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.

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 did an interview with Pascal Lottaz on his channel Neutrality Studies, available here. Pascal is from Switzerland but now works at Kyoto University where he seems to have the dream job of talking to interesting people around the world. He posts 3 or 4 fairly long interviews each week, worth watching as you will not get that sort of information from the mainstream.

****

The massive “No Kings” marches in the US and elsewhere came and went but it doesn’t seem as though much has changed. Herr Drumpf is still king, still camped in what’s left of the White House; American and Israeli forces continue their unprovoked and illegal attacks on Iran; Cuba is facing death by strangulation and half a dozen other countries are under threat. Meantime, the Epstein saga rolls along with no end in sight; Wall St is up and down depending on the king’s mood but it now appears that lots of his courtiers are cleaning up to the tune of hundreds of millions; allies are enlisted and dumped willy-nilly; and life is about to get much worse for half the people on the planet, the poor half who can’t do anything to defend themselves. In the US, inflation is up, employment is down, costs are up, farms are going broke, health care is unattainable, hundreds of smaller rural hospitals will be forced to close, travel largely paralysed … all in all, not a good place to be. All this from the wannabe-king who was elected to stop inflation and the Ukraine war on Day 1, bring back jobs, make everybody a winner and launch no more foreign wars. As a result, his approval rate is the lowest ever recorded for a president, but 33% still support him. What would he have to do for them to turn against him? Who knows, we’d rather not find out.

Politicians usually make at least an attempt to do what they promised in their campaigns but Trump hasn’t, quite likely because he doesn’t remember what he promised in 2024. Other politicians declare what they’re going to do and do it, but everybody is outraged because nobody believed them. One such honest fellow was Frau Schicklgruber’s little boy, Adolf, better known by his stepfather’s name, Herr Alois Hitler. In November, 1923, believing that the Bavarian state government was likely to secede from Germany and unite with Austria, forming a large Catholic state in central Europe, Hitler and his group attempted a putsch. This quickly collapsed and he was sentenced to five years in prison but served only about a year. During this time, he began dictating what became the two volumes of Mein Kampf [1]. This was published in 1925-26 and sold well, especially after he became Reichskanzler in 1933. There were a few pirated English translations but they didn’t sell. The authorised version, translated by James Murphy, wasn’t finished when war broke out, meaning very few British politicians read it until the bombers were overhead. That was a problem because in it, the author had set out in considerable detail his plans to build the Thousand Year Reich.

Most of those who had read it were very supportive of everything he had said, especially the tirades against Bolshevism and the USSR. And Jews, of course, because the English upper classes were fierce racists themselves. In Vol. I, he expanded on his version of race science, the core of which was the idea that there is a hierarchy of races, with northern Europeans at the top and all the rest down below. The Aryan races, he believed, had given humanity everything worthwhile; the other races would never amount to anything and were useful only as labourers. They had to be kept in their place and definitely not allowed to interbreed with the higher races as that would lead to racial dilution and thence to social collapse. His racial views meshed neatly with his nationalism, that each country had to be racially pure otherwise it would decline and he wanted Germany to be at the top. This led to his particular hostility for Jews as he believed they formed Bolshevism in order to dissolve nations into a single world state that they would govern for their benefit, all the while polluting the gene pool with their inferior blood. Because of what has happened since, that sounds bad today but at the time, this sort of talk was pretty standard throughout Western Europe, North America and the former British colonies such as Australia, Canada, South Africa etc.

If this were all, the rest of the world could have lived with it but he had economic ideas as well. Germany was a great nation but it was kept from its rightful place at the top of the hierarchy by not having enough land. Britain and France, the other great nations, were also quite small but they had their huge overseas empires which allowed them to become wealthy and thus to bestride the world. By contrast, the German-speaking peoples were stuck in a narrow strip of land and unable to expand. Without more land, they must decline; there were no decent territories overseas; therefore Germany must look east, to the vast tracts of Eurasia occupied by the second rate Slavic nations. In order to fulfil her destiny, Germany must take control of the under-utilised Slavic territories, thin out the excess population and keep the rest as labourers for the farms, mines and factories that German ingenuity alone could build. As Darwin said, life is a struggle in which only the fit survive which Hitler took to mean that anybody who wasn’t prepared to fight for his race didn’t deserve to survive, much less to breed and spread his defective blood. What we would call defective genes, such as criminality, mental disorder, addictions, uncontrolled violence, homosexuality, prostitution, etc, along with other defective races, had to be eliminated for the good of the nation.

That’s it, there’s his plan, set out in Chap.14 of Vol II of Mein Kampf. There were no apologies because none were needed. What he planned was simply reenacting the spread of the British and French overseas empires according to standard eugenic principles, the only difference being that he would be colonising white people. The few Englishmen of influence who had read it were generally supportive because their loathing of Bolshevism was at least as intense as his. They would support anybody who opposed the Reds, as Churchill said after meeting Mussolini in 1927:

If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been wholeheartedly from start to finish with Fascismo’s triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism … I could not help being charmed, as so many other people have been, by his gentle, simple bearing and his calm, detached poise, despite so many burdens and dangers. Any one could see he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people …

Churchill also believed in eugenics, including sterilisation of the ‘feeble-minded’ as part of a program to improve the English race. In these respects, Churchill was not an extremist. He became the prime minister, dear friend and confidant of kings and queens, the beatified hero of the 20^th Century but when it came to racial hierarchies, Churchill and Hitler were on the same page, as they say. People may object that Churchill was a minor player in the race game but he wasn’t: in 1942, he called Indians “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” In 1943, for the purpose of feeding its armies, Britain engineered a famine in Bengal that killed 3.5million people and left untold millions of children damaged for life. Churchill knew exactly what the British policies would do and pressed ahead with it.

The Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 began with the largest army ever assembled in human history. Over the next four years, between 25-35million Soviet citizens died, including deliberate genocidal programs in the occupied areas. The unspeakable horror of that period is burned into the Russian soul but most people in the West know next to nothing about it. They don’t know that 80% of German casualties were on the OstFront, the Eastern War. Post-war, the Soviet leadership swore: “Never again. Nobody will ever threaten us again,” a vow the US and NATO have completely ignored (the period is captured in the book Khatyn by Ales Adamovich, and the film Come and See, based on the book, also on YouTube; anybody who hasn’t seen it needs to but be warned). It came about entirely because one group of humans decided they were superior beings who had the right to dominate another group, slaughtering them and taking their land for their own glory. Needless to say, the people deemed “inferior” decided otherwise. At the Nuremberg trials, it was agreed that aggressive war is not permissible under any circumstances, that the Nazi leaders who committed that offence were guilty of the gravest crimes and had surrendered their right to live.

The urge to dominate and its equal and opposite urge for freedom are built into us but they are not biological absolutes. Dominating other people feels great but we don’t have to give in to that urge. If we choose, we can resist it and still lead perfectly satisfying lives. The very idea that one group is superior to another and has rights and privileges denied to others is not compatible with a peaceful world. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, and with the ever-growing threat of global warming, we could go further and say that the very idea of superiority is an unacceptable danger to the safety of the planet.

Unfortunately, the twin ideas of racial superiority and racial inferiority live on and have pushed the world into another war. Eighty years after the last great racial war, a group of humans has decided they are superior beings who have the right to dominate another group, slaughtering them and taking their land for their own glory. Once again, the aggressive group has openly declared their intention to invade other nations, to slaughter their people or drive them out while enslaving enough to provide labour, in order to build a glorious empire in which they will reign supreme. Starting in 1896 with the publication of the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, the group known as Zionists have broadcast their belief that, as the “Chosen People,” they are superior to other human beings and thereby have an right inalienable right to the lands and livelihoods of the indigenous people of the Levant. Their starting point is some writings they regard as divinely inspired in which their tribal deity promised them all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18–21). Atheistic Zionists, of whom there are plenty, rely on what they call “historical reasons” to claim the territory although they never specify what legal basis that provides. It has no basis, of course. There are plenty of very wealthy Jewish people in Australia. Imagine that tonight, a group of Aboriginal people knocked on a Jewish door and said: “Hey man, this is our land, you mob stole it from us. We got a real strong historical claim on this land so you lot can just go an’ camp on the street, we’re takin’ over this place.” I doubt very much the occupants would want to move.

Putting that aside, after an absence of 2,000 years, the Zionists decided to occupy what they say is their promised land. Particularly since 1948 when the UN granted them a sizeable part of the region, they have constantly engaged in aggressive activity intended to drive the indigenous population out and/or wipe them out. Because they have managed to gain the unqualified support of the ruling class in the US, they have been able to pursue their goal without let or hindrance and now feel sufficiently encouraged to attack a distant country, Iran, which was never part of the supposed “birthright.” That this takes us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe is dismissed by the Zionist clique and their fanatical supporters in the US as somehow “antisemitic.”

Lost in the noise is the point that, even by their own bloodthirsty standards, the Zionists are acting duplicitously. The covenant or contract between the Judaic tribes and their deity is repeated at different points in their holy book but the core message is crystal clear: “I will give you this land if you keep my law” (e.g. Deuteronomy 28:63). There were something like 613 laws in their book, one of which explicitly states: “Thou shalt not kill.” However, as we watch the world’s first genocide broadcast in real time, it is equally clear that the very people professing to be observant of their religion are committing mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and thoroughly enjoying it. How do they sleep at night? The answer is very simple: by a process of verbal trickery, they have convinced themselves that the indigenous Palestinians are not actually human, so they can be killed as we kill rats and cockroaches. That is, they have adopted the very belief system that allowed the Nazi SS to commit the defining crimes of the 20^th Century, and are now working hard on the defining crimes of the 21^st Century. They believe: “We are superior beings, you are inferior. We therefore have the right to invade your land, to conquer you, to drive you out or slaughter you, and to take your land in order to build a glorious empire.” That is precisely what the Nazis said in 1925, and acted on in 1941. In fact, Netanyahu has openly stated that his plan is that Israel will become a global superpower, potentially dominating the world.

Evil is as evil does. If this was a crime against humanity in 1945, it remains a crime against humanity in 2026. In fact, more so as Israelis are far better educated than the barely-literate German farm boys who followed the swastika to a brutal death on the steppes. The justifications offered by the very sophisticated Zionist propaganda machine are irrelevant. If the death of Anne Frank was a grievous crime, then so too was the death of Hind Rajab. It doesn’t matter how many Jews were killed in Europe so many years ago, the Palestinians were not involved, as the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion admitted in 1956:

Why should the Arabs make peace ? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them ? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them ? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that ? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out [1, p99-100].

Goldmann was clear: “…Ben Gurion is the man principally responsible for the anti-Arab policy … He had no consideration for anyone, friend or foe.”

The urge to dominate is human, it is in all of us. However, the notion that one group of humans is superior to another and therefore has privileges not available to the other and has the right to act on them without restraint leads to atrocities. The US believes it is a nation of superior humans with rights and entitlements not available to others, including the right to attack other nations when it chooses to do so. That supremacist national ethos is not compatible with the safety of the planet. Zionism is a supremacist belief system which is equally destructive of human rights. Combined, these two countries threaten the future of every living thing on earth, and it all comes about because their leaders lack the insight that while dominating others feels wonderful for them, it does not feel good for the oppressed people who must eventually fight back.

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

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

****

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.

****

After last week’s post, a reader emailed:

These scholarly posts are all very well and have the ring of truth, but the question that arises is, now what? Where is the call to action? Otherwise, they may help to increase the sales of your books, and good luck to you with this, but where does it lead us? You are either preaching to the converted, or are one of several voices crying in the wilderness. Do you hope that by a process of attrition, in a few decades orthodox psychiatry will fade away? I hope it will, and soon. We need to call for the disestablishment of orthodox psychiatry and the banning of so-called psychiatric drugs, except in a few well-defined circumstances such as benzodiazepines for short-term use in acute mania. As I have said before, psychiatric so-called diagnoses have no objective basis and mental distress should be treated with psychotherapy, not drugging.

It’s a bit disappointing that this stuff has only a “ring of truth,” I would like to think the arguments are unassailable but there you are. Also, royalties from the books would barely feed a small pet rat for the year, which is true of practically all technical books but we soldier on. As for preaching to the converted, yes, to a large extent that’s true as mainstream psychiatrists and their keen supporters don’t read critical material but they’re not my audience. Their minds are made up, they resent uncomfortable facts getting in the way and react angrily to questioning. From the point of view of critical developments within psychiatry, they’re a lost cause, as the renowned nuclear physicist Max Planck described:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it (The philosophy of physics, 1936).

In particular, psychiatry’s mainstream, who are practically all devout biological psychiatrists, control the narrative. They decide who is allowed to speak at conferences, whose papers get published, who can teach medical students and trainees (residents), who sits on the college board, who gets the various posts in the college etc., and they’re ruthless in their control. There are so many examples, I wouldn’t know where to start but one from history is illuminating. Readers will be aware that it is about a century since convulsive techniques were first used in psychiatry, for the explicit purpose of inducing diffuse, low grade brain damage. Almost as soon as insulin was isolated, it was used to cause convulsions by lowering blood sugar and it quickly became very popular among psychiatrists. However, it was very demanding of staff time so it turned out that a small group of patients were getting up to 90% of the time and effort while the rest sat in the back wards twiddling their thumbs.

In 1953, a registrar (trainee) in London published a statistical analysis in Lancet showing that all the benefits attributed to insulin therapy were, in fact, pure placebo [1]; it was the staff attention that was doing the job, not the insulin. The establishment of British psychiatry were incensed: how dare this young upstart think that his figures could disprove their long clinical experience and their impeccable judgement? They made sure he couldn’t get work so he had to leave the country for New Zealand, where he was very popular (BTW, that also happened to philosopher Karl Popper, who was both German and Jewish by descent. He went to the UK in 1936 but couldn’t get work so he went to Christchurch and survived the war, to our lasting benefit). It took years for psychiatrists to accept that their “insulin therapy” had nothing to do with whether patients got better, the old generation had to retire and make room for more open minds. This illustrates the point made by Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), an American architect, designer and futurist (and relentless self-publicist):

You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

My experience is that fighting the “reality” purveyed by the psychiatric establishment is a compete waste of effort. They are so firmly stuck in their particular way of thinking that criticism simply bounces off. Take one of my sore spots: the spurious biopsychosocial model (BPSM). As you’re probably tired of reading, this is essentially written into the RANZCP’s charter. According to the then president of the college, the BPSM is the basis of teaching and clinical practice in Australia and New Zealand, with similar sentiment in the UK and other places. That is a lie. At the time she wrote that, she knew perfectly well that it didn’t exist [2]. She and her successor have refused to provide any evidence to show that it does exist, they don’t even respond to letters. Moreover, they’re protected from any consequences, all the way up. It is impossible to get anybody to take the matter seriously as they’re all complicit, all the boards and supervisory agencies are stacked with their friends, the top professors in the country ring the important politicians who are thrilled to be on first name terms with the top professors in the country, and so on.

This sort of intellectual incest is not a freak case, this is NORMAL, this is how these people run their empire. They’re like Trump: he lies and lies and gets away with it but it raises a question: do they know they’re lying? If all your friends are saying the same thing, are you lying to repeat it or just a a sheep following the flock because it’s safer? The same thing is true of their so-called “biomedical model,” the one that justifies all the drugs and decides who gets the influential posts and the big research money. This runs the show, it’s behind the signs in public toilets: “Feeling anxious or depressed? See your doctor” (who will give you tablets). Again, it doesn’t exist [3]. Every attempt I’ve made to get one of its supporters to provide a copy has failed.

You would think that they’d be very keen to prove a critic wrong: if you believe your model is the basis of good practice, shouldn’t you send it to doubters to bring them back on the path of righteousness? Apparently not, which is exactly what Buckminster Fuller had in mind: Don’t waste your time “fighting the existing reality.” Having built their lives around either of these phony “models,” psychiatrists are so heavily invested in their version of reality that they’re incapable of considering an alternative. Facts, figures, carefully argued cases, they just bounce off the walls of armourplate the establishment has built over the years because doubt is too scary for them. That’s human, nobody likes looking stupid so we move to the second part of Fuller’s injunction: build a model to replace the existing reality. After forty years of effort, that’s now been done [4] so now I can sit back and wait for the honours and royalties to roll in. But nothing happens. The establishment’s walls are so thick that they don’t even know there’s “a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” They don’t know because they don’t want to know. Journals won’t review it; complementary copies are sent to bigwigs but don’t get a response, science reporters on TV and big papers don’t answer, on and on. This is normal, this is how science is conducted, as science writer and general practitioner, Robert Youngson, noted:

The idea that (scientists) are engaged in a calmly disinterested search for truth and are totally unaffected by such unworthy considerations as personal pride, competitiveness and envy is a dream of adolescent idealism [5, p60].

According to the experts, the critical psychiatry movement is doing everything right. We have highly qualified people investigating the claims made by conventional psychiatrists, examining their figures and showing exactly how and where they’ve fudged the results. John Read in London studies ECT [6]; Joanna Moncreiff and her team look into antidepressants [7], Mark Horowitz and colleagues show that psychiatric drugs are addictive and how to get off them [8], Jon Jureidini and Co. in Adelaide [9] dredge through clinical studies to show how the claims aren’t substantiated, and so on but who listens? There is a regular international conference on overdiagnosis and overprescription; I’ve been to several but you just see the same old faces each time, and nothing changes, as Robert Youngson noted (rather sadly):

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

He was talking about conventional sciences, such as physics and chemistry but remember that psychiatry is hardly mainstream science. It’s not even mainstream medicine and a large part of the problem is that psychiatrists themselves don’t know what to focus on. Does psychiatry deal with the mind or does it not? If we assume it does, then it opens a Pandora’s box of woes: What is the nature of the mind, how does it arise, how does it interact with the body, how does it become disordered, does free will exist, where are the boundaries of disorder, where is the borderline of morality, what is personality, and thence personality disorder…? There’s no limit. Oh, and the biggest one of all: who should deal with mental trouble? Should it be physicians, priests, secular moralists, poets and playwrights, school teachers, sports trainers, militarists and disciplinarians, prison guards…? And how: punishment, drugs, surgery, spells, criticism, holidays, sex and other indulgences…? Again, no limit.

I can state straight away: psychiatrists aren’t fit even to begin answering those types of questions. That’s far above their pay grade so it was a godsend when, in 1929, the positivist cavalry rode in and, with a firm proclamation, put a stop to all the headachey stuff [10]. Henceforth, they announced, science is about what we can see, measure and duplicate. If you want to be seen as a serious scientist, give up all that mimsy stuff, put on a white lab coat and march to our stern drumbeat to the uplands of sober rationality. But if certainty is not your scene, then join the poets and philosophers over there bickering about flowers and fairies and never coming to a conclusion.

“Excuse us, good sir rationalists,” said the psychiatrists, “but we want to talk about minds and yet stay with our medical colleagues. Can we have a dispensation and a clean white coat?”

“Can you see the mind?” demanded the imperious voice. “Can you measure it? Can you bring us the leg of a superego, can you distil essence of guilt in a bottle? No? Then off you go, join the shamans and thaumaturges with their ouija boards and tarot cards, their meridians and crystals, and don’t waste our precious time.”

It was not a good day for psychiatry. Forlornly, they gathered their bits and pieces and made ready to cross the bridge to the land called Fantasy until suddenly, somebody pushed through the crowd and stood boldly before the officers of positivism. “You’re mistaken, sirrah,” said the confident young voice. “We psychiatrists claim our right to march behind the banners of science. Our field is not, as people suspect, matters of whimsy such as mind and emotions, hopes and ambitions, no, we are scientists of the brain. Out with the ego, in with the microscope and bunsen burner and onward to the brave new world of clinical neuroscience.” With a ragged cheer, the psychiatrists scuttled back to the join the quiet and disciplined lines of physicians, there to hide behind the neurologists and immunologists, close to the pharmacologists where they were soon harnessed with a bit shoved in their mouths by the drug companies. So it has continued to this day, with each generation of medical students and psychiatry trainees dipped head first in a bucket of biological Kool-Aid and left there until they drank the lot.

That’s a bit poetic but the message is quite clear. Positivism, the ruling doctine in modern science actively excludes any and all non-empirical matters, i.e. anything that cannot be directly traced to experience. All frankly mental matters such as morality, art, religion, ethics, creativity and so on, meaning everything that distinguishes us from animals, is excluded from the purview of science. In particular, this means philosophy of mind is excluded. Logic gets through as it’s sort of mathematical, but nobody in psychiatry talks about the mental medium in which the logical processes take place. We end up with a group of people granted extraordinary civil power by society who know nothing about the moral or other limits to that power. Above all, they resent being questioned because they don’t recognise the right of anybody to question them on matters that their own (very restricted) frame of reference tells them are meaningless. If you try to ask a psychiatrist about the difference between science and pseudoscience, a very important issue in philosophy of science [11], they just change the subject or stamp off. Or start accusing you of being aggressive.

