to dominate others prevails; for their tame ideologues, beavering away in their ivory towers, * the drive to avoid being dominated is the stronger and has coloured their entire output. Two different facets of the same biological phenomenon supporting the same political agenda: “I want to be free to dominate you so I can be richer,” and “Being free of oppression is more important than being free to screw the poor.” In their expression, these are personality factors which come from early life experiences (and not from genes): we can choose to dominate or we can choose to be fair; we can choose to submit or choose to resist. But these two drives can come together on the same side of the political divide as both groups firmly believe that individual freedom is the primary sociopolitical virtue. They just want it for different reasons.

Three figures, all larger than life, should be mentioned but we can only talk about two today: Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), Milton Friedman (1912-2006; Nobel Prize 1976) while the third, the Russian-American author, Ayn Rand (1905-1982, pronounced “yne”), was not an economist herself but influenced some very powerful figures in the profession. Friedman was such a prolific author that his writings have their own entry in Wikipedia. He more or less dominated American economics for decades but we’ll leave him for another day. Before we say anything, we need to talk about -isms, because there are a lot.

We’re accustomed to think of politics in terms of right wing and left, where the right is conservative and capitalist, and the left is radical and socialist. This is not a good classification. For example, ask anybody where fascism sits on this spectrum and they will point to the far right. That’s not correct. Fascism is a technology of gaining and holding power, and is freely used by left (Stalin, North Korea) and right (Hitler, modern Israel). A better analogy is of a political smorgasbord, where a large array of choices is on offer and politicians can mix and match as the fancy takes them. The political buffet has different forms of government (hereditary autocracy, democracy, theocracy, etc); different economic systems (individualist or monopoly private capitalism, collectivist or monopoly state capitalism, social welfare, dirigist etc); different doctrines (religious, secular, nationalist, racist, militarist, etc); different power structures (tolerant, authoritarian/totalitarian, centralised, dispersed, anarchist), and so on. Even that short list gives several hundred combinations of dishes rom the buffet; no wonder countries with apparently similar political structures often end up arguing.

Complicating this is the fact that politically-minded individuals will chop and change throughout their lives, picking up one doctrine for a while then later swapping to something else, even its opposite. Within and between groups, alliances form, deform, reform and dissolve; ideas move from one side to the other and back again, the only constant being that the people involved are all convinced they’re right and their opponents need to be smacked down. Generally, people start their political careers on the progressive-social welfare-egalitarian-internationalist-tolerant side of things and drift to the other side as they age, i.e. toward intolerant, conservative, nationalist, hierarchical opinions. Murray Rothbard didn’t. He started life almost as a caricature of the hardline, intolerant, arrogant far right wing teenager and didn’t so much as drift to the extreme or libertarian wing as gallop headlong. His early life took him through the Depression and World War II but as a comfortable middle-class New Yorker, he had a pretty easy time of it. At Columbia University in the 1940s and 50s, as one of the very few Republican supporters in the entire school, he swam against the “tide of extreme leftists” (essentially normal students), emerging as a “libertarian.”

Libertarianism is an extreme version of classic liberalism, which developed during the Enlightenment as a reaction against the theocracies and hereditary autocracies of Europe. Liberalism says the free individual is supreme; it values freedom of thought, assembly, religion, movement, commerce, etc. Liberaliasm is secular, rational, progressive, with its eyes firmly fixed on the future. Taken to extreme, libertarians oppose any form of external control by governments etc; they generally oppose taxation for any purpose other than police and military; oppose social safety nets or public services on the basis that anything the government touches is necessarily inefficient and oppressive, and so on. The ultimate form is what are called “sovereign individuals,” a motley bunch who insist that nobody is allowed to tell them what to do under any circumstances. This is actually a variant of the paranoid personality disorder but there is no dividing line between hard-line but sane libertarians and these ultra-extremists, whose pathological hatred of authority periodically erupts into gunfights with police. While Rothbard was never violent or advocated it, they are all drenched in the same ideology, all talking the same language of domination: “Don’t tread on me because I will fight back.”

On graduating, Rothbard started teaching but was soon picked up by a fund that promoted right wing ideologies. He was supported by them to write a textbook which emerged in 1962 as Man, Economy and State, a 1460 page doorstopper (I have no plans to read it). Later, he was supported by the Koch brothers (pronounced ‘coke,’ which is appropriate), billionaire sons of Fred Koch, one of the founders of the protofascist John Birch Society and a major investor in refining in Nazi Germany. Rothbard’s work was directed at providing intellectual cover for a rapacious, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Although he spent his entire life in and around universities and the rapidly growing far right think tanks, he was always regarded as fringe and was never accepted by the mainstream. Nonetheless, whatever standing he lacked in academia, he made up in the febrile, fractious and often bizarre world of far right politics. At different times, he was close friends with Sen. Joe McCarthy; with David Duke, the scurrilous former grand wizard of the KKK; and a variety of holocaust deniers. It is a measure of his internal contradictions that he often referred to Jews as “kikes” even though he was himself Jewish. This meant he was on a collision course with the Jewish state as he was a lifelong opponent of wars and colonialism.

In a short piece from 1967, decrying the cancer of socialism in America (truly) [1], he mocked government and taxes as misdirected and wasteful in that they encourage people to think they can get a free ride. Conservatives moaned that the country was being brought to its knees by “liberal intellectuals, aided and abetted by trade unions and farmers,” but they neglected to mention that the real danger was actually big business working behind the scenes, that “war, culminating in the present garrison state and military-industrial economy, has been the royal road to aggravated statism in America.” The welfare state was allegedly built to serve the poor but the poor were actually the overweaning state’s victims, through being conscripted to fight in foreign wars, to work as wage slaves while being hit hardest by the mortal sin of income tax, and so on. In other places, he attacked egalitianism, women’s rights, civil rights and the welfare state as the products of men dominated by their mothers and wives, of Jewish women and lesbian spinsters “whose busybody inclinations are not fettered by the responsibilities of home and hearth.” Nobody escaped his acid tongue, which suited his avaricious paymasters to the ground.

Rothbard argued with everybody, starting, joining and leaving groups or making and breaking friendships with abandon. Even though he was never an establishment figure, he knew everybody: during his childhood, his family’s neighbour and close friend was Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1970-78. Burns helped introduce him to many powerful people, which brings to mind a comment by Rachel Ball of the Human Rights Law Centre: “It’s easy to stand atop a mountain of privilege, and tell those at the bottom of the mountain that privilege is irrelevant.” One of Rothbard’s on-again, off-again friendships was with the author, self-styled philosopher and enfant terrible, Ayn Rand. This quite bizarre woman’s reputation rested mainly on two epic novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). When I was 16, a friend at school lent me Fountainhead, saying it was the greatest thing he had ever read. I thought it was odd, I couldn’t understand why people could be so selfish but, of course, selfishness just was her philosophy. Of Atlas, John Rogers said:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I tried to read it once but soon gave up, bored by the cardboard characters and what I now see as its narcissism. Nonetheless, she had a major influence in the US, for example, she was close friends with Alan Greenspan, the longest serving chairman of the US Federal Reserve (1987-2006) who famously failed to see the GFC coming as he thought the free market would act rationally to preserve itself (he also said: “Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said,” 1987). Rand’s philosophy, called “Objectivism,” is summed up by a well-known passage in Atlas:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

This quote, her leitmotif, is taken as gospel by millions. In reality, it says: “The unrestrained individual is the highest social good. My happiness is my only moral justification. If I want something, I get it but I am not responsible for how you feel about it. How you live, or even if you live or die, is no concern of mine.” It directly licences the wanton selfishness and disregard of the Epstein class. Ayn Rand was a psychopath, no question about that. She was domineering, almost grotesquely narcissistic, paranoid and argued with everybody. She never gained any sort of academic or literary approval during her life time which offended her greatly. These days, as the high priestess of egotism, she is widely read by incels, the alt-right, QAnon followers, neonazis and deniers of all sizes, shapes and inclinations, as well as by right wing politicians of all stripes, capitalists, libertarians, sovereign citizens and various other whizzbangs, religious fanatics and fruitcakes. There is no psychology as such in her work, just her opinions.

Rothbard was greatly offended by the welfare state as he believed it was an enormous fraud imposed on society by a small power elite for their benefit:

In sum, the most important fact about (Lyndon Johnson’s) Great Society under which we live is the enormous disparity between rhetoric and content. In rhetoric, America is the land of the free and the generous, enjoying the fused blessings of a free market tempered by and joined to accelerating social welfare, bountifully distributing its unstinting largesse to the less fortunate in the world. In actual practice, the free economy is virtually gone, replaced by an imperial corporate state Leviathan that organizes, commands, exploits the rest of society and, indeed, the rest of the world, for its own power and pelf. We have experienced, as Garet Garrett keenly pointed out over a decade ago, a “revolution within the form.” The old limited republic (of the Constitution) has been replaced by Empire, within and without our borders [1].

True. Couldn’t agree more. Watching what the US has become and what it is doing to itself and the world, Rothbard is surely turning in his grave even though he is responsible at least in part for the looming catastophe. He, Rand and so many others are fascist enablers, and it’s all because their “neoliberalism” is an ideology of human behaviour with no basis in a formal theory of psychology. It assumes that, bound by a minimum set of rules, people will act rationally. They do: they make as much money as they can by throttling everybody else. What was missing was something to make them act decently. As a result, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and Netanyahu and all the gang came along, found the myriad loopholes where people are expected to do the right thing, and leapt right in. These people are not aberrations, they are the products of neoliberalism, a psychopathic sociopolitical system that has no means of stopping them. And the world suffers.

* If you want to know, the expression comes from Song of Solomon 7:4. “Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus.” Doesn’t seem very romantic to me.

Reference:

1. Rothbard, M (1967). The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique. First published in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein (New York: Vintage, 1967). Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150618045339/http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard40.html

****

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 American Psychiatric Association’s annual jamboree is on now in San Francisco. Psychiatric Times celebrated with an interview with Prof. David Dunner, the psychiatrist who, 50 years ago, invented the term “rapid cycling” in what was then manic-depressive psychosis, now Bipolar Affective Disorder (BAD). At that time, there was great excitement in the (new) bipolar camp as safer forms of lithium were available, as well as rapid laboratory tests, so there was pressure to put more and more people on it. Soon after, while at the NIMH, he and coworkers published their paper on Bipolar II Disorder, which extended the diagnosis in uncharted new directions. The net effect has been to extend what was once quite a rare diagnosis (about 0.2-0.5% of population) to cover 2-3% of the population, meaning about ten times as many people on drugs. Not long after, the bipolar diagnosis was extended to children, with as much as 8,000% increase in rates of diagnosis.

The interview was titled Rapid Cycling, Lithium, and the Landscape of Bipolar Disorder. The interviewer wanted the old chap to talk about how they came up with the concept of rapid cycling and what has happened since but that wasn’t clear. He was speaking without notes and had obviously given this type of talk hundreds of times, and kept talking more or less without prompting. In the early 1970s, people taking lithium were sent to a “lithium clinic” for their blood tests and prescriptions. I never knew why this was necessary but it meant that big centres had lists hundreds of patients available for research. Gradually, it emerged that people who had rapid swings of mood would not do well on lithium, which is where the drugs called “mood stabilisers” (actually anticonvulsants) found a niche. Their story is bizarre. In the 1960s, a Mr Jack Dreyfus (1913-2009), a very wealthy businessman who developed direct-sale mutual funds, was prescribed phenytoin (Dilantin) by his GP, even though he wasn’t epileptic. Dreyfus was a dreadful person with a truly filthy temper (politely described as “volcanic”) but the drug calmed him. He went on a sort of crusade to publicise it, writing a book and distributing it free to doctors, reputedly at a cost of $70million (about $600million today), and even gave a sample to Richard Nixon. From that, it was a small jump to using anticonvulsants to “treat” episodes of elevated mood. Over the years, anticonvulsants have gradually replaced lithium so that now, they and so-called 2^nd generation antipsychotic drugs are seen as the first line drugs for anybody given the diagnosis. Also, lithium tablets cost nothing to produce (US$2.00 a box in India), which may have something to do with it.

As the drugs have changed over the years, so too Dunner feels the clinical picture of bipolar has changed. Whereas once people in a manic or hypomanic state were elated and grandiose, now they are more likely to be irritable and paranoid. As the interviewer said, “The phenotype has changed” (for readers not familiar with the term, genotype and phenotype are biological expressions. Genotype specifies the actual genetic code in the DNA while phenotype is how it is manifest in life). There was no suggestion as to why this has happened or its significance.

I’m not sure what the interviewer intended from this rambling talk as it wasn’t educational in the usual sense, more an unfocussed reminiscence by an 86yo who really didn’t know anything apart from surveys from long ago and who said what in the various DSM committees over the years. He talked about “the serotonin mechanism and the dopamine mechanism and the noradrenaline mechanism” in depression and how difficult it is to get a drug that matches each one for each patient: “We’re very bad at predicting who’s going to respond to what sort of drug. It’s not clear why that should be” (at 51.20). Psychiatrists, he complained, generally don’t have a plan of management, unlike say oncologists who have different forms of chemotherapy available in case the first one doesn’t work. This produces difficulties as all too often: “Patients fail a whole bunch of drugs” (at 46.00). It’s a “failure of technology,” he said (at 54.10), in that we don’t have adequate genetic tests to work out which type of disorder the patients have and how to target them with the precise drug for that disorder. Treatment in psychiatry defaults to: “Try this, but if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

At 48.50, he dropped a bombshell but the interviewer didn’t notice: “I don’t believe we know how depression comes about or how our drugs work.” Nonetheless, he was convinced mental disorder is a physical disease of the brain, because (at 52.20) “There’s probably a whole bunch of ways these people become depressed…” in terms of their biochemical mechanisms. Still, he was quite clear that these days, depression is a lot easier to treat than in the old days. Most cases are treated as out-patients, either at hospitals or in private practice, and only a few require admission and ECT as used to be the case. After an hour, it ended with the usual effusive thanks for a most interesting and informative talk, etc.

What did we learn? What used to be called manic-depressive psychosis was definitely uncommon so these people were often admitted but didn’t spend a lot of time in hospital. However, it was potentially dangerous as people in a true manic state did dangerous things or just became severely dehydrated. Now that it’s bipolar disorder, it’s become very common, everybody is put on drugs, it’s clinically different and treatment isn’t successful. In his Anatomy of an Epidemic from 2009, science journalist and critic Bob Whitaker puts the case that the spread of the diagnosis is due partly to the much looser diagnostic criteria that started in DSM III (1980) but mainly to the spread of psychiatric drugs, especially antidepressants and stimulants [1]. Today’s diagnostic criteria, especially for bipolar II, are so elastic they can cover almost every person who has a few ups and downs – and who doesn’t? There are, however, several groups who are especially prone to ups and downs. These include people with unstable personalities and people taking psychiatric drugs, who comprise an overlapping and ever-growing segment of the community.

Once a psychiatric diagnosis is made according to today’s loose standards, drug treatment is mandatory. This is not because the drugs are always effective, i.e. the patients will never “fail their treatment,” as the speaker put it, but because of the risks of being sued if something goes wrong. Instead, the much more powerful impetus is the urge in psychiatrists to prescribe drugs, to “do something doctorish,” because everybody expects it, that’s what psychiatrists do. In the main, psychiatrists don’t know how to take a history or don’t see any point (or both) because the theory says it’s all genetic, so why bother asking about how home and school were 30 years ago? Very few offer any sort of talking therapy these days because again, it’s genetic and talk can’t change genes. That’s why up to 16% of the adult population are taking antidepressants, and large and growing numbers of people are taking stimulant drugs.

Both of these groups of psychoactive drugs are seriously destabilising. Soon after starting SSRI antidepressants, up to 15% of people will experience a bout of agitation, irritability and overactivity, with poor sleep, emotional detachment, disorganisation, big ideas, etc. If this happened with any other group of drugs, it would be classed as a “drug side effect” but antidepressants are different. If it happens with these drugs, then by decree, it isn’t a side effect, it’s the drug “uncovering” a previously unseen “bipolar tendency”:

A full manic episode that emerges during antidepressant treatment (drugs, ECT etc) but persists at a full syndromal level beyond the physiological effect of that treatment is sufficient evidence for a manic episode and therefore a bipolar I diagnosis [2, p124, also p133].

What is the “physiological effect” of a drug? Nobody knows, so it’s taken to be “significant blood levels,” but we know that psychiatric drug effects persist long after it is cleared from the blood. What happens is that some ordinary Joe is having a bit of trouble at work, a few family upsets, not sleeping very well, irritable, etc. the usual sort of thing that comes and goes in life. A well-meaning relative says “You’re depressed, I saw that in the notice in the public toilets. Go and see your doctor.” He sees the GP who promptly prescribes an antidepressant. In a week, the unfortunate person has reacted with what looks like a hypomanic attack, has lost his job, more family disputes, maybe a traffic fine for driving erratically. With no idea what is going on, the GP sends him to see a psychiatrist who confidently diagnoses bipolar disorder and prescribes a heap more drugs, but they induce further mental disturbance, in a self-reinforcing manner. Within a few days, this previously normal citizen has been converted into a fully-certified lunatic who is facing a life of iatrogenic entanglement in the psychiatric industry. It’s that easy.

Problem is, as the speaker said, we don’t know what these drugs do. We may call them SSRIs or SNRIs or MAOIs but what are they doing to the brain, the most complex thing in the known universe? There are over 100 neurotransmitters in the brain, and each of them can be excitatory or inhibitory; serotonin alone has 14 different receptors. The idea that a drug works on just one of them and not the others is ludicrous. In addition, there’s the effect of the brain itself in trying to maintain its equilibrium when drugs interfere with normal function. Nobody knows any of this. Psychiatrists talk of “neural circuits” but that’s just talk, on a level with the talk from 75 years ago when psychiatrists talked of “cutting the brain tracts that are causing the mental disorder.” Add to this the explosive growth in the numbers of people taking stimulants for their (largely self-diagnosed) “ADHD” and we have a psychiatric industry essentially out of any control but which is both highly adept at denying it’s causing any problems – and hostile to any suggestion that they could be.