If you say, as Thomas Insel, former long-time director of the US NIMH, says, that the techniques and processes of ordinary laboratory science will tell us all we need to know about mental disorder [12], then you have made a metaphysical decision, meaning a matter that has to be argued from first principles because there is no observational evidence that can bear on it. That is, you have made a philosophical decision. But if you have previously decided that no matters of philosophy count, then you’re stuck because you can’t tell if your decision was wrong. The only knowledge that can convince biological psychiatrists they are wrong is knowledge they have already ruled inadmissible. By this means, science degenerates into dogma. This, of course, is the basis of their supreme confidence, confidence that comes across as unfettered arrogance. In fact, it is the arrogance of sublime ignorance.

If anybody knows how to break through that wall (by legal means), let me know because everything I’ve tried has gone nowhere. We’ve reached peak biological psychiatry, the promises remain unfulfilled, the repetitious rhetoric no longer impresses. All we can do is create enough noise to let the rising generation know that all is not well in psychiatry and hope they run with that. I think it will happen but first, they have to free themselves of the strait jacket of naïve positivism. That’s a hoot: psychiatrists in a strait jacket, but it’s true.

References:

1. Bourne, H. (1953). The insulin myth. Lancet. ii. (Nov 7 ) 265 (6798): 964–8.

2. McLaren N (2023). The Biopsychosocial Model and Scientific Deception. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 25: 106-118.doi:10.1891/EHPP-2023-0008.

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

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

6. Read J, Ross C, Timimi S (2022). A study of ECT on 278 children and adolescents; methodological, conceptual, and ethical concerns. Brain and Behaviour 26 December 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.2866.

7. Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R.E., Stockmann, T. et al. (2022) The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry Published online July 20th 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0

8. Taylor D, Horowitz M (2024). The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-drugs.London: Wiley-Blackwell.

9. Aboustate N et al (2025). Restoring TADS: RIAT reanalysis of the Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study. Int J Risk Saf Med. N/S, p1-20. DOI: 10.1177/09246479251337879

10. Hahn H, Neurath O, Carnap R (1929). The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle. Ernst Mach Society, University of Vienna.

11. Pigliucci M, Boudry M (2022). Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. Chicago: University Press.

12. Insel TR, Freund M (2012). Shedding light on brain circuits. Biological Psychiatry; 71:1028-9.

****

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.

****

“Trump seems increasingly incoherent. Is he on the edge of mental collapse?”

Since Trump has the power to end life on the planet, the fact that a professor of politics asks that question implies we are in the most serious trouble. The Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds from catastrophe. Does everybody understand what that means? Do the people making the big decisions understand? No, they don’t, and they don’t care. They have more important things on their minds, like smashing their enemies. Two questions arise: Is Trump losing it, and how did we get here?

Q1: Is Trump losing it? Yes, most assuredly. He is 79, in poor general health, with frequent signs there is some health problem requiring regular IV therapy (e.g. lecanemab, for Alzheimer’s Disease). He hardly sleeps, gets practically no exercise, eats junk and can’t start his day before midday then runs out of steam by 5.00pm. This is in the setting of a person of mediocre intellect amd poor education, who struggles to read and knows very little about the real world. As a personality, he is psychopathic and narcissistic, meaning he is incapable of seeing things from another person’s point of view and unable to form emotional bonds. People are simply objects to him, he plays with them for a while then throws them away. He always was and still is totally corrupt and dishonest with no concept of truth: for him, truth is whatever yields a profit for him. At his best, he was jealous, suspicious, vengeful and remorseless in settling scores but his best days are long gone. All his life, he has been impulsive, disorganised, lazy, demanding, scheming, manipulative, full of prejudices and thoroughly unpleasant. Like a toddler, if something catches his eye, he reaches for it (“I want Greenland, I want the Canal…”) but has no idea why and quickly loses interest. Oh, and he has no sense of humour at all (see this one). Now, he is dementing at an accelerating rate.

If he were not very wealthy and the only person who can pull in the votes for the even more wealthy people who own the Republican party, if he were just a suburban grandfather, he probably wouldn’t be in a nursing home yet. A person at this stage of dementia would be at home but wouldn’t be allowed to go out by himself but he probably wouldn’t want to. As long as he had a TV and a regular supply of KFC, he’d be manageable, or maybe throw in a phone that isn’t connected so he could tweet away, happy with the idea the world is listening (much as they did with his father, Fred, when he was dementing; he was put in an office with a phone and a secretary who brought in piles of papers for him to sign). Mary Trump, Donald’s niece by his older brother, Fred Jr, is a astute PhD psychologist with an excellent YouTube channel. She says her uncle now shows the signs that her grandfather showed in his dotage. She’s talking about the person with the Big Red Button on his desk who has just launched an unprovoked, illegal and immoral war of aggression under cover of perfidy and nobody’s doing anything about it. Perhaps they’re waiting for the first nuclear bombs to fall just in case this one isn’t serious.

So we can be satisfied that this malignant buffoon is dementing but it’s actually worse than that. He’s half way, his memory is still relatively intact so he can fool people but his judgement, such as it ever was, is shot. Judgement is probably the highest intellectual function of all, and therefore first to go. It’s not an all-or-none phenomenon, he will have good days and bad, and mornings are usually better than evenings. If he sticks to routine, he can rely on old learned material but if he has to make a decision based on half a dozen conflicting demands, he will just go for the most salient, which is usually: “What’s in this for me?” or “How can I hit my enemies?” He would never consider: “How will this impact other people, will it make life worse for people with limited resources?” That will never come up because it never has once in his life. So we’re told that the decision to invade Iran was pushed on him by Netanyahu who told him that the two spurious “assassination” attempts in late 2024 were organised by Iranians and will have another go so Trump should get in first. That was enough. He never considered things like … Strait of Hormuz; Gulf country refineries and gas plants; body bags of US troops; impact on poor countries, and so on, because those things mean absolutely nothing to him, even if he had heard of them. He doesn’t care about dead US troops, he wriggled out of Vietnam and said soldiers who got killed were suckers. He certainly doesn’t care about dead Iranian children. The reason he fell for Netanyahu’s ploy is partly personality, partly dementia but also he can’t cope intellectually with all the demands and is increasingly agitated and unable to focus. Even a healthy person would be struggling with all the trouble he’s stirred up. That’s why he doesn’t make many appearances and his speech is slurred during them. I’d say he’s being kept upright by drugs. Same thing happened to Hitler after the July 1944 plot and explosion. His physician, Dr Theodore Morell, who was a total scoundrel, was pumping him full of a cocktail of amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, home-made vitamins and so on.

So is Trump on the edge of mental collapse? Yes. He should be removed from office immediately, but his “loyal” minions are all too scared to make the first move because they fear everybody will turn on them and they’ll be finished. Mainly, lèse-majesté is just too, too scary for the poor dears as most of them are useless, grasping psychopaths themselves.

That’s the immediate question, and so to the second: How did we get here? Again, it splits in two parts. The first relates to the way we humans form our governments, and the second asks what it is about the American system of government that allows such a disastrously unqualified person to swoop in and snatch the prize. We’d like to say that governments exist to get the job done, to make people’s lives better and smoother, to help those who need help and provide opportunities for those who will use them to benefit the community but that’s not true. Governments exist because some people are obsessed by power and work diligently and mostly dishonestly to build a hierarchy to elevate themselves so they can dominate everybody else, just because dominating feels so much better than being dominated. There is a strong biological basis for this based in the testosterone economy [1].

As a result, and whenever they can, humans will build a far-reaching dominance heirarchy that gives enormous power to a few people at the peak, and none for those at the bottom, such that the privileged can loot the community to their hearts’ content, bestowing vast wealth and luxury on themselves while those at the bottom of the pile live in holes in rubbish dumps and eat what they can forage. As people ascend the hierarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows and expands to consume all the resources in reach. It’s a bit like Parkinson’s Law, which says that the amount of work to be done expands to fill the time available and to consume all the labour (see Oscar Wilde’s comment: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.” The modern version: The police state is expanding to arrest all the people dissatisfied with the expanding police state). As people go up the heirarchy, their sense of privilege and entitlement grows to satisfy their sense of their exalted status. This applies equally to men and women, as in “Let them eat cake.” Throughout most of history, kings lived in unbelievable luxury while the poor starved in freezing hovels or slaves died of malaria in muddy swamps (compare a small example, Brighton’s Royal Pavilion with the picture of poverty from early Victorian England in Friedrich Engel’s account [2]).

There’s nothing actually wrong with the idea of hierarchies, if you want a job done, generally it improves efficiency but their execution fails on two points. First, the ever-expanding sense of privilege of the few. The wealthy have no sense that there should be a limit to their greed: the wife of newspaper magnate and convicted felon, Conrad Black, allegedly said: “My extravance knows no bounds.” She wasn’t joking. It never occurs to them that enough is enough, that the extra they take means less for somebody else. And they don’t care. They genuinely believe they deserve it and the poor don’t. Elena Ceaucescu, wife of the Romanian dictator, apparently said just that. There had been a birthday party for one of her grandchildren at one of their country estates. The guests ate one or two pieces of the enormous cake, then it was sent back to the kitchen. The staff knew it would be thrown out so they started to cut some for themselves. Elena came into the kitchen, saw what was happening and grabbed all the cake, throwing it in the bin. “You don’t deserve that,” she snapped, and stalked out. A year or two later, she was shot.

Second problem is the quality of the people attracted to power hierarchies. They draw people who are intrigued, fascinated, beguiled and turned on by power but the process is self-winnowing. For anybody in a government or political party or business or club or church of any sort, there will come a day when they have to make a decision: choose between principled conduct that leads to loss of status, and unprincipled that opens the door to the corridors of power. Most people will choose integrity and accept a lower status but some don’t want that. For them, scruples are a handicap on the golden road to glory, so they ditch them and scramble eagerly up the slope, pausing only to kick clods of dirt on anybody coming behind them. This applies across the board and has done since Homo sapiens first appeared.

With very few exceptions, the political process throughout the world favours the self-interested and unscrupulous. People may start with noble ideas but they don’t last long. They soon realise that fortune favours the malleable so they mould themselves to the prevailing winds. The current prime minister of Australia, one Anthony Albanese, used to be strongly supportive of the Palestinian cause but no longer. These days, he and his government are 110% behind the US-Israel axis now and have no problem with US bases in this country playing major roles in the current war of aggression against Iran. For example, the instructions to sink the unarmed Iranian frigate IRIS Dena and leave the sailors to drown were received at Pine Gap station and relayed through NW Cape submarine station.

Worldwide, in every walk of life, political processes have evolved that select for the self-interested, the greedy and unscrupulous, the hypocritical (yes, Mr Scott Morrison, former PM of Oz and loud member of the scandalous Hillsong Prosperity Gospel Church, we’re most definitely talking about you), the brutal and the contemptuous, for deluded religious fanatics, messiahs, mass murderers, political saviours and all the rest of our political masters. We think we’re going to get liberation and democracy but we end up with kakistrocracy, government by the worst (apparently from Greek κακά, meaning poo).

That’s the generic fault in political systems, but the American system is much worse than most because it concentrates so much power in the presidency. What in other countries is a gradual pyramid of power in the US is a pillar rising high with the president seated alone on top. The president is executive head and appoints the cabinet who are beholden to him. Unlike the Westminster parliamentary system, and beyond a perfunctory screening by the Senate, US cabinet members are not responsible to the electorate. In fair electoral systems, cabinet ministers and even prime ministers can and do lose their seats. However, if the US Senate is controlled by the presidency, as this one is, then they simply wave through whomever the president pushes forward, with predictably disastrous results. Add to that the pervasive influence of dark money and hidden lobbies, and the system is set up for autocracy, as has happened. The Supreme Court has been stacked with corrupt and partisan sycophants; the military hasn’t so much as blinked in launching an illegal war of aggression (yet again); the Dept of Justice is run by a seriously paranoid woman who sees her job as hounding Trump’s opponents; the cowed House of Representatives is terrified of being “primaried” by a Trump wannabe; the Secretary for Health thinks he knows everything about health (as does Donald “drink bleach” Trump); police and immigration services are morphing into a Sturmabteilung; regulatory bodies hamstrung; on and on.

We could easily write a computer program for this sort of government, and it would end up with a fascist dictatorship just because the lust for power only ever ratchets up, it never ratchets down. This is humanity’s fatal flaw. The only saving feature is that the lust for power that resides in each of us is balanced by a slower but more determined drive to resist being oppressed. When the domination becames unbearable, when people feel they are about to lose the most important thing in their lives, they will rise and fight for freedom. The great revolutions of the past 200 years, France, Russia, China, didn’t come from nothing. They were created and crafted by the blind lust for power by a small minority who decided they were appointed by breeding or history or God to rule, and who found out the hard way that not everybody shared their opinion of their majesty. Any group on earth who feels superior to their neighbours and who decides to push them around is going to face a day of reckoning.

The power elite in the US in particular feel they have the moral and historical right to boss the rest of the world around and they have the bombers to do it, so they do. Israel is driven by the Zionist notion that they are special people who have the right to shove their neighbours aside, or kill them, in order to steal their land. That is exactly what Hitler set out in his vision for Germany [3]: the Germans, he said, are superior people, the Slavs inferior; Germany doesn’t have much land and can never achieve its predestined greatness while the Slavs have vast areas and will never amount to much; therefore according to the laws of nature, the Germans are entitled to invade the Slavic lands, conquer them, eliminate half their population and enslave the rest as farm and industrial labourers so Germany can build a glorious empire that will last a thousand years. This is precisely the program of the fanatic Zionist government in Israel with their plan for Greater Israel. It didn’t end well, either for Germany or the 25million Slavs they killed. Trump started this war late on Friday night, thinking it would all be over by the time the stock markets opened on Monday morning but it isn’t running to plan. Truly. That is how our world is being run.

This dumb war will not end well for the US either but, in the process of wrecking their own country, they may well end everybody else’s, too. It’s essential that the rest of the world work out where their interests lie, and form an immovable bloc to resist the US-Israel axis. The notion that two countries with 3% of the world’s population can hold the 97% to ransom just be creating havoc is beyond absurd. It’s time to ditch NATO, dump the USD as reserve currency, leave SWIFT, reform the WTO, IMF and World Bank without the US, swap to sustainable energy, reduce globalisation, dump neoliberal economics and so on. The US and Israel can live in their own little bubble, thinking of Raptures and Messiahs, while the real world gets on with business. Every crisis is an opportunity and we need to grasp this one. Either our politicians grow a pair or get shoved aside.

That’s possibly a gloomy view of humanity but I believe we’re well and truly past the point where we can kid ourselves our governments are good and they know what they’re doing. They aren’t, and they don’t. Practically every country in the West is governed by self-interested trash and if we don’t do something about it very soon, we as a species and possibly the entire biosphere may not have a future.

References:

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

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

3. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Germany’s policy in Eastern Europe. Chap 14 in Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition (2011): Henley in Arden: Coda 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.

****

Many years ago, during my training, I wrote a paper on a series of nine cases of people diagnosed by other psychiatrists as suffering from schizophrenia who had dramatically improved following slow reduction of their drugs and insight-directed psychotherapy. Follow-up was two years but the paper was rejected on the basis that manifestly, not one of them was schizophrenic. Why were the editors so confident? Because they knew that it was impossible for people with this diagnosis to get better with psychotherapy and without drugs. I’d forgotten about this but it came back this week when an article appeared in the drug company flier, Medscape, titled: “A Single Dose of Short-Acting Psychedelic Rapidly Eases Major Depression.” They used dimethyltryptamine, a close analogue of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT), commonly known as serotonin. To me, it’s clear: either they weren’t depressed, or everything psychiatry believes about depression is wrong. Or both.

There are at least 14 different 5HT receptors, widely distributed throughout the body and brain: 90-95% of the body’s 5HT is actually produced in the small bowel. In the brain, they populate some of the most complex regions of all. To say that there is a 1-1 relationship between brain levels of this chemical and mood betrays a gross ignorance of how the brain works. There are now half a dozen hallucinogenic drugs being prescribed for depression, including the anaesthetic ketamine, psilocybin, cannabinoids (from marijuana), LSD is having a rerun, and so on.

How many different forms of “treatment” of depression are out there, competing for the consumer’s dollar? Heaps. There’s ECT, of course, although it isn’t clear whether it’s the electricity coursing through the brain that does the job or the convulsion. I have argued that every claim made for ECT is false [1] but psychiatrists swear it’s essential – except when they don’t get paid for giving it, then they seem to lose interest. The original plan of all the “convulsive” techniques was to cause diffuse, low grade brain damage; nobody talks about that now. ECT is slowly being superseded by that old standby, magnetising the head (TCMS), delivered at great cost by private psychiatrists with precious little evidence that it does anything that much cheaper treatments can’t do. There are also various sorts of electronic brain ticklers being licensed in the US for DIY enthusiasts which are leaking into different markets. There’s one from a company called Exomind, although I’m not sure why anybody would want their mind wandering loose at night.

Then there are all the drugs, including the original monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI) and the very toxic tricyclics such as amitriptylline, which should have been banned decades ago. The SSRIs, introduced from about 1990 on, have been an absolute goldmine for the drug companies as anything up to 15% of the adult population are now taking them. However, there is zero evidence that they have actually done anything to alter the incidence or trajectory of depression apart from making it worse. They’re supposed to reduce suicides but they don’t. There is also increasing evidence that they actually cause suicidal and/or homicidal impulses or actions, probably through their side effect of akathisia. It’s important to remember that practically all of these drugs were discovered by chance.

Now, we have more interesting approaches. I’ve previously mentioned how people are using faecal transplants to lift the mood, which is relatively harmless compared with vagal nerve stimulation via implants. The vagus or 10^th cranial nerve is the “calming” nerve that opposes the flight or fight response throughout the body. Stimulating it blocks the alerting or panic reaction, producing a calming effect. However, it has no direct effect on mood. Then there’s exercise, which appears to be as effective as most other things although the fact that it takes place in a group probably has a lot to do with it. And there are more, but it all adds up to the fact that depression is now a big industry. However, it would have to be the world’s weirdest industry because all the people making money from it agree on only one point: that depression is a physical “disease” of the brain even though none of them has the faintest clue how this could come about. Moreover, nobody can put up a remotely convincing case as to why it can’t be just a psychological state.

Why does depression have to be physical? Well, if you want to get a seat on the gravy train, that’s what you have to believe but there is actually a reason, although precious few psychiatrists know it. As I’ve often said, it’s a legacy of the leap to a positivist science one hundred years ago. Anything that couldn’t be seen or measured had to be discarded; the mind can’t be seen or measured; therefore the mind must be discarded. QED. Hence today’s “mindless” psychiatry, where the human experience is reduced to genes and chemicals bumping in the dark. Who you are, how you got to be caught in the machinery of the mental health industry, what you want for your life and all that squishy stuff is simply ignored. And it’s all going nowhere. You can’t have a dozen different and contradictory treatments and still insist you know what you’re doing to the extent of being handed people’s lives and suspending practically all their human rights.

“But,” psychiatrists say, “we do know what we’re doing. We’re guided by the biomedical model with the biopsychosocial model to plug the gaps.” No they don’t, this is a “mere assertion.” These things don’t exist [2], they’re part of a gigantic con job that is kept alive by the ever-elusive goal of reducing the mind to the brain. The claim is that studying the brain will tell us all we need to know about the mind. When it’s put like that, it’s clearly nonsensical: studying the physical structure of a book, its size and weight and the chemistry of paper and ink, will tell us nothing about what is actually written in the book. The informational content of the book is not explained by its physical structure just because information is not reducible to matter and energy. This was made clear in 1948 by the rather unusual mathematician, Norbert Wiener, in his little book that started the cybernetics revolution:

The mechanical brain does not secrete thought ‘as the liver does bile,’ as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day [3]

He mentioned the liver secreting bile as that was a favourite of the many people who had convinced themselves there would be a physical solution to the question of mind: “The brain secretes thoughts as the liver secretes bile.” Wiener was pointing to the important point that the brain is simply the mechanism of production of mental life but it is not the mental life itself. Eighty years later, people still make the mistake of thinking that a mechanism and what it produces are one and the same thing. Thoughts and other mental elements emerge from the brain by a rational process but they are not identical with the brain itself [4]. This is the same as for the computer I’m using or the phone in your pocket. It has a physical structure that generates an informational state, the computer chips are the mechanism but they don’t determine what is written in that informational state. This is equally true of the brain. Our DNA gives us the capacity for language but it doesn’t determine what language we will speak or what we will say or believe in that language.

I’ve said depression is wholly a mental state emerging from the brain but there is no disease, no “chemical imbalance,” no bad genes causing it: it is simply the brain doing what it’s told to do. Depression is the predictable reaction to adverse life events but in order to move beyond the “mere assertion” that it’s all psychology, we need to propose a mechanism. We can use anxiety as the exemplar, not least because mainstream psychiatry doesn’t take seriously. We can define anxiety as the response to the perception of a threat [5; this clarifies why it isn’t a circular definition]. Anxiety is not a disease state, it is simply a case of the mind perceiving a threat and the brain reacting in the way 500million years of evolution have told them to act. Practically every living creature has a threat response of some form or another which is highly standardised throughout the animal kingdom: the critter sees or senses something that doesn’t seem right and immediately, it becomes highly alert and focussed on the potential threat. It’s body switches from its quiet, peaceful mode, maybe eating or picking its fleas, to a state of high arousal. The heart beats faster, blood flow is diverted to muscle, heart and brain, breathing accelerates and so on. The reaction to a threat is very fast because a slow threat response wouldn’t go its job. We’d get eaten before we were ready to run.