In every western country, the numbers of people taking psychiatric drugs unnecessarily is growing rapidly, largely as a result of another trend in psychiatry: rediagnosing people with unstable personalities as “bipolar” and putting them on drugs. Personality disorder is real, it’s very significant, for the subjects, their families and for the larger community [3, Chap. 8] but psychiatry doesn’t know what to do about it. This is a failure of psychiatry, not a “failure of the patients.” In the main, orthodox psychiatrists know nothing about personality or its disorders. They don’t have a theory of personality or a model of personality disorder, and therefore have no rational treatment for personality problems. This means they have no idea where personality disorder stops and frank mental disorder takes over, plus they don’t get paid if they can’t provide treatment, so the scene is set to stop giving personality diagnoses and label everybody “mentally ill” and put them on drugs. Prescribing relieves the need to be seen to “do something” * and drugs are where the money is. When the unfortunate patients react badly, as most will because they aren’t “mentally ill” in any meaningful sense, they will get more drugs with or without a forced trip to the local nuthouse. After a while on the psychiatric treadmill, they’ll fall in a heap and be put on a pension. This is how mental disorder is manufactured in the 21^st Century.

The whole talk was just a rambling and unfocussed trip down memory lane which took an hour to say precious little. Essentially, it was pseudoscience, science-sounding talk but unburdened by the ballast of a formal model of mental disorder. I certainly don’t believe things have changed as much as he said. Mayer-Gross’s textbook of psychiatry from 1969 (edited by Slater and Roth) specifically said that irritability and paranoid thinking were prominent in elevated moods. If it’s worse now, it could be because more essentially normal people are forced to take very unpleasant drugs with a host of adverse side effects against their will. The thing that always impressed me was how so many of these people lied, and the lying got them into trouble. My teachers dismissed this behaviour as “delusional, caused by his illness,” that it would get better when the drugs did their job. But it didn’t. It became more subtle, a personality factor, which leads back to the question of distinguishing between personality disorder and “mental illness.” However, as long as there’s no money in treating personality disorder and lots to be made from treating bipolar disorder, that’s a non-question.

What the speaker describes is a failure not of a “technology of mental disorder,” but of ontology, a failure of basic understanding directly caused by the lack of a formal model of mental disorder. Mainstream psychiatry won’t admit that it doesn’t actually know what it’s doing but the illustrious speaker gave it away at 48.50:

I don’t believe we know how depression comes about or how drugs work … We don’t actually know what causes depression or what our drugs do … We’re very bad at predicting who’s going to respond to what sort of drug. It’s not clear why that should be.

It’s clear to me but what he didn’t say was: “But we’re absolutely convinced it’s all biological and drugs are the only way to go.” Can he prove that? Of course not, but he also believes that anybody who wants proof is “antipsychiatry” and must therefore be silenced.

*The politician’s syllogism applies equally to psychiatry: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this will be done.”

References:

1. Whitaker R (2009). Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York: Random House.

2. American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition. Washington DC: APA Publishing.

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

****

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.

****

Politically, there’s something unexpected happening around the world. In one country after another, the traditional two-party duopoly of right wing vs. left wing is crumbling. We saw it in last week’s local government elections in the UK where the Conservatives, the oldest political party in the world, were hammered into about fourth position. Labour, the governing party, lost thousands of council seats around the country and the Labour prime minister’s political career hangs by a thread. In a by-election here in Australia on the weekend, one of the most rock-solid rural seats fell to a far-right insurgent party. In France, prime ministers come and go; India’s recent elections show a lunge to the right; Israel’s government is willing hostage to religious fanatics who are fascist in all but name; Argentina’s doctrinaire right wing is dismantling decades of social safeguards; Japan has recently lurched to the right and is busy rearming; and then there’s the US. Something strange is happening.

In fact, it’s been happening for quite a while but now it’s really starting to show. Chaos, destruction, social breakdown, and rage. Everywhere people are so angry yet what are they angry about? Except where there are actual wars going on, the overwhelming bulk of the population are far, far bettter off than they were 70, 50 or even 30 years ago. Literacy rates and standards of education are rising, especially for girls, health standards are rising, the average life span is rising, women are no longer trapped by a pregnancy every year, housing is better, roads are better, cars are cheaper, mobile phones and the internet are ubiquitous yet people are still not happy. In the US, what are called “deaths of despair,” meaning suicide and overdoses, are now so common that the mean life span is actually dropping, first time in modern history that has happened in a developed country not at war. Even popular music is suffering: the yearning lyricism of “Love me do” has been drowned by the angry gabble of gangsta rap.

It wasn’t always so. The decades after World War II were seen as a “golden age” for ordinary people. In the UK, rationing during the war had given the working classes their first balanced diet in history. Even in the late 1930s, Orwell reported that people doing heavy work and pregnant women lived mainly on oatmeal made with water, white bread and potatoes. In the 1950s, Britain built its NHS, extended schooling and had a huge housing program to replace bombed areas and the vast Victorian slums crammed together with no building codes [1,2]. In the US, the GI Bill extended education to the masses, the huge highway system provided brought markets to the hinterland, and industry hummed to replace the destruction of the war. The salary of the average CEO was about 20 times that of the median worker. Australia welcomed immigrants to work on massive projects such as the Snowy River Hydro Scheme and the rapidly expanding public housing and infrastructure (schools and hospitals) to cope with the baby boom. Education was essentially free. Take-home pay for workers had never been so high. An ordinary worker could raise a family in their own home with their own car, as British PM Harold McMillan snorted: “You’ve never had it so good.”

That’s all gone. Industrial jobs have vanished overseas, housing is impossibly expensive, especially for young people weighed down with student debt, public health services groan as people are forced out of high cost private practice or simply go without, drugs, alcohol, overbearing police who can never seem to catch the big fish, red tape, loss of privacy to private and government domestic spying agencies, and the average CEO in the US takes home nearly 400 times the median worker’s salary. Things were supposed to get better but they’re not, they’re getting worse by the day. Our brain dead governments can’t seem to stop fighting with everybody, universities have turned into repressive factories that simply mine students for their money, gambling flourishes and the Epstein business shows our leaders are corrupt to the core. Our leaders. What a joke. How did such a ghastly shower of no-hopers, conmen, parasites and paedophiles get their slimy hands on the controls? Did we take a wrong turn somewhere? Yes, we did. It’s called neoliberal economics and it has a lot to answer for.

The doctrine of neoliberalism emerged in the early 1920s in a small group of economists in Vienna, so it’s often called the Austrian school of economics. The first and most influential was Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) who built his system of economics on the notion that only individuals are effective; essentially, if everybody cares for themselves, we don’t need bossy governments. Only individuals know enough about what they want and their local business to make the essential decisions to bring it about. Governments can never know what individuals know and their decisions are inherently inefficient; therefore, the only good government is the smallest possible that can do the jobs that nobody else wants or is able to do. Anything that impedes an individual’s self-directed actions or encourages individuals to rely on others, especially government services, is anathema. It’s said that 80% of economists in the world today follow the Austrian school or one of its variants. Governments everywhere are in a race to the bottom to see who can be first to sell off assets and reduce services to “improve efficiency.”

Von Mises and his many disciples such as Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992; Nobel Prize 1974) developed the notion of “trickle-down economics,” that accumulation of capital by individuals was entirely laudable as they would then invest the money, providing jobs for workers and generally lifting the wider economy. Government doesn’t have any significant role in this process, which is natural and flows from self-interested human activity. People don’t need to be told what is good for them. All governments have to do is guarantee a “level playing field” for all actors in the market economy built on essentially common sense laws that will facilitate economic activity and provide safety for all citizens.

As economists, the Austrians had very little effect in the early post-war period when governments in most countries were building welfare states with “safety nets” to provide for their citizens. By the early 1970s, everything was humming along as the “baby boomers” were getting into their stride. Apart from the usual wars, life was generally a lot better so people who weren’t doing so well or who had been elbowed aside began to press for their rights. This alarmed the elite who didn’t like the idea of an uppity working class threatening what they saw as their natural right to an ever-larger share of the expanding national wealth. This was especially true in the US where the wealthy lived in fear of two potential events: a workers’ revolution aimed at restricting or even abolishing capitalism, and an uprising by the long-repressed black people. The real nightmare was that these two movements would fuse into a single, irresistible force, ending their privilege. So, in 1970, they decided they needed to get in first. Just as Marxists have their Communist Manifesto, or fascists their Mein Kampf, so the power elite had a guiding doctrine known as the Powell Memorandum (1971). Its author, the lawyer and future Supreme Court judge, Lewis Powell, was a former counsel for the tobacco industry and a major influence on the “tobacco playbook,” the general recipe for industrial skullduggery.

We will never know the full history of the neoconservative, neoliberal movement. They’re called neoliberals because they wanted to return to the liberal principles of the 19^th Century, based on universal laws and rights, freedom and the supremacy of the individual over institutions, rationality, reasonableness, sobriety and restraint, and so on. That’s a gigantic topic in its own right; suffice it to say that Powell urged “responsible citizens” to take control of the community before it was too late, meaning before the long-haired, rebellious youth of the day got power and began to – shudder – dismantle privilege. He set out a program by which the hotbeds of rebellion, such as universities, the press and broader media, etc., could be captured and neutered, turning them into faithful servants of capital rather than breeding grounds of wannabe bolsheviks trying to steal the wealth of the hard-working and self-denying elite. Central to his plan was the establishment of a network of what are now called “think tanks,” very well-financed institutions with credentialed researchers on the payroll working on programs to hand to governments for immediate implementation.

A major part of their plan involved developing and publicising the Austrian or neoliberal school of economics. They had their work cut out for them as practically all of the economists were prolific and generally terrible writers. The bad news was that they were prolix, vague and generally woolly thinkers; the good news was that as prolix, vague and generally woolly thinkers, their work could, with a little massage, support exactly what the reactionaries wanted: minimal government restraint and maximal freedom to get as rich and powerful as they wanted. In essence, it was a lunge for power. They wanted to take control of the entire government, society and economy and redirect it to satisfy their wishes in such a way that it could never again be taken off them.

A central element was what they called “trickle-down economics,” which said that capital must be given to individuals to invest because only they know enough about the community’s needs to satisfy them. Therefore, taxation and other economic policies have to be reshaped to funnel capital from the factory floor and the farmer’s paddocks, to the “captains of industry and finance” in their eyries in Wall St so that, armed only with their dispassionate self-interest, they could work out where best to invest it. That would provide jobs for all and the “rising tide” of GDP would “lift all boats.” All this made perfect sense to busy politicians and lawmakers, whose understanding was aided in no small part by the generosity of the caring people who had taken so much time to write the legislation for them and were keen to help with troublesome side issues such as campaign funds. In the first step, moving money from the poor to the rich, they have been outstandingly successful, as US Sen. Bernie Sanders reports:

As Republicans prepare legislation to provide more tax breaks to billionaires with massive cuts to programs working families need, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today highlighted a new report from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation, which found that nearly $80 trillion in wealth in the United States has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1% over the past 50 years (my emphasis).

That’s only the US, there are plenty of other places following the same policies. Trouble is, there was a small hole in the Austrian theory of economics, a hole just big enough to allow $80trillion to slide through, largely unnoticed. I don’t think it was the intention of von Mises and his disciples to leave a hole in their theories, and I doubt if Mr Powell noticed it in 1971. I don’t think many people have found the exact hole since then but a lot of rich and powerful people have noticed its effect and were delighted to stand and watch as the geysers of money jetted aloft, perchance to fall upon their heads. The name of the hole is “human psychology,” and we could possibly forgive economists, lawyers and certainly politicians and bankers and so on for not seeing it. The effect of the hole in their theory has been to negate the second part of their theory of trickle-down economics, to invest their new wealth for the benefit of society.

In the original works, wealthy people are seen as rational actors, calmly going about their business of making sure their little bit of the world runs efficiently and satisfies their needs. They follow rules, check the information, weigh up what’s needed and what people will pay for, and then invest. Workers, the people for whom the investments are made, are even more robotic. They go to work, provide for their families, pay their bills, live and quietly die. Nowhere in the theory is there any recognition of what utter pricks humans are. The seminal works by von Mises, Hayek and others do not talk about corruption, or greed, or of putting your foot on your opponent’s throat and pressing just for the sheer joy of crushing another person and taking his property. That is, while they are strong on humans as rational creatures, they don’t give any account of the irrational human drives, the most irrational of which is the drive to dominate. They have a lot to say about humans as rational actors, and plenty of humans are indeed rational actors, but not the rich. Above all, there’s nothing in neoliberalism on scoundrels like Donald J Trump, who don’t have a rational bone in their bodies. As it exists, neoliberal economics doesn’t just fail to keep psychopaths out, to stop them taking over, it invites them in and makes them comfortable by relieving them of any residual guilt. So that’s just what they do. Instead of investing the money in their home markets where they made it, they ship it offshore to secretive banks in tax havens, then lend it back to themselves at brutal interest rates that consume all the profits so they don’t pay tax at home, either. So simple, why didn’t Hayek think of that?

Look at a couple of examples. Kevin Walmsley is an American businessman in Kunming, China, who writes brief and informative Substack posts and YouTube videos on how the US is shooting itself in both feet with its antagonistic and generally corrupt attitude toward China. In this video, he describes how a fire truck made in the US takes 4 years and $2million to deliver, whereas the same thing in China (and generally better) takes six weeks and $400,000, but nobody is allowed to import Chinese trucks because Trump and the firetruck manufacturers. The extra cost is entirely artificial. I have the same problem here in Brisbane with my solar power system. We have full solar PV and batteries. When we installed it in 2017, the power company (commonly known as AGL and the Forty Thieves) paid us 22c per kwh for power we exported to the grid, which they then sold for 35c per unit. We paid off our installation in 6 years and could look forward to 20 years of free, totally clean power and about $2,400 a year as a small profit. Then they reduced it to 20c/kwh, and again a while later to 17c per unit. We could still make about $1700 a year, but they have just changed it to 3c/kwh, which they sell for 35c, giving them nearly 1,100% profit and wiping out our little payments. Oh, and they now charge us a “pole fee” for the pleasure of exporting our electricity back to their grid. The person who buys the power at the other end also pays the pole fee, which is like me buying a stamp to post a letter, and the postman charging the addressees another fee to put the letter in their box.

It’s a small example but, multiplied over the million or so home solar installations in the state, it gives the company about $3billion extra profit each year for no further investment, and they don’t pay tax as they are largely foreign-owned (i.e. owned by shell companies in tax havens). To cap it off, they are classic rentiers, i.e. they have inserted themselves in the production and distribution process without contributing anything to it, but charging the end user a fee they can’t avoid. They don’t generate power, they buy it from the power generators and they even rent the poles. It’s a fantastic little racket if you can persuade the politicians to let you get away with it but we’ll fix them. We’ll get an electric car and put our excess power in the car, saving petrol and depriving the pricks of the eye-watering profits they make at our expense. But this is what a free market is, this is what a free market does. It gives insiders the power to tilt the playing field in their favour and there’s nothing the dumb consumers can do about it.

The neocons who set this up, who persuaded Thatcher and Reagan of the virtues of “small government,” probably didn’t realise all this at the time but they woke up to it very quickly, quick enough to push the legislation through before any troublemakers sat up and said: “Hey, your model of human behaviour is crap, like, you haven’t got a model. This is fantasy, it opens the door to a ghastly shower of no-hopers, conmen, parasites and paedophiles.” Because that’s what it’s done, and that’s why everybody is so angry, and that’s why it’s all going to fall apart. What we’re seeing today in terms of the widespread dispossession of the working and middle classes (who actually carry the country on their backs); of the concentration and, above all, the encryption of wealth by and for the 1%; their criminality and their utter cynicism; coupled with the ever-growing threat of global warming and of nuclear war; these are the direct and predictable results of allowing a class of people to believe that they could plunder the commonweal for their personal benefit with impunity while broadcasting to the world that they are doing us all a great favour by getting richer.

As a social experiment, neoliberalism has absolutely failed in every respect. It did not lift billions out of poverty, China did that without any help from von Mises, Hayek and Co. It has not spread the benefits of industry, science or education evenly, has not helped the disabled or neglected, has not stopped war and is driving us toward the precipice of environmental catastrophe, just because the project deliberately weakened the ability of the great mass of people to influence their governments. As we see in the illegal, immoral and abhorrent wars of aggression in West Asia. It’s time to call a halt to the gathering disaster before it’s too late. We’re only seconds from midnight.

Don’t think for one instant that people of the character of Trump or Netanyahu give a shit about ordinary people and will come to their senses. They’re only interested in domination for domination sake. They won’t stop as they don’t have a better self. If you want your grandchildren to have a future, then speak up.

References:
1, 2: See George Orwell’s classic reportage, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Timeless.

****

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.

****

Last week, reader Moebius commented:

My quick conclusion is: The class of people who treat others as sub-human showed how sub-human they are themselves. But how to deal with that as humans? If we would exterminate the actual sub humans then we would be just as bad. Yet if we dont do enough against them then they will just continue.

This is a critically important conundrum: How does a reasonable person deal with an unreasonable person without becoming unreasonable in the process? It is at the basis of the concept of a “just war,” recently in the news as Pope Leo has challenged the legality and humanity of the Netanyahu-Trump war of aggression against Iran. However, nobody, not even a pope, has ever been able to resolve this issue. The Christian principle is “turn the other cheek” but that presumes the other person has a conscience. A lot of people don’t, which is why they’re aggressive in the first place. The evidence is that when it comes to imposing their agenda, hard-core zionists do not regard people opposing them as worthy of consideration. We see this in southern Lebanon right now. The Israeli military has ordered something like a million civilians to leave their homes and move north, even though there are no facilities for them. As they go, workers move in with explosives and heavy machinery to demolish their homes and everything they can (wach the brief video in that link). This is precisely the program they have been implementing in Gaza for the past 30 months, which is itself a copy of their policies developed in the 1930s and honed to perfection in the Nakba, or catastrophe, the violent ethnic cleansing of the area allocated to Jews in the partition of 1948.

Just as a reminder, the mandated territory of Palestine was divided by a UN resolution, handing 56% of the territory to the Jews, who were about 35% of the population, and 44% to the 65% who were indigenous Palestinians. As soon as the UN resolution was implemented, the new Israeli army, formed from terrorist groups and former troops in the British army and armed by the British, began a violent action to force as many Palestinians out of the designated Jewish areas as possible. In the following months, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by attacks on their villages during which some 10-15,000 were murdered. By the end of the year, Israel had expanded its territory to 78% of the mandate. The story put about that the indigenous people “chose” to move is an absolute, unmitigated lie. They no more “chose” to move than you would suddenly pack a few bags tonight, grab your kids and rush out on to the streets clutching them, abandoning your home while heading for who knows where (a brief directed video here). Israel is the only country in the world that has not defined its borders just because, ab initio, it has intended to keep expanding them, as in the illegally annexed Golan Heights of Syria and is now taking place in Gaza, the West Bank and in Lebanon.

In excess of 500 villages were destroyed during the Nakba, and this is where it becomes significant. The Israelis had in place a plan to eradicate all traces of those villages and overplant them with trees, so that nobody would be able to return and nobody would know of their crime of ethnic cleansing. The person responsible for this plan was one Yosef Weitz (1890-1972), whom I’ve mentioned before. Weitz came from Czarist occupied Poland and became head of the Land and Afforestation department of the Jewish National Fund, which had been established in 1901 to collect money to buy Palestinian land. He joined the JNF in 1932 and soon became head of the afforestation section but his main role was in forcing Palestinians off their traditional land. Post World War II, he was very active and influential in the program to “transfer” Palestinians into neighbouring countries (who were all nearly bankrupt anyway) and wipe all trace of Palestinian occupation from the landscape. In this, he was successful to the extent that he is known in Israel as the “architect of the transfer,” meaning ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population:

Our army is steadily conquering Arab villages and their inhabitants are afraid and flee like mice. You have no idea what happened in the Arab villages. It is enough that during the night several shells whistle overhead and they flee for their lives. Villages are steadily emptying, and if we continue on this course – and we shall certainly do so as our strength increases - then tens of villages will empty of their inhabitants. This time these self-confident ones, too, will feel what it is like to be refugees (Yosef Weitz, Diary, 21st April 1948).

There was never at any stage any doubt that this was the program to be financed and pursued by the Jewish state (see here for more quotes by Weitz on ethnic cleansing). It was written into zionism from the beginning in about 1891. In 1924, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), one of the main figures in the early movement, wrote an essay entitled The Iron Wall (1923) in which he explicitly stated that the Palestinian population would oppose their replacement, so they would have to be pushed aside and held in place by an “iron wall”:

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach (emphasis added).

Soon after, he said that this zionist project was “moral and just” because “national self-determination” is itself a moral objective which Palestinians reserved for themselves so they couldn’t complain if somebody else applied it. There was no mention of prior claims to the land. Ethnic cleansing is deemed a crime against humanity. If it takes place during wartime, it is also a war crime. Granted that prior to the Nuremberg trials, it had never been formulated in these terms, mainly because all the major world powers practised it avidly, but it certainly had been by 1948 and was written into the UN Charter. Before 1946, it was considered evil, which is why the imperialists kept quiet about it, but after that it was a crime. On this basis alone, repeated statements of intent of criminal action by many leading zionists over the past 125 years prove that the entire zionist movement is a criminal enterprise. There is no conceivable defence to this charge, but it gets worse.

I’ve previously mentioned how Hitler justified the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 (chapter 14 of Mein Kampf). The explicitly stated goal of the German fascist government was to invade the Slavic lands to their east; to conquer the various governments; to eliminate half the population and to enslave the remainder as labourers to build an empire glorifying the Aryan race. Hitler firmly believed that all good in human progress had come from the Germanic races so, in building their Thousand Year Reich, they were preventing a slide into another dark age and thus doing humanity a great favour. Essentially, the backward Slavs owed everything worthwhile in their lives to the tall, handsome and clever people to their west, so the Nazi invasion was morally justifiable, even if 30million “excess” Soviet citizens were slated for liquidation in the first year of the occupation. That was the entire purpose behind launching what became World War II. The notion that it was a war against Jews is false. As Hitler himself stated, eliminating the Jewish populations was a side issue. They did not invade France or the Low Countries to snatch their Jewish populations, they did it to safeguard their major ambition, the conquest and colonisation of the Slavic heartlands.

From very early following the invasion of Poland in 1939, SS squads known as Einsatzgruppen (special groups or task forces), working close behind the lines began the process of exterminating millions of people and destroying their means of survival – their homes, schools, farms, bridges etc. Their goal was to transform the landscape from its traditional or historic form into a form suited to the expanding empire. By the time of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, they were ready and waiting and immediately began their evil work. This included the well-known massacres in Ukraine such as Babi-Yar but, more importantly for the Nazi project and largely unknown to outsiders, the murder of some 650,000 villagers in what is now Belarus. Come and See, a Soviet era film from about 1985, shows this in brutal detail with the unmistakable message: “Nobody will ever be allowed to do this to us again.” The point is that the Jewish demolition squads operating in southern Lebanon right now are doing essentially the same job as the SS Einsatzgruppen did in the USSR for four years from June 1941: eliminating their means of survival. Granted they are not lining people up and shooting them but the Israeli military is doing that daily on a piecemeal basis. During the infamous Seige of Leningrad of 1941-44, about 1.5million people died. Gaza has been under seige and continuing bombardment for 30 months, and people are dying of starvation or preventable illness, often spread by the plagues of rats.

The similarities between the Nazi conduct in World War II and zionist conduct in Palestine for the past century are not loose analogies. Politically, they are precise homologies: Fascism is as fascism does. Their inhuman conduct comes directly from the belief: “We are superior and you are inferior so we can do what we like to you.” In turn, this arises from the biologically-based, universal human drive to form dominance hierarchies, with me at the top and you down below just because it feels so very good for me. The converse, of course, is that people will resist subjugation, even to death. This is the paradox of hierarchy, that we humans all come equipped with two opposing drives, to dominate and to resist domination. That’s all anybody needs to know about politics. All of the nationalist or religious, racist, historical or social justification lathered over this base is cosmetic. It’s propaganda designed to hide the brutal reality of Macht hat Recht, might confers right, which is Trump’s modus operandi. Nobody should be taken in by it.

Now there are people who try to say that we should not even use the words “fascist” and “zionist” in the same sentence, let alone compare them objectively, but that’s both absurd and dishonest. We can compare any two governments in the world, or the actions of any two armies, or political systems, or organised crime in different countries, or companies, health systems, schools, sports teams, anything. Comparison of different political and social systems is a value-free exercise. We can, for example, state that even though the US has always claimed to be a democratic state founded upon universal principles, its actions have always been those of the imperial states that ruled most of the world when the US first formed itself. To examine this proposition, we write a list of all the characteristics of imperial states through the ages, then give the US a score on each of those factors to see how it stands. In fact, it comes out badly. This is not anti-American. While it is possibly true that the great bulk of Americans would be heartily offended by the exercise, that testifies to their ignorance of their own history, not to the nature of the process.

We can also see how the US rates as a fascist state using the criteria listed in Chapter 2 of Narcisso-Fascism (pp32-33). If we give a score for each factor where 0= not at all, 1= a bit, 2 = quite a lot and 3= a great deal, the US doesn’t do very well, especially under the present regime. Indeed, if certain well-known oligarchs had their way, it would be right up there with Mussolini. I doubt the US would ever reach the Nazi class as the American 1% are too corrupt and would divert everything to themselves. This is a perfectly legitimate intellectual exercise and can be applied to any government anywhere. Israel, for example, scores very high, not far below North Korea but it doesn’t stop at just the form of government, it extends to their programs and future plans. For example, the Israeli government’s policy of confining Palestinian civilians to a very limited part of their former lands, restricting their diet, spying on them, controlling all movement and information and periodically blowing them up is precisely what the Nazis did in the Warsaw ghetto and so many other cities that they occupied.

As a matter of sociopolitical fact, the current Israeli government is following the expansionist policies championed by the Nazi party in Germany, and is using many of the techniques developed by the SS and others. That is, the victims have become persecutors. Having assumed a position of absolute power and impunity, they have adopted the methods and doctrines and, most importantly, the self-justification of previous fascist governments. All this springs from the very human urge to dominate other people. Once a group gains power over another, they will eventually come to despise their underlings who, in turn, will grow to hate their overlords and will want to overthrow them. That’s biology; don’t waste your time arguing with biology because it means there will be no peace in the world while one group believes it is superior to another and grants itself rights and powers it denies the other. As long as it exists, expansionist zionism is a mortal threat to world peace.

So back to the reader’s question at the head of this post: How do reasonable people deal with unreasonable people without themselves becoming unreasonable? I think the answer to that is: You can’t. You have to hold your nose and strike with the least force necessary to do the job while doing the minimum damage to the troublemakers and none to those who aren’t involved or who had no say in it, all the while seeing it not as an opportunity to get rich or get even with people but as an unsavoury but absolutely necessary duty to safeguard the future of the planet (see this article for more detail). Fighting may not be nice but, as the reader points out, if we do nothing, the power-hungry will get worse.

This is why the world is turning against the US: for all their talk, everybody can see that the citizenry are doing next to nothing about the evil people who have taken control of the country and its vast military for their personal benefit and profit. What Americans do to themselves is their business but what they do to everybody else is ours. Bad people have to be removed from office and denied access to power. Israel can be brought to heel just by cutting off the vast flows of funds that keep it afloat. Without the untold billions that pour into it each year, it will collapse in a heap (which is already happening). People worry about the illegal nuclear weapons gifted to the zionists by the West but they can be dealt with easily: simply hit the kill switches in all their aircraft. Without planes to deliver them, the weapons are useless. All it takes is political will, but Netanyahu has Trump in the squirrel group over the Epstein files. We soldier on.

****

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 world economy seems to be lurching from one disaster to another but financially, there is one bright spot: the massive investment in artificial intelligence. Perhaps it’s reasonable to spend so much developing AI as there seems to be a severe shortage of the natural kind, especially in our “leaders.” For medicine in general, AI has long been held out as offering major breakthroughs, especially in interpreting complex laboratory results in radiology and biochemistry. Reading Xrays, for example, is still a dark art but if the computer simply screened out the normal results, leaving the abnormal for the radiologist, it would save a lot of time and expense for everybody. But what about psychiatry? If reaching a diagnosis in psychiatry is simply a matter of ticking boxes, as per the DSM system, couldn’t we just speed the process by seating patients in front of a computer screen?

To an extent, that already happens, except they’re seated in front of a junior member of staff who shuffles through a long questionnaire, ticking boxes or, all too often, leaving them empty. Later, a psychiatrist flicks through the file, asks a few more questions, assigns a diagnosis, signs a script and another happy customer is sent on his way. This sort of mechanical process is ideally suited to AI: diagnosis by algorithm, treatment by convention … but what about the human element, you ask? In a survey from 2020, 83% of a group of nearly 800 psychiatrists from 22 countries felt it “unlikely that future technology (would) provide empathic care as well as or better than the average psychiatrist” [1]. How much “empathic care” does the average psychiatrist provide? The best people to answer that would be the patients, definitely not psychiatrists themselves, and the answer is likely to be something like “precious little.”

The extensive surveys on ECT conducted by John Read and his group in London show clearly that psychiatrists are very bad at communicating with patients [e.g. 2]. In many parts of the world, if patients aren’t happy with their treatment, they are simply graded as “insightless” and they get it as an involuntary patient. Not much evidence of empathy there, but perhaps we should look at it from the point of view of the psychiatrists. After diligent enquiries lasting up to five minutes, they have reached a diagnosis and decided on treatment but then the deranged soul in front of them starts to object and carry on. Such a nuisance because all psychiatrists know that it’s not the patient talking, it’s the disturbed brain chemistry. There’s no more point talking to the mentally ill than there is in talking to the drunk or the demented. Many years ago, the deputy superintendent of a big mental hospital told me: “I pay no more attention to the utterances of the mentally ill than I do to the vomitus of a child with gastro.” Lots of empathy there: could a computer beat it? Reference [3] describes three types of empathy: the question is whether machines can mimic it.

First type is “cognitive empathy,” being able to understand the pressures on another person and work out why that person is reacting in just that way. Second is “affective empathy,” experiencing emotions as the person feels them. However, this easily gets out of control in inexperienced therapists, who may burst into tears on hearing what has happened. Finally, there is “motivational empathy,” meaning a willingness to work for the other person’s benefit. I would say that this should include a determination to continue even when the odds aren’t good. Not like one psychiatrist I heard of. The patient said he recounted his story but the psychiatrist was becoming increasingly dismissive and finally put his pen away and went to open the door: “That’s hopeless,” he said, ushering the patient out, “you may as well go and hang yourself.” That’s true.

The idea of an “AI therapist” is well and truly here. In the US, millions of teenagers regularly use the various “chatbots” (from “chattering robots”) which target them. There are a lot of advantages. Chatbots are available 24/7, as they say, which is very helpful for the teenagers who sleep all day and sit on their computers all night, but also for poorly-serviced areas. Computers know everything, all the resources available, how to apply for different things, what the law says, which bus to catch and so on. Most importantly, they don’t forget. A chatbot retains everything although they’re generally not good on slang and therefore misfile things. They are non-judgemental, which often helps self-conscious teenagers who fear criticism. Most of them are free but very often, if the user mentions anything serious like suicide, they prompt the user to upgrade to a paid subscription. Finally, the point of a chatbot is to keep the user engaged, so they don’t say things like “That’s probably not a good idea.”

The disadvantages are many and real. Firstly, they’re not much better than a well-meaning and caring old aunt who knows about “nerves and the glums” from experience. She can’t do much more than listen and give a bit of ordinary advice. Free chatbots are programmed with low-grade advice based in CBT and not much else. They are non-judgemental in the sense the psychotherapist Carl Rogers developed, essentially agreeing with anything the user says. This often leads young or inexperienced people, meaning the great bulk of their users, to think the chatbot “really understands” when it’s simply following a program written by a group of nerds on the other side of the world. Necessarily, the program will reflect their biases. For example, many psychiatrists refuse to ask about the influence of religion on the patient’s early life on the basis that religion isn’t scientific and can’t influence genes.

One intelligent young man described a rather difficult family life. His father was a fairly senior public servant and his mother a kindergarten teacher. His schooling had been repeatedly interrupted as his parents wanted him home-schooled although legally, it wasn’t available at the time. Somehow he passed Year 12 and entered university to study IT, but he had no social life as he simply didn’t know how to mix with his age group. During the interview, he was asked about religious matters but dismissed the questions lightly, which wasn’t convincing. At the end of the interview, he sat silently for a while then, mentioning his background in IT, asked about confidentiality again, especially regarding on-line files. Reassured that there were none, he said: “What I said about my parents wasn’t true. They were religious maniacs, they were completely mad. Many times, I would lie awake at night, terrified they were getting ready to sacrifice me, like Abraham was ordered to sacrifice Isaac.” Slowly, he leaned forward, covered his face and began to cry. Later, he explained that he knew that once material is on a computer connected to the internet, there is no security but a computer would probably have diagnosed him with a paranoid psychosis. And asked him to upgrade to a paid sub.

Granted, these are early days in AI, but given that society is spending trillions on AI while hundreds of millions of people go hungry or are blown up, and that “chatbot therapy” is spreading rapidly, society needs to think about it before something goes wrong. The biggest problem lies in psychiatry’s failure to decide on the causation of mental disorder: is it physical, or is it psychological? If it’s physical, then there isn’t much need for chatbots as therapists, they only need to provide a questionnaire the user can complete and then get a score which says “depressed/not depressed,” etc. That is, the program will be biased toward giving people a diagnosis and shunting them to their general practitioners, who will oblige with the necessary drugs. In fact, we already have that. There are lots of free sites, kindly subsidised by drug companies, that will reliably spit out a couple of diagnoses based on the sloppy language used in the DSM system. The patient then goes to the GP waving the printout and demanding drugs. This is what happens with “ADHD” and amphetamines and is largely responsible for the explosion in rates of diagnosis of “adult ADHD.” Prescription rates for stimulants are rising exponentially as the medicalisation of society proceeds apace. Given that all services of this type are compelled to err on the side of caution, meaning that if there is the slightest doubt, the patient must be labelled as “mentally ill,” then it is mathematically inevitable that ever-larger numbers of people will get it.

On the other hand, if mental disorder is a psychological phenomenon, which model of mental trouble will the chatbots use? That would depend on who wrote the program. If it’s a straight cognitive model, it will be looking for contradictions in the patient’s belief system, generating cognitive dissonance (i.e. anxiety and/or depression), or conflict between his belief system and the larger society’s rules. It might be simply CBT, giving the patient sets of instructions to follow and monitoring compliance, with lots of encouragement for progress or mild disapproval for backsliding. That would be fairly harmless except a certain proportion of people would come to rely on it to make decisions for them. If it’s Rogerian, based in his concept of “unconditional positive regard,” how would it deal with jealousy, which is probably the most dangerous human emotion? It couldn’t, it would have to be programmed to refer those people but then they wouldn’t go to the appointments, which points to the larger problem: people will very quickly sort themselves into two groups, sugggestible and dependent people who like talking about themselves to an ever-present, non-judgemental listener, or those with plenty wrong in their lives who get annoyed when anybody tries to correct them. The first group will quickly make their chatbot an essential part of their lives and make contact a dozen or more times a day, gradually withdrawing from real life in favour of a soothing fantasy. I’m sure this has a lot to do with the explosive increase in the numbers of young people who nominate themselves as “gender disordered.” The second and more disturbed group will simply disconnect and continue being jealous.

The real risk to all of this, however, is generic, a product of what the chatbots are. There are cases going in California where families are suing the AI companies because they believe the “therapybots” encouraged their children to commit suicide. Chatbots can “hallucinate,” meaning invent something to fill a gap, which the user then takes as gospel because a chatbot can’t be wrong. Computer programs originate anywhere in the world so it’s wide open for malicious actors. They can easily be used for covert marketing, including fringe religious groups or political parties using them to recruit people, which leads to the much larger problem of online scams. These are extremely professional and very effective at separating the gullible or the desperate from their lifesavings. The many and varied forms of fraud on the internet are estimated to be a $500billion a year industry, and it’s growing by the day. Therapy chatbots are wide open to abuse because their users are already self-selected as vulnerable and needing assistance. They’re also open to abuse because there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free app on your phone: if it’s free, you’re the product.