The trigger for a startle reaction/threat response etc. is a mental perception and, in that respect, we’re no different from other animals. However, humans have an extra step that gives us grief: we can use our intellect to predict trouble for ourselves, and we react to it as though it were real. If I think something bad is going to happen tomorrow, I will get edgy and jittery today. Animals can’t do that, they can only react to the direct perception of a threat whereas, to our detriment, we can predict without any direct stimulus. If, however, the threat I perceive is itself part of my startle response, I’m trapped. Something makes my heart beat a bit faster but I take that as a threat in itself: “Oh dear, my heart is racing, that must mean I’m about to have a heart attack. Call the ambulance!” More commonly, it’s something like:

I have to give a talk shortly. I hate giving talks, the thought of it makes me shake and sweat. People will see I’m shaking and sweating, they’ll think I’m a fool, they’ll laugh at me and that thought is making me shake and sweat more. I can’t do this, I’ll die of humiliation, I have to cancel it.

This is so simple, it all makes perfect sense so why doesn’t psychiatry adopt this approach instead of wasting time and money looking for the genetic cause of anxiety? Because the mentalist account doesn’t fit with their materialist ideology, the one they haven’t sorted out. That’s the only reason, even though this cognitive model applies to all emotions, including misery.

In the case of sadness, the triggering event is the perception of a loss. This is not uniquely human; many animals show a similar reaction to a loss. The mechanism, as I suggested last week, is that the perception of a loss blocks the so-called “pleasure circuits,” meaning life becomes colourless and tasteless. Nothing is interesting, nothing exciting, nothing worth bothering with because it won’t bring back whatever has been lost. All we want to do is find somewhere quiet and disappear. After millions of years of evolution, this is how we deal with losses. So far, so predictable: this is the model of a standard grief reaction. It doesn’t require any fancy chemical imbalances or such like. If, however, that reaction is combined with other psychological factors, particularly self-esteem and the perception of the world, then we can account for practically the whole of the phenomena of depression. For example, as a child, Smith experienced a terrible loss, after which life never got back to any sort of normal. He has reached adulthood essentially waiting for things to go wrong; when anything bad happens, his first thought is: “I am going to go through what I went through years ago. That nearly killed me, I can’t face it. But if I get over this, it’s only going to happen again. Might as well finish it now.” That is not a “chemical disease of the brain,” that is the entirely predictable reaction of a sentient being to adverse life events. The problem is that every time he thinks of his loss, he sends another signal to repress all pleasure in life so that the misery seems continuous, never a break.

Similarly, Jones had a seriously disturbed childhood, bounced from one “carer” to another so he never felt wanted. Every time anything went wrong, he was blamed so he has grown up constantly frightened he is doing something wrong, that he will get into trouble and will be unable to defend himself as he panics. He thinks he is unlovable, a useless individual that nobody wants. As a result of childhood experiences, people will actually say this. When asked: “How do you rate your self-esteem, how do you see yourself as a person?” they will reply: “I’m useless, I can’t do anything right.” That’s their default mental state, that’s what goes through their minds when they’re alone. If something else goes wrong and they experience a further loss, they fall to thinking:

I’m a total waste of space, I can’t do anything right. Nothing feels good but good feelings never last anyway. Nobody can help, nobody is interested in me. It’s always been like this, it’s not going to change. I don’t see any point going on.

That constellation is called depression but it is not a disease. It is the predictable reaction to a loss in a person with poor self-esteem. You could say that early life experiences have sensitised them to losses, that they over-react but if you make the effort to understand their lives from the inside, it all makes sense. Another person, Brown, had a similar early life but learned he could cope by working hard, keeping his guard up and the occasional fight. He thinks: “I’m OK, I can get things done but the world is a cruel, punishing place and everybody is against me. If I trust people, I’ll only get hurt.” If he experiences a loss, he reacts with anger:

I did everything right and look what happens, I get nothing and they walk away laughing. This doesn’t happen to others, only me. People get a kick out of putting me down, they talk about it and plan it, I know because they stop talking when I come in the room. I have to get in first, I have to protect myself because nobody else ever will.

As a result, he rubs people the wrong way and things steadily get worse but he doesn’t believe it’s his fault. One day, he decides he’s had enough and will “check out,” as they say but he is so full of hatred that he wants to spread it around and make some of them suffer as he feels he has suffered. As he has.

None of this is complicated. It’s easy to get this sort of information just by taking a proper history but if you believe the person sitting in front of you is just a fancy chemical soup, you won’t ask:

“Right, Mr Brown, do you have the feeling people are talking about you behind your back?”

“Er, yes, they are.”

“I see” (ticks box for ‘paranoid ideas’).

“Aren’t you going to ask why?”

“No, I don’t need to. You’ve got a chemical imbalance of the brain. We’ll give you some tablets to fix it.”

“I have the feeling you don’t believe me, like I’m some sort of fancy chemical soup.”

“Well, if you think that, you’ve clearly got a very bad case so you’ll need an injection and some more tablets. You don’t want it? You’d rather talk it out? Very serious lack of insight. Wait here while I sign this detention order and you’ll get it anyway.”

If psychiatry wants to be taken seriously, it has a number of crucial questions to answer: Is the mind a real thing? Can mental events have mental causes? Can the mind malfunction in the presence of a perfectly healthy brain? These are real questions, which psychiatry (and psychology and a few others) have been avoiding for a century. The biocognitive model [4] says the mind is a real thing that emerges from the brain via rational processes that we can understand in principle, if not all the details. It’s real because it can act on the real world, but a different sort of real thing than rocks and cyclones, which can also act on the world but are controlled entirely by the laws of physics. This brings up another important point for biological psychiatrists: if mind reduces to elementary particles in the brain, what happens to free will? Do we control ourselves or are we governed by the same laws of physics? That would mean our lives are fully determined at the moment of birth, or even at the time of the Big Bang, whereas all our system of laws and society are built on the notion that we can choose what we do. Mainstream psychiatry avoids these matters as they don’t have a theory of mind but they also don’t want anybody to know that.

The biocognitive model says that the mind is an informational state so the question of free will is a pushover. I can see something start to happen, such as a small child starts to walk toward an open door at the top of the stairs. In a split second, I can generate an image of the likely outcome: child falls down the stairs. Immediately, I do something to change that outcome, like distract the child while closing the door. That is the central point of mind as an informational space: we can generate alternative futures and choose between them without upsetting the laws of physics (full details in [4]). Without that, we’re automata, just perambulated bags of fancy chemical soup.

Depression is a reaction to life events. The mental event of misery is the reaction to losses, just as anxiety is the reaction to threats. Sustained sadness is not a “disease” of the brain and DNA has practically nothing to do with it. It is caused by repeated losses, which may be long past or recent but are complicated by personality factors. The most common cause of recurrent or persistent depression is anxiety, which is why vagal nerve stimulation appears to work. In civilian life, 95% of anxiety comes from early life. Anxiety wrecks life and makes people feel they have lost any chance of enjoyment, now and in the future. That’s the ultimate loss. After a long period of struggling against this terrible idea, they give up hope for themselves and quietly disappear. But that’s not a disease. It could happen to any of us. Searching for a biological cause for psychological events is like searching for the end of a rainbow. One day, psychiatry will be forced to accept this but you know what they’ll do? They’ll pretend, as they always do, that that was never their goal.

References:

1. McLaren N (2017). Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Critical Perspective. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 19: 91-104. DOI: 10.1891/1559-4343.19.2.91

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

3. Wiener N (1948, Rev. Ed. 1965). Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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

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

****

Fresh from the joy of blowing up a huge oil depot on the outskirts of the enormous city of Tehran (about 20million) and poisoning the air, soil, water and 20million lungs for years (here, at 8.25), the US-Israeli axis have now started their usual trick of destroying hospitals and health centres. This is itself a crime but it is in the setting of an undeclared and unprovoked aggressive war, the “supreme international crime,” which was launched under cover of “negotiations to prevent war.” That is, the US and its Zionist overlords are also guilty of perfidy, the crime of treachery of the most despicable kind. What they have done is actually worse than infiltrating your troops dressed in the other side’s uniforms. When a German unit led by Otto Skorzeny did this in the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944, the disguised troops were rounded up and summarily shot by the US Army. In practice, if not in law, perfidy is punishable by death. Res ipso loquitur: Trump and Netanyahu are guilty of perfidy.

How did we get to this stage? There was a time when the noble, benevolent and God-fearing countries of the West stood shoulder to shoulder to protect the poor and downtrodden of the world against the relentless spread of godless communism in its crusade to crush the flame of freedom with its vast, robotic hordes of brainwashed troops. Now the position has been reversed. The poor and downtrodden of the world need protection from the West, as novelist John Updike warned:

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible (Rabbit Redux, 1971).

Trump won office promising never to get involved in foreign “forever” wars again. In barely 14 months, the US has bombed seven countries, each attack without provocation on essentially defenceless countries. The USSR never did that, China has never done that; Iran hasn’t attacked another country for 300 years. Add to that the six countries Israel has bombed in the past year using American planes, bombs and missiles, provided free and fueled by the US, and then look at the rest of the world: outside Ukraine, also provoked by the West, hardly a single bomb or even an apple core has fallen on foreign heads: Malum est sicut malum facit. Evil is as evil does. How did we get to this stage? How did we turn into the villains? (NB: Pakistan and Afghanistan are the exceptions).

The short answer is that nothing has changed, it’s just that now we see we’ve all been fooled. We’ve been led up the garden path by experts in duplicity, by people unburdened by the mimsy morality of the mumbling middleclass muttonheads who voted for them. Trump promised to end the Ukraine war on Day 1: 423 days later, it’s still going. He promised to reduce inflation. It’s going back up. To bring back jobs. The US lost 92,000 non-farm jobs in February alone. The only promise he’s kept is to deport foreigners but that’s having a terrible effect on farming and construction. And people still support him.

There’s nothing new or uniquely American about this. The headline in today’s Economist newsletter (paywall) screams: “Iran strikes Qatar’s main energy hub.” Right at the bottom, it says this is in retaliation for Israel attacking Iran’s main gas field after it had been warned not to. 90% of readers don’t get to the end of the article. They know that. Go back in history. Everybody knows the remarkable story of the British East India Company, how it brought industry and civilisation to India and made heaps in the process. Some may have heard of the Opium Wars, when Britain’s Royal Navy attacked China for trying to prohibit imports of opium, which was having a devastating effect on the country. Unheard is where the opium came from: from vast plantations built on peasants’ farmland in India by the East India Co., which forced the peasants off their land then employed them for next to nothing to grow the opium. When China objected by burning the bales of opium, the saintly Queen Victoria, whose Royal Estate held great parcels of East India Co. shares, lent them the Navy to blow the Chinese resistance away. When Britain first went to India, the standard of living in India was actually higher than in Britain. When it left, 250 years and $43trillion (modern money) later, India was devastated and will probably never recover.

The story has always been: “We’re good, they’re bad, it’s our duty to blow them away.” There’s no truth in this. For 500 years, Europeans have looted the planet, attacking, plundering, slaughtering with let or hindrance. Any opposition has immediately brought the most vicious response the invaders could muster. Look at the African region of Congo which was left out of the “Scramble for Africa” because it was impenetrable. In the 19^th Century, the market in rubber was exploding, fortunes were being made overnight. Belgium didn’t have an overseas empire so the king, Leopold II, decided he would take the Congo as his personal estate and force the locals to grow rubber for him. The savagery of the occupation was legendary: “The brutality of King Leopold II in his former colony of the Congo Free State was well documented; up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908” (Wikipedia; see the photos). Nobody cared. The slaves were black, there were plenty more where they came from.

This was not exceptional. When the British colonists arrived in Australia in 1788, the Aboriginal population has been estimated at 300,000. Within ten years of whites arriving in any area, up to 90% of the Aboriginal population had died. They had no resistance to Western diseases. Smallpox devastated the tribes around Sydney while in the Kimberley, in the far north west where I worked, measles and whooping cough had the same effect. Aboriginals who resisted were met with gunfire, from whites and from the Aboriginal police brought in from other areas according to the standard British policy developed in India and other colonies.

Making hay off poor people has never gone out of fashion. Former UK Labour prime minister Tony Blair has been busy since he was booted out. Starting from nothing, his personal fortune has grown to £60-75million, and that’s only the money he has declared. Like all other wealthy people, he will have at least the same amount hidden in offshore tax havens. This is the “Epstein class,” the new name for the UHNWIs, the ultra-high net worth individuals who, with a few pretentious exceptions, travel silently and ceaselessly around the world, arranging deals, buying, selling, trading in everything licit and illicit, moving money from one tax haven to another, hiding assets, swapping favours and links, wheeling, dealing and stealing. Author and journalist Oliver Bullough wrote about them a few years ago in Moneyland: why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back. It seems we didn’t take it back and they’ve been having a great time at our expense. The slowly unfolding Epstein business is showing what the wealthy and powerful get up to when they think nobody’s watching, but what we’ve seen so far is barely scratching the surface. The sex trafficking is actually a diversion, a tiny part of the oceans of corruption that take place out of our sight.

It’s like Trump’s “war against narco-terrorists.” With no authorisation, he stages “interdictions” of alleged drug traffickers, using the US Navy as a set of bath toys to kill people on the high seas. This is properly known as murder and piracy but that’s ignored. At a cost of at least $10million per boat, he keeps his dimwitted followers happy, thinking he is doing something about the drug problem. The whole thing is performative, a show for the evening news: all he’s doing is diverting attention from the movements of vast sums of drug money, at least $500billion a year, all of which is readily tracked if they want to. He has no intention of interfering with that, it would bankrupt a lot of banks. However, it seems we now stand at a crossroads. This whole empire thing is on the verge of coming unstuck. Urged on by the evil Benzion Mileikowsky (aka Netanyahu), Trump has launched what must be the most brainless, unplanned, disorganised stuff-up of a war in history.

This monstrous mess has been 73 years in the making, since 1953 when Britain’s MI6 and the fledgeling CIA engineered a coup to overthrow the legitimately elected, mildly socialist and nationalist Iranian government because they wanted to nationalise the oil industry. This time, after at least 25years of grim warnings that they intended to attack Iran, the US and Israel have finally done so. After at least 24years of grim warnings from Iran that, if attacked, they would immediately close the Strait of Hormuz, thus strangling 25% of the world’s seaborne trade in oil and gas, the bombs started falling. Undeterred and with no plan, the US and Israel, its partner in this and many other crimes, have attacked Iran. To the collective astonishment and indignation of the West, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, thus blocking 25% of the world’s seaborne trade in oil and gas, thereby threatening global recession, not to overlook farming failure as 30% of the world’s production of the essential fertiliser, urea, also comes out through the Strait, as well as a lot of food and machinery and chemicals going the other way.

Who could possibly have expected this? Who could possibly have understood the labyrinthine complexity of the universal conditional, foisted on us by those wily Greeks (and the Indians, and the Chinese and Arabs and everybody with half a brain): If A, then B. If A happens, then B will inevitably follow as a law of nature. If you pull the cat’s tail, she will scratch you. If you touch the stove, it will burn you. If you drink and drive, you will go to prison. If you attack Iran, she will immediately disrupt the world economy for as long as it takes.

The blinding stupidity of the people ruling the world today is far, far beyond breathtaking, it’s genuinely frightening. Their braindead war has already started a huge economic meltdown, with the most vulnerable countries suffering first: indebted African and Asian countries that need ships to export their products so they can buy food, and so on. The Gulf countries, who have been very willing partners in this business since 1979, hosting American bases and enabling the attacks, are in the shit. Their economies are totally dependent on exporting hydrocarbons and associated petrochemicals, including urea, and importing food by ship. With the boundless flow of petrodollars, their populations have grown far beyond sustainable levels. The huge cities that didn’t exist even 40 years ago, Dubai, Doha, Manaman and all the rest of the steel and glass towers poking out of the desert, they’re uninhabitable without vast inputs of energy and money. 90% of their water comes from desalination which is powered by fossil fuels, not the sun. What are they going to do when they can’t flush their turds? They don’t have food reserves, it’s all JIT, just in time delivery, so maybe if they don’t eat, they won’t have any turds.

Everything comes and goes by ship. Through the Strait of Hormuz. Which is closed. Because the fuckwits in DC and TA thought they were so clever that they could suspend the universal constant, that they could attack Iran and the Strait of Hormuz would miraculously remain open to traffic. So very soon, all those millions of people in the Gulf states will start to get hungry and hot and thirsty but they can’t get out by ship because the Strait is closed and their airports and highways are within missile range. Needless to say, the ten million labourers and domestics from the Subcontinent and other places will be first to suffer but nobody worries about them, certainly not the Epstein class.

Who could possibly have expected any of this? Damned Iranians, they’re just so unfair, don’t they know their role in our 73 year drama of psychopathic grandiosity is to roll over and play dead?

Two huge questions arise. They say you get the government you deserve but I don’t believe the 97% of the world who live outside those two countries have done anything so bad as to deserve what is happening now. That’s not quite true. Through inertia and just wanting a quiet life, we have negligently allowed the political arena to become a playground for the corrupt, the amoral, the self-interested and the utterly heartless – for psychopaths, in other words. I don’t think it’s ever been any different, see the example of the East India Company’s drug dealing, but this time it’s pushed us to the brink of nuclear war. Trump was stupid enough to ignore all the advice he was given (see here for a very knowledgeable disccussion of how he was fooled into this disaster). Given he launched the war with practically no objectives or plans, he’s stupid enough to think that if he’s losing, which he is now, he could pull off a victory with a few nuclear bombs on Tehran. I doubt that any of the junior psychopaths around him would have the courage to say: “No. You’re not going to do that.”

Netanyahu has declared he has waited 40 years to attack Iran, no reason given; if he is about to lose, I think he’s sufficiently evil to say “If I’m going down, I’m going to pull them down with me.” The Samson Option, as it happens. His goal has always been to bring about Greater Israel; that way, he can go down in history as the greatest Jewish leader since Noah. He doesn’t believe all this messiah crap but the rest of his deluded fascist coalition do, and they won’t let him back down. Pushed into a corner, the one he has just made for himself, I think he would do it.

In the interests of sleeping at night, let’s assume that doesn’t happen. Let’s assume the Trump-Netanyahu clown car bumbles along and doesn’t fall off the road. Europe’s economy starts to collapse as they have refused to buy Russian gas in the past so now, when they need it, Mr Putin simply laughs and reminds them he has reliable customers to his east. Japan and South Korea, which get 90% of their oil and gas from the Middle East, start to sink very quickly. India is allowed to get some fuel so they’ll struggle along. Australia gets all its jet fuel and other chemicals from the Gulf so we’ll soon feel the pinch.

In the Gulf, refineries are already shutting down but they’re not like the aircon in your house, you can turn them off today and back on tomorrow. Oh no, once closed, a refinery takes a minimum of months to restart but oil wells have to be capped. That’s a huge job in itself but they don’t restart just be taking the cap off, lots of them will collapse. The large aluminium refinery in Qatar, source of 30% of the world’s aluminium (Russia and China make much of the rest), has already closed and will take six months or more to restart. Their huge gas train has stopped production due to damage and no ships to load; they’re a bit easier to restart but will still need months of very expensive repairs, assuming they can get the parts through the Strait of Hormuz. This was all totally predictable. Trump is now saying he wasn’t warned this would happen but he’s lying, of course.

Assuming the whole place isn’t incinerated in a nuclear war, what’s likely to happen? It’s a bit hard to tell, our “leaders” are not rational people. Their only interest in life is domination. They are true narcisso-fascists. The Iranians are obviously very rational, they’ve been organising for this for decades. After the debacle of two attacks under cover of negotiations, they’re not going to fall for that again. I think they will hold out until they get what they want: the US out of the Middle East and Israel unable to launch any more attacks, meaning no air force and, above all, their nuclear bombs removed. However, if that happens, and it seems likely, both the US and Israel will be at serious risk of falling apart. Start with the US.

Empires don’t unravel cleanly. Sometimes they collapse in a firestorm, such as after both World Wars, and sometimes they just crumble like the car in Blues Brothers (Britain, for example). Can the American empire, which has been built on “full spectrum domination,” survive being cut off at the knees? The narcissistic hurt to the US would destroy their ruling class. The whole point of empire is not to shoot all the peons, they’re needed to work the mines and plantations, but to keep them all terrified. If they stop fearing, the empire is exposed as a gigantic con job. If the US fails on its promise to keep the Gulf states safe, which it has, what does that mean to its military colony down here? Australia is a huge aircraft carrier for the empire. Pine Gap is the most important US spy base outside Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA.

Having American bases hasn’t made the Gulf states safe, it’s pulled them into the shooting range and painted a target on their foreheads. The world will see this and everybody will be having second thoughts. I hope so. The Americans should get out of the Middle East, the Islamic world can sort itself out without Americans constantly interfering and playing one off against the other. OK, then why stop at West Asia? What about Europe? Isn’t it time they stopped playing tough guys and realised they need to make peace with their large neighbour to the East? All the Russians want is to stop being threatened, and to be treated with respect. The nation of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Tschaikovsky and Shostakovich is tired of being treated like a mixture between Genghis Khan and Uncle Tom. If the oh so clever and cultured West Europeans can’t sort that out, they’re not trying.