In the case of AI programs, the developers are using the responses to train their bots. In one sense, that’s pretty harmless, it just dumps billions of responses on the machine which combs through them, teaching itself what normally comes next. The other sense, however, is anything but harmless. Before the material can be searched, it has to be recorded, and once recorded, it will never be erased. It’s there forever in the company’s archives because they may want to use it again. It’s also in the massive US Government NSA digital data archives, at Bluffdale, in Utah, whose stated goal is to preserve all electronic records from around the world for all time. Whatever you say or do on the internet is instantly recorded and scanned by extremely high-powered data-miners. If a teenager says something “indiscreet,” like “I wonder if I’m transgender?” or “I hate school, I’d like to blow it up,” it’s still there in 30 years time when s/he wants a sensitive government job or the government decides it doesn’t like him/her. It happened fifty years ago when the Nixon government broke into the office of the psychiatrist Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had consulted over his conflict on US policies in Vietnam. It happened to US Sen. Tom Eagleton who had to withdraw his nomination for vice-president when it was revealed he had had ECT years before (worse, because almost certainly, he didn’t “need” it). I don’t know how many young men I assessed for military service because they had been prescribed stimulants years before they applied, but I never saw one who met criteria for a life-long, genetic disturbance of attention and concentration.

There’s another point to ponder, which is that mainstream psychiatrists love technology. As soon as something new appears, they grab it and try to apply it to psychiatry, and AI is no different. It’s becoming clear to all but the devout that genetic research in psychiatry is running into the sand. Billions of dollars worth of research has yielded nothing so very soon, they’re going to need a new trick. AI fits the bill. It’s sufficiently impressive and expensive to beguile young researchers, and sufficiently vague to fool all the old folks in academia and on the grants committees, so this should be good for another 20 years or so. Nothing will come of it but I’ll make a suggestion: Instead of mentally-troubled people using AI chatbots for their personal “therapy,” why not turn it around and use it to train staff? It’s no big deal to write standard programs mimicking a paranoid person or a severely depressed person, and it would make it much easier for supervisors to check on the junior’s progress. Combined with an AI video of an angry person or somebody weeping piteously, it would be a lot quicker and a lot safer than letting them loose on the genuine article in the emergency department. Just a suggestion.

Alan Frances, formerly chair of the DSM-IV committee, has compiled a long list of advantages and disadvantages of AI in psychiatry [4]. My feeling is he tends to overstate the benefits and understate the risks but that’s just an opinion.

References:

1. Doraiswamy PM, Blease C, Bodner K: Artificial intelligence and the future of psychiatry: insights from a global physician survey. Artif Intell Med 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0933365719306505?via%3Dihub

2. Read J et al (2025). A large exploratory survey of electroconvulsive therapy recipients, family members and friends: what information do they recall being given? J Med Ethics; 0:1–8. doi:10.1136/jme-2024-110629

3. Gabriels K, Goffin K (2026). Therapy chatbots and emotional complexity: do therapy chatbots really empathise? Current Opinion in Psychology 68:102263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2025.102263

4. Frances A (2025). Warning: AI chatbots will soon dominate psychotherapy. Brit. J. Psychiat. doi: 10.1192/bjp.2025.10380

****

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 report issued recently by Euro-Med Human Rights Centre makes chilling reading, as the title warns: “Another genocide behind walls” Sexual violence in Israeli prisons and detention centres and engineered impunity. I started reading it but soon stopped as the contents are truly appalling. It describes levels of institutionalised depravity far exceeding anything that we know of the Abu Ghraib crimes. In the overwhelming majority of cases of torture in Israeli prisons, inmates are not subjected to what Americans call “enhanced interrogation” i.e. torture to get information. They are tortured partly for the amusement of the military guards and partly to hammer home to their victims that they’re nothing, they have no human rights because they don’t even rate as humans. This is most important as it indicates that the state of Israel has crossed a deadly line.

For decades, we have been bombarded by propaganda about Israel’s industrial scale victimhood and its “most moral army in the world.” We are constantly told that the Jewish experience of persecution justifies anything and everything that Israel does anywhere in the world to the extent that nobody is allowed to say or do anything that a devout Zionist may not like. For example, in Queensland, the Liberal-National government has recently passed a law forbidding anybody from using the expressions “from the river to the sea” or “globalise the intifada.” The ostensible purpose is to prevent some people who identify as Jewish from feeling “threatened.” At a recent protest, the first person arrested by a large squad of heavily armed police was a Jewish man in his 70s. Meantime, the Zionist state gets on with what is manifestly genocide in Gaza; encourages and assists brutal pogroms and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank; deliberately targets civilian populations and infrastructure while invading and occupying neighbouring countries; destroys homes and farms in Lebanon in order to force the displacement of a million civilians; and launches aggressive war against a distant country under cover of peace negotiations. That’s about the full extent of the crimes prosecuted at the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals.

Fortunately, we are no longer hearing of the “most moral army in the world.” To my mind, it takes a special sort of cowardice to fly five minutes in a $100million supersonic bomber to a refugee encampment, drop a 1000kg shrapnel bomb on the ragged tents huddled in the sandhills below, incinerating children, and then fly back for breakfast. That indicates it is not just the state of Israel that has crossed the deadly line, it is all its inhabitants, too.

Granted Israel has the most active cooperation and unconditional support of the US in committing these crimes –legally, they are equally culpable cobelligerants – but one thing is crystal clear: the people running Israel, and the 92% of the population who want the wars to continue, are concerned only with opinions within the beltway in Washington DC. They do not have the slightest regard for public opinion anywhere in the world. The overwhelming majority of the world’s population, probably 99%+, are horrified by what they see each day on their screens and want it to stop, yet it continues just because the US authorises it. There has been a “ceasefire” in Lebanon now for 12 days; in that time, Israel has sent its bombers and tanks across the border hundreds of times, killing at least 45 people and injuring many more. As they say, in Israel, “ceasefire” means “you cease and we fire,” because they don’t care what people think. They are utterly impervious to public opinion and absolutely confident that they can keep attacking and killing with complete impunity. As a matter of psychology, you have to ask: how can they divorce themselves from any regard for other people’s opinions? How can they cut themselves off from the rest of the human species and just live their lives as though nobody else’s views count? Well, that’s just the point, isn’t it, because as far as they’re concerned, other people’s views don’t count, for a particular reason.

Let’s go back a bit in history, to my childhood in rural Western Australia many years ago. In Grade 4 of primary school (aged 8), we were taught how the colony was founded in 1827 and how the brave settlers had to fight the Aboriginals who killed their stock. In one lesson, we learned of the “Battle of Pinjarra” in 1834, when the Aboriginal people south of Perth were finally subdued in a pitched battle. It is now correctly known as the Pinjarra Massacre although I doubt anybody talks about it these days. I can still remember the pictures in our text books, of white men crouched behind fallen logs firing as prancing Aboriginal warriors hurled spears at them or bit the dust. Decades later, I found that this was absolutely false. The people who wrote that text for children must have known it was a carefully planned slaughter. The British military (as they were) and the settlers waited until all the Aboriginal men in the district would be away at an important corroboree, leaving only the women and children and a few old men at the main camp. The whites attacked at dawn, killing a large number of the terrified and defenceless people and hunting the survivors on horseback through the bush.

With great artifice, we were not told any of this. The narrative were we given was of the brave-hearted and far-sighted colonists working hard to tame a wild land and bring it under cultivation. We were not told that within 10 years of whites arriving in a region, 90% of the Aboriginal population would be dead. Most figures say 80% of deaths were due to European diseases, against which they had no resistance (smallpox, measles, whooping cough etc); 10% died by white violence and another 10% died by Aboriginal violence, especially the brutal Aboriginal Mounted Police. These were recruited from distant tribes and were pleased to settle ancient vendettas with British guns. They were eventually disbanded due to their violence. This was classic British imperial “divide and conquer” policy, honed to perfection in India and so many other places. The reason we were not told any of this was because it was a source of shame. Even today, most white Australians still know nothing about the Frontier Wars.

Other history lessons that year were much the same. Of the colonisation of India, for example, we were taught about the Black Hole of Calcutta, in 1756; we were not told of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919. In high school, I studied languages instead of American history, but the little we read said next to nothing about slavery or the destruction of the indigenous people. The same thing happened in Germany during World War II. Everybody knew about the concentration camps but they knew enough to keep quiet about them. Everybody would have known that entire sections of the community were disappearing, Jews, Romany, Africans, alcoholics, mentally troubled people, criminals, but there was never any public mention of what was happening to them. Post-war, large numbers of people insisted they did not know of the extermination programs in occupied territories, which was apparently true for many [1]. All news was controlled and people knew well enough not to listen to or spread rumours. It was safer to know nothing.

Modern Israel, however, is different. Marauding troops gleefully post videos and photos of themselves destroying civilian property or looting damaged buildings – blowing up a university is a great joke – or attacking other religions. Back home, gangs of youths wrapped in flags regularly storm through streets in the Palestinian quarters yelling “Death to the Arabs,” and nobody blinks an eye (here for Abby Martin’s excellent report). Instead of concealing their crimes, they revel in them, luxuriate and celebrate them, then head off to commit more. Within living memory, they have gone from being victims of one of humanity’s worst crimes, to cheerful perpetrators of the defining crimes of this century. How does this come about? We need to know because until we do, there is nothing to stop it happening again. And again.

My view is that what is happening in West Asia now is the predictable result of the most basic human impulses. These are in fact common to practically all mammals and to many other species. Once we have met our obligatory biological needs for air, food, water and shelter, we move to the next level, of optional drives which have a strong basis in biology (some people prefer to call them instincts). The first is that we are social animals; we gravitate together to form little groups. The other side of that coin is xenophobia, that while we feel better with familiar faces around us, we mistrust outsiders. All too often, that mistrust turns to hostility and aggression. We are both drawn to our own group and repel other groups, especially when it comes to the next drive, our home territory.

Practically all predatory animals are territorial. Saltwater crocodiles, for example, are intensely territorial, our only difference being that all other animals know when enough territory is enough. If they can’t defend it, they will lose it. Humans, however, have no idea when enough is enough as we have something other animals don’t have: a sense of privilege and entitlement. For us, territory includes property and people, especially sexual partners. The more we have, the more we feel we’re entitled to have, so we take more, leading to a bigger sense of entitlement in a self-reinforcing cycle. Crucially, there is no limit to the lust for property. We have an On-switch for acquisitiveness, but no Off-switch.

The final drive that defines us is our urge to form dominance hierarchies, for which territory is an integral part: we identify with our territory and use it to dominate others, which is intensely rewarding. Conversely, being forced into a submissive role is painful and we will resist it to death. Taken together, these features amount to a human nature, if you will, but of course it’s essentially higher primate nature. Thus, the natural history of human society leads to tribalism where the winner takes all while the losers fester in resentment and plot revenge. It means that, without proper regulation, human society is inherently unstable, which is precisely what we see playing out in West Asia today (and many other places). That still doesn’t explain the wanton violence of the Israeli assaults on Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, or why they think a perfidious attack on Iran is justified. There needs to be a further step, a step that crosses the deadly line between a bit of playful jousting and crimes against humanity.

Despite the blizzard of propaganda which says that nothing Israel did before October 7^th justifies the Hamas attack, but that event justifies everything Israel has done since, the record of deliberate violence by Israeli immigrants against the indigenous Palestinian population goes back to at least 1919. The original architects of Zionism, the plan to build a Jewish state in Palestine, knew there were at least 750,000 inhabitants in the region who would not be happy to be shoved aside, and who would resist. The plan was therefore to push most of them out and to use the remainder as labourers to build the new state. In the 1920s and 30s, self-proclaimed Jewish terror gangs led by, among others, future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, attacked Palestinian gatherings, such as markets and cinemas and isolated villages, their express goal being to make life intolerable until the people were forced out.

As the occupying power, Britain actively cooperated in this. I am not aware that any pre-war Jewish terrorists were ever prosecuted, even though Britain used its full imperial might to suppress a Palestinian revolt and backlash in the 1930s. During World War II, Britain recruited and trained many thousands of Jewish men in the British Army but not, to my knowledge, more than a few ethnic Palestians. Post-war, these troops formed the nucleus of the new Israeli army, gifted their weapons and fighting machines by the departing British. The Palestinians didn’t stand a chance. Disarmed during the 1936-7 rebellion, they were at the mercy of the combined Israeli army and terror gangs, who showed no mercy. The message, usually delivered in a hail of gunfire and grenades, was “Get out or get killed.” Once the state of Israel was declared in May 1948, the serious ethnic cleansing began.

We are constantly told that Israel was born in a “war of independence.” This is false. Shortly after the proclamation, the ramshackle Arab armies crossed the border to try to prevent the very obvious ethnic cleansing that was going on, but they stood no chance against the heavily-armed, well-trained and blood-thirsty Israeli forces. A lot of the Arab trucks were in fact unarmed, sent to rescue the fleeing civilians and take them to safety. Don’t ever believe the story that the Palestinians left voluntarily. They were no more inclined to walk out of their ancestral homes, leaving everything, than you would walk away from your home tonight, taking just what you could carry. Since then, the plan to occupy the territories identified in Herzl’s original work, Der Judenstaat, in 1896, as “Greater Israel,” has been pursued with unwavering devotion. It is correctly called ‘devotion’ as liberating the “promised lands” for the “Chosen People” of Israel is seen as a religious duty, not just a matter of greed. They believe they can get away with this because God is on their side, urging them on to slaughter every Palestinian man, woman, child and donkey: “Kill all Amalek,” as Netanyahu said. As physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg noted: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

In fact, this has nothing to do with religion, as Blaise Pascal commented: “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” Why is smashing your neighbours seen as attractive by the Israelis? For exactly the same reason the Nazi armies were delighted to smash into the USSR in June, 1941: invade and conquer the inferior races, wipe out half of them and use the remainder as labourers to build a Thousand Year Reich to glorify the German race. Even the former head of Mossad saw that Israel is exactly the same. Yosef Weitz, one of the early influential Zionists, had no doubts:

It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples. No ‘development’ will bring us to our goal of independent nationhood in this small country. Without the Arabs, the land will become wide and spacious for us; with the Arabs, the land will remain sparse and cramped... The only solution is Palestine, at least Western Palestine, without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises!... The way is to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries … Not one village, not one tribe should be left. And the form of the transfer needs to be the creation of a refuge for them in Iraq, in Syria and even in Transjordan. There is no other way out (diary entry, Dec. 20^th 1940)

Their plan was built wholly and solely on the notion: I will take your territory because you don’t count. This is the deadly line that must never be crossed, because by converting your enemies into subhumans, you licence yourself to be inhuman. Subhumans can be exterminated with no regret. This is the point at which educated, intelligent people stop being reasonable and become fanatics. The British crossed it in Australia and many other places. Germany crossed it in 1933. Israel has crossed it. Rabbi Yaacov Perrin stated this aloud at the funeral of the American physician and mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Nobody in Israel objected, the president did not criticise him. Same on October 8^th when then defence minister Yoav Gallant named Gazans as “human animals.” In fact, the president agreed with him. What Gallant meant was “Palestinians are animals in human form, and we can therefore wipe them out without breaking the Third Commandment.” Nobody said a word because the dehumanisation of Palestinians is now institutionalised within the state of Israel. It is accepted without question within the Jewish zionist diaspora and, most important because they support Israel’s plan of conquest, within the American evangelical and christian nationalist zionist support base. Without this vital American financial and political support, Israel would fall apart.

Genocide is the natural and predictable outcome of starting with the belief that I am in some vital sense “chosen” or “special,” because the other side of that is the belief “and you are not chosen or special, so we can do what we like with you because God is on our side.” This has nothing to do with religion. The religion was tacked on later to justify what they wanted to do, which was to give themselves a testosterone boost by crushing their neighbours. That has everything to do with physiology, the same physiology we share with bull elephant seals slugging it out on an Antarctic beach. As long as any group in the world believes is it superior to others and is therefore exempt from the normal laws of human conduct, that only they have rights while all the rest have duties, there will be no peace. Zionists believe they are superior and have rights that others don’t have. Therefore, while zionism persists, there will be no peace unless they withdraw from the world, find an uninhabited place, build a wall around it and get on with their endless squabbling. But that is what ghetto means, as Nahum Goldmann said:

..the worst of (our) encounters was with the Christians, not with the Muslims … the ghetto is historically a Jewish invention. It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the ghetto limits, Jews lived there already … the Jews lived a life apart, without worrying about the laws or customs of others [2, p66]. .

Fascism ends either when the enemies it has created combine to wipe it out, or it destroys itself from within. Fascism starts with the belief: “I am superior to you, you must do as I say.” From this flows the sense that one has the right to treat others as subhuman, to treat them in a bestial manner. This is not delusion, qua mental illness, it is self-delusion, the deliberate and willed choice to do something evil just because it feels good. Evil is as evil does: people who choose to believe they are sanctified by a higher force to pursue certain evil tasks, that whatever they do to lesser beings is justified, are capable of the most egregious crimes, limited only by their imagination and physical means, as Voltaire noted:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil (from Miracles and Idolatory).

And because they are acting in a higher purpose, whenever something goes wrong or their project fails, some less pure person must be held responsible and punished. So they turn on each other, the evil they have unleashed consumes them. This is happening now in the White House; Israel is next on the list.

References:

1. Johnson E, Reuband K-H (2005). What We Knew: terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany. An oral history. London: Hodder Headline.

2. Goldmann N. (1976/78). The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London.

An excellent commentary on the infiltration of Australian politics by the zionist lobby:

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-enforcement-the-lobby-that-bought-australian-democracy/

****

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.

****

Psychiatry has long had a fascination for hormones. For example, it was only a few years after the discovery and isolation of insulin in 1921 that psychiatrists began using it to induce seizures for their “shock therapy.” Every time a hormone became available, somebody tried to apply it to psychiatry: testosterone and aggression, thyroid hormone and anorexia nervosa, endorphins and depression, cortisol and everything… Most of this very expensive research is based in a sublime ignorance of hormonal function and goes nowhere but there never seems to be any shortage of money to finance it. The reason it is financed, and the reason it fails and will always fail, are one and the same reason: a failure to appreciate that ancient problem called the “mind-body problem.”