But what about the empire itself? Could it survive without constantly beating its chest about how wonderful and powerful it is and blowing up fishermen on the high seas? I don’t think so. John Updike also said: “America is a vast conspiracy to keep you happy.” The ordinary people of the US are kept in line by a ceaseless stream of lies and propaganda about how lucky they are to live in the Land of the Free and the World Policeman and The Most Powerful Nation in History blah blah, when the reality is they can’t afford to go to hospital and their schools are falling apart and their trains and subways are rat-infested pissoirs and their politicians are all totally corrupt and screwing children. If the peons start to suspect the truth, the propaganda machine switches to the old faithful, “Look out, drug dealers and child molesters are swarming across the border to murder you in your sleep,” i.e. make them scared. Drop Site Daily reported this morning:

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is set to walk away with an $887 million compensation package after the Trump administration facilitated a monopolistic merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. As the agreement is being finalized, thousands of workers are simultaneously set to lose their jobs.

It is impossible to get that sort of money honestly. All it took was a donation to Trump’s PAC. Meanwhile, young Kushner J, Trump’s incomparably venal son-in-law and peripatetic Chabad Zionist, has been busy raking in billions of Arab money while doubling as a “negotiator,” a job for which he has zero qualifications, was not elected and didn’t get Congressional approval. That is, he got it by nepotism and promising to give some of the loot to Uncle Donny. When the common people in Coldwater, Kansas (pop. 687), realise they’ve been cheated by experts, they won’t stop with shaking their fingers at the rich. Once the façade starts to fall away, their rage will continue until the tumbrils are rolling. That’s what happens to empires.

And Israel? Their position is much more precarious. Israel meets all the criteria for a clericalist-fascist state [1, pp3-34, 165-171]. It’s held together by two things. First, the single idea that it is surrounded by crazed and satanic enemies who dream of nothing more than cutting off every Jewish head and drinking the blood. Hatred of their neighbours is the only thing that the different factions of Israeli society have in common, it stops them tearing each other apart. A fascist state can’t say “Hooray, all our enemies are vanquished, we can relax and enjoy the view.” The minute it does that, all the previously repressed tensions explode and it flies apart:

As is well known in Israel, hatred between secular Jews cannot match in intensity the mutual hatred between diverse groups of religious Jews… internecine hatred between religious Jews, and especially between Haredi rabbis, is often virulent [2, Chap. 3].

Second, American money, weapons and technology keeps them together. Financially, Israel has been on life support since before it began. Without the billions of “aid” and “donations” (including $100billion from Germany which everybody forgets) and free weapons and nuclear industry and IT and surveillance industry, its economy would collapse. Yes, they have some gas now but that’s all, the rest of their economy is entirely artificial. There are more mines and more farms within 100km of my house than there are in the whole of Israel. They have no productive base. Half their water comes from desalination and that could be blown up before you read this because Trump very foolishly had an Iranian desalination plant bombed. Great way to conduct a war, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing but that’s what happens when you give halfwits and psychopaths nuclear weapons.

So if the Americans aren’t there to foment trouble and protect Israel from the universal conditional (“If you kill Palestinians and steal their land, their relatives will come after you”), and the Muslim countries of West Asia and North Africa make their long-delayed peace, the days of the nuclear-armed, incurably aggressive Zionist-apartheid state will be numbered. That would be the best possible outcome. The worst is too scary to think about.

References:

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

2. Shahak I, Mezvinsky N (1999). Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto Press: London.

****

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’s post provoked a couple of comments that raise important points:

The underlying problem can be put succinctly: to talk of mental disorders implies there is something wrong with the brain. This is purely speculative and arises because of failure to appreciate that mental symptoms (depression, anxiety, delusions, etc.) – even if extreme – don’t rise in a vacuum but are a reaction to life events.

The idea that to be biological, categories must map onto distinct causes with no crossover is patently untrue. Happens just as rarely in physical medicine as psychiatry. Never heard of the patient with obesity, sleep apnoea, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, throw in CKD in a few years time....??? These are classic “syndromes” that rarely travel singularly... How many patients with T2DM “just” have diabetes??? Even more unlikely than that your patient with MDD “just” has depression. Comorbidity is not a feature of psychiatry that is absent in physical medicine … (from a medical student).

The point at issue is the vexing question of the nature of “mental disorder” itself. By that term, I mean broadly “complaints of disabling inner distress and/or manifestly disturbed or disorganised behaviour in the absence of demonstrated organic brain disease.” In trying to answer this question of the nature of abnormal mental life, psychiatry is off to a terrible start as it doesn’t have any sort of theory or model of what could be called “normal mental life.” Before you can answer the question of nature of mental disorder, you need to be able to talk meaningfully about mental order, aka theory of mind. To me, that’s elementary but to mainstream psychiatrists, it’s not, it’s a silly objection as they believe they have a formula that, in the fullness of time, will answer all questions regarding human mental life.

The term “disorder” was chosen for DSM-III in 1980 in order to get away from the assumptions implicit in their previous term, “reaction.” In DSM-II, everything was a reaction: Depressive reaction, schizophrenic reaction, phobic reaction, etc. This came from the rather eccentric but very influential Swiss-American psychiatrist, Adolf Meyer. Meyer’s record during his long life was too complicated to summarise here, he gets a fair bit of space in Andrew Scull’s history [1]. He didn’t like Freudian psychoanalysis as he had started his career as a neurologist (as did Freud) and although he kept a strong interest in the brain throughout his career, he saw life events as dominant, hence the idea of a “reaction.” DSM-III wanted to be atheoretical, to have no presuppositions, so they opted for “disorder,” allegedly on the basis it was so vague nobody could object. True or not, it’s close to neutral; all it says is something isn’t right. However, that doesn’t take any great insight: the whole point is that the community can see there’s something wrong. I’ve dealt with Aboriginal people and with peasant farmers deep in the mountains of far south Thailand who live fairly traditional lives, and they all understand “He ain’t right in the head.” The specialist’s role is to explain it and, ideally, to treat it without making it worse.

Enter psychiatry: Andrew Scull and Ann Harrington [2] show that as the idea of demonic possession was pushed out, medical people took over, but never as a united front. There was always a split between the tender-hearted and the firmly clear-sighted (as they like to see themselves). One side proposed that mental disorder was essentially a moral matter, partly in causation and partly in management. In the West, the idea goes back to Greek times at least, the notion that inherent personality flaws led to disaster which could be avoided if the person wasn’t so full of hubris, overweaning pride and conceit. Treatment therefore had to be directed at getting the person back on the strait and narrow, by moral suasion and good examples, e.g. the York Retreat run by the Quakers in the UK.

Opposed to them is the even more ancient idea that the root cause of any sort of disturbed behaviour is a physical affliction of the brain or other parts of the body. The Romans were strong on this idea [3] but it’s very widespread, often seen as the idea that there is something that can be added to or subtracted from the diet that will relieve all manner of woes. In the West by about 1800, that had hardened: mental disorder was increasingly seen as some sort of brain disease for which physical treatments were essential. These were many and varied and mostly cruel as it was widely held that terrifying the sufferer was an essential part of jolting the brain back to normality. During that century, the idea of hereditary degenerations of the brain gathered strength and fed into the eugenics movement, with catastrophic consequences in Nazi Germany. When the common and invariably fatal condition known as general paresis of the insane was found to be due to infection of the brain by syphilis, the idea of a “biological” psychiatry got a huge boost. But by that stage, Freud had burst on the scene with his notion that all mental problems are psychological in nature and could be treated with talking, so the split became permanent (as a former neurologist, Freud was sure the mind would turn out to be physical and, early in his career, wrote his Project for a Scientific Psychology, (1895) which wasn’t published during his life, for good reason).

The early versions of the DSM were heavily influenced by Meyer’s disciples but by the late 1960s, it was becoming clear that psychiatry was in a mess. There was too much intuition built into both the idea of a diagnosis and in treatment. As a patient, your diagnosis depended largely on who you saw but treatment depended on how much money you had. If you were rich, you could see a genteel psychiatrist in a comfortable office for long sessions of talking but if you were poor, you were shoved into a vast nuthouse full of seriously deranged people and you got what was on the treatment menu. If that meant having all your teeth extracted and half your large bowel removed, so be it; only the insightless would complain, and lack of insight meant psychosis which meant more treatment, not less. Grim days indeed.

Anyway, here we are in the 21^st Century and psychiatry’s historic split between mentalists and organicists has largely healed, but not by any advance in understanding. Biological psychiatry rules the roost, the notion that all mental disorder is due to a primary disorder of the brain. The idea that mental problems have mental causes has fallen away and gets very little airtime, as a glance at any major psychiatric journal shows. The reason for this neglect is perfectly clear: positivism. This is the philosophical doctrine underlying science as we know it today. I’ve covered this in more detail in [4] but very briefly, just about a hundred years ago, a group of physicists, mathematicians and logicians in Vienna, known to history as the Vienna Circle, turned science around. In a brief and punchy manifesto, published in 1929 [5], they announced that science, including maths and philosophy, could only be based in what we can prove. From this flowed a model of scientific explanation: every observation has to be explained in terms of what has been proven before. If we can’t prove it, it isn’t rational. Unprovable stuff may be pleasant or entertaining but that’s for poets and musicians; science itself had to stand or fall on what we can see, measure and duplicate. Explanation in science is reductive, every higher order observation must be fully explained in terms of lower orders, meaning no miracles and no skyhooks.

This is the doctrine of empiricism, that true knowledge comes to us via our senses, not by revelation, as in religion or charlatanry. By definition, and regardless of how real it feels, we can’t see or measure the mind; therefore, all talk of the mind is irrational and is not part of science. That put the early psychiatrists in a bind: their business was the mind, so how could they talk about it and still remain within the bounds of valid science? The Freudians ignored it and gradually drifted off into ever-wider circles of speculation that eventually split apart acrimoniously [6]. Biologically-inclined psychiatrists, however, were in a much stronger position. They didn’t want to talk about “The Mind” as a thing sui generis, a thing in its own right, they saw mental life as simply a step on the path down to the brain. It’s a bit like pain for a surgeon: a complaint of pain in the right iliac fossa is just a sign post on the way to a diagnosis of appendicitis, and then directly to an operation which cures it. All very mechanical, no room for whimsy. Same for psychiatry: under the new positivist regime, the complaint “I feel sad” is simply a signpost to low serotonin (5HT) for which a particular drug is de rigueur. Nothing whimsical, nothing fanciful, in either the psychiatrist or the patient.

So what about the mind? How does that fit in with the new “biomedical model” of psychiatry? It doesn’t. Your life experiences, your hopes, fears and ambitions don’t get a look in. It’s all brain, and the brain is all genetics. In fact, that hasn’t worked out very well so there’s now room for inflammatory chemicals floating around in the blood stream, epigenetics, diet, environmental chemicals (one of RFK Jr’s pet obsessions), bowel flora and so on. In fact, these are all more or less closely related but that’s another story. As far as “The Mind” goes, that too is a matter of biology. To complete the story, which almost never happens, it’s expected that all mental life will eventually be explained as a matter of biology, as in “One fine day, ordinary laboratory science will tell us all we need to know about the mind with no questions unanswered.” How will this come about? “Oh, don’t worry about that, science will ride to the rescue.” This is called promissory materialism, clearly expressed by the historian and materialist philosopher, Richard Carrier:

…everything can be reduced to matter and energy in space and time: quarks and other sub-atomic particles and their behaviors are all that there is, out of which everything without exception is made. And this fits with the fact that society can be reduced to humans, and humans can be reduced to cells, and cells can be reduced to chemical systems, which can be reduced in turn to sub-atomic particles. So therefore societies can be reduced to sub-atomic particles. The natural corollary of this view is that the sciences follow the same pattern: sociology can be reduced to psychology, psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics. So, theoretically, all of sociology and psychology can be described entirely by physics [7, S.III.5.5].

That’s optimism for you. I believe he’s wrong, my case is set out in [4, Chap. 14]. Nonetheless, that opinion underpins the biomedical model psychiatrists talk about (the one they have never written, see Chap 2 in [4]). They’re thinking in terms of linear causation, that event A leads to event B and thence to C, etc, when the reality of mind and much biology is non-linear.

The position at present is that the idea of a reductionist biological psychiatry dominates the field but it is based in an old and, I have argued [4, Chap 2; 8], outdated concept of science. Vast investment of time and money in biological psychiatry has failed to reveal anything of even remote interest; it survives on promise alone. Strictly speaking, as per the dictates of a valid philosophy of science, biological psychiatrists should set a date or an event that would force them to give up but they never have, mainly because their egos get in the way. After all this time, they just can’t admit they could have been wrong all along.

So back to the comments from last week. The term “mental disorder” itself says only that people assume something in the mental realm is wrong and must be explained. It wasn’t intended to imply a biological cause but it’s ended up that way, just because establishment psychiatry doesn’t pay more than lip service to the idea of researching psychological matters in psychiatry. They can study social factors, such as the relationship between alcholism and depression, because that evades the rule against mental factors but that’s all. As the reader says, the belief that all mental disorder will reduce to a special case of brain disorder is purely speculative, it has never been justified. However, if you say that out loud, you’ll wear a torrent of abuse from the mainstream, as in “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Comment No. 2 comes from a medical student, starting with: “The idea that to be biological, categories must map onto distinct causes with no crossover is patently untrue.” What I said was:

The categorical approach in DSM only makes sense if we assume that all mental disorder is biological in nature, that each distinct surface syndrome will map down to a specific disorder on the genome with no cross-over.

The context was that Blind Freddy can see that all measurable parameters in mental life distribute dimensionally, not categorically, so why did the DSM-III committee build their system on such an obvious error? It has to be that they were preparing the ground for a full-blown reductionist biological psychiatry. If they had another reason, I’d love to hear it but I’ve never seen anything that would qualify as a justification. He continues: “Happens just as rarely in physical medicine as psychiatry,” and suggested Type II diabetes (obese type) as an exemplar. Before we start on that, what about Huntington’s Disease? Kartagener’s syndrome? Type I diabetes? Every known infection and so on? Here, the surface manifestation maps down to a very specific and unique biological cause.

The example he uses, generally known by the dopey expression “Metabolic syndrome,” is in fact a good example of the very complex feedback systems in the body, but they start with a psychological fact: the person eats too much and doesn’t exercise enough (to digress: Wikipedia: “In the U.S., about 25% of the adult population has metabolic syndrome, a proportion increasing with age…” In the 1950s, it was practically unknown, especially in countries that still had rationing from the 1940s. Look at this photo of the early Rolling Stones: they were NORMAL. In my high school of 1100 kids in the early 1960s, there was one child who would qualify as obese. He was a pom and had arrived here seriously overweight. He died years ago. These days, I can go to the shops and half the kids waddling past are as fat as he was). A high fat, high calory diet causes obesity and changes in the bowel flora which increases bowel wall permeability to chemicals with kinin-like activity and contribute to insulin resistance. One physical state leads on to another, with each biochemical step along the way carefully charted. How does that relate to depression as a unique, stand-alone biological disease of the brain? It doesn’t. Despite spending untold billions on basic research, biological psychiatry can’t offer any potential pathways by which brain states influence mental states. It’s all promissory materialism.

I’ve made the case that the most common cause of recurrent or persistent depression is an unsuspected anxiety state [9]. Anxiety is to be seen as purely psychological with no significant genetic component, while depression follows it as a realistic mental reaction to a troubled life. One mental state causes another, then the impairment of depression feeds back to intensify the anxiety, wholly as a psychological phenomenon. That’s not too complicated: mental disorders have mental causes. Mainstream psychiatry refuses to consider this (the local journals wouldn’t even review my book, that’s how hostile they are, but they wouldn’t give reasons).

What is called “comorbidity” in psychiatry is a perversion of the medical term. It is taken to mean “co-occuring but causally independent conditions.” A person can therefore have half a dozen or more diagnoses: Major depression, generalised anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder; social phobia, ASD, borderline personality disorder, avoidant PD, sleep disorder, tic disorder and so on. I’ve seen people who have been given up to a dozen separate diagnoses and a drug or two for each one, e.g. an 18yo woman who (from memory) had had eleven diagnoses and 32 different drugs plus ECT in three years. It’s crap. They were all seriously anxious; when the “comorbid anxiety” was managed effectively, all the other stuff disappeared, like when the over-eating and lack of exercise is managed, all the other components of the so-called metabolic syndrome disappear. Psychiatry refuses to believe that mental problems have mental causes. That’s because reductive biological psychiatry is an ideology of mental disorder, not a rational science [8, Chap 2].

There is an important principle in philosophy generally known as Occam’s Razor, or the principle of parsimony. It says that the number of explanatory entities must not expand beyond the minimum required to do the job: “Of two theories competing to account for an observation, the simpler explanation is to be preferred.” Psychiatry has two theories competing to account for the observation of mental disorder, the reductive biological account and the psychological. The biological says: mental disorders have biological causes, i.e. it is a branch of the ontological position known as physicalism (previously materialism). Jeremy Stoljar at ANU, probably the preeminent authority on physicalism, says it won’t work [10]. He says that the notion that knowledge of the brain will fully explain mind is either a boring truth that doesn’t advance our knowledge, or an interesting idea that just happens to be wrong. It is not and never can be both true and interesting.

If we look at Richard Carrier’s brave reductionism (“So, theoretically, all of sociology and psychology can be described entirely by physics…”), it reaches the point where he has to explain how a fundamental particle can have a sense of humour. It can’t be done. There’s another old idea called panpsychism, the notion that all elementary particles are endowed with a tiny quantity of mentality. When enough particles come together to form a brain, a mind ensues and takes control. I’ve always thought this was a bloody stupid idea but it’s had a second coming recently based on the notion that the non-physical cannot arise from the physical. I have a paper due for publication soon, building on the biocognitive model [9], that shows exactly why it’s a bloody stupid idea because the non-physical can definitely arise from the physical. It’s called information. So back to Bro. Carrier: stepwise reductionism as per his plan is exactly what biological psychiatry needs to write their phantom biomedical model. In their naivete, they think it provides a resolution of the mind-body problem but it doesn’t, because they still have to admit that mental matters are real, that simply wanting to move a pile of bricks will eventually move the bricks. The argument is more complex than we can cover here but it leaves them no wriggle room: intellectually speaking, reductionist biological psychiatry is flogging a dead horse.

The alternative is the psychological account: the mind is a real thing arising from the brain’s computational capacity by rational processes, and mental disorders have mental causes. That’s pretty simple: depression is a reaction to life events. I have outlined [9] how this can come about, essentially a form of paralysis, as it were, of the brain’s real but poorly-understood reward system. Just as the perception of a threat activates the sympathetic nervous system, producing among others a rapid heart rate, so too the perception of a major loss deactivates the brain’s “pleasure centres.” This produces a picture of apathy and detachment which, if it goes on long enough, results in a sense that life is pointless so it may as well end. This is not a complicated notion. The only thing that stops mainstream psychiatry adopting it is their adamantine refusal to look at anything that says mind is a real thing, i.e. any theory that says they could be wrong. That, of course, is the antithesis of the scientific attitude but we won’t start on that now (see [11] for some details of the mind-numbing recalcitrance of the RANZCP).

The biocognitive model [9] offers a resolution of the mind-body problem specifically for psychiatry but, in doing so, it consigns biological psychiatry to the history books. A corollary of that model is that animals have minds but don’t tell that to psychiatrists, you’ll get a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

References:

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

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

3. Robinson DN (1996). Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: The insanity defence from antiquity to the present. University Press: Harvard.

4. McLaren N (2024). 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.

6. Masson JM (1984). The Assault on Truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Simon and Schuster.

7. Carrier, R. (2005). Sense and Goodness Without a God: a defence of metaphysical naturalism. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. (Kindle version)

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

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

10. Stoljar D (2010). Physicalism. Oxford: Routledge.

11. McLaren N (2023). The Biopsychosocial Model and Scientific Deception. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 25: 106-118.doi:10.1891/EHPP-2023-0008.

****

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.

****

I’ve been told I’m not to use the expressions “the Epstein class,” or “Operation Epstein fury” because the very powerful US-Zionist lobby, the Anti-Defamation League, has ruled that those term are “antisemitic.” Their reasoning isn’t clear but meantime, I’m still allowed to call the present war of aggression launched by Israel and the US “Operation Epic F*ck-Up.” Because it is. Even bearing in mind that the US has started and lost a dozen wars since 1945, this stands head and shoulders below the rest.