In its modern form, this goes back 400 years to the French polymath, René Descartes (1596-1650) who suggested that the mind and body are separate and distinct substances existing independently of each other. With what is now known as Cartesian dualism, he bequeathed us this very sticky question: If mind and body are separate substances, how can they interact? If the mind has all the substance of smoke, how can it do the equivalent of rolling a boulder uphill? Its fingers would slip. The philosophical complexities of this question were endless and kept philosophers amused and bemused for centuries, until in 1879, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) broke with tradition when he established the first experimental laboratory in psychology. Wundt was an interesting person. He studied medicine then worked in the laboratory of the renowned physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), after which he decided to apply Helmholtz’s methods on human and animal psychology. He was the first person to refer to himself as a psychologist, started the first psychology journal and wrote the first textbook in psychology. He had very broad interests including psychophysiology and anthropology and wrote extensively on what he called folk psychology, the huge set of beliefs that ordinary people have about minds. However, he quickly ran into Descartes’ problem, that of separating mind from body and how they interact.

By 1913, this was getting out of control so a bold young American psychologist, John B Watson (1878-1958) threw down the gauntlet. All this talk about minds and bodies and souls, he shouted, was going nowhere; psychology needed to divorce itself from such talk and stick to what it could see and measure. We can’t see or measure minds but we can certainly see behaviour, so that has to be the raw data of a genuine science of psychology:

I can state my position here no better than by saying that I should like to bring my students up in the same ignorance of (the mind-body problem) as one finds among the students of other branches of science (1913, more details in [1, chap. 4]).

Thus was born behaviorism, the idea of a mindless psychology which, after a delay due so that imperial society could stage a world war, dovetailed very neatly with the developing philosophy of science known as positivism (1929). The version developed by Burrhus F Skinner (1904-1990) tersely said we should ignore the fanciful “mind” as all behaviour is under the control of the environment. If a behaviour is positively reinforced (rewarded) by the environment, it will increase; if negatively reinforced or punished, it will cease. There is no place and no need for minds, the environment tells us all we need to know. Meantime, most psychiatrists had long had the same idea, that we can’t and needn’t talk about minds as such. Instead, they talked about “mental disease as brain disease,” i.e. physical diseases which rendered people incapable of making decisions for themselves and required physical treatments. Mainstream psychiatry adopted the general principles of positivism without even noticing it, and definitely without considering the larger issues involved.

One reason for this was that psychiatry had long been seen as disreputable, a case of the incompetent leading the deranged, and it desperately needed the aura of orthodox science and medicine to rehabilitate itself. Psychiatry as biology seemed to promise this, so Watson’s call to arms was soon adopted. Granted there was the small diversion of Freudian psychoanalysis but this was brief, about 40 years at most, and was largely restricted to the US (see [2] for an interesting and readable account). Part of the excitement of a biological psychiatry was what seemed to be the endless promise of the newly developing field of endocrinology. For example, when insulin, the hormone governing glucose metabolism, went astray, the patient died. If other hormones played up, could that cause the brain to malfunction such that mental life became disordered? Oh boy, let’s go!

Let’s say we’ve now had a hundred years of investing in biological psychiatry. The longest-serving director of the NIMH, Thomas Insel (a very biological psychiatrist), said that in his 13 years running the show, he disbursed about $20billion in research funds, almost all of it directed at hard core biology. When he retired in 2013, he had to admit he had nothing to show for it; in the dozen years since, still nothing. Compare that with the Manhattan project, or the human genome project, or the campaign to identify Covid19 and develop immunisations: very complex problems were brought to heel in a few years of concerted effort. Psychiatry is just not in the same class, hardly even on the same planet, and the reason is Descartes’ question: if there is a mind, how does it interact with the body, or can we dispense with it and pretend we’re all zombies? When studying physical changes associated with mental disorder, does the physical change cause the mental disorder or is it the other way around? Invariably, mainstream psychiatry assumes that the physical disturbance is primary and the mental effect secondary: the body governs the mind, and nothing else is possible. That’s what biological psychiatry means but, as Insel admitted, it hasn’t worked. Don’t worry, they say, it’s sure to come good, just send more money.

Biological psychiatry is an ideology, that much is clear [1, Chap. 2], and the defining feature of ideologues is that they are never wrong. They’re incapable of admitting their fundamental stance is misconceived, and definitely unable to apologise for wasting everybody’s time – and lives. Always it’s “We’re making huge strides in understanding mental disorder, on the verge of great discoveries.” When, as always happens, that “great stride forward,” such as the atrocity known as psychosurgery, loses its gloss, rapidly advancing technology provides another. All too often, it’s simply the same old same old recycled, as is now happening with hormones, but psychiatry is the only medical discipline without a past, only a glorious but ever-receding future.

A hormone is a chemical secreted in one part of the body which has its effect in a distal part, mostly carried to its target organ by the blood stream. In the old days, it was assumed that each hormone had one job to do but it’s now clear this isn’t true. They can have dozens of effects, and it all depends on the specific receptors and where they are in the body. Testosterone, for example, was originally assumed to have only sexual effects but it is now known to have a huge range of effects, starting at about the fourth week of gestation and continuing throughout life. Naturally enough, it affects the gonads but it also affects the brain, skin, muscle, bone and ligaments etc. As soon as reliable tests were available, psychiatrists wanted to know whether excessive testosterone “caused” male aggression. No, it doesn’t. In fact, primary disease states causing excessive testosterone are rare; high levels are essentially determined by psychological factors, which brings us back to the mind-body problem: how can thinking cause a rise in testosterone? Well, as every teenager soon realises, it sure can, and usually at the worst possible moment.

The problem for biological psychiatrists is that they can’t explain this, which forces them into a corner where anything undesirable is deemed a “disease.” For every disease, there then has to be a primary biological cause because nothing else is conceivable. We see this in a couple of articles published in Psychiatric Times. One looks at the relationships between sexual hormones and eating disorders. They want to show that binge eating is somehow related to the effects of testosterone on the brain, because testosterone is the male hormone and males are more impulsive than females so when they see food, they can’t switch off the urge to reach for it. Or something, it’s all lost in the jargon about aromatase (an enzyme) and the brain’s immeasurably complex “hypothalamic and arousal circuits.” Undeterred, they conclude:

(This research) can help us understand a broad range of psychopathology where impulsivity or a difficulty responding to cues from the environment leads to less than optimal functioning or impairment in some cases.

The person interviewed for the article is a psychologist. Normally, psychologists don’t study neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, endocrinology, and so on. Instead, and channelling their inner JB Watson, they all have sublime faith in their methodology. He is saying: “OK, we don’t have any results but send more money and we’ll see what we can find.” Where critical thinking fails, methodology will deliver.

The other paper is potentially a bit more helpful as it looks at a well-known side effect of what are called antipsychotic drugs: wrecking the patient’s sex life. All these drugs are dopamine (DA) blockers, which means they release the inhibitory effect of DA on prolactin, causing high levels. This important hormone has a huge range of effects, both physical and psychological, so for people compelled to take the drugs, excessive prolactin is very troubling: loss of libido, menstrual dysfunction, lactation, gynaecomastia, impotence, infertility, osteoporosis, pimples and so on. Predictably, the authors conclude with the suggestion that to counter the sexual side-effects of psychiatric drugs, sufferers could be given more drugs. As it happens, prolactin is also a “stress hormone,” meaning it is released in response to a variety of stressors, both physical and psychological. People with early mental disorders often show high prolactin levels, indicating they are feeling distressed. The article ends by lamely suggesting this may be used as a “biomarker,” i.e. as a test to decide who is heading for a mental breakdown. They could also ask people if they’re feeling upset but that won’t happen, because the ideology of biological psychiatry says minds are irrelevant.

The question facing mainstream psychiatry is clear: can we talk of the mind with the same level of reliability as we talk about neurons and rocks? The answer is a qualified yes, but first we need to deal with the ancient problem of trying to join two incompatible substances. The way to do this is to get rid of the idea of “the mind as a substance.” The biocognitive model [3] says that if we conceive of mind as an emergent informational state and not as a separate “substance,” then plugging it into the body’s well-known, neural-based informational system is conceptually quite simple: all we need to join mind and body is the correct three pin plug. I don’t mean in the sense that philosopher David Chalmers uses in his latest book, Reality + [4]. Chalmers has written some serious philosophy but this book isn’t part of it. It’s part daydream and part mischief, wrapped up with some non-serious idealism (my critique is at [1, Chap. 10]). However, he had previously clarified two issues in philosophy of mind, which he called the “easy problem of consciouness” and the “hard problem.” The easy bit is how we make decisions. He suggests that’s all mechanical, it is very fast and silent in that we can’t access it. I see this as the basis for Freud’s “system unconscious,” but that’s not essential. The mental process of making a decision is essentially mechanical; our personal contribution is simply to change the weighting of the various factors in each decision: “Hmm, looks like rain. I don’t like getting wet so I won’t go for a walk just now.”

The hard problem is how the brain generates the experience of being alive, the realm of senses, emotions and so on. In the biocognitive model, experience (or qualia) just is the result of layered, recursive processing of the sensory input in the informational space generated by the brain. Emotions are the internal equivalent of sensations, triggered by specific signals from the computational or decision-making part acting on specialised, deeper centres: “I see a snake. Snakes are dangerous.” That part is silent and near-instantaneous; it has to be, otherwise we’d step on the snake. The act of recognising a threat immediately triggers the threat response, commonly known as anxiety, which has its mental effect of feeling bad, plus the physical components getting us ready for action – racing heart, rapid breathing, sweating, tremor, etc. All animals have a threat response of one sort or another (the “flight or fight” reaction).

Crucially, there is no discontinuity between perception and action, no point at which information has to jump from one “substance” to another. Regardless of their location or their function, all neurons conduct their information in the same impulses. Impulses generated in a receptor organ, such as the eye or touch receptors in the skin, are passively conducted to the computational neurons of the brain where they are manipulated to produce two outcomes, action (the easy problem) and sensation (hard problem). Once a decision is made, instructions are sent to the different muscles or secretory organs. The mind-body junction then becomes the point at which a computational neuron touches (synapses on) a neuron conducting instructions to the body. These can be motor neurons, activating different muscles systems, or endocrine, activating different secretory glands. Assuming all computational neurons are alike, the difference is the terminal point of a conducting neuron. There is not just one “mind-body junction,” there are billions, but they add up to a single, smoothly functioning system (technically, this raises the question of epiphenomenalism; another day).

The mind as we know it is an informational space generated by the brain’s computational capacity. It seems likely that we will never learn the exact codes used in this process but that’s not essential. For psychiatry, what counts is that there is a single functional path from receptor organ to effector organ, transmitting messages by the same mechanism throughout; all that changes is the significance of the messages, depending on where they are and how they are manipulated. This offers the reliability we need to talk meaningfully about the mind. We use the patients’ reports of their mental state combined with what we see of their behaviour to work out what factors must have been involved in their making just that decision. That is, we assume their computational processes are rational, which means we can work out what they must have believed in order to make that decsion. The brain is working fine, it’s just that their beliefs are scrambled or contradictory. Trump, for example, believes he has to be seen as the winner in any encounter with a human being. If anything goes wrong, he blames the other person. He would deny this because it’s obviously silly but we ignore his denials and conclude he has no self-esteem and his entire life (Reich’s “character defence”) is geared toward concealing just this point. However, the picture is now complicated by his rapidly advancing dementia.

Similarly, the biological approach to anorexia nervosa is to search for a biological “cause” for wasting away. Nothing has ever been found. The alternative is that, regardless of what they say, anorexics have made a decision to lose weight. It is conscious, it is not a disease state but is based in wrong beliefs, mostly related to self-esteem. Anxious people will commonly deny they’re anxious as they see it as a moral failing. However, the fact of being anxious says they have perceived a threat; the practitioner’s job is to work out just what the threat was. In fact, it is recursive: the panicky person is scared of being anxious. However, fearing your own anxiety state automatically brings it on. Nothing wrong with their brains, they just fear stammering and looking stupid [5]. Similarly, a depressed person has experienced a loss. Perhaps it’s recognising that a marriage is no good but leaving seems impossible; or that being anxious is intolerable but nobody seems able to help, so there’s no hope for life. This also works for psychosis. There is a good example in Mad in America this week. The father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and poisoned by drugs. In fact, he had a secret fear of angering men in authority dating from childhood. This fear drove him to imagine what may go wrong, and eventually to believe it had gone wrong. Nothing wrong with his brain.

The brain is a computational organ. That’s what it is, that’s what it does. If the output state, including emotions and behaviour, are “disordered,” then don’t waste time checking the machinery of computation (the brain itself), just look at the beliefs governing the computations. Some of these are obvious, but the damaging ones are usually well-hidden, even non-verbal because they go back so far, as Freud explained.

If we conceptualise the mind as a “substance,” then it necessarily has magical properties and can’t be included in a science of human behaviour. If we reconceive it as an emergent informational state, we get rid of that problem. This formulation fits neatly with our understanding of how the nervous system works, and is consistent with the current model of data processing. That model wasn’t available to Descartes so he did the best he could. Seeing “me, my self,” as nothing more than whispy informational states is a bit of a wrench but if you rely on a mobile phone to do your banking, you’re already familiar with it. This is why artificial intelligence is potentially very dangerous: the money-hungry clowns running it are likely to take short cuts and develop a model that has no inner restrictions. A bit like some politicians we could mention.

References:

1. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

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

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

4. Chalmers DJ (2022). Reality+: Virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy. London: Allen Lane.

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

****

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.

****

Everybody knows there’s a war going on in West Asia (actually one of about six around the world), that the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded (by both sides, in fact) so practically no oil or LNG can get through. That’s part of it, because a heap of important chemicals are also unable to move, including urea fertiliser, sulphur, aluminium and nickel from refineries, and a huge array of feedstocks for the plastics and chemical industries. Equally, the huge quantities of food the Gulf states normally import, as they don’t grow their own, is stuck in ships or on wharves overseas. I expect that most people reading this haven’t noticed much change yet but reserves of fuels and chemicals such as jet fuel will soon start to run out. That, however, is the predictable bit. The people who started this war apparently had convinced themselves it would be over in a few days and nobody would notice, so they didn’t do anything to prepare for a siege, which is what it now is. They were so confident that they did nothing. BAU, business as usual, they said, except this time it isn’t BAU. After the Iranians had spent 25 years issuing the clearest of warnings, that if attacked, they would close the Strait, somebody attacked them so now it’s closed. “Unfair!!!” shriek the people who attacked them, “you didn’t warn us!” But they did warn, and now it’s happened so stop pretending because very soon, the consequences will start to flow. The first consequence is that fuel prices around the world have risen sharply. DropSite News reports this morning:

EU Energy Commissioner warns war will affect prices for years: European Union Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen said Wednesday the Iran war was costing Europe around 500 million euros (approx. $585 million) each day and would affect prices for years to come. “This is not a short-term, small increase in prices. This is a crisis that is probably as serious as the 1973 and the 2022 crises combined,” he said… (I strongly recommend DropSite News as independent media).

That’s inconvenient for the West but, in many parts of the world, it’s very serious. Thai farmers can’t afford fuel for their little tractors to plant rice, so they have to do it by hand; that grows enough for the family and a bit for sale but none for export. Oh dear, we didn’t think of that. But even if they can plant enough rice, there won’t be any fertiliser for it during the growing season, so the harvest will be down another 20% or so. Thailand is a major rice exporter, to Africa and the Middle East as it happens, but the ships can’t get through to deliver it anyway. Golly gosh, who could possibly have expected this? Oh well, if they can’t have rice, let them eat bread, there’s lots of wheat, isn’t there. Er, no, there’s not.

One of the world’s major wheat exporters, Ukraine, is having a spot of bother and its exports of wheat are down by about 50%. Its neighbour, also a major exporter, is also in trouble as they keep bombing each other’s railways and ports and threatening ships that try to come through the Black Sea. Well, don’t worry, there’s always the US of A, they grow a lot of wheat. True, they do, normally, but these aren’t normal times. Large numbers of American farms are facing bankruptcy because tariffs imposed (illegally) by the politician they voted for have disrupted international trade in their major crop, soybeans. As a result, they don’t actually have the money to plant wheat as their alternative crop. It takes very big machinery and a lot of money to seed 2,000 acres of wheat, you certainly can’t do that by hand. Even if they had money, which they don’t, there’s a severe shortage of diesel and, in the free market economy they all champion, that means the price has doubled and will soon double again when the summer demand hits. Then there’s the fertiliser they can’t get, partly because Chinese fertilisers are under heavy tariffs, partly because there’s none coming from the Persian Gulf, which normally supplies about 33% of their needs. Oh dear, looks like the American food bowl of the world is going to be a bit empty this year. OK, put them aside, there’s always Australia, a major wheat exporter.

When I was a student, I used to work on the wheat bins, always had a great time standing knee deep on mountains of wheat but this year, guess what? That’s right, El Niño. Now I can guarantee that not one of the “very stable geniuses” in Washington and Tel Aviv (DC/TA to the incrowd) who planned this shitshow of a war has ever heard of this, and even if they had, they would neither understand nor care about it. It’s the oscillation of cool and hot water across the Pacific which governs rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere. This year, as predicted, it’s indicating a drought in Australia, which is not good for growing wheat, and floods in South America, ditto. It gets worse. Australian soil is light and deficient in minerals so it requires specialised fertiliser. The main one is superphosphate, which is manufactured by mixing rock phosphate and sulphuric acid H₂SO₄, which comes from sulphur, which is a by-product of refining heavy sulphur oil, which comes from … the Persian Gulf.

A major, world-wide food crisis is now firmly booked, starting in a few months, although the rich don’t care, they’ll still be able to afford their caviar and their bubbly. That’s not true for the 20million or so expatriate workers in the Gulf, from poorer countries in South and South-East Asia. Their remittances are often key to their families’ survival. In 2025, remittances comprised some 6.5% of Bangladesh’s GDP. That’s big money when you don’t have much else. Suddenly, business in the Gulf isn’t looking so good and millions are being sent home.

It all goes to prove that old saw, “Be careful what you wish for.” The President of Peace and his God-fearing sidekick in Israel have long wished for a war with Iran; now they’ve started it but before long, there will be a lot of people wishing they hadn’t. In the good old days, kings and prime ministers who stuffed up found their heads on a pike by the city gate. Ah, the good old days….

All of this was entirely predictable. Iran had warned for a quarter of a century about closure of the Strait; everybody knew exactly what products went through it, how much went each way each day and where; they knew that farmers in four of the biggest grain exporters, US, Ukraine, Russia and Australia, were struggling and couldn’t take another body blow; and they know what happened in 2011, last time grain prices leapt: Arab Spring, governments falling left right and centre. This time, it’s worse, there are more countries on the brink; more people living hand to mouth; more health services broken by war; more guns floating around; more bombers and, of course, the poor man’s bombers, drones, yet these clowns still couldn’t put their political ambitions aside and sort out their differences without killing heaps of the vulnerable and pushing the world economy to the brink. The only silver lining is that lots of people are now swapping to electric cars. What’s wrong with us? Talking of the atomic bomb in 1946, Bertrand Russell said:

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.

If things were bad in 1946, they’re worse now. In the past eighty years, we’ve gone backwards. At least in those days, the trouble was all due to a clash of doctrines; today, it’s just vastly-inflated egos and religious cranks slogging it out to see who can be king of the castle and looter-in-chief. Polling figures indicate that, at most, 10million people in the world think the fighting in the Gulf is a good idea (half of them live on the opposite side of the world so it hardly affects them). That’s about 0.12% of the world in favour, 99.88% against. So much for democracy.

It seems that in his dozen trips to the US over the past year, Netanyahu has been working on Trump to launch a war. They had a half-hearted one in June last year; in February this year, Netanyahu was taken into the White House Situation Room, the ultra-top secret room buried deep underground where no foreigner has ever been, especially one without a security clearance, and was seated at the head of the table in the president’s chair, to spin his spiel. Of the twenty members of the US cabinet present, 18 thought it was brainless (even Rubio said it was BS); Trump and Hegseth were in favour so, under cover of peace negotiations, they attacked on February 28^th.

Of the 29,452 days since the end of World War II, there has not been a single one that the Exceptional Nation has not been actively involved in one war or another. Not one day, not an hour, not even a minute of peace. That’s pretty exceptional. Yet the crucial point is this: It is always somebody else’s fault. For forty years, it was the commies (remember that word? Nixon liked it), driven by their urge to destroy capitalism. That’s what we were told, but it wasn’t true. Marxist doctrine said that so as long as there were capitalists, they would always try to crush socialism. Especially in late stage capitalism, socialist countries would be under attack and would have to defend themselves. History shows the truth in that. However, Marx also said that the march of history is inevitable, capitalism must eventually fail and socialism would triumph, as Khruschev said: “We will bury you.” People laughed at him, called him an ignorant Ukrainian peasant but he didn’t see the real problem, that capitalism may bury all of us.

What’s wrong with us? We can be sure that if they had been given true information before being polled, 90% or more of American citizens would have voted against war. In every other country except one, it would be even more. Only in Israel do a majority (85-90%) favour continuing the fight but remember that large numbers of people have already left the country and are unlikely to return. In the US, “The majority of American Jews (60%) oppose the US war with Iran, viewing it as a reckless escalation without a clear mission or exit strategy.” It is being run entirely at the behest of a minuscule group of the world’s population, for the benefit of … whom? Cui bono, as they say? At his trial in Nuremberg in 1946, former Reichsmarschall Herman Göring was in no doubt:

People don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America nor, for that matter, in Germany. That is understood. But, after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

This gives us an idea of what’s wrong with us. Like all primates, humans have a series of fundamental, biologically-based drives that essentially define us. We are social animals, meaning we like to be surrounded by our kind, but we are also xenophobic, meaning we fear The Other and don’t trust strangers. We are intensely territorial, which covers not just land but physical possessions, including the most valuable of all, sexual partners. Last and definitely not least, we are hierarchical animals, we form dominance hierarchies where the top dog feels great lording it over the rest, and the rest simmer resentfully and plot revenge. Given just these four characteristics, the basis of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism, tribes form themselves with a leader and a heap of followers who will aggressively try to steal the neighbouring tribes’ territory and goods because they don’t like their faces. Or just kill and rape them for fun.

That’s humans in a nutshell. Don’t remind me of altruism, the people who get to the top couldn’t give a rat’s arse about altruism, they’re in it for Number One. As Göring said, the leaders and their financiers are driven by the urge to conquer and gain territory and power, while the troops are told they must defend family and territory against the ruthless enemy, which they believe and will altruistically do, even at terrible cost. Different stories for different classes. So who is winning from this brutal war? It’s not, as Göring said, the poor slobs who get blown to bits, often they’re better off. I have interviewed at depth thousands of veterans, very often listening to stories that they have kept secret all their lives. I never once met a veteran who considered the sacrifice worthwhile. Sure, many of them from World War II felt they had no choice but to defend the country but the many “wars of choice” this country has engaged in since are different. They were all “somebody else’s war,” which makes the injuries, mental and physical, so much worse. Listen to Mohaddeseh Fallahat, a mother who spoke to the UN Human Rights Council this month after her daughter was killed in the US airstrike at Minab school on Day 1 of the US-Israeli war on Iran:

As they walked out the door, they simply said, Mum, come pick us up after school. That simple sentence now repeats in my mind a thousand times. Each time my heart burns with pain. No mother ever thinks she will send her child off to school with a smile, only to be met with silence. (from Eugene Doyle, NZ)

The stupidity of our “leaders” beggars the imagination. What do they think they’re up to? Where is the cost-benefit analysis they should have done? Who’s winning? Cui bono? I write the Israelis off. They are now totally brainwashed by a clericalist-fascist fantasy that they can push a hundred million people off their traditional lands to satisfy some ancient myth and the world will sit back and applaud. As I’ve said before, the Zionist plan to colonise vast areas in West Asia is precisely the same program the Nazis had planned for the USSR in 1941: invade, conquer, wipe out half the population and keep the rest as slave labour in order to build an eternal empire for the greater glory of us. “Master Race,” “Exceptional Nation,” “Chosen People,” these are all the same lie, just expressions of the primeval urge to dominate other humans as subhumans. As long as any group on earth believes these stories, there will be no peace.

If the Zionists were on their own, none of this would happen but they have the Americans in tow, like a child leading a piglet along by a string tied around its nuts. Perhaps 30million Americans are also in the grip of an apocalyptic fantasy, that if all the Jews go back to Israel, there will be a huge war of Good vs Bad, the Goodies (American evangelicals) will prevail, their messiah will return, the Jews will all be sent to hell and there will be a glorious empire for a thousand years before 144,000 “true believers” are wafted up to heaven while the rest go down to the furnaces. They call themselves Christians but they ignore all the squishy stuff about “Thou shalt not kill” or “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” Instead, they salivate and masturbate to the gory bits about killing every man, woman, child and donkey (1 Samuel 15:3).

These are the people who elected Donald Trump, who then overrode 18 members of his cabinet and 80% of the population to launch a war that, in his occasional lucid moments, even he now realises was a monumental screw up, certainly the worst in that country’s history. Not the worst thing they’ve ever done, but the worst outcome for them because this will upend the balance of power that has prevailed for the past few hundred years. We stand at the end of the “rules-based international order” where the dollar reigns supreme. Good. Bring it on, but just keep the nuclear weapons out of it, can you? Despite anything you self-defined Godly people have been told, defeat is endurable, but nuclear winter is not.

Last word to Bertrand Russell: “The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

****

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 last week’s post, I mentioned how Bob Whitaker had compiled a list of advantages to exercise as a treatment for depression compared with disadvantages of drugs. His list of adverse effects of psychotropic drugs did not include akathisia or suicidal and homicidal ideas and impulses, which are probably the most serious side effects. Akathisia is a disabling inner sense in the limbs of having to keep moving. It is very troublesome and there is no way it can be controlled by will power. Most major psychiatric drugs can cause it, especially antipsychotic drugs and SSRIs. It can come on within a few days of starting the drug and may fade away or persist, often getting worse when the dose is changed, either up or down. This is a problem in public psychiatry because if a person gets agitated from psychiatric drugs, the invariable response is – more drugs. Which, of course, makes it worse, so they get more and more until everybody gives in in the face of such severe mental disorder and they call for ECT.

Akathisia is definitely not minor. I’m sure it has a lot to do with sudden, impulsive suicide bids in the first few weeks after a drug is started, and with inexplicable homicides. For example, there was a terrible case in the south-west of West Australia in 2018 when a 61yo man shot six members of his family and himself. Initially, there was a report that he had recently been diagnosed as depressed, almost certainly meaning he had been prescribed medication, but this report soon disappeared. However, it is now known that he was taking SSRI’s at the time of the incident. Akathisia can also start or intensify after the drugs are stopped, and can persist for years, as conservative Canadian psychologist and self-publicist, Jordan Peterson, has learned. His health is crumbling but that report comes from Hindustan Times, hardly standard reading outside India:

… (his daughter said) Peterson, 63, is suffering from a “psych med-induced neurological injury,” adding that his symptoms have persisted despite being off psychiatric medications for six years.

I suggest the reason you won’t get this in MSM in most parts of the West, as in the homicide above, is because they won’t mention complications of psychiatric drugs as it threatens drug company profits (when it comes to corporate profits, drug companies and the media are on the same side of the fence). Peterson, however, is a psychologist who has made a fortune from his self-help books and videos: why was he taking psychiatric drugs in the first place? I don’t know, I don’t follow him but it seems his little inspirational homilies didn’t quite work. Perhaps he should have stuck with exercise, which works well in most cases of mild-moderate “depression” (in quotes because there’s no such thing as mild depression, that’s just normal [1]; anybody who isn’t at least “mildly depressed” from watching the news these days needs to get a grip on reality). Exercise isn’t just good for the miseries, it’s also very effective in delaying the onset and retarding the progress of Alzheimer’s Disease. Fortunately, this has been studied quite extensively over years [2,3] even though nobody takes any notice of it. Finding a drug to prevent or even reverse Alzheimer’s would be the path to incalculable riches, so that’s where the research money goes. Financially, getting people to trot around their neighbourhood or stretch in the park isn’t in the same league.

There are two sorts of exercise, physical and cognitive, and two sorts of physical, aerobic and resistance-training. Exercise reduces blood viscosity and all sorts of nasty inflammatory chemicals [4], improves balance and coordination, thereby reducing falls and fractures, reduces diabetes and its myriad complications, gets sluggish bowels working without drugs and clears the bronichals, as my old grannie used to say. Aerobic exercise aims to improve cardiorespiratory fitness and get the blood pumping through those elderly arteries. The main aerobic exercises are walking and jogging, cycling and swimming. Resistance training means lifting weights but it doesn’t have to be a lot and doesn’t have to be heavy. It’s the persistence that counts. Twenty minutes of walking one day and weights the next is effective, especially if done in a social group and includes mental exercises such as crosswords and sudoku. All this is known to retard ageing: combined with a balanced diet, regular steady exercise is the most powerful anti-ageing factor known. Obviously, life style can accelerate ageing but it can also retard it. The earlier people start, the better the outcome but it’s never too late.

As I said, this has been known forever but there’s no money in it so nobody bothers with it. However, with the ageing population and shrinking workforce, they’ll have to otherwise we’ll have swarms of elderly disabled people in nursing homes and nobody to look after them. Keeping people out of nursing homes is very cost-effective, especially when the “treatment” costs nothing. The problem is that psychiatric research is only funded if it involves biology, so a recent report in the prestigious psychiatric journal Psychological Medicine was a bit surprising [5]. They were studying the relationship between a diagnosis of schizophrenia and the ageing process using a cohort from Dunedin, NZ, born in 1972-73 and followed since. This group has been extensively studied using a variety of (expensive) tests and the results are accepted as reliable.

It’s been known for many years that people taking major psychiatric drugs in the long-term, essentially meaning for life, die much younger than their undrugged peers [6]. In Australia, they lose about 19 years of life whereas in the US, where people commonly have larger doses and more drugs (polypharmacy), that figure is 25yrs. That’s a lot of life to lose, well over a quarter of your allotted span, to it’s important to know: is it the “disease” that kills them, or is it the treatment? They had only about 1000 subjects, which isn’t a lot for this type of study, but they were able to conclude that yes, people with schizophrenia age faster than the other people who acted as controls. By some fairly complex statistics, they decided this wasn’t due to family genes, to tobacco or to the drugs they had been prescribed. By exclusion, they concluded that it is the condition itself that causes people to age faster than their peers or siblings. This is important: psychiatry has a truly appalling record of mistreatment of the mentally troubled [7], up to and including the “euthanasia” program in Nazi Germany that killed several hundred thousand people – and, of course, failed to eradicate the “defective genes” that everybody believed were causing mental disorder.

However, there is one factor they failed to take into account: that what seems like accelerated ageing is actually an indirect result of the treatment. Psychiatric drugs are seriously unpleasant. They have a wide range of adverse effects, including emotional numbing and detachment, apathy and inertia. Socially, people taking them are mostly severely isolated, including from their families. Friends drift away, relatives lose interest or are too busy in their own lives. People on psychiatric drugs have little enthusiasm for anything and tend to sit around smoking and drinking Coke as there’s little else they can do and nobody to do it with anyway. So their health declines. They get fat, they develop Type II diabetes, their arteries clog and they die young after a life of misery and emptiness. If that’s caused by the drugs, then what we’re doing is no better than in the old days when they cut people’s brains to “cure their diseases.” This is critically important, especially for people taking drugs against their will or who have been misled by drug company advertising, which is practically everybody.

The paper on schizophrenia and ageing involved twenty researchers from around the world and clearly a lot of computer time. It reads as though they’re trying to find a link between premature ageing and the mental trouble, that they have a common biological cause. Of course they would, that’s what psychiatric researchers do, that’s how they get their money and get ahead. They concluded:

Our findings add to a growing body of evidence supporting the hypothesis that accelerated aging is present in schizophrenia, which may contribute to the higher risk and earlier occurrence of age-related diseases. Future clinical trials should examine whether interventions targeting aging-related diseases reduce morbidity among schizophrenia patients [5, p10].

Notice how they said further research should “target age-related diseases” and didn’t mention why these unhappy people were ageing rapidly. That is, we should study the outcome of premature ageing, such as diabetes and high blood pressure etc, but not the cause of the premature ageing process itself. Was this part of a conspiracy to conceal the bad effects of psychiatric drugs? Possibly, although author Gary Greenberg wasn’t so sure. In a review of his diatribe against DSM-5, titled The Book of Woes, he was asked: “Could you briefly summarize the problem, as you see it, of the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists?” He replied:

I don’t think there is a conspiracy in which drug companies pay doctors to create diseases for which they can then sell the cure. But who needs conspiracies when you have capitalism?

In fact, there was such a conspiracy involving Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman (now deceased) and Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of risperidone, but what he means is that people see what they want to see, they see what they’re rewarded to see. Each of us has a set of beliefs that guide our decisions through the day, but not all beliefs are equal. Some can be changed easily, as in “I used to like that song but I got bored with it,” while others are more like concrete foundations to our lives. We don’t like changing these as it seems we’re no longer the same person. You can see this in the US at present: about 35% of the electorate still support Mr Trump even though he’s doing everything he said he wouldn’t do and nothing that he said he would do. Their belief shapes their perception of reality but that’s not just because they’re idiots, we’re all inclined to do it. General practitioner and historian of science, Robert Youngson, said:

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 [8, p293].

He quoted the great Lord Lister who found the same thing:

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.

This is what education is about, finding the “concrete slabs” that are messing with our thinking and replacing them (it’s also true of psychotherapy). I think this paper, on ageing and schizophrenia, is a clear example of how our beliefs shape our perceptions. As good reductionists, they want to find a biological cause for the observation that people with this diagnosis seem to age prematurely. They’re committed to the belief that all mental disorder is biological, so it simply doesn’t occur to them that a diagnosis could be the result of non-biological factors. In their minds, the mere fact of a diagnosis says “biology,” they’re incapable of thinking in any other terms. It’s like the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. People say: “It has to be biological, they actually die while saying they need to lose more weight. That can’t possibly be psychological.” Really? What about all the young men who take drugs to get more muscle bulk? They die too, even after being told their habit is dangerous (brief video here). Morbid obesity is the same, they eat themselves to death. Others speed on motorbikes or cover themselves in tattoos or studs (ugly but not necessarily fatal) but that doesn’t prove it’s biological. You see the business model:

If it isn’t 100% normal, it’s an illness; if it’s an illness, it has a biological cause; if biological, we can make our name by discovering the cause so let’s get some grants and get started. Whoopee, fame and fortune here we come.

When it comes to the question of premature ageing in mental disorder, yes, it will require a long-term study so the sooner we get started, the better. However, we already know the answer: regular steady exercise of body and mind is the most powerful anti-ageing factor known. The bodies and minds of people on psychoactive drugs don’t get exercise as they’re too apathetic, so they age quicker than their undrugged siblings. But don’t be surprised: that’s what the drugs do, that’s why they were invented, to keep people obtunded and tractable [7].

Let’s assume we sort this out, will that resolve the issue? No, not at all. The problem isn’t just a matter of tidying a few loose ends, it’s the whole fabric of modern psychiatry. In the absence of a formal, articulated model of mental disorder, there is nothing to control psychiatrists. Society relies on their good intentions, which is not such a bright idea because it assumes they actually know what they’re doing. My case is that they don’t, they only think they know, so if this matter is sorted out, they will simply move camp a bit and start again, such as giving up on serotonin and starting on inflammatory chemicals from the bowel again (it was tried a century ago; it must be time for a rerun). Critical psychiatry ends up as a game of whack-a-mole, endlessly chasing after the leaders of the pack as they press ahead into unknown territory and leaving messes that can take many years to sort out, all without a single apology for lives ruined. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were sterilised or whose brains were cut in the completely wrong belief that this would help them or society. Nobody ever apologised.

References:

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

2. Meng YC et al (2018). Exercise Intervention Associated with Cognitive Improvement in Alzheimer’s Disease. Neural Plasticity. Article ID 9234105, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2018/9234105.

3. Chen W-W et al. (2016) Role of physical exercise in Alzheimer’s disease (Review). Biomedical Reports 4: 403-407.

4. Tortosa-Martinez J, Clow A (2012) Does physical activity reduce risk for Alzheimer’s disease through interaction with the stress neuroendocrine system? Stress, 15(3): 243–261. DOI: 10.3109/10253890.2011.629323

5. Whitman ET et al (2026). Replicated evidence for an accelerated rate of whole-body aging in schizophrenia. Psychol Med. ; 56: e42. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41656957/.