Kevin Walmsley is an American engineer who lives in Kunming, China. A couple of times a week, he posts brief reports on Substack and YouTube as Inside China / Business. Each time, he takes some claim made by US or Western commentators about China’s industry or economics etc. and shows with a few graphs that they’re talking rubbish. This week, he’s looked at the economics of attempting to defend against missile and drone attacks, and the effects of the fighting in the Gulf on international air travel. Bearing in mind that an Iranian Shahed drone costs from $25-50,000, depending on its configuration, and they can make 100 a month, and that each Patriot or Iron Dome ground-to-air defence missile costs from $0.5-4million but they can only make ten a month, and at least half of them miss their target, then the economics of the war Trump and Netanyahu started are not looking good. No way. Moreover, Western airlines have taken a massive hit because they have to divert away from Iranian airspace but they’re not allowed to fly over Russia, and jet fuel has doubled in price in a week and will get much, much higher as it can’t be shipped, but nobody wants to fly anyway, so he expects major airlines to start going broke before long. Add to that the effect of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, which it has long threatened to do if attacked, which upset Herr Drumpf:

If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far. Additionally, we will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again — Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them

That is, he is threatening genocide. However, Iran was attacked so they have closed the Strait and no oil can get out, nor chemicals, nor fertilisers, nor plastics; and none of the food that the Gulf countries import (80% of their consumption) or machines can get in; and Europe is seriously dependent on Gulf oil since Biden and Co. blew up the Russian Nord Stream II gas pipeline; and Ukraine won’t allow Russian gas or oil over its territory, all of which adds up to Europe teetering on the brink of collapse. Add to that the news that Gulf oil and gas producers have had to cease production, which means their refineries and gas plants have to be emptied and put on maintenance and it takes a minimum of a month to get them going again; and the world doesn’t have a month’s supply of oil and gas in reserve, then you really have to ask: “Who are the clowns who started this monstrous cock up? What were they thinking? What was their goal? How did they think they’d achieve it?”

One thing is clear: for 40 years, Netanyahu has dreamed of destroying Iran. He says so (it’s actually 47 years, since the Revolution in 1979; see Gantz, fmr defence minister here, starting at 0.55). US presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden resisted; Trump gave in. I don’t think we need to bother explaining that, he’s a dementing fool who is easily manipulated by promises of making lots of money and is terrified of the Epstein files leaking. What we would like to know is: What happened to the chiefs of staff and the National Budget Office and the CIA economics section who are supposed to understand things like the fact that 20million barrels of oil passes through Hormuz each day, 20% of world seaborne oil trade, and Europe and Japan and Korea are totally dependent on it? Didn’t they understand that airlines actually need fuel to keep flying, that they’re not huge gliders? That ships don’t move without bunkers? Where are the adults in the US who are supposed to rein in the pirates and gungho adventurers?

We can’t rely on Trump’s cabinet because he chose them on the basis of their fanatical loyalty to him. Hegseth, the so-called secretary of war is no use, he’s a fanatical christian nationalist (read: fascist) who just loves the idea of killing people. He approved the attack on the Iranian frigate that was returning from the regatta in India; he knew it was unarmed and was carrying a heap of dignitaries who’d gone for the ride; and he knew the submarine that sank it would not stop to rescue survivors, as it is required to do and as its captain knew it was required to do. So we can write him off. We can write off another important person, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, because she is seriously paranoid. Her performance before the Congressional committee a week or two ago was bizarre. Every time she was asked a question, she launched a vicious personal attack on the member who was interrogating her. She saw everything as a direct personal attack on her and her saint, D Trump. That’s paranoid, but not psychotic like Trump’s “White House director of faith matters,” one Paula White, who is completely off her head. Rubio, the secretary of state, better known as Narco Rubio because of his family connections, spilled the beans when he said they launched the attack because they knew Israel was going to attack Iran and if they did, then the Iranians would target American “assets” (radar, bases, etc) in the Gulf so they thought they’d better get in first, which is a crime (here, at 4.00). The rest of them are a bunch of liars, crooks and carpetbaggers, none worse than Trump’s nauseating son-in-law who is making a fortune out of all this, so we can’t expect any sense from them.

I don’t get this at all. Most of these people have university degrees so they’re not lacking intelligence. They have worked in and around major corporations and public service for decades, so they have some sort of experience. They were born into the closed world of wealth, power and privilege; they know exactly what goes on. They know everybody who’s anybody, and they know precisely who’s doing what with whom, where and for how much. They know that if you attack somebody, that person is going to get you back because that’s exactly what they do themselves. Before any attack, the military and CIA run these elaborate and very expensive “war games” where they start with what they want to achieve and then have to work out what the other side will do in response. Surely they can work out that if they attack Iran, it will retaliate with missiles, and that the Israeli missile defence system (Iron Dome, etc) gets its tracking info from the very high-powered and expensive US radar bases in the Gulf countries, so the first action the Iranians would have to take would be to destroy the American forward radar bases. Which is exactly what happened. I knew they would do that and the reason I knew they would do that’s because that is exactly what I would do (there is a fairly long account of it here by Richard Medhurst, a UK based reporter who was born in Syria to a Syrian mother and UK father, who speaks fluent Arabic and gets along in Hebrew; his bleached hair is recent).

I can’t answer why the Americans allowed themselves to be drawn into another “forever war,” especially as their president promised there would be no more; hubris, I expect, plus his fear of going to prison. As for the Israelis, the world needs to know that their plan for the past 80 years has been the total destruction of the entire Islamic Middle East. Not just Gaza, not just Lebanon, but the lot: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, now Iran, and their next target is Turkey, with Egypt and the rest of the Gulf to follow. This is all set out in their eschatology. There will be a mighty war in the Middle East; the Jews will triumph and build their Third Temple, their messiah will arrive, Jews will rule the world then be taken up to heaven while the rest of humanity goes to burn in hell because that’s where they came from.

Watch this video from beginning to end, especially the two rabbis at 2.55 and 11.35. The producers are reputable (I’ve checked). The videos are now quite old, perhaps 25 years or so. At the time, the belief system they propound was considered fairly extreme but these people and their millions of followers are now mainstream right wing, in Israel and in the diaspora, which more or less means the US. They are supported by the fanatical christian nationalists (they don’t get a capital C because it’s a heresy) who echo that view with the small exception that all Jews will also be sent to the deep fryer for eternity. The second speaker, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994) was leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect and hugely influential. He described the difference between Jewish and gentile souls in this way:

The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness … A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written, ‘And the strangers shall stand and feed your flocks’ [Isaiah 61:5]. The entire creation (of non-Jews) exists only for the sake of the Jews.

This is the driving principle behind the attack on Iran. It is amplified by Netanyahu’s urgent desire to satisfy the ultra-fanatics who voted for him to bring on the war that will lead to what they believe will be Zionism’s triumph.

We live in exceedingly dangerous times. A very large part of the world is being run by a coalition of religious and political extremists working hand in hand with the deeply corrupt business and political Epstein class, although it’s hard to tell them apart, not one of whom has the sense to look ahead and try to work out the consequences of their actions. Everybody knows that since the MH-17 disaster over Ukraine in 2014, in the event of a war, planes are not allowed to fly anywhere near it. If they can’t go the direct route, it costs them a heap more. Everybody knows that if the Strait of Hormuz closes for any reason, Europe and half the world are caught in the squirrel grip. Why can these people not think ahead? And if they can’t think 24 hours ahead, can we trust them to think decades ahead on something like global warming? No, we can’t. If so-called christian nationalists think that literally setting the world on fire is a good thing, can we trust them to make proper decisions about firing Tomahawk missiles (at $5million each) at a girls’ school? No, we can’t, they’re not Christians at all, they’re an apocalyptic heresy. If we said to Hegseth and all his mates “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matt.5.9), they would fall over, shrieking with laughter.

We’re in trouble, ladies and gentlemen. The world is being run by fanatics and fockwits who get their rocks off by dominating everybody else for their own advantage. They believe they can do no wrong, that everybody who disagrees with them is satanic and must be destroyed, and that violence is purifying. Remember that these people are not mad, any more than the Nazis or the British imperialists were mad. I could say this is turbo-charged narcisso-fascism but it’s worse than that. It’s truly messianic (see here for a good account of this mind-set; check the photo parody of the Last Supper, that’s Ms White in white channeling God).

Kevin Walmsley always finishes his videos and posts with two words: Be good. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

I was interviewed for a podcast in Switzerland; the interviewer is a physics graduate interested in psychology:

The Nexus

The Nexus Pod | Jock (Niall) McLaren - The Rule of Narcissism | Podcast #15

Dr. McLaren is a retired Australian psychiatrist, critic and author with decades of clinical experience. Trained in medicine and the philosophy of science, Niall takes the exotic approach of applying these psychological insights in geopolitics. He has published several book, including the most fascinating Narcisso-Fascism. My article mentioned in the cl…

Listen now

2 months ago · 1 like · Mark Solar

****

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.

****

Imagine a community of people who live in merciful isolation from the madness of today’s world. Perhaps their home is a valley like the people of Erewhon in Samuel Butlers whimsical story, or in Herbert Wells’ Country of the Blind, although I prefer them to live on a palmy tropical island, dominated by a towering mountain and ringed by coral reefs enclosing limpid lagoons. While they know nothing about the rest of humanity, they know a great deal about their world. They build their houses from carved volcanic rock, rather like the elegant double gates of Bali, and have similar musical instruments to gamelin. With their solid canoes, they can catch fish in the lagoons and even dive for pearls. All their clothing comes from the coconut palms but they don’t need much. They have their own system of medicine, a system of laws and their own creation stories. Very importantly for fishermen, they can look at the sky and predict the weather for the next few days. However, as much as they are dependent on the weather, they don’t know what clouds are. Their forecasters have an elaborate system of classifying clouds and know that this cloud will bring rain but that one won’t. Of course, they have no idea how water gets up in the sky but are not much concerned because it’s so reliable. Some people say they’re scared of clouds but the forecasters shrug their shoulders and tell them not to be silly.

Every now and then, one of their young people disappears for a few days and then comes back very excited. “I’ve climbed the mountain,” he says, because most of them are young men, “and now I know what clouds are. I’ve walked around inside a cloud, I got wet from it. There’s nothing to fear, they’re actually quite nice.” The forecasters and all the old people scoff at this. “How ridiculous. Everybody can see that clouds are solid, look, you can’t see the sun through them, how much more solid do you want? You’d better lay off the kava, junior, it’s scrambling your brains.”

****

About every fifteen years, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) launches yet another version of their magnum opus, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or DSM. These days, No. 5 is getting a bit long in the tooth so they’re gearing up for No. 6. The amount of work that goes into this thing is simply astounding, with thousands of people meeting regularly for years, huge amounts of research sifted by dozens of committees, drafts, redrafts and penultimate drafts galore for a work that steadily gets bigger and extends its reach further into normal daily life. Their job is quite difficult. They have to convince everybody that the old one, launched with such fanfare a few years ago, is no longer fit for purpose, it’s holding psychiatry back, creating stigma and so on, problems the new one will resolve. However, they have to do so without admitting there may be anything actually wrong with the old one in case anybody gets the idea there may be major flaws in the entire conceptual approach. What is its conceptual approach? Well, that’s an interesting question because according to them, it doesn’t have one.

The first DSM in 1952 was little more that the US Army system of classification for psychiatrists, dressed up with some psychoanalytic terms to make it acceptable to private psychiatrists. It was needed because health insurers wouldn’t pay unless they had a standard diagnosis, same as in the rest of medicine, so psychiatry obliged. DSM II, published in 1968, listed 182 disorders in just 134 pages and was again dominated by Freudian ideas, more a literary work than scientific. It was subjective and open to interpretation so, after a series of embarrassments, they decided to dump the whole thing and start again. DSM III, in 1980, was a radical change in that it was purely a classification based on observable facts only, while saying nothing about the mind or the nature of mental disorder itself. It was deliberately descriptive, with no attempt at explanation of what it was describing. This atheoretical approach was seen as just the first step in making sure everybody was talking about the same thing, the essential preliminary to a science of mental disorder. With various amendments and a bad case of middle-aged spread, this remains the case today.

Trouble is, it wasn’t atheoretical. It made a number of major assumptions that made sense if and only if all mental disorder is biological. They started with the idea of categories of mental disorder, that each condition was a separate category, distinct from normality and from all the others, and could be reliably identified by asking a few questions. Why did they do that? If you ask somebody in the street, they’ll tell you that obviously, mental troubles are related to each other, one woe quickly leads to another, and that there’s no cut off point between normal and loopy. The categorical approach in DSM only makes sense if we assume that all mental disorder is biological in nature, that each distinct surface syndrome will map down to a specific disorder on the genome with no cross-over. Then, the story goes, the drug companies will make a drug for each disorder and hey presto, humanity would be freed of the scourge of mental disorder.

On the other hand, if we start with the idea that mental disorder is wholly psychological in nature, that it starts with life experiences and what we believe and perceive, then the whole categorical thing breaks down. Clearly, there’s no line separating normal and abnormal, and a person can be feeling fine today and terrible tomorrow just because of what happens. His biology doesn’t change at all, only his experiences. In this approach, mental life becomes a hugely complex mess with no certainty that what we think is happening is actually true, and opens the door to all sorts of quacks and crooks. That was what the DSM committees wanted to avoid. If psychiatry is to be part of mainstream medicine, it has to be based in observations only, with no fanciful theories like ids or egos or penis envy, and no room for guesswork. Also, the biological approach had the very real benefit of not needing a theory of mind as its starting point. All the mental stuff could be dismissed with a wave of the hand, as in: “Don’t you worry about that, science will give us the answers. Meantime, just keep taking these.”

Trouble is, half a century after the DSM-III project started, we’re no closer to that goal. Psychiatrists are still arguing over basics, like whether fidgety children are normal or not, or how long grief should last and so on. However, help is on the way in the form of a bunch of committees to start the long job of writing DSM-6. In a series of introductory articles a few weeks ago, they marked out their “road map” to the future. The first paper, Initial Strategy for the Future of DSM, starts on an optimistic note:

In the 45 years since the publication of DSM-III, knowledge about psychiatric disorders, the psychosocial and cultural impact on them, their treatment, and their biology has evolved tremendously [1].

Focussing on biology, they point out a real risk for psychiatry, as in: be careful what you wish for. If we find biological causes for mental disorders, then “… once biological underpinnings become known … it might lead to an erosion, if not erasure, of (psychiatry) as neuroscience advances.” Oh dear, psychiatry might end up with the shrinking disease. Their response is four subcommittees, each of which set out its agenda in the remaining articles. The first one is the “Structure and Dimensions” Subcommittee [2], who proposed a new model for DSM-6, although they admitted it was all very early and vague and would need to be hammered into shape over time. What model? That’s where their horse stumbles at the starting gate: there is no “model.” After talking vaguely of how to incorporate biology with psychosocial material such as early life events, unemployment or other traumatic events, they concluded:

… it is unlikely that there will be empirically validated biomarkers or biological factors for the overwhelming majority of patients with psychiatric disorders in the next several years …

Or ever? After decades of effort and untold billions spent, by their own admission, biology has delivered precisely nothing, with no prospect that this will change for as far as we can see ahead. However, there is another committee to look at this, reporting on “The Future of DSM: Role of Candidate Biomarkers and Biological Factors” [3]. Their goal is “… developing a long-term strategic plan to realize a vision for biomarker-informed … evidence-based practice and precision psychiatry.” Or something. They consider a range of blood tests, genetic studies, scans of various types, all of which appear to be going nowhere, until they finally pull up something called neurocircuitry.

This may sound impressive but it’s not. Pinned down, it means only that the brain has circuits connecting one part to another, just as Ramon y Cajal told us nearly 150 years ago, but it tells us nothing about the information they’re actually carrying. It’s the same as looking at a plain envelope: you know where it came from but you can’t tell what’s written inside it. They conclude: “As scientific research delivers vigorous validation of candidate biomarkers, transformative approaches to defining and treating psychiatric illnesses will become available” Their program, in other words, is just promissory materialism, the idea that ordinary physical science will one day answer every question we can ask. Logically, this is as weak as it gets, just an unproven belief system, little more than a ploy for not answering sticky questions. However, they think they deserve lots of money to investigate it (and would prefer people to stop bothering them for results).

Now we move to the interesting bit, “A Strategic Vision for Incorporating Socioeconomic, Cultural, and Environmental Determinants and Intersectionality” [4]. Unfortunately, it simply gives them the chance to talk in vague generalisations about how “… demographic, economic, neighborhood and built environment, environmental events, and social/cultural context … affecting the prevalence and severity of health and mental health disorders and outcomes across the life course.” No mention of individual psychology, like what was my early family life like? What do I believe about myself and how do I fit in the world I inhabit? None of that, and there’s a reason we’ll come to. It ends with a few motherhood statements, like: “Unique vulnerabilities across overlapping identities bring about compounded barriers to stable housing, quality education, and culturally competent care that would not be apparent if we considered each identity (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, or socioeconomic status) in isolation.” And so we come to the last subcommittee, which asks: “Are Functioning and Quality of Life Essential Elements of a Complete Psychiatric Diagnosis?” This shortens to the FunQoL subcommittee and lets them have lots of pretty diagrams about the “Interplay between the dimensional domains of psychiatric symptoms, distress, functioning, and quality of life and their role in psychiatric illness burden,” diagrams that leave us none the wiser.

These subcommittees, about 80 people in all, have already spent a huge amount of time on this, the very earliest stage of this vast project, but what have they achieved? Nothing. They’re like the people on the mythical island who could describe and name clouds but who didn’t know what clouds actually are. Same with the descriptive and supposedly atheoretical DSM: psychiatrists set out the criteria for saying “This is depression and that is a phobia,” but they don’t actually know what that means, they can’t explain it. Description is not explanation. Sure, they will mumble something about chemical imbalances or even neurocircuitry, but what does this actually mean? When pinned down, these impressive terms have no explanatory power, they do not extend our knowledge beyond the observable facts that need to be explained. They are shibboleths, terms that signal the person using them is a bit special and should therefore be treated with respect and not questioned. The last thing psychiatrists want is anybody questioning them.

The whole project for DSM-6 will go nowhere. Yes, there will be a bigger, heavier manual with dozens more diagnoses and hundreds more qualifications; yes, they will encroach on normality like the ocean eating away at the Gold Coast (in that case, not fast enough, that’s for sure); yes, the drug companies will find hugely expensive new drugs for the new diagnoses; yes, there will be specialist clinics which, for a very large fee, will confirm your self-diagnosis of lycanthropy and grant you a pension; and no, nothing will get better for the people whose mental lives are a mess. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The reason it will fail is very simple: there is no mention of humans as beings with minds. They’ve left it out. No mention of personality or how it interacts with life events, no account of hopes and beliefs or why these count, nothing that says we are dealing with humans as sentient creatures.

If biological psychiatrists want to be taken seriously, they need to set out a path that explains how mind can be reduced to brain and, crucially, why psychological explanations must fail. As it is, the DSM would work just as well for vets dealing with miserable horses or annoying bull calves that want to play. Still, we shouldn’t knock it too much. It will keep thousands of psychiatrists and their tame psychologists and social workers busy for years to come, feeling important as they’re actually doing something for all those mental people. Probably if they left them alone, most of them would be better off. So back to the quote from the lead article:

In the 45 years since the publication of DSM-III, knowledge about psychiatric disorders, the psychosocial and cultural impact on them, their treatment, and their biology has evolved tremendously [1].

What utter rubbish. Nothing has changed but if you tell that truth, you’ll never get a position on the DSM committees.

References:

1. Oquendo MA et al (2026). Initial Strategy for the Future of DSM. Am J Psychiatry; XX:1–9; doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.20250878.

2. Ongur D et al (2026). The Future of DSM: A Report From the Structure and Dimensions Subcommittee. Am J Psychiatry; XX:1–9; doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.20250876.

3. Cuthbert B et al (2-026). The Future of DSM: Role of Candidate Biomarkers and Biological Factors. Am J Psychiatry; XX:1–8; doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.20250877.

4. Wainberg ML (2026). The Future of DSM: A Strategic Vision for Incorporating Socioeconomic, Cultural, and Environmental Determinants and Intersectionality. Am J Psychiatry; XX:1–8; doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.20250875.

5. Drexler K et al (2026). The Future of DSM: Are Functioning and Quality of Life Essential Elements of a Complete Psychiatric Diagnosis? Am J Psychiatry; XX:1–7; doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.20250874

****

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.

****

Where do we start? After the Trump regime kidnapped the head of state of Venezuela, I said that if he gets away with it, he’ll try something bigger. I was right. He and his mate Netanyahu just murdered the spiritual head of some 250million Shia Muslims.

It’s tempting to say something like “Madness is engulfing the world,” except it’s not madness. There isn’t the slightest hint of insanity in the action of the US-Israel axis in attacking Iran. In clear consciousness, they have planned this for months, fully aware that in launching an aggressive war, they are committing the “supreme international crime,” illegal both in international law and under US law. They know precisely what they’re doing. With great precision, they positioned troops and weapons of fearsome power exactly where they wanted them in order to produce maximum damage to civil and military sites in Iran. Moreover, every member of ther armed forces knows exactly that in engaging in an unprovoked attack, they are committing a major crime.

Once again, the US pretended to engage in negotiations with Iran and then attacked without warning, this time in the holy month of Ramadan after the meals to break the fast when everybody goes to bed early as they have to be up early. Within a few hours, they had blown up a girls’ primary school, killing at least 175 people, mostly children, and injuring many more. Since then and following Israel’s plan in Gaza, they have selectively bombed at least ten hospitals as well as important civil infrastructure, which is itself a war crime. Even as the news of those crimes was being broadcast, Australia’s prime minister was first to issue a statement supporting what are, in law, criminal acts:

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression. For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran directed at least two attacks on Australian soil in 2024. These appalling acts targeting Australia’s Jewish community were intended to create fear, divide our society and challenge our sovereignty. In response, Australia took the unprecedented steps of expelling Iran’s Ambassador, suspending operations at our embassy in Tehran, and listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a state sponsor of terrorism. Our Government has sanctioned more than 200 Iranian-linked individuals, including more than 100 linked to the IRGC.

With international partners, including the United States and the G7, we have called for the Iranian regime to uphold the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Iran’s citizens. These calls have gone unheeded. Instead, the regime has instigated a brutal crackdown on its own people leaving thousands of Iranian civilians dead. A regime that relies on the repression and murder of its own people to retain power is without legitimacy.

It has long been recognised that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to global peace and security. The international community has been clear that the Iranian regime can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. The United Nations Security Council has reimposed sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the International Atomic Energy Agency Board has formally declared Iran in non-compliance with its non-proliferation safeguards obligations.

We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.

This bit of drivel is stuffed full of the most blatant and hypocritical lies imaginable. The oppression suffered by Iranians started in 1953, when the US CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered a coup to overthrow the mildly socialist and secular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. Because he wanted the profits for Iranians, Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry which Britain had been plundering for decades without paying royalties. Enraged, the whities threw him out and installed the protofascist regime of the so-called Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi who was addicted to grandiose pseudo-military uniforms. He allowed the US and Britain to take what they wanted while he ruled with his singularly brutal secret police, Savak. In due course, Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamist revolution and the West declared economic war on Iran. A few years later, they pushed their then good friend, Saddam Hussein, to attack Iran on the promise he could have their coastal oil fields. Iran would have smashed Saddam in a few months but with the most active assistance from the US and UK, including espionage, money and weapons, the war dragged on for eight years.

Throughout that terrible war and since, driven by the US, Western countries have imposed the most severe economic blockade on Iran, devastating the economy and producing unrest among the 90million Iranians. It used to be the case that an economic blockade was casus belli, a formal ground for war but today, the rule is Macht hat Recht: the powerful do what they want and the poor suffer what they must. In 2003, the Ayatollah Khameini declared that nuclear weapons are haram, forbidden under Islamic law, and cancelled Iran’s small nuclear weapons program, leaving only a civil program in place. Constantly prodded by Israel, the US and other NATO countries have insisted that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, that it is a week away from having The Bomb, leading to ever-more restrictive sanctions, and constant sabotage and assassinations by Israel. Eventually, during Obama’s time, the JCPOA was signed, allow intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the IAEA. By all accounts, this treaty was doing its job but, in 2018 in one of his regular anti-Obama tantrums, Trump tore it up. Iran continued to comply with it but that wasn’t good enough so last year, the US and Israel bombed their facilities.

For over seventy years, Iranians have been oppressed by the West. Naturally enough, their government has reacted in much the same way the Australian and British and US and German and other governments have acted over the past few years, by restricting civil rights, building intrusive domestic spying agencies, penalising dissent, etc. And all the time, the Iranian economy has been sinking lower and lower. If the West hadn’t overthrown the Mossadegh government all those years ago, the Iranian economy would now be about twice the size of Italy’s, with an equivalent standard of living. Iran would be a major industrial power, more so even than Germany, with a huge research and development program, far bigger than Britain has ever had. And that’s what it’s all about. The West can’t stand competition. They want to dominate. End of story. In particular, they want to dominate anybody and everybody who is not of white western European ancestry. They will stop at absolutely nothing in their mania to strangle all competition, especially as they have now lost the struggle to dominate China. And, despite their best efforts, Russia is still there, it hasn’t broken up as they confidently forecast, so they turn to Iran.

But let’s continue with Albanese’s slop: “For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force…” Fomenting coups and wars, invading sovereign nations, economic strangulation, that hasn’t been destabilising, has it? No, of course not, that’s just normal neoliberal business practice for dealing with wogs. “…and nuclear programs.” The one that ended in 2003, you mean? The same one the IAEA says doesn’t exist, the one you obliterated in June 2025? This is the old Iraqi WMD lie recycled. There were no WMD in Iraq and there was no nuclear weapons program in Iran. Netanyahu has been predicting for 30 years that Iran is a week away from having nuclear weapons but he lies easier than he breathes. Israel, let’s not forget, has up to 200 nuclear warheads and the bombers to deliver them but is not a member of any international treaties to restrict them. “…brutal acts of violence and intimidation…” Like the 1,800+ acts of terror and hundreds of murders committed by Zionist “settlers” against the Palestinians of the West bank last year, you mean?

“Iran directed at least two attacks on Australian soil in 2024.” The information that led to that conclusion came from Mossad. There is no evidence that Iran gives a shit about Australia. “… intended to create fear, divide our society” even though the overwhelming majority of Australians are opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other places. “…and challenge our sovereignty.” 47 years of economic sanctions and blockade, assassinations, sabotage and bombings is not a challenge to Iran’s sovereignty? “In response, Australia took the unprecedented steps of expelling Iran’s Ambassador…” but it hasn’t uttered so much as a whimper against Israel’s monstrous genocide in Gaza, supplying weapons and allowing US bases in Australia to function as a vital part of the espionage and control of bombers. “Our Government has sanctioned more than 200 Iranian-linked individuals…” It has sanctioned precisely zero Israelis, including those charged with genocide by the ICC, and even allowed one of its main architects to come here a few weeks ago. “…we have called for the Iranian regime to uphold the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Iran’s citizens.” They have said not one word about upholding the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Gaza’s sorely tormented surviving citizens.

“…the regime has instigated a brutal crackdown on its own people.” There is ample evidence from people on site at the time that the recent violence was instigated and carried out by people acting on instructions from the CIA and Mossad. Prior to the violence, at least 10,000 Starlink terminals and automatic weapons were smuggled into Iran and distributed to groups opposed to the government. These were used to coordinate the violence. The Iranian intelligence services worked out how to jam them, and the violence stopped immediately. “A regime that relies on the repression and murder of its own people to retain power is without legitimacy.” A bit like the Saudis killing Jamal Khashoggi, you could say. Like the US ICE killing people on the streets? Like the spreading chain of prisons run by ICE in the US? “Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to global peace and security.” Bullshit. It doesn’t exist because it was stopped in 2003 and was “obliterated” a few months ago. “…the Iranian regime can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.” Well, after all this, they’ll probably be looking at North Korea and wondering how they have survived for so long against such hostility. Something to do with their nuclear weapons, maybe?

“… Iran for failing to comply with the JCPOA..” That treaty ceased to exist when Trump tore it up but Iran largely complied with it. The IAEA report says: “…inspectors have been unable to determine whether Iran’s nuclear programme was ‘exclusively peaceful.’” That was because they no longer had the right to unrestricted access to any and all sites after Trump trashed the JCPOA. The suggestion that Iran had stockpiled 400kg of highly enriched uranium was not based on any evidence that came from within Iran. Mossad, the Israeli spy and sabotage agency, are unrivalled in their ability to spin and spread lies, that’s their stock in trade.

Finally, “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.” He forgot to mention Israel’s nuclear bombs, of course, he is always fastidiously careful not to upset the Zionist lobby, and that Israel had just killed the person who issued the fatwa against Iran developing nuclear weapons. As for threats to international peace and security, since 1945, the US has bombed 29 sovereign countries, including no less than ten since the “president of peace” wormed his way back into the White House not 14 months ago. Iran has not attacked another country for over 300 years.

Lies, lies, lies. His whole statement is a tissue of lies resting on a foundation of hypocrisy that makes my skin crawl. The Prime Minister of Australia is either a shameless liar or a nauseating hypocrite and spineless coward who repeats lies without daring to check their veracity. He is unfit for office. His proper station in life is as branch secretary of the cleaners’ and sanitary workers’ union in a small country town but it also seems these people are competing to see who can be the most disgusting. Tomorrow morning at 6.00am in Adelaide, Australian foreign minister Sen. Penny Wong will host a breakfast for International Women’s Day. I wonder if they’ll hold a minute’s silence for the 165 little girls murdered in their school in Minab on Saturday?

The most appalling part is that all this death and destruction is because Trump is flailing around creating distractions so he doesn’t have to face the Epstein stuff but nobody in the US has the courage to call him out. Not even the generals who know full well they are committing crimes, but nemesis is coming, that much is inevitable. He will lose the mid-term elections and the last 3million files will be released. Assuming he is still compos mentis, he will then go to prison. Netanyahu has a prison cell with his name on it waiting for the day he can’t plead “national security” to avoid his corruption trials but he’s having a great time just now. He has been trying to destroy Iran for, as he says, 40 years (at 6.55). Same in Britain. The egregiously dishonest Starmer, former chief Crown Prosecutor, is a dead man walking mainly because of his supine loyalty to the Zionist lobby.

None of this is madness. This is wickedness simpliciter. We have handed our governments to the Epstein Coalition.

*****

Why is hypocrisy so infuriating? Somebody says to you: “Come back, you mustn’t walk on the grass.” “Oh dear,” you reply, “I’ll have to go the long way around instead.” Somewhat peeved and a little humiliated for not knowing the rules, you set off but before you get to your goal, you see the same person walking across the grass. Why is that so annoying? I see it as a matter of dominance: you allowed that person to dominate you. In the interests of civility and doing the right thing, you gave in, only to see it was by deceit, not by honest competition. That’s humiliating, you know the other person is looking down on you and we don’t like that at all: “I allowed you to dominate me, you think you’re so smart and I don’t forgive that.” We may not spend all our time fighting to be top dog, but we don’t like being fooled into being the poodle. Going up the hierarchy is joyous but going down stings. We remember stings long after we have forgotten the fun bits.

****

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 is back on fire again. In truth, it’s been on fire every day of my life but it’s definitely getting worse, to the point you’d ask who’s actually mad in all this? Is it the quiet, helpless people locked in mental hospitals or sitting mute at home or in school, drugged to the eyeballs, or is it the people firing missiles at primary schools? In fact, with one notable exception, the people organising and doing the shooting are not mentally disturbed in any way. They are fully conscious, in control of their faculties and aware of what they’re doing. We could argue that they have no awareness of the long-term consquences of their actions but that’s their choice. The information on global warming, nuclear winter, desertification, pandemics, famine, civil war and so on is freely available but, in their lust for power and wealth, they choose to ignore it.

The exception, of course, is the fairly rapidly dementing Donald Trump, from whom all the scoundrels in the world are taking their cues. In my view, he should be removed from office immediately but that’s a matter for the US power elite. Unfortunately, since so many of them are making so much money from his term, they don’t want to derail the gravy train. One who probably isn’t making heaps of money from his office is the secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) Mr RF Kennedy Jr. He’s been in office a year and Lancet, one of the leading medical journals in the world, marked the occasion with an editorial, calling it: “One Year of Failure.” In order to get approved for his position, he made numerous promises over what he would and wouldn’t do but, as the editorial shows, he has broken most of those and is working on the rest.

There are two sides to the impact he has had. The first and most obvious is the effect on people’s health and, given his obsession with immunisation, that means children dying of readily preventable diseases. In this, he is driven by his good friend and fellow fanatic, the notorious former surgeon Andrew Wakefield. The second, less obvious but possibly more consequential, is his destruction of the huge and very successful American biomedical research program. Long term programs such as the diabetic study have been cancelled after 30yrs, mRNA research ditched, even though it led to the Covid immunisation in record time, cardiac studies and so on. Essentially, he has wrecked American research, leaving the field wide open to the diabolical Chinese who, needless to say, are racing ahead. Fortunately, he hasn’t said much about psychiatry or mental disorder but his influence is seeping through. Peter Simons, a psychologist with Mad in America, reports on a new drug for schizophrenia which has been approved without any clinical trials.

Vanda Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer, had a patent on iloperidone for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (approved in Australia but rarely used as too expensive). That was approved in the normal way years ago but their patent was due to expire, so they applied for a new drug registration based on the active metabolite of the drug. However, they didn’t submit any new information, all they did was show that when iloperidone is taken, it is quickly metabolised to milsaperidone which is an active agent, so the original studies were actually about it. They were granted a patent on the basis milsaperidone is a new drug but were not required to follow the procedure for testing and proving new drugs as the FDA said the two chemicals were interchangeable so it wasn’t new. This is ridiculous: either it’s new and they can have a patent but must jump through all the regulatory hoops, or it’s not new so they don’t have to do the tests but then can’t have a patent. That nonsense would never have happened under the old regime at the FDA but all the boring old sticklers for procedure on the various committees have been dumped and replaced by Trump and RFK loyalists. Two questions arise: Why is this happening, and will they start on the wholesale drugging and shocking of people with mental troubles? There have been a few whispers but nothing much.

The question of why this is happening is not a scientific question. It isn’t, as some people have suggested, an example of a genuine scientific revolution, as originally described by philosopher Thomas Kuhn. Until Kuhn published his ideas just over 60 years ago [1], the general idea was that scientific progress is essentially a straight line from primitive darkness to the sunny uplands, driven by indomitable human rationality. Kuhn said that’s not true. Scientists spend an awful lot of time groping in the dark, following false leads, researching nonsense and squabbling over incompatible belief systems. Every now and then, he said, problems in a particular field build up to the point where it’s in chaos, full of contradictions and unable to explain anything properly, with no clues as to how it can be improved. Then it all changes. Somebody, often an outsider or newcomer to the field, announces that the whole approach is wrong and proposes a completely different way of looking at things. This forces a revolution as the old idea and a lot of its champions are thrown out, and the younger generation takes over and starts to build a new science in its place.

Kuhn’s favourite example was the Copernican revolution where the ancient notion that the earth is the centre of the universe was discarded in favour of the heliocentric model, placing the sun at the centre with earth spinning far out in the darkness. This was truly revolutionary, it forced people to accept that the universe is inconceivably large and we’re just a very small part of it. However, as Galileo discovered when he published a fairly mild defence of the Copernican system, a lot of very powerful people didn’t like that idea. Nonetheless, the new model made sense of a lot of troubling observations and allowed the science of astronomy to race ahead so, after a great deal of snapping and snarling, the old fogeys were eventually shoved aside. This appears to be generally true. Bishop Niels Steensen showed that the earth is ancient and that fossils are the remains of animals that no longer exist, which upset the creationists. The great Louis Pasteur showed how sicknesses were caused by microscopically small bugs, not by noxious vapours rising from swamps. Darwin, of course, turned biology upside down but there were so many others: Marie Curie’s work on radioactivity, Einstein’s relativity, the idea of continental drift, etc. Which brings us to psychiatry.

As you know, psychiatry wants to be seen as a normal part of today’s scientific medicine. Mainstream medicine, however, is firmly fixed in mainstream science which says that we can’t talk about unobservables. If it can’t be seen and measured and duplicated, it isn’t the province of science. Psychiatry wants to deal with the mind. The mind can’t be seen or measured, therefore the mind with all its emotions and mixed up beliefs is not the province of science. Impasse. Psychiatry’s escape from this trap is to say: “Aha, but we’re not really talking about the mind. It may sound as though we are but we’re actually talking about the brain.” Everything that makes up a human mind, emotions, beliefs and the like, is stripped out of what has been called their “clinical neuroscience,” leaving only a shell of a person waiting for somebody to do something to his brain to bring life back to normal.

Instead of focussing on the person, psychiatry pushes ahead on two fronts. The first and oldest is to find some sort of physical remedy to kickstart the brain, to reboot it to normal mode. The history of all the blind poking to find a physical cure for mental disorder is simply chilling [2] but that doesn’t slow anybody. The belief “Mental disease/disorder is brain disease/disorder” comes first, it dictates the research program: “If mental disorder is brain disorder, there must be a physical cure. OK, let’s find it.” So they start searching, but they can only search using the available technology. In fact, all psychiatric drugs have been discovered by chance. One episode that should have more attention was pushed by a financier, not psychiatrists. Jack Dreyfus (1913-2009) was one of the first to develop mutual funds and became extremely wealthy. In about 1966, his GP prescribed the anticonvulsant drug, phenytoin (Dilantin), even though Dreyfus wasn’t epileptic. Instead, he had a truly filthy temper and exploded in rage at anybody and everybody, so perhaps the GP was getting a bit desperate.

Phenytoin is a powerfully sedating drug which numbs emotions. Dreyfus was delighted with this and wrote a book which he published and sent to many thousands of doctors throughout the US. From this came the idea of using anticonvulsants for what is called bipolar disorder. Phenytoin is fairly toxic so they soon started using carbamazepine then grabbed valproate when it was released and the rest is history. There’s no justification for this; it quietened the psychopathic Dreyfus so nw everybody gets it. The entire history of psychiatric drugs follows this tradition; something seems to work, therefore it is widely used and after the event, people manufacture a story about how it works. The so-called serotonin hypothesis of depression is another example, now debunked [3].

Shock treatment, of course, were developed in the search for something that would cause widespread low-grade brain damage. It was believed, on no evidence as all, that brain damage was protective against psychosis, and since seizures produced low grade brain damage, therefore seizures should protect against psychosis. Hence ECT and all the other electrical and magnetic toys that are used to make money from misery. That’s one of psychiatry’s two fronts. The other is to find something in the brain that would qualify as a “cause” of mental disorder.

Sixty years ago or more, it was all chemicals and electrical impulses because that was the limit of the technology. In the 1950s, somebody decided that people with schizophrenia were secreting a toxic chemical; after a bit of searching, they found a blue chemical which was named taraxein. If they gave it to spiders, they weaved misshapen webs; if they gave it to prisoners, they became psychotic. This had a huge impact, everybody was terribly excited but it soon emerged that nobody could replicate their results. Eventually, it was shown that their method was leaching a chemical out of their plastic laboratory equipment, so that idea fell in a heap. Another researcher decided that people with psychosis were having seizures in a deep brain structure called the nucleus accumbens; he was fond of sticking needles deep into brains to record the EEG patterns but that as too dangerous so it didn’t go far.

Technology has advanced considerably since then, far beyond mere chemicals and brain waves. Molecular genomics is the frontier, so that’s where eager psychiatrists gravitate. When the human genome project was finally published, nearly 25 years ago, everybody predicted that this would be the greatest breakthrough of all time, it would give us the secrets of mental disorder and how to make drugs to correct it. After that, psychiatry would be simply tidying the bookcases. Needless to say, it didn’t happen so genomic research in psychiatry is quietly sliding from centrestage, preparatory to being whisked into the memory hole along with taraxein and iced water therapy.

A recent paper on the genetics of depression starts: “Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating neuropsychiatric disease associated with high risk of death by suicide …” [4]. Firstly, that tells us what they’re thinking: “It’s all biology.” The term ‘neuropsychiatric’ has absolutely no meaning, it’s just a way of making the speaker sound important. And who says being depressed is a ‘disease’ in any meaningful sense of the word? Nobody. Anyway, they move on. Very large scale genetic studies of depression have revealed … nothing. The number of genetic loci thought to be involved in depression is approaching 750, meaning their individual contribution to feeling miserable is immeasurably small, if it exists at all. Compounding this, a lot of the potential influences are epigenetic, meaning they are minor changes outside the DNA that affect how it is expressed without altering the genetic code. That is, it’s all guesswork.

Given this gloomy outcome to decades of very expensive research (we’re talking tens of billions), this is all a little underwhelming but one thing about biological psychiatrists is they never give up. Neurotransmitters have failed us? Don’t worry, there’s a new technology called genomics, let’s try that. Oh dear, not looking encouraging is it? Don’t worry, they’ve discovered all these amazing inflammatory chemicals, let’s give them a bash. It won’t work. Depression is not the result of brain inflammation, it is the product of life experiences, some current and some long past but that has to be sorted out by talking to the sufferer.

So genomics is going nowhere fast, neurotransmitters have let us down, cytokines aren’t sparking much interest, and they’re even being forced to admit that their drugs are addictive. In the broader picture, the one Thomas Kuhn drew, what does this say? It says the contradictions are building up. After a hundred years or more, biological research in psychiatry is going nowhere. It has produced no interesting results and answered no significant questions about the nature or causes of mental disorder. Biological psychiatry cannot make any interesting predictions about the course or content of mental disorder; it has no basic theory [4, Chap. 2]; there are no fancy new drugs in the pipeline so all the manufacturers can do is repackage old stuff and get their friends in admin to issue a new licence; and the more treatment people get, the worse the outcome. At this stage, after biologists have held centre stage for well over half a century, it’s time to call a halt.

What we require of biological psychiatrists is a statement from them as to when they will give up and admit they’ve been on the wrong path. If they don’t do give that, they are not practising science, they are ideologues. Which we know anyway but is there any chance of this happening, any chance of them standing back to give somebody else a go? No way. The whole process of research in psychiatry has been dictated by the sorts of people who put RFK Jr in the driver’s seat. Bean counters have replaced people with experience and imagination. Massive surveys by questionnaire have replaced in-depth understanding of individuals, and for researchers, computation has replaced contemplation.

The people running psychiatry today are entrepreneurs, busy people who dart from one meeting to the next grants application by way of jetting off to present the same paper at a different conference. They make money, build networks of influence, trade favours, fast track their friends and, by controlling the publishing industry, quietly sabotage any ideas they don’t like. They are, in fact, the result of forcing the study of mental disorder into the procrustean neoliberal economic model, of discarding such wishy-washy concepts as “mental distress” in favour of the world of mission statements and key outcome parameters, budgets and time lines, corporate plans and human resource units.