6. WHO (2016) Premature death among people with severe mental disorders. WHO/MSD/MER/16.5. https://www.who.int/mental_health/evidence/excess_mortality_report/en/

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

8. Youngson, R (1988). Scientific blunders: a brief history of how wrong scientists can sometimes be. London: Robinson.

****

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 is no question, we live in epochal times (adj.: describing events, changes or discoveries so significant they mark the beginning of a new era or epoch; implying momentous, historic or revolutionary importance). The last time we saw seismic changes in the world order was 1989, when the vast USSR and its satellites began to fall apart and go their separate ways. “The end of history,” shouted the rather histrionic Francis Fukuyama, who said the end of communism (P.S. not in China) and the rise of liberal capitalism indicated that human social evolution had reached its end in a post-ideological world. All we had to do was sit back and enjoy its fruits. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way. No sooner had the Iron Curtain fallen than Yugoslavia caught fire, then Kuwait and the first Gulf War, then the attacks on New York, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza and finally Iran in this, the Third Gulf War.

It’s worth noting that we have had the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and now the Iran War but these are actually all just chapters in one long-running American War Against Everybody, with an Israeli side. This time, however, it seems the combination of The Exceptional Nation and The Chosen People have bitten off more than they can chew. Without warning, without provocation, without UN Security Council authority, and under cover of “peace” negotiations, they attacked on Friday night, fully expecting to be able to declare victory before the stock markets opened on Monday morning. To their utter astonishment, the Islamic Republic didn’t collapse. Amazingly and without any precedent in history, the people rallied around their flag and leaders and actually fought back!!! Can you believe the sheer effrontery of those Persian ingrates? But it gets worse. Not content with knocking out all the billion dollar American radars and control systems and flattening 17 of their hugely expensive military bases in the Gulf monarchies, quel horreur, they closed the Strait of Hormuz. In less fraught times, 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas, not to mention 30% of the world’s fertilizers and a huge range of basic chemical feedstocks for the plastics and other industries, passes through this narrow stretch. Such ingratitude: post-ideological neoliberal capitalism comes knocking and they slam the door shut on everybody, upsetting the entire capitalist order. Truly breathtaking and just sooo unexpected, as the Israeli ambassador to Australia announced this week:

Dr Newman said Israel tried to take all scenarios into consideration, including worst-case scenarios such as the potential for Iran to already have nuclear warfare (sic). But he admitted Iran’s closure of the vital waterway was “not part of our planning … You hope and pray that … even a rogue entity like Iran, will not do what is worst for them and for the international community,” he said. Israel also did not expect Iran to carry out retaliation attacks on certain Gulf countries.

Assuming this person was not lying and not out of his mind, it seems the world is being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by people who launch wars on the strength of “hopes and prayers” and without having read the news for the past 25 years. Complete idiots, in other words, and ambassador Newman is one of them. For a quarter of a century, Iran has responded to the gale of threats blowing from Washington and Tel Aviv (usually abbreviated to DC/TA, as they are essentially one and the same) with the promise that, if attacked, they would close the Strait. As they had long expected, they were attacked so, as they had long promised, they have retaliated by, and note this crucial point, by the non-lethal means of slipping an elastrator ring around capitalism’s enticingly dangling balls. The ever-honourable US-Zionist axis, including the most moral army in the world, attacks traditional targets like girls’ schools, hospitals, bridges and so on, killing and maiming just a few tens of thousands, yet the crafty Orientals in Tehran drop a turd on the desks of the world’s hard-working bankers and industrialists by threatening their profits!!! OMG, what’s the world come to? You can’t even launch a war these days without the duly-appointed enemy rugpulling you. Such is their concern that the IMF has issued a warning of global recession. Forget the schoolgirls, it says, think of the poor billionaires.

But this raises a crucial point that has been overlooked by so many in the uproar: that we are not and never have been in a “post-ideological world.” The very idea is an impossibility, a self-contradiction because every human society is based in a set of unargued opinions, i.e. an ideology. They’re unargued because they’re considered so basic they can’t be argued. For example, the idea that humans have rights can’t be argued. You either accept it or reject it because without that principle, there’s no society. Sure, history and modern politics show that very often, one group believe they have more rights than another, or even all the rights, but that’s inherently destabilising as the oppressed group will eventually get sick of being crushed and will fight for their freedom. Calling them “terrorists” and bombing their schools and homes is self-defeating. You cannot bomb your way to peace as equality is the sine qua non of a peaceful world. Thus, when people shout that hey, we’re all in a post-ideological world, all they’re saying is that you have to accept their belief system as the unquestionable reality, the only conceivable possibility, while everything you hold precious is twisted ideology. So what is the fundamental belief system of the western world that has to be accepted as bedrock reality? Neoliberal capitalism, which is simply social Darwinism rewritten in economic jargon to justify the rich getting richer and the poor going to hell.

Social Darwinism is the law of the jungle applied to society, survival of the fittest by any means necessary, but with a twist. Social Darwinism says that if you’re on top, that’s because you’re a superior type and you therefore deserve more than the hoi polloi. It’s very popular with people born with a silver spigot in every orifice because it takes the universal, biologically-driven concept of dominance hierarchies and hides it under a moral cloak. Social Darwinism says superior people rise to the top; if you’re on top, you’re superior but if you’re not, you’re clearly inferior and you should be quietly grateful for any scraps that come your way. As we know, every human comes equipped with twin opposing drives, one to try to get to the top and the other to resist being pushed down. Common sense says that’s a recipe for instability: not everybody can live on the top floor. Somebody has to take out the rubbish so the best system would be one where everybody takes a turn at the fun jobs and then the dirty jobs. That wouldn’t work very well: not everybody can be a surgeon and planes need only one pilot. Swapping jobs all the time would be inefficient, so we specialise and society becomes more productive. However, as soon as we allow specialisation, we get a hierarchy and with it comes inequality, because that’s what hierarchy means. Neoliberals say that’s actually good because it’s efficient. It rewards productive people and encourages the less productive to work harder, all without anybody having to issue orders.

Neoliberal capitalism says that the most productive society will give the greatest benefit to all citizens as the most efficient society is the most productive. However, there is no human or group of humans with sufficient knowledge to decide the best path to high productivity. That has to be left to the market, which is just the sum total of all citizens acting dispassionately in their rational self-interest to maximise their benefits. The market is self-regulating in that it rewards good ideas and penalises failures. People with bright ideas must be allowed to put them into practice, thereby creating more wealth. Anything that interferes with this process, such as government regulation, interferes with the efficient market and reduces overall wealth, which is bad in itself. From this cluster of beliefs, aka ideology, flows the view that economies are self-correcting so the best government is the smallest possible. Regulation is bad; only private enterprise is able to direct resources where they’re needed and most likely to do good; and public enterprise is necessarily inefficient as it directs investment to inefficient sectors and encourages the indolent in the idea that somebody else will provide for them. This is the ideology of Thatcherism-Reaganism-neoliberalism in a nutshell. It comes from the group of economists known as the Austrian school, whence came many of its originators, principally Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, but nowadays, about 85% of economists follow their creed.

After fifty years, we can pronounce it a total failure. The reason for its failure is crystal clear: it is a doctrine of human behaviour, but it is not built on a foundation of a human psychology. It assumes humans will always act in rational self-interest and that ipso facto, this is beneficial to the society. It doesn’t take into account the possibility that people will realise they can more efficiently (quicker, less effort) advance their self-interest by working against the interests of the broader society, i.e. by crime and corruption. Granted, the neoliberal economy rewards hard work and self-denial but it has no basis in morality, it rewards the cheat just as effectively as the honest worker, but a lot quicker and with less tax. Just by a little light cheating or skullduggery, people can leapfrog themselves up the hierarchy, but why stop there? They soon learn they can use their wealth and power to influence the workings of the economy even further in their favour, to tilt the level playing field, to nobble their opponents or dump them in the river. Thus is fascism born.

The inequality leads to widespread resentment, which the clever operators exploit to favour themselves, but capitalism is never content. It can’t say “Enough’s enough, somebody else can have a go,” it has to keep going as it is built on the notion of the dominance hierarchy, the twin drive to get to the top and its opposite fear of falling down the ladder: “If I slow down, somebody will overtake me. I won’t be No. 1, and that’s worse than death. Or definitely worse than the deaths of 165 superfluous Iranian schoolgirls.” This is the entire motivation behind the perfidious American-Zionist attack on Iran. It’s all greed, the insatiable lust for power and dominance, the delirium of crushing other people underfoot, especially brown or black foreigners.

Neoliberalism is simply the dominance hierarchy, the core principle of narcisso-fascism, applied to economics, so where does it end? There are only two ways fascism ends, either the external enemies it has created unite to overthrow it, or it turns on itself internally and tears itself to bits. In fact, I’d say it’s already ending. Hungary threw out its odious little wannabe-dictator this week but more importantly, over in Godzone, the dementing Trump has gone just a teensy bit too far and his base are turning against him. His failing war has turned a lot of people against him, the Zionist killing machine has alienated the entire younger generation around the world, and Trump himself has over-reached. First was when his failing frontal lobes allowed his grandiose personality to break out and insult the Pope. It’s OK to shoot people in the streets but don’t upset His Holiness: lose the Catholic 10% of your voters immediately. Then he released the bizarre picture of himself as JC, laying on his healing hands, which upset huge numbers of evangelicals in his MAGA base, and spawned libraries of spoof videos (watch for a good laugh). And then some industrious souls found that somebody close to the administration had been profiting from insider-trading on Trump’s on-again-off-again threats in his war. Hundreds of millions of dollars were traded after hours, shortly before he dropped his threat of all-out war; somebody knew in advance as that was statistically impossible. Finally, the depth of cheating in his so-called World Liberty Financial crypto currency is emerging, which has allowed the Trump Tribe to make off with at least $1.5billion (if Justin Sun accuses you of corruption, you know you’re in trouble). Not to mention the billions devout Zionist Bruh Kushner has trousered while pretending to be the US envoy to the Middle East. There’s heaps more, even darling Melania felt the need to tell the world she never knew Epstein despite the photographic evidence.

Anyway, all this is interesting but not surprising, this is the natural history of fascism. We, the great unwashed, can only hope the whole shitshow collapses in ruins before Trump’s ever-decreasing mind gets the idea a nuclear bomb will fix those upstart Iranians, or Cubans, or Venezuelans, or Chinese… Don’t fall for the story that this is all part of a big plan, a feint to fool the Russians or Chinese while Trump snatches the big prize, whatever it is. This is the end of empire, the final thrashings of a society built on the notion that greed is good and dominance is better. Sure it is, for small elite, for a while. Then the bills start coming in.

****

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.

****

This week at Mad in America Substack, Bob Whitaker pointed out that regular steady exercise has a singularly powerful effect in relieving and preventing depression. This has been known forever, of course, but is rarely mentioned and even more rarely studied. The reasons for this neglect are clear: there’s no money in it for psychiatrists, they lose control of the process, and it clashes with their so-called “biomedical model” that isn’t [1]. These days, you can buy a jigger to give yourself direct current stimulation of the brain that cures everything from stuttering to fallen arches. There’s always money for research on ECT, TCMS, TCDC, photonics, even pyrotherapy, although the pipeline for new drugs seems to be rather empty of late:

A major challenge for progress in novel pharmacotherapies has been our lack of a full understanding about the causes of depression.

So said a reviewer in Medscape. In English, that says: “The reason there are no new antidepressant drugs is because we haven’t got a clue what it is or why it happens.” Not everybody agrees. Some researchers are convinced they know what it is (a biological disease of the brain) and why it happens (your genes). It has led the irrepressible Ian Hickie to claim that we don’t get depressed because bad things happen to us; instead, bad things happen because we have depressive genes [2]. It seems our genes determine our lives, right down to whether we are in a war zone or not. Given that some 85% of children in Gaza say they would rather die than endure further bombing, that’s clearly nonsensical, so why would apparently sensible and highly educated people believe it? The answer, I have shown, is because psychiatry is an ideology, not a rational science [3]:

An ideology is a structured set of beliefs, values, and ideas that shapes how individuals or groups understand, interpret, and act within the social and political world.

Essentially, an ideology is a set of value-laden beliefs that followers are required to accept as a whole and without arguing. If they argue, the group will splinter into squabbling factions as do political or religious movements. The core ideology of modern psychiatry is: “All mental disorder is just a special sort of brain disorder.” So when the writer above talked about “…our lack of a full understanding about the causes of depression,” he meant “the physical causes of this brain disease.” When it’s put in those terms, it’s obviously pretty stupid because, for all the money spent on drugs and on biological research, none of those terribly clever people has ever proven why mental disorder isn’t precipitated by life events. They just believe it because their notion of science has no room for mental factors. Science, they say, deals only with observables, with things we can see or measure; if we can’t measure it, it isn’t science; we can’t see or measure the mind; therefore the mind is not a field of science. That’s all there is to it, but it doesn’t stop there. In commenting on last week’s post on free will, reader PC, from the UK (a psychologist who thinks a lot on these questions) asked whether we can construct a valid rational model of mental life without falling into into classic errors like the infinite regress. Wearing his devil’s advocate hat, he put the well-known argument against free will:

You cannot choose what you choose to choose, i.e. in what sense did I choose to write the word choose just now. Schopenhauer (said) Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills…

This says that if I choose to lift up a glass, then I must have chosen to choose to pick it up, and before that, to have chosen to choose to choose to pick it up, ad infinitum. The regress bit means going backward to try to find the answer, and it’s infinite because it constantly requires the same step with no end, as in: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” (Darwin provided the answer: a different sort of chicken). An infinite regress is never explanatory, as in: “I will myself to close the door; but first I must will myself to will myself to close the door … etc.” The only solution is not to take the first step. This is what the positivists had in mind when they said: “We can’t see mental things like the Will, so we can’t include them in our science.” Modern science therefore doesn’t talk about the mind, from which came the long and pointless behaviorist program in psychology, the plan to write a non-mentalist psychology, which took a hundred years to go exactly nowhere [4]. It also led to a psychiatry that doesn’t talk to people about their mental lives: “Just answer those questions, take your tablets and come back in a month.”

On the one hand, the world today is teetering on the brink of catastrophe, which makes us anxious and depressed yet, on the other, all the smart people who think about these things are telling us that there’s nothing we can do, just take your tablets and watch TV. In their view, the conduct of our “leaders’” is all determined by their genes, as is our response to their appalling behaviour, so it seems we’re stuck in a predetermined doom cycle. That’s what happens when you live in a physicalist universe. Fortunately, help is on the way. The biocognitive model says that the narrow (antidualist) view of science dumped on the world in 1929 [5] has reached its use-by date and we need to turn to a new, expanded model of science of the mind based in the idea of information as a real thing [6].

In world history, the period 1929-48 provided plenty of distractions but it also saw the development of a radically new form of science, now known as computer science or information technology, etc. The idea that science consists only of studying real things that we can see and weigh and put in bottles expanded to include the concept of information as a real but invisible thing. At first, people fought the idea because it seemed the concept of information was being used in exactly the same as people had used magic, inventing something unseen to fill the gaps in our understanding. These days, everybody accepts that information is a real thing because it can act on the real world. The laws governing computation are known in detail and the physical mechanisms to generate and transmit it are reaching the limits of the material sciences. The mere existence of information as a law-governed system says the universe is governed by two completely distinct sets of laws with no points of contact. That’s what dualist means, not two substances or two metaphysical forces of good and evil.

These days, there’s nothing magic in all this but there’s one problem: somebody forgot to tell all the busy people in psychology and psychiatry they’re out of date. The big tent of science has expanded to incorporate notions like minds and will and hopes and ambitions: they can no longer be dismissed as magic. If the mind is an informational state generated by the brain’s computational capacity, then we can recast those old concepts in informational terms and start to use them again. Consider the example PC raised, the concept of free will, of being able to choose something and make it happen:

Determinism says: There is only one possible way for the universe to unfold and that’s determined by the initial state and the laws of the material universe. Any sense of free will is illusory.

Free will says: Untrue. However I acted a minute ago, I could have acted differently.

We’ll take a rock as the exemplar of the determinist system. A rock has a crystalline internal structure but no internal structure or mechanism and no motive power of its own. It heats up in the sun and cools at night, maybe fracturing in the process but there’s nothing magic about it. For that rock to decide to move, say further uphill because the view is better, external energy would have to be provided. However, that would upset the universe because it’s a closed system. Using that as the example, people then look at the brain and say it too follows all the physical rules, its chemicals and electrical gradients are not magic in any way. Therefore for that brain to change its “mind” would require external energy and, given all the people on earth, that would soon cause energy imbalances such that things would either blow up or grind to a halt. Therefore, the mind must be reducible to the brain because nothing else is possible.

That’s wrong from the beginning. The comparison is not between a thinking rock and a brain, but between two functioning brains, one coherent and the other incoherent. These days, the physiological activity of the brain is very well understood as wholly physical in nature. In humans and in all other animals, neurons fire their impulses, nerve tracts are activated, limbs and lips move, etc. without ever involving the supernatural. We can work out with great precision the energy demands of a brain. However, that’s not all there is. If all the neurons in a brain are firing randomly, they are using energy at a certain rate but there’s no coherent output. That person would be in a coma. In the alternative, the neurons are firing at the same rate and consuming the same amount of energy but they are coherent, governed by the rules of logic, so there will be an informational output. That person is awake and responding normally to the environment. The energy consumption of a healthy brain is about 20W, or 20% of the body’s needs, and this hardly changes between sleep and waking. It isn’t the energy consumption that determines the brain’s informational output but the coherence of its activity. Crucially, coherent function requires no more energy than lying in a coma. In thermodynamic terms, the computational activity of a brain is a free lunch.

In the biocognitive model, the informational activity generated by the healthy brain just is our mental life, so our mental lives are real yet do not upset the matter-energy balance in our sector of the universe. The three ring circus in my head does not breach any laws of thermodynamics so that old argument against mental life falls in a heap. Free will then is simply the process of computing possible outcomes and choosing from them according to the model of the conditional operator used in logic and IT, which says: If X is true, then Y is true. If X happens, then Y will happen. In logic notation: X → Y (material implication). There is no infinite regress. If the first element happens, then the second will automatically follow. Just a moment, you say, isn’t that just determinism in logical guise? No, because as psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird said, “Any scientific theory of the mind must treat it as an automaton” (1983). To break the determinist lock, I can choose to change all the conditions:

If this is Monday, I’ll have a sandwich for lunch. If it’s Tuesday, I’ll have a pie. No, that’s getting boring, I’ll have noodle soup for a change.