Biological psychiatry is reaching the end of the line. A revolution is due. But don’t think change is going to come from within the psychiatric establishment. People who have committed themselves for 20 or 30 years to a particular “vision” of mental disorder will not wake up one day and say “Looks as though we’ve been completely wrong all these years. Why don’t we go back and talk to people about their mental lives?” That doesn’t happen. There was an opportunity a year ago when Kennedy was appointed to his job. He could have said to the director of NIMH: “Can you let me have a copy of your concept of mind and your model of mental disorder, and why you believe biology will tell us all we need to know about mental disorder? After all the money you’ve spent, you must have this somewhere, just slip it on my desk tomorrow, thanks, ” He could have said that and there would have been a long, embarrassed silence followed by lots of feet shuffling because they don’t have it. They’ve never bothered. That’s like NASA not having a plan of where the moon is or how they’re going to reach it but spending heaps on what they’re going to do when they get there. Meantime, Kennedy has spent his time wrecking things that can’t be replaced, so there’s little reason to believe change will come from him. And unless he or somebody like him applies the screws, there’s no chance of revolutionary change coming from the mainstream. Lord Lister (1827-1912) said:

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.

He could have been talking about biological psychiatrists. Time for a big change.

References:

1. Kuhn TS (1962/1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2^nd Edition, 1970. Chicago, Ill: University Press (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 2, No. 2).

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

3. Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R.E., Stockmann, T. et al. (2022) The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry Published online July 20th 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0

4. Zallar LJ, Dupont MB (2026), Brain and Blood Biomarkers of Major Depressive Disorder. A Systematic Review. JAMA Psychiatry. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2025.4613

****

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.

****

We’re all familiar with Orwell’s description of the total state in 1984, how it maintained power by controlling what people were told. Winston Smith’s job in the archives meant constantly revising and rewriting history so that people could only know what the Party wanted them to know:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and every street and every building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right … Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

I regard Orwell as the greatest writer of the 20^th Century, right up there with Shakespeare in the pantheon, because he was able to pick the important points and put them in clear and unforgetable prose. It’s just over 76 years since he died: what would he make of the present? I think he would look at today’s headlines from London and say: “Didn’t I tell you?”

Britain on ‘collision course’ with Russia, head of Army warns. General Sir Roly Walker says Putin is on a war footing and it is imperative UK continues to rearm (Telegraph, Feb 24).

Britain almost on WWIII ‘frontline’ says Armed Forces Minister. UK is already ‘battling’ frontlines against Russia as the world looks terrifyingly similar to pre-WWII global war build-up, warns Armed Forces Minister and war veteran (Mirror, Feb 24).

Chief of the General Staff warns UK is on a ‘collision course with Russia’. Four years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Britain’s top soldier has issued one of the starkest warnings yet about the future of European security (London Business News, Feb 24).

Russian invasion of Ukraine shares ‘similarities’ with run-up to Second World War, armed forces minister says. Al Carns, a former special forces colonel in the Royal Marines, said Ukraine is on the frontline of Europe’s defences as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale onslaught enters its fifth year (Sky News Feb 24)..

NATO chief warns of ‘inevitable’ war with Russia as ‘relentless’ troop deployment looms (Daily Express US Feb.24).

That’s pretty scary: according to the experts, war with Russia is “inevitable” so should everybody start digging trenches in their gardens and dust off their gasmasks? That same day, we see a report in the Guardian mocking Russia’s military in Ukraine:

Four years into Ukraine invasion, Russia’s gains are small, while Kyiv remains resilient. With the Russian military performing poorly, Ukraine is clarifying strategy and pushing back with modest success … Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth grim year, has already gone on longer than the entire fight on the eastern front in the second world war. The Soviets marched from the gates of Leningrad to Berlin in a little over 15 months in 1944-45; today the Russian rate of gain in Pokrovsk in Ukraine is 70 metres a day, in Kupiansk, 23 metres … The gains are trivial, given Ukraine’s size, amounting to 1,865 sq miles 4,800km2 during 2025 (about 0.8% of the country) …The diplomatic misdirection demonstrates how poorly Russia’s military is performing.

Two totally contradictory stories. One shrieks “TheRussiansarecomingTheRussians arecoming, quick, get more guns and bombers and nuclear subs…” while the other says (equally unrealistically) “The Russians are totally useless and about to fall apart.” Meantime, over in Godzone, the self-appointed “president of peace” and claimant on the Nobel Peace Prize has amassed a “mighty armada, the biggest and most beautiful armada the world has ever seen” and is making noises like “Looks like we’ll have to invade Iran to stop them getting the bomb” because they’re “a week away from getting the bomb” even though (a) Trump tore up the JCPOA to prevent it in 2018, (b) their (tiny) civil nuclear program was “totally obliterated” in the unprovoked and illegal bombing raids last June, (c) the Ayatollah has repeatedly said nuclear weapons are a crime in Islam and they will never pursue them, and (d) they’ve been a week away from a bomb for nearly 25 years. Everything faded into mist, the lie became truth.

In 1945, Orwell published Notes on Nationalism, an essay exploring what he saw as widespread but very dangerous political drives. Writing just as the war against fascism was ending, he saw common elements in Nazism and Stalinism, in religious extremism and in atheism, pacifism and aggressive nationalism, Zionism and in racism. These elements he called ‘nationalism,’ although he was aware it wasn’t a good term. In particular, he saw the struggle to get to the top, to dominate and crush the opposition as a universal human drive which we have to recognise and deal with if we wish to avoid catastophe:

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Replace his word ‘nationalism’ with ‘Narcisso-Fascism’ and we’re talking the same language. He knew his opinions would be unpopular but that never bothered him much. He wasn’t so much concerned with the recently vanquished European brand of fascism as with what we would now call Little England Fascism, of both right and left wings:

As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort … But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes.

Le fasciste, c’est moi. The drive to dominate is universal but why? As Orwell recognised, political theory can’t answer this question. In order to explain our urge to be No. 1, we have to leave politics and move to a more fundamental level. We now know the drive is genetically hard-wired into us, working at the hormonal level to control our behaviour in ways which are so much part of us that most of the time, we don’t even recognise them. Because being on top feels so much better than being pushed down the ladder, we automatically form ourselves into dominance hierarchies. This training starts very early and never lets up. Kindergarten and school, business, sport, religion, police and military, entertainment and above all, politics, are all about competing to get to the top by all possible means. We may say to our children “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, just play the game,” but we don’t mean it. Our child wins a ribbon at sport and we jump up and down and tell everybody. Our team wins the competition and we dance around cheering and laughing. Our party wins the election and we celebrate for days. Winning is ecstasy, everybody loves a winner and wants to join in. It’s exactly the same process in humans, in baboons, in dogs in the street, elephant seals, lizards, birds, you name it, we’re all hooked on the same cocktail of hormones.

Trouble is, winning may be ecstasy but on the other side of the coin, defeat, is misery. For every cheering winner, there’s a sullen and resentful loser plotting vengeance. Just as we will compete strenuously to beat the other side because winning feels so good, so we will also resist because losing feels so bad. In fact, losing and being oppressed feels so bad that, very often, people will put their lives on the line to resist. It’s called war, and it is at this point that politics has to give way to psychology. Readers will be aware that I believe the economic ideology called “neoliberalism” is utter rubbish as it is based on a false model of human psychology. It’s simply a plan to transfer as much wealth as possible from the 99% to the 1% and, from their point of view, it’s been a staggering success. We see the same flaw in mainstream political theories, e.g. Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism and Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamics. While these describe what goes on between nations, they can’t explain it because they are not built on a theory of psychology.

To explain international aggression, we have to drop from the national or macro level, to the individual or micro level. Why are nations aggressively trying to dominate each other, e.g. the US and Israel launching yet another unprovoked attack on Iran? Because individuals like to be dominant, it’s immensely exciting to be Top Dog. Why don’t the Iranians roll over and say “Come on in, take what you want, we’ll manage with the leftovers”? Same reason as you wouldn’t allow a group of strangers to move into your home and shove you out the back. Mearsheimer says: “International relations are anarchic, therefore nations must struggle to gain local hegemony to safeguard their interests.” Unfortunately, because Mearsheimer and all the other “experts” put so much emphasis on nations trying to exert “hegemony,” they fail to see that international relations are anarchic because nations are trying to dominate each other. The drive to dominate comes first, the chaos and anarchy is secondary. His view licenses the anarchy, he justifies it. Well, maybe he doesn’t personally but people grab his ideas and shout: “Look, the expert says it’s all chaos out there so we’d better arm ourselves and get in first.”

Just to complete the story, Turchin says that warfare has turned humans into cooperators. His book Ultra Society from 2015 is subtitled: How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on earth [1]. Really? We’re cooperating on preventing global warming? Cooperating on restricting arms sales to civil wars? Cooperating on preventing sexual trafficking of women and children? Eliminating the vast drug industry? What crap. We don’t cooperate at all, we just form bigger and more powerful dominance hierarchies and start attacking (I’ve just submitted a paper to Turchin’s journal pointing out the errors in his approach but expect it won’t get far).

All of this counts. In Britain, the government is trying to scare people to stop spending money on their failing social services in order to buy hugely expensive weapons that will never be used but will inevitably provoke an equal and opposite response from this week’s enemy. Similarly, Trump and his busload of clowns are talking themselves into yet another catastrophic war; and Israel announces that it intends to take almost the entire Middle East for itself. Oh, you didn’t see that? Yes, in a carefully stage-managed “slip,” the US ambassador to Israel, the Christian nationalist (racist) and ultraZionist (fascist), Mike Huckabee, gave notice that Israel is dead set on implementing its plan for “Greater Israel,” i.e. to steal any land where, according to their mythology, a Jewish foot may once have trod. This includes most of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, all of Kuwait and Jordan, one third of Saudi Arabia and over half of Egypt. The original Zionist plan for Palestine, from the 1890s, was to force at least half the indigenous population out and keep the rest as agricultural and industrial labourers. As recently as 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosel (1920-2013), former chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party said:

Goyim (gentiles) were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world, only to serve the People of Israel … Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.

Great life if you can get it but this time, their plans are a bit bigger. The population of those countries is somewhere about 250million in all; they are supposed to sit passively by while a gang of 7million Europeans takes their prime agricultural land, their oil fields and industries and many of their ancient cities and … and what? The plan, it seems, is to bulldoze all the Islamic monuments and build some sort of theocratic state according to classic Judaism, there to await their messiah. In some branches of ultra-extremist Judaism, when the Messiah arrives, Jews will rule the world for a while, then they will go to heaven and the rest of us will burn in hell for eternity. That’s their plan.

You have to understand that, even though he is a total idiot and therefore very dangerous (Idiot: a person who, coming across evidence that contradicts his beliefs, discards the evidence and keeps his beliefs), Huckabee didn’t make this up. This plan has been around a long time, I probably first heard of it in 1982, in the aftermath of the Israeli-engineered slaughters in the Palestinian refugee camps in Shatila and Sabra. Huckabee is as one with both the Zionist lobby in the US and with his Israeli hosts, and the more extreme they are, the more he likes them. He did not speak out of turn, he simply repeated what he has been hearing for years, possibly decades.

Under the influence of their fanatical religious mania, the extremists in Israel think they can forcibly displace perhaps 150million people and all will be well. The “Arabs” will simply take their donkeys and camels and kids and off they’ll go, because, as the current Israeli minister for national security, one Itamar Ben Gvir, says, “Jews are above the law.” This truly despicable human being is of much the same character as Reinhard Heydrich and must not be dismissed as the buffoon he usually seems to be. He has at least 8 convictions for terrorist activities and is closely allied with Kahane Chai, the only declared Jewish terrorist group in the US. However, he is immensely powerful in Israel and has millions of fanatical followers in Israel and in the diaspora. He meets regularly with Huckabee, who is very close to Trump (not a friend, Trump doesn’t do friends).

If the ultraZionists think the other 850million Muslims in the world, in North Africa, Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in Iran, the Gulf countries, Indonesia, etc. will sit quietly by while this plan is enacted, they are completely off their heads. They should have listened to their first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who said:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That’s natural: we’ve taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? [2, p99]

Ben Gurion loathed Palestinians: “Arabs are barbarians ... (they) only understand force.” Nahum Goldmann, one of the prime architects of the modern Israeli state, said of him:

(He was) a very able and cunning diplomat and politician, really one of the best I have ever come across. A promise from him was quite worthless. He did not hesitate to promise one thing and then do the opposite. He was absolutely unscrupulous… he never had his fill of power… he only wanted to dominate [2, p94].

He only wanted to dominate. Precisely. That is the central thesis of Narcisso-Fascism: we love to dominate because it feels so damned good. Sure, we dress it up in high-sounding words, we say God is leading us or the light of democracy or history, or Our race deserves to lead, or We are the exceptional nation, but that’s only window-dressing to make the old ladies at home feel good while their sons and grandsons are being blown to bits on some far distant shore, because the reality of domination is clear. As Orwell said: Ich bin der Faschist. I am the fascist. The fascist is in me. In Hebrew, אני הפשיסט, ani hafshist.

The idea of Greater Israel has been bouncing around in Zionist circles for probably a hundred years but Huckabee has been used to float it in public to see what sort of response it gets. If it provokes fury, they’ll shelve it for perhaps another hundred years but if nobody says much, they’ll press ahead with it. The first step will be to reduce Iran to rubble before moving on to the major Sunni powers, Egypt and Turkey. So far, only the Muslim world has reacted badly, which is progress because they’ve long been enablers of the Zionist project (e.g. encouraging the US to attack Iran, selling oil to Israel, sabotaging resistance groups, financing ISIS, etc). As a group, the West has reacted to this truly insane idea much as they reacted to Hitler’s plan [3, Chap. 14, esp. pp396-98], first published in Mein Kampf in 1925, to invade the USSR and reduce the Slavic populations to helotry: “Ho hum,” they yawned, “there’s too many of them anyway. Do be darling and pass me another cucumber sandwich.” But it won’t work. The Zionists may defeat the Palestinians and Arab armies, they may succeed in driving huge numbers of people off their traditional lands and so on but they’re only setting up trouble for themselves.

It’s usually said that women are more affected by hormonal swings than men but there’s no truth in that. The hormonal drive to dominate is much stronger in males than females; conversely, males are much more affected by defeat than females. If they’re beaten at tennis or cricket, they drop their balls and slink off. But where women don’t usually fight so insanely to get themselves to the top, they have another impetus to resist oppression, called children. Women may not be so obsessed with their football team winning (“Oh for heaven’s sake, calm down, it’s only a game.” “Are you mad, woman? This is the bloody grand final and we’re down”) but they never get over oppression. They’re not so much worried about being oppressed themselves, they tend to find ways of coping but on one point they are implacable: they want their children to reach their full potential. Quietly and without a fuss they will fight any system that prevents that. If you startle a lone female bear, she’ll run off but if you threaten her cubs, look out.

In Gaza today, mothers know that just a few kilometres to the north, happy healthy children wake after a good night’s sleep, have a solid breakfast, dress in clean clothes and walk safely to a free school with sports fields, free lunches, free health care and so on. Then they look at their own children sitting under a torn and flapping tent, their bare feet caked in mud contaminated with raw sewage, whimpering miserably because they had no sleep due to gunfire and bombs dropping nearby, cold and hungry, bitten by insects and weakened by worms, with no schooling for years and no schools left standing, no health care, knowing that even searching for a few sticks for a fire to cook some porridge will attract the snipers, and they will not forget. Maybe they would forgive losing their home, their own health and their future, even their parents and husbands but they will not forgive somebody doing it to their children. Why should they?

So the women of the Muslim world, and the women of the true Christian world (not the dupes in the heresies), and Hindu and Buddhist and everything else, have to come together and speak as one: This madness has to stop. The world can no longer be held to ransom by a few religious maniacs and their vile, corrupt, child-abusing friends in the West who are obsessed with the hormonal rush that comes from crushing people underfoot. Today, there is no place for supremacism. The entire political process in the West has to be turned around but change will not come from the people who think only in terms of competing and fighting to get to the top at any cost. Change will not come from the Trumps and Starmers and Albaneses and Sisis and Putins and Netanyahus and the royals and bankers and industrialists and all the rest of the Epstein class. They’ve been steeped in the idea of competition since infancy, they can’t think in non-competitive terms so they’re a lost cause. As for all the men who feel guilty that they’re not higher up the ladder, there’s hope still but real change will be generational. It will start early in life by teaching children that they can be happy and productive without being on top. The program to flatten dominance hierarchies starts early: get rid of all the competitions in schools, stop pushing children into sport and music competitions, just let them learn to play the game or the piano for enjoyment, without having to win.

Today’s evil and corrupt ruling class, the Trumps and Mandelsons and Epsteins and so many others, have to be shoved aside and replaced by people who believe that humans can live peaceably and profitably together without somebody standing over them with a gun. Be warned: they won’t go voluntarily. Yes, it will require changes in the way we run our lives but if we don’t start this process very soon, we’re finished. If Israel thinks it can push 200million people into the desert so it can fulfill its grandiose mythological fantasies, it needs to be shown in the clearest of terms that it can’t. There is no room in the world today for supremacism, including Zionist supremacism. And if that’s antisemitic, I wear the badge with pride.

References:

1. Turchin, P. 2025. Ultrasociety. How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators o earth. Beresta Books.

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

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

****

John Read is professor of psychology at University of East London but is less interested in psychology’s traditional focus on “rats and stats” than on what psychiatrists are doing. In particular, he studies ECT: has it been researched properly, is it effective, how do people react to it, and so on. Recently, he and his team have published a series of papers based on a large international survey of people who have received ECT and their families. They have recently published another on the perceived positive and negative effects [1], and one of the team has published an article on MIA. This was not your usual survey which tells people what answers they’re allowed to give but simply asked:

‘Please name up to three positive effects of your ECT, if any’ and

‘Please name up to three negative effects of your ECT, if any’.

3% of the responses reported only beneficial effects, such as improved mood, or reduction in suicidal ideas or psychotic symptoms. 46% reported a mix of positive and negative effects but 51% reported only negative effects. In all, 97% reported some adverse effects of the ECT. The paper, which is free to download (link below), gives many examples of how people felt their lives were made worse. The important point here is that, as reported a few months ago, nearly half of people said that following ECT, their quality of life was “much worse” or “very much worse” [2]. This is a problem as the traditional medical oath says: Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. According to the “consumers” of ECT, it does a lot of harm such as wiping out people’s memories of their childhood or, much worse, erasing their memories of their children’s childhoods. Why is it still used? In my view, the answer to that is not a matter of science but of the sociology of psychiatry [3; this paper includes all the following figures].

ECT is widely used in Australia, for example, the state of Queensland, population 5.5million, uses more ECT than the England-Wales division of the UK NHS, population about 55million. In the UK, ECT usage has declined by 90% since 1980; in Australia, it is going up and up, including nearly doubling in West Australia in the 10 years to 2016. ECT is given for “treatment resistant depression” or as an emergency, to save life or sanity. Most of it is given in private practice, mainly to middle-aged, middle class women with private insurance. They just happen to be the group with the lowest suicide rate; the group with the highest rate, young men, hardly get any ECT. They also have the lowest rate of private health insurance. This is all justified by the RANZCP which has a very active section who think mental trouble is best managed by electricity. The college itself says ECT is:

Safe; effective; essential; irreplaceable; an established and valuable treatment that should always be available when clinically indicated; important and necessary treatment; an injustice if unavailable; doesn’t cause brain damage; no long-term ill effects; the only alternative for many patients; and much of the opposition to ECT is based on fear and irrational thinking, not science [3].

Phew. No wonder it’s used so freely in Australia and parts of the US but what about the rest of the world, groping in the darkness of prescientific thinking? The key to answering that lies in a large-scale review published in 2012 [4] which charted how ECT is used worldwide. The first and most important point is that there are places in the world where it is banned. According to the RANZCP, they’ve been overwhelmed by fear and irrational unscientific thinking but in fact, they refute everything the college claims for ECT. There are also lots of places in the world, some of them such as Norway and Italy quite civilised, where it is severely restricted or simply not available without considerable inconvenience, so people don’t bother. They muddle along somehow. In places where it is used, there are always huge differences from one region to another or even one part of a city to another. The state of Victoria, for example, uses ECT 600% more than New Zealand, which has the same climate and exactly the same demography in all respects. The only significant difference is that New Zealand has practically no private psychiatrists.

Based on the results of the survey by Read and his team, there is no doubt that if ECT were invented today and submitted to proper testing, which it never has been, it would not be approved so why is it still used? Psychiatrists can choose from only three conceivable justifications for using ECT. They may say:

1. I believe all mental disorder is physical in nature and therefore requires physical treatment, such as drugs or ECT; or

2. I have reached the limit of my skill set; I don’t know what else to do; or

3. It pays well.

Option (1), that mental disorder is all physical, is not only an unproven ideology, there are convincing reasons to believe it can’t be true, it is logically contradictory [5]. Option (2) flows from the first, in that psychiatrists with little training or experience in psychotherapy (most of the moderns) will quickly run out of ideas and will reach for the electrodes. Option (3), that the money is unbeatable, is a winner. For psychiatrists in private practice, ECT is extremely lucrative. They can pull in up to AU$250 for something that takes about 5 minutes, most of which is spent waiting while the rest requires no more intellectual effort than opening a can of beer. A dozen of those on a Monday morning gets the week off to a great start.

Psychiatry’s “institution” of ECT relies on nobody doing the proper studies to justify it. Why haven’t they been done? Because only a “true believer” will want to go to all the trouble of applying for a grant and setting up a large-scale, multi-centre, long term (20 years) survey to decide whether we need ECT or not. However, true believers shape the studies to deliver the results they want. To make it worse, all the people sitting on the grants committees and the ethics committees and so on are true believers. They’re like the people who get themselves on mental health tribunals: they’re all committed to the idea that “mental people” have to be treated firmly for their own good, even where it means locking them up long term and holding them down for their “treatment.” The fact that, as Read’s group showed, for a sizeable proportion of people, this is seriously traumatising, not to mention degrading and humiliating, doesn’t get a mention: if they don’t want treatment, that just proves how deranged they are. If they complain, they obviously need more, as a Sydney anaesthetist reported:

The consequences (of ECT) were dire. Retrograde memory loss was profound. I was devastated and searched for answers where my treating doctors could give none.... I was left then to claw back a life only half remembered [6].

According to the RANZCP, the good doctor’s complaints are due to fearful, irrational and unscientific thinking and should be ignored.

There is no other field in medicine, or indeed in science as a whole, that can get away with this sort of thing, which leads to the crucial point: how do they do it? How can they say it doesn’t cause brain damage and has no long-term ill-effects when 49% of people say it made their lives “much worse or very much worse”? This is unbelievable but it takes us out of the field of ordinary science into questions of what psychiatrists are thinking, i.e. the sociology of psychiatry and its philosophical underpinnings. Thus it was with considerable interest last week, that I tuned into a seminar on philosophy and psychiatry run by the college’s section on philosophy. It featured two speakers from the UK, a professor of philosophy and psychiatry and a researcher, as well as one psychiatrist from NZ and one from WA on the topic “Philosophy - and why philosophy now for psychiatrists.” It consisted of a half hour ramble from the professor, with the other speakers adding bits here and there, on how interesting philosophy is and how psychiatry is leading the field in introducing something called “values-based practice.” He illustrated what this meant by a long story about a lady who was booked for a knee replacement but didn’t end up getting it because she wanted her mobility restored whereas the operation is good for pain relief but not mobility, so she decided she would rather put up with the pain which was then successfully treated with physio and tablets.

This says that what patients believe and want for their lives should be taken into account, a partner, as it were, to what is called “evidence-based practice.” The evidence base is the scientific stuff, i.e. what works and doesn’t work, and why. This has to be integrated with what could be called people’s “irrational fears and unscientific thinking” about mental disorder. There is a lengthy and highly biased editorial from nearly 20yrs ago announcing the birth of this hybrid which concludes:

Psychiatry, therefore, in being first in the field with policy, training, and research developments in values-based practice as an essential partner to evidence-based practice, is leading the way towards a medicine for the 21st century that is both firmly science-based and also genuinely patient-centered [7].

Great. Perhaps this is a step along the path leading away from coercive, custodial treatment toward what the UN Commission for Human Rights calls “rights-based practice.” That it, we have to get rid of all coercion in psychiatry and base our practice on people’s human rights [8]. Except psychiatrists don’t want it [9]. In fact, they get very angry when people talk about closing the nuthouses and banning ECT [10] and allowing patients to choose what treatment they want and who they see. Choose who they see? What next?

I sat through 75 minutes of this “seminar” but all we were told is how exciting and stimulating philosophy is and how it leads to lots of joyous discussions with colleagues on the delights of exploring ideas such as integrating what is called “lived experience” into mainstream psychiatry (i.e. listening to people who have been on the receiving end). There was none of what we might call “philosophising,” i.e asking sticky questions and demanding answers. My experience of trying this is that you will get kicked out of the meetings. After clicking off the seminar, I was reminded of a cartoon in Punch many years ago, where a man, obviously a common council worker, was standing at a counter while a very glamorous young thing stared imperiously at him around a sumptuous drape. “How dare you come into this boutique and shout ‘Shop’?” she demanded. Now I understand how psychiatrists who claim to be interested in philosophy are actually hostile to sticky questions, as in “How dare you come into our charming civilised meeting and shout ‘Bullshit’?” They like the idea of listening to patients complain about their treatment, they just don’t like patients who complain. They like the idea of integrating patients’ values into their treatment, as long as the patient’s values are the same as the psychiatrist’s. They like the idea of a “rational, evidence-based scientific psychiatry” as long as they get to define what evidence is scientific and what is the product of fearful and irrational antipsychiatry propaganda. That’s not philosophy as I was taught it. Moreover, the idea that philosophy is joyous and exciting and stimulating is pure crap. People who say that sort of thing don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s as Orwell said of writing:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand (From Why I Write, in Decline of the English Murder).

He could have been talking of philosophy: it’s horrible, drives you mad, forces you to stay up late searching through ancient books or reading the latest bit of drivel from some pretty face who makes squillions on the lecture circuit spouting uplifting tosh that appeals to the insecure and self-indulgent, just so you can show where he’s completely wrong, if not a charlatan. Like Deepak Chopra, who has just been defenestrated in the Epstein fallout (I love it, always thought he was a crook). Philosophy is as they say in the gym: No pain, no gain.

A philosophy seminar is like a boxing match: you either come out feeling bruised and battered with a fleeting sense of victory, or you come out bruised and battered and defeated, plotting vengeance. There’s no in between, no shades of grey. For example, in the college’s warm little bubble of mutual back-scratching, was there any discussion of how human values are to be reconciled with psychiatry’s positivist base, which says that values are metaphysical rubbish and can be ignored? Nope. If a patient doesn’t want ECT, how is that reconciled with his or mostly her right to refuse it? No mention but we know she’ll get it anyway. Any thought as to how Australian psychiatry is driven by something called the biopsychosocial model, the one that doesn’t actually exist? Crickets. And the biomedical model, what about that? Oh, we’ve just run out of time, have we? We always do.

I could go on but it gets boring. The whole point of what the chair called an interesting and informative and stimulating seminar is not to cause anybody your actual discomfort but to reassure each other that yes, we’re so civilised and so aware, we can tell our shiraz from our merlot while talking vaguely of human rights. That’s not critical analysis. Terms like “excellent work” and “fascinating and informative” are code for anodyne, non-threatening bilge that gives everybody the warm fuzzies and replaces the bedtime mug of Milo. Non-threatening is the operative term. Psychiatrists do not like threatening philosophy. Socrates’ gruesome end we know about; Spinoza was declared dead by his community and nearly ended up that way; Descartes fled to escape the Pope’s guardians of virtue; Voltaire was chucked in the slammer half a dozen times for insulting royalty with his questions … It reminds me of another cartoon, this one from Playboy long ago, the “Grandma” series. Grandma is lying déshabillé on a chaise while a rather angry young man looks down at her. “So whaddayer want, sonny?” she asks coquettishly. “Good taste or good grandma?” That’s what these people have to answer: “So whaddayer want, mate? Good taste or good philosophy? Take yer pick coz yer won’t get both in the same sentence.” We know what they’ll say: Let’s talk the talk but (shudder) don’t make us walk the walk. We love to talk about human rights and values in abstract but you’ll still get the ECT you don’t want.

References:

1. Read J et al (2026). The self-reported positive and negative effects of electroconvulsive therapy: an international survey. Journal of Affective Disorders Reports. 24:i0i008. At https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadr.2025.101008

2. Read J, Arnold C (2017). Is Electroconvulsive Therapy for Depression More Effective Than Placebo? A Systematic Review of Studies Since 2009. Eth. Hum. Psychol. Psychiat. 19: 5-23.

3. McLaren N (2017). Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Critical Perspective. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 19: 91-104. DOI: 10.1891/1559-4343.19.2.91.

4. Leiknes, K.A., Jarosh-von Schweder, L., Hoie, B. (2012). Contemporary use and practice of electroconvulsive therapy worldwide. Brain and Behavior. 2(3): 283–344. doi: 10.1002/brb3.37

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

6. McPhee, I. (2009). When doctors get sick. Radius (Sydney University), Autumn 2009: 10-13. At: http://sydney.edu.au/medicine/news/pubs/radiuscontents/2009/March/22_1_coverstory.pdf

7. Fulford KWM (2008). Editorial: Values-Based Practice: A New Partner to Evidence-Based Practice and A First for Psychiatry? Mens Sana Monogr. 2008 Jan-Dec;6(1):10–21. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3190543/

8. UN OHCHR/WHO (2023): Mental health, human rights and legislation: guidance and practice. Geneva: WHO/UNHCR. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240080737

9. Hickie, I, (2019). Building the social, economic, legal, and health-care foundations for “Contributing Lives and Thriving Communities”. The Lancet Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30378-5

10. Abrams, R. (2000). Letter: Use of ECT in Italy. American Journal of Psychiatry. 157: 840.

****

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.

****

At the recent Munich Security Conference, the Australian deputy prime minister and minister for defence, Richard Marles, stood in front of the large audience of international bigwigs and announced that the current military expansion in China is the biggest seen in the world since World War II. In a commentary, Brisbane Prof. Warwick Powell provided detailed figures showing that everything Marles said is completely wrong. Since 1945, the US has been engaged in a vast military build-up that, at times, exceeded the total military outlays of the rest of the world combined. Now was Marles lying, or is he a fool? Answer: Probably not, and Yes. I would say he was engaged, as he usually is, not in lying but in what the late philosopher, Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023) of Princeton called “bullshitting” [1].

Frankfurt was an epistemologist, he studied what we can know, how we can know it, how to tell truth from falsity and other vital questions. The liar, he said, knows exactly what he is doing (and yes, there are female liars but we’ll stick to his terms). The liar knows the truth, he knows that his audience doesn’t know the truth but he doesn’t want them to know it so he feeds them some false information and does what he can to make sure they never learn the truth:

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...

I like that, it points to the precision required to be an effective liar. Bernard Madoff was an effective liar until the GFC overtook his lies. Trump is an ineffective liar but he meets criteria for Frankfurt’s other category, Bullshit. As Frankfurt said, not everybody who utters falseties is lying. A lot of people, especially politicians, are trying to influence the audience emotionally, so they simply fill the air with words without caring whether they’re true or false. Bullshit is “...more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.” Now in giving his speech, Marles had clearly not looked at any figures on military expenditure because he would have known that even today, the US is by far the biggest spender, eclipsing China, Russia and a few others combined. But Marles wasn’t interested in figures. His only concern was to sway the audience to believe that China is a real and present danger and we need to spend heaps on eye-wateringly expensive weapons so we can repel the latest version of Australia’s perennial fear, the “Yellow Peril.” Except now they’re Reds as well, which probably makes them orange.

Marles didn’t look at any figures because he doesn’t want them: his mind is made up and figures just get in the way. So he is a foolish bullshitter and, in my view, ipso facto unfit for government but that’s up to his electorate. Anyway, if we kicked out all the fools and bullshitters, there’d be very few people left in government. Have a look at Prof Powell’s article, it’s very good but in respect of American militarism, it raises a critically important question which he doesn’t address: WHY? Why does the US spend so much more on weapons than anybody else? What do they think it will get them, what’s their payoff? Right now, the US is positioning itself to attack Iran. Jeremy Scahill at DropSite News released a truly frightening article: “‘This is Not a Dress Rehearsal’: U.S. Engaged in Massive Military Buildup as Threat To Bomb Iran Grows” (scroll down below the large picture of ships at sea). Aggressive war is deemed the supreme international crime yet here we have the “president of peace” directing the world’s policeman to an unprovoked attack on a foreign country. WHY? WTF do these nuclear clowns think they’re doing? Well we know what they’re doing, same as they did in Venezuela and Iraq and Syria and Libya and so on: destroying the country so they can take its oil and sell the victims lots of expensive stuff and keep their weapons industry in business. Except Iran is perfectly happy to sell its oil at the going price, meaning about 2% of the cost of an invasion, so what’s their game?

The game is the same as Powell’s figures outlined: total world domination for no other reason than it feels so good being the colossus astride the world, laughing at every other country quaking in fear and lining up to kiss the American ass (it means kiss their arse, not their donkey). That is why the US is running its infrastructure into the ground while it maintains about twenty times as many foreign military bases as the rest of the world put together. It suits the power elite to terrorise small countries (Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Denmark and so many others) and push everybody else around even when it is clearly working against American interests, just because domination feels good. Power is its own reward. The question is: Should the world be run by what is essentially a national neurosis taking the form of a mafia standover racket? Obviously it shouldn’t, it should be run according to a set of mutually agreed rules but the one half-hearted attempt to do that after 1945 failed when the “rules-based international order” got in the way of the world’s hegemon. We are now careering* along with essentially no rules in place, where “The rich and powerful do what they will and the poor suffer what they must.”

Was it ever different? No, not really but there was a pretence where a ceasefire meant the stopping the shooting and not just fitting a silencer and keep firing. Now, Trump says out loud what the others did quietly, behind the scenes. Bush and Blair said it was essential to invade Iraq to destroy their “weapons of mass destruction” which could reach London in 45 minutes. There were no WMD and they knew it (in the years since as some sort of grand panjandrum of the Levant, Tony Blair has amassed a fortune of between £60-75million. Pounds. And that’s only what people can track, it doesn’t include what he has hidden offshore). Trump doesn’t bother with that, he just says “We want Greenland so we’ll either get it the easy way or the hard way but we’re going to have it.” Needless to say, this blasé attitude is causing waves of panic around the world.

As the Munich Conference showed (the latest one, as well as 1938), Europe is in disarray. At home, their industry is collapsing after the US blew up the Nordstream II pipeline, cutting off the cheap and reliable Russian natural gas that had powered their factories, forcing them to buy American gas at twice the price. To their north, Trump is threatening to invade Greenland, which is part of a European country. Out east, the US pushed Europe into war over Ukraine and is now threatening to walk away, leaving the European damsel alone in the house with an enraged Russian bear. Meantime, down on the southern flank, Israel is conducting its usual mayhem while refugees fleeing the chaos stream across the seas. So far, there’s no threat from the Azores to Europe’s west but it could come, it could come. Britain’s slow post-imperial collapse is gathering speed as they neglect social services in order to build new nuclear submarines to counter the “Russian threat.” France is France while the rest of the place is slowly congealing into a state of panicky paralytic inertia. Poor things, maybe the Indians will form a West Europe Company and take over, forcing Europeans to grow drugs to sell to the US in a reversal of Britain’s role in Asia (growing drugs in India to sell to China). Or maybe Europe could do something truly radical, like declare peace and end the stalemate.

Since birth, we’ve been raised on a diet of “Us Goodies vs Them Baddies,” but the core thesis of Narcisso-Fascism is that this is a curtain of bullshit held aloft by a scaffold of lies. The proper way to see human affairs is as a ceaseless ferment of one individual/ group/ nation or alliance trying to dominate another, thereby producing permanent instability with frequent dips into anarchy. As long as there have been humans, there has been a frenzy of humans trying to dominate and oppress other humans. This isn’t recent, it’s as old as Homo sapiens. Ötzi, the Neolithic man found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps from 5,300 years ago had an arrow head buried in his back. There is ample archaeological evidence going much further back to say that humans have always fought each other. Marx got it wrong: humans don’t fight to control resources so they can have a higher standard of living, they are happy to impoverish themselves by fighting just so they can dominate other humans. That’s all we need to know.

The foundational lie beneath the endless and hugely expensive politico-military drama of the past 80 years is that we, the noble and far-sighted, generous and caring West, stand firm in the face of the barbaric Red and Yellow hordes who, if we didn’t hold them back, would erupt from the Eurasian land mass and swarm over the civilised world, raping, murdering and pillaging all the way because barbaric Eurasian hordes. Decade after decade, we’ve had this view pumped at us without a moment’s break, that without the Pax Americana, we would all be in the gulag. That’s why the US has nearly 850 overseas military bases, to “contain” the communist/Russian/Chinese aggression and threat … but there isn’t a word of truth in it. The only reason the “baddies” are heavily armed is because they feel threatened. Right now, Iran is under direct threat of a massive bombing campaign intended to destroy their infrastructure and render this hot, dry country of 85million people ungovernable, if not uninhabitable. Questions on how Europe would cope with 40million destitute refugees have been left to another day.

Why is this happening? Why is nobody freaking out about it? We’re talking of war, people getting killed for nothing. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again but expecting a different result. Invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Syria and a dozen others have been catastrophes so why will this be different? Or is the US locked in some sort of collective insanity? We can answer that. This time will be different only in the sense that an invasion of Iran will be ten times worse than all the previous invasions put together. And yes, the US is indeed locked in some form of insanity, an unquestioned urge to dominate all other people at any cost. China is NOT a threat to Australia, we do not need nuclear submarines to defend ourselves against them as they are our biggest trading partner. The moment there is any sort of shooting with China, this country will be bankrupted and ruined, immediately, totally and irremediably.

Does Deputy Dog Richard Marles know this? No, I don’t think he does. He’s too stupid, he believes whatever bullshit the spy agencies put on his desk, the stuff that they collect from the Washington fax each morning and hand to him unread. The real cause is that the US is in high alarm that China is about to overtake them, so they’re forcing everybody to enlist in their “China Containment Policy” bullshit. And the world drifts mindlessly toward catastrophic war, as though nobody is at the controls. Well, they’re not. Nobody with any brains, that is. They’re locked in a self-reinforcing group think bubble where nobody asks: “Hey, do we actually need to dominate everybody? Can we be happy without being king dick? The Kiwis are happy without being Number One, so why can’t we?” That’s not going to happen, nobody is going to be the little boy who says the emperor is wearing no clothes. Nobody in the Washington Bubble, that is, so it has to come from elsewhere. What about Europe, home to democracy and civilised tea parties and all that? Why can’t the Europeans get together and announce:

Rightio, everybody, party’s over. Pick up your toys and go home, close your bases and stop threatening everybody while we sort out how to live in peace. We’ll bring Russia into the EU, as they wanted decades ago and Washington said No. You can leave Iran alone, they’re our neighbours so we’ll sort out any problems, you outsiders who don’t know history are only screwing things up. Stop arming Israel, put any war criminals behind bars and let the Middle East develop as it will.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. We are not given any evidence that China is a threat, we are only told that it is a mortal danger to us and we must not question this or we’re China dupes. We are not told why we must support Israel come what may, only that if we don’t, we are “antisemitic” and will lose our jobs, if not be sent to jail. We are not told how Russia is a threat to Europe, only that it is and must be resisted at all costs, up to and including nuclear war. Nobody has explained what Mr Putin would do with Europe if he overran it. In Ukraine, fighting a ramshackle and totally corrupt country that is being propped up by outsiders, Russia is advancing at about seventy metres a day, at huge cost in men and material. At this rate, it would take them a thousand years to reach the Atlantic, and 500 million Europeans are supposed to be scared of them? And what would Putin do if he woke up and found he was suddenly in charge of 60 million Italians? You can’t do that to him, he’s not a young man, the bloody Italians can’t even govern themselves let alone follow orders from Moscow. All this talk of “threats” is cloud cuckoo land, the self-deluded fever dreams of fanatics, religious cranks and racist crackpots who think they can’t have a life as Number Two in anything.

Today, Europe is in serious danger of economic and political collapse just because it has allowed itself to be pushed into constant confrontation with Russia. And China. And the Muslim world, and everybody else. The simple fact is that if Europe made peace with Russia and built a super-economy extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok by way of the Stans, even including Pyongyang, something like 900 million people would instantly be immeasurably better off. Combining European brains with Russian talent and resources would be unbeatable … and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it’s all about. That idea just is the stuff of American nightmares. For the power elite in the US, facing a Eurasian superpower would be like staring down into the sulphorous pits of hell. For a hundred years, Europe has been kept at daggers drawn with Russia, to prevent them forming a pan-European economy and dislodging the US from its perch. Can there be a Eurasian Union? Yes, it’s very easy. The Europeans have to stand in public and say:

We are not interested in fighting or confrontation. We want to live in peace. There are urgent problems we all need to deal with but we cannot do it while we are fighting each other. For all the wrongs we have done you, we apologise. We will never threaten you again and to prove it, we will start the process of disarmament. For the first time in your history, you do not have to look over your shoulder to the west. We’re on your side.

I can even tell them where to give this speech: right here, at the foot of this memorial in Volgograd, commemorating the 30million Soviet citizens who died in the 20^th Century’s fifth invasion of Russia, including four by the West. I think the nation of Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy would accept that; all they want is to be treated with respect and not forced into a position of subjugation. Because as much as the Americans and their toadies in the West are turned on by the thought of dominating the Slavic people, the Slavs (their very name means ‘slaves’) are absolutely determined not to be forced to kiss the American arse. They will fight every attempt to make them, and I’m on their side.

Right now, February 19^th, with two nuclear-armed aircraft carriers and a thousand planes cruising just outside Iranian waters, the world is teetering on the brink. All because of one dementing old man and 10,000 psychopathic sycophants who think they can get ahead by agreeing with him.

War is not a human necessity. Conflict is a political choice. If we don’t do better, we don’t have a future.

Reference:

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

****

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.