There is no choosing to choose to choose, it is simply a matter of setting up “If A happens then B will follow according to my rules.” If I don’t like the outcome, I change the rules. A decision by a human is not a metaphysical event in some magical space, it is simply cascades of rules acting on rules acting on sensory inputs to compute an outcome and then implement it. Our mental capacity to look ahead and generate a range of possible outcomes for any initial state of affairs allows us to choose the best or most suitable path and put it into effect: “If the outcome is unfavourable in terms of existing rules, then change the conditions,” i.e. another example of the logical rule of material implication: I look ahead to decide whether to change my rules. No magic, and definitely not determined by the laws of the physical universe.

Of course, not all our rules are equal, some are important and some less so. Mr Trump is a fine example of this. He has only one rule in life: “I must win everything at all times in every possible way, and everybody must know it.” That’s behind everything he does, that’s all there is to him. The rest of us have thousands of rules all jostling to be noticed, mostly consistent but sometimes a jumble. In the biocognitive model, personality, the sum total of rules governing an individual’s life, is paramount and mental disorder is the outcome of disordered or dysfunctional rules. Very simple, and it doesn’t force us into absurdities such as thinking that our DNA determines what happens to us in life.

Does any of this matter to psychiatry? I believe it does. Psychiatry’s intellectual stance was built on the idea that science must be limited to observables. Nobody is allowed to talk about unobservables; the mind is unobservable; therefore psychiatrists can’t talk about the mind. Except the business of psychiatry just is the mind, so they had to get around that hurdle and the way was to change a patient’s reports of his/her mental state from mental reports to reports about their brain’s physical state. “I feel sad” has nothing to do with severe losses in life, it’s just code for “My serotonin is low.” That leads to a search for drugs and other physical treatments but it also blinds psychiatry to the possibility that it may in fact be on the wrong path, that the search for “novel pharmacotherapies” is a search for the end of a rainbow.

This is just the briefest summary of the case for the biocognitive model, set out in [6]. It is a dualist model, i.e. it says there are two separate realms to the universe, the physical and the informational, each operating independently according to different sets of laws. Each realm is wholly rule-governed, even though we don’t yet know all the rules; and that the mind emerges from or supervenes upon the brain’s coherent function by virtue of those rules. Philosopher David Chalmers set out the general case for this process [7] but he left what he called the “laws of supervenience” blank. My suggestion is that they are the rules of a dual-valued logic which the mathematician George Boole (1815-1864) called “The Laws of Thought” [8]. These rules are the foundation of the entire IT industry, so there’s nothing magic in them. Boole has had a vast influence on the world but he died largely unknown; I think he was quite a heroic figure.

The other point about a non-magical view of mental life is that it leads to the notion of animal minds, that animals are also gifted with minds even though they may have just a few grams of brain tissue. That suggests that the emergence of mind is a software matter, not a matter of brute computing power. I don’t believe we need invoke quantum computing, partly because we don’t know what it means, partly because there is now evidence to say it has limits but mainly because it is used to “fill the gaps,” i.e. as a latter-day magic.

So back to the question of whether exercise is better for depression than drugs. In his brief article, Bob Whitaker shows how exercise is actually much better for us than drugs can ever be. Exercise is efective in relieving depression and also has a long list of positive benefits, whereas drugs may relieve depression but they come with a long list of ill effects (note he didn’t mention akathisia or suicidal ideas and urges, which are the most serious). Plus drugs are expensive and addictive so they’re a bad deal. If, however, we view depression as a reaction to life events occurring in a sentient being, we can quickly see that the psychological approach is correct. Fortunately, there is now a model of mental life which accounts for mental disorders as psychological states. That’s a vast improvement over mainstream psychiatry, which doesn’t have any models. But don’t they realise that trying to write a non-mentalist psychology is actually the more difficult path? They should just admit defeat, recognise that science has expanded into entirely new realms and start again. It’s so much easier, except they all have a rule which says: “I can’t possibly be wrong because that would push me down the hierarchy and that’s too painful to consider.”

References:

1. McLaren N (2024). Biological Psychiatry: Reductio ad Absurdum. Chap. 2 in Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon.

2. 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-x

3. McLaren N (2013). Psychiatry as Ideology. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 15: 7-18. 10.1891/1559-4343.15.1.7

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

5. Hahn H, Neurath O, Carnap R (1929). The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle. Ernst Mach Society, University of Vienna. http://rreece.github.io/philosophy-reading-list/docs/the-scientific-conception-of-the-world-the-vienna-circle.pdf

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

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

8. Boole, G. (1854). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Dover Classics of Science and Mathematics. New York: Dover (1958). Now available through Google Books.

****

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.

****

On Monday, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Dem, Mich.) posted on social media:

After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide. It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office.

Is Trump a maniac? I’ve said often enough that he is not psychotic. He is a grotesquely narcissistic and psychopathic personality, with the emphasis on the former but the danger in the latter. He doesn’t have the steely resolve of the true psychopath, e.g. Reinhard Heydrich, Stalin, Bernard Madoff, because he is actually very anxious but he conceals it. He is scared of men and is therefore attracted to tough, steely men who he thinks won’t assail him or humiliate him. A very large part of his abuse of women is intended to make him feel tough but also to impress other men that he is really successful with women. He surrounds himself with men such as Hegseth, Bongino, Miller, Bannon and Patel who also treat women like objects whereas men who can relate to women reasonably normally, perhaps Bessant and a few others, are not central figures. Women in his life have only two duties: look glamorous to impress people how successful he is with women, and worship him. And come across, of course, except he’s now too fat and too old to try: a late night and a rough woman would be the end of him.

He is psychopathic in the sense that he has no capacity for feeling for humans, as his niece, PhD psychologist Mary Trump, says often enough. People exist to do as he tells them; if they don’t, he either walks away from them or loses his temper and starts issuing threats but when it comes to action, he goes to water and walks away, throwing insults over his shoulder. TACO (things have reached a sorry state when you have a Wikipedia page saying you’re chicken). His main goal in life is dominating people, either by having them worship him, by cheating them as that proves how clever he is, or by getting somebody else to bash them to the ground. He has never been in a fight in his life and would panic if anybody shaped up to him. Having the world’s largest nuclear arsenal makes him feel like he’s a real person instead of a hollow shell, as he has no self-esteem. He is not like a lot of people whose self-esteem is negative, as in “I hate myself, I’m a piece of shit,” but the concept simply doesn’t apply to him. There’s nothing inside, it’s just empty, echoing space which is why he has to surround himself with golden ornaments, attractive women and put his name on everything within reach: “If I have a gorgeous blonde on my arm and my name in gold on a big tower, that tells people I’m really somebody. Aren’t I?”

Throughout his life, he has relied on two things that allow him to dominate people: his inherited and/or borrowed money, and lying. He lies to cover his many deficiencies, to cheat people so he can gloat how smart he is, and because his money allowed him to get away with it. People have known since his schooldays that he is a liar but they hung around and agreed with him in the hope they could get their hands in the honey pot too. Now, they hang around because they hope some of his power will rub off on them, or through fear that he will use his power to crush them if they disagree. He doesn’t lie in the calculated sense defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, he is not a compulsive liar:

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship... [1].

Instead, he lies in the sense that he says anything that comes into his head that seems likely to get him what he wants at that time. He doesn’t remember what he has said because he knows he doesn’t have to, he can lie and people will fall for it and tomorrow he can say the opposite and they’ll lap that up, too. He thinks their applause means he is a “very stable genius” but mostly it’s because they like the way he hates their enemies. They also think he’s a complete idiot who says any bit of shit that comes into his head and doesn’t remember it next day but his supporters convince themselves he’s on their side.

He says he likes to surround himself with losers. That’s true. He can’t stand any competition, especially from smart people who can trip him up with words. That’s why he totally dominates meetings, by forcing people to remain silent while he rambles on. He is an instinctive racist, he doesn’t like foreigners of any sort, especially if they’re not tall white northern European males, but if those tall white northern European males are clever or good looking or athletic or betray any sense of not falling into line to worship him, he hates them too. Xenophobia is a normal human drive but his is exaggerated by his lack of self-esteem: he hates people speaking foreign languages around him because he can’t. Just as he can’t drive and can’t cook and has never planted anything or repaired a child’s bike or helped an old lady across the street or surfed or cleaned anything or done anything normal. Nothing. He can play golf but even at that, he is a notorious cheat. Oh, and all his so-called religiosity, with the lunatic and charlatan Paula White “blessing” him, that’s performative only. He doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, doesn’t know anything about it and doesn’t care but he will go along with it as long as he’s centre of attention and all the stiffs are standing around, eyes closed and touching his hem, and it gets votes.

Why then, do people vote for him when they know he is a cheat and a liar and a failure at businesss? Because he appeals to their prejudices, The reason he does this so astutely is because the prejudices of the working class, his MAGA base, are also his prejudices, he hates their enemies and he licenses them to hate openly. Why do they have enemies? Partly because the US has always hated outsiders, be they native tribes, black slaves or immigrant workers stealing their jobs, but the main reason is neoliberal capitalism exporting their factories and telling them to hate immigrants. Socially, Trump is a nobody and he has all the prejudices and hatreds of a nobody. His grandfather got his start running brothels; his father, Fred Sr, cheated and lied that to a sizeable fortune; and Donald inherited all their vices, including the need to be accepted by classy society. Somewhere along the line, somebody put the idea in his head: “You could be president one day.” That idea caught and grew and grew because if it came true, it would be the ultimate put-down for all the upper crust people who had sneered at his gauche behaviour or laughed at his ignorance or refused to return his calls. That’s the only reason he ever thought he could reach the White House. Oh, and the chance to make truckloads of money on the side, which he has left to his sons and his egregriously corrupt son-in-law. He was never interested in government, he has no idea how many government departments there are or what they do, all he wants is to get power, to humiliate his enemies and to reward the rich people who helped him scramble up the ladder in the hope they’ll like him. Again, this is the normal human urge to dominate people but turbo-charged to the point of a compulsion by his vast sense of inadequacy. Still, it’s not psychotic.

That’s his personality, so what’s going on now? Well, as I constantly say, he’s dementing. It was slow at first but since about mid 2025, it’s accelerated. He is forgetful but that’s not the dominant sign: for him, it’s the degradation of what has never been a strong sense of proprietary, of judgement and social awareness. We have to be trained to be aware of other people as creatures with minds of their own and rights of their own, it doesn’t come naturally, and he was never trained. Mary Trump said that in his family, money was everything. If you had no money, you were nothing but if you had money, you were Big. That’s it. No emphasis on honesty and integrity and empathy or any of that tender-hearted slop, just gimme the money and stand back. Fred Trump Jr, Mary’s father and Donald’s older brother, wasn’t much interested in money or business. He wanted to be an airline pilot so he was shoved out, lost his inheritance and died of alcoholism at 42, when Mary was still 16 and which, understandably, she will never forgive. Significantly, Fred Trump Sr, Donald’s father, died of Alzheimer’s Disease. Mary says she sees in Donald’s eyes the same sort of detached vacancy she saw in her grandfather’s eyes. She’s not wrong on that, you can see it when somebody else is talking and he fades out.

To me, his dementia was perfectly clear 3-4 years ago (I have extensive experience dealing with dementing and brain damaged people of half a dozen races and cultures). He should not have been allowed to stand the second time but by that stage, he had the wind in his sails, the voters in his pockets and the big donors lining up to shower money over him in return for favours. Given the bizarre, quasi-imperial American electoral system, nobody could stand against him for fear of reprisals, which are an integral part of his seamy background, and the rich donors knew they could make squillions out of him, so they didn’t support any competition. So, with a bit of help from cheating and lying and manipulating the voter rolls, he got back in but this time, his many helpers and hangers-on were ready. Driven by the reptilian Stephen Miller and a squad of equally poisonous individuals, they had all the lists of names ready, one list of toadies to be appointed to vital positions and the other of enemies to be persecuted to destruction. This is Trump’s paranoid personality but it is not a paranoid psychosis. Thus far, this would be a fairly simple story of a dimwitted and ignorant proto-fascist gaining power and making a huge mess of things until people got tired of it and turfed him out, but then there is Epstein.

For background on the cosmic levels of corruption in the US and so many other countries that allowed Epstein to get ahead, see Whitney Webb [2]. She also posts regularly on YouTube although she needs to be very careful of an accident with a speeding bullet. Epstein was a psychopathic crook and pervert, and also happened to be a Jew. That meant he was as one with the entire wealthy and corrupt element in the Zionist movement for whom perversion and criminality are not social disqualifiers. They could do their dirty work together to mutual profit but Epstein knew that if he dared put a toe out of line, they would glom him. While he did what they wanted, they would give him all the secret assistance he needed, and what they wanted was dirt, something in which he specialised and was delighted to cooperate. He was never an employee or “agent” of the Israeli state or Mossad or anything, but he cooperated by feeding them the dirt and secrets they wanted. In turn, they were happy to arrange for people to give him what he wanted, money and connections, up to and including the slimy Leslie Wexner, he of Victoria’s Secret fame, who granted Epstein power of attorney over his entire estate, then worth billions.

Epstein was not a lone wolf, he ran a sizeable business with premises in different countries and employees and agents and phones and computers and so on. His business was connections with people, trading favours, collecting dirt and selling it on. He became very wealthy but, of course, the people who made him wealthy have a strong interest in shutting down any enquiries, so we only know of the really stupid ones, like the bozo Andrew Windsor or the devious Peter Mandelson who can be sacrificed to keep the public quiet. And above all, Israel and Mossad and the entire Zionist movement have an immensely powerful interest in making sure nothing leaks but they’re in a strong position as they have all the dirt they need to keep the most stupid person of all dangling on a string, one DJ Trump. Every bit of information Epstein gathered from his myriad email spies and CCTV and hacked banks and so on, all per courtesy of the nice people in Mossad and Palantir and Microsoft and Oracle etc., all of that was backed up and stored on servers buried deep underground at Israel’s nuclear weapons site at Dimona. They have the lot proving that Trump has always been a sadistic paedophile and he knows they’ve got it, which is why he doesn’t sleep at night. So he does what Bro. Netanyahu suggests, which is anything needed to bring Greater Israel to reality so he can keep his fascist coalition together and go down in history as the greatest leader of Jews since Moses, and keep his own corrupt arse out of prison. If anybody wrote this sort of stuff in a novel, it would be laughed off the shelves; a factual account, such as Whitney Webb’s monumental effort, is just sickening.

Driven by various demons, Trump has indulged in increasingly impulsive and stupid moves, each of which he thinks will solve his problems but, because he can’t think ahead and his cabinet are too servile or self-interested or off with the pixies to say anything, each move makes things worse, so he becomes more and more agitated and says more and more ridiculous things like saying the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia had kissed his arse, or he will destroy the entire Iranian people, some of which come to pass but most don’t because he still has enough sense to realise he can’t do it so he backs down, throws insults and starts on something else, but it is all temper tantrum, not psychosis:

Truth Social: Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

(April 5^th) Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

(April 7^th) A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This is a direct threat to use nuclear weapons to commit genocide. Fortunately, he backed down, because Iran didn’t budge and possibly because the Chiefs of Staff finally found their cojones and told him No. All of this is exceedingly dangerous to the world: the Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. For years, I have been saying to anybody who would listen (full disclosure: not many) that I can remember them announcing the death of Queen Elizabeth’s father on the wireless but I am certain that things are now worse than at any stage in my life. And now, I can state with no fear of contradiction that this has been the most dangerous day of all. If Israel starts to lose seriously, like facing invasion rather than just not winning, Netanyahu is likely to start hurling nuclear weapons around. Trump could stop him, that’s technically very easy, just flick a few switches in the Pentagon, but he would be too scared of all the Epstein material being dumped in the open. If Trump were on the verge of losing, he would be highly likely to start firing them on the basis that if he can’t win, nobody else is allowed to. The entire world is being tossed around by a pair of unspeakable psychopaths as though it were a beach ball at a children’s party on the edge of a cliff in a strong wind.

Anyway, Trump backed down although Israel threw a tantrum and launched a massive wave of murderous attacks on Lebanon so the Strait remains closed. The result of all this stupidity is the international power-broker par excellence, the US is finished for all time. The US has shown itself to be utterly incompetent, dishonest to the core and utterly untrustworthy, and utterly contemptuous of all humans bar a few wealthy people connected to the president and his criminal family. This is not surprising. The country that could lie its way to war in Korea and in Vietnam and in Iraq and Libya and Syria, and then lie about the lies and blame its victims, should not have any power in the world. Time has come for the other 97% of people in the world to say: “Enough is enough,” and cut the US and Israel out entirely. If they want to be Exceptional Nations of Chosen People Fulfilling God’s Destiny, go right ahead but they can do it alone. Cease all trade, cease all banking, dump the US$ as reserve currency, replace SWIFT, swap from the American GPS to the European Galileo or Chinese BeiDou systems, end all military relationships, don’t let their planes land, move the UN back to Geneva, end all patent protection on drugs, close their embassies, nationalise their companies, don’t recognise their passports … oh, and release all the Epstein files. Then they can impose sanctions to their hearts’ content but nobody will notice.

Meantime, Trump is totally unfit for office. Is he psychotic? No, he is not psychotic. Is he dangerous? Yes, most emphatically. Does he know what he is doing? Hardly. Due to his rapidly failing intellect, his psychopathy and his agitation, he has practically no control over his actions. This puts the world in serious danger but he doesn’t give a shit. All he cares about is attention. He is a ridiculous, disorganised, self-involved, callous and heartless, fiendishly corrupt, sadistic child molester, but he is not psychotic. He must be removed from office immediately by any means necessary, up to and including one of the decapitation strikes he is so happy to use on others. The time for being polite has well and truly passed. If the US doesn’t act soon, it proves it has no moral standing, its “Christianity” is pure Hollywood.

A point to consider: Iran has just defeated the US-Israeli war machine by non-lethal methods. It must be unique in history that aggressors have been brought to their knees by people trying to keep to international law and basic humanity. All power to them. To see why their victory is important and what they are fighting, watch this.

References:

1. Frankfurt H (1986). On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 6 (2): 81–100. (Fall 1986). https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAOB-3

2. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

****

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.