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

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In a truly bizarre incident in Queensland a few years ago, an 8yo diabetic child died after her parents withheld her insulin. They were members of a small religious group who believed in divine intervention, that she didn’t need the drug as she would be healed by faith and prayer. For days as the child sickened and finally died, they sang and prayed around her, even refusing to call police or ambulance when she had been dead for 24hrs as she wasn’t dead, just sleeping. All 14 adults have since been convicted of manslaughter. The leader of the group, whom the judge described as “a dangerous, highly manipulative individual” was sentenced to 13 yrs in prison while her parents, who made the decision to stop the insulin, got 14yrs. All the other members who were accomplices to her death were given between six and nine years to think about it.

Fortunately, this sort of thing is fairly rare in this country but not so in the US. Given its long history as a refuge for European heretics, it has a rich tradition of spawning cults of various sorts. Indeed, what’s a cult? There are various definitions but mostly they focus on the idea of a small group of people, usually following a charismatic leader who demands absolute loyalty to his ideas (most are men), be they original or his interpretations of standard texts. Members of the group are tightly bound to the leader and to each other and are mostly required to make considerable sacrifices, such as withdrawing from the larger society and from their families, giving up wordly pleasures and handing over large sums of money or property to the leader. Often, they wear distinctive clothes or have unusual haircuts or beards and use a jargon or cant that outsiders struggle to follow. People can join cults themselves or be born into them but typically, leaving is made as difficult as possible.

Given all this, why would anybody bother joining? Why give up the comforts of suburbia, such as a beer while watching the footy on TV or a day at the beach ogling the bikini-clad belles, just to stand around with a group of weird-looking people singing hymns and yelling “Praise be with you, brother”? The answer is that people only do anything because they expect a pay-off. It may be that they expect a reward of some sort in their crappy lives or they fear punishment but hoping for a benefit of some form keeps them on the hook.

Typically, cult-like religious revivals and radical political movements are the product of unhappy people in unstable times; people are dissatisfied and are inclined to follow anybody who confidently spouts that he has the answer to all their questions and the solution to their discontents. The 20^th Century saw several of the biggest political cults of all time, Stalinism in the USSR, fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan, and Maoism in China. They were totalitarian, meaning total control over every aspect of life for the whole population at all times. They had the power of the state behind them: anybody who questioned The Party or The Leader was likely to get the chop.

These days, religious cults can’t quite match that although ISIS tried. In the main, they rely on people choosing to join and stay so they have to keep the excitement flowing in order to keep the punters but a big part of their spiel is fear of leaving, fear of the ever-alert enemy waiting to pounce. For mainstream religions, cultish offshoots are heresies that need to be opposed. In the old days, that led to bitter wars that dragged on and on. Where possible, heretics were crushed and burned although if they took control, they did the same to the remnants of the old orthodoxy. Fortunately, in the West, we have moved beyond internecine religious wars although we’re still quite partial to fighting other religions when the chance presents.

As everybody will know, the West is experiencing a resurgence of religiosity which, depending on where you stand, is either a return to the True Religion or a slide into heresy. As usual, the epicentre is the US, spreading rapidly around the world but this illustrates an important point: religious revivals start with a panicky populace but they spread and develop according to the money. In the US, the conventional or mainstream churches are loaded but this is mainly property that they picked up 100 years ago or comes via deceased estates. The new, megachurches rely much more on donations, and that is a large part of their appeal.

Firstly, they are mostly based on an electrifying personality rather than a novel interpretation of the scriptures, and second, they are in the business of marketing prosperity. The message is: “Come to hear Pastor X, you’ll feel better, and stay to get rich.” Instead of the old Christian notion of helping the poor, the modern version is prosperity gospel, as in the old “God ’elps them wot ’elps ’emselves.” If you’re rich, it’s a sign that God favours you; if you want to get rich, donate to the pastor and you’ll get your money back seven times” (seven is the magic number). Behind it all looms the ever-present temptor, Satan himself; if the promise of riches isn’t enough to keep them in line, the fear of the devil will. As a result, the pastors become exceedingly wealthy and use that as a drawcard: “I believe and look how rich I’ve become. You can do it too, just drop your money in this pot.” This idea isn’t restricted to the fringes of Christianity, it’s actually quite common in a lot of religions, especially among poor people. And the priests and pastors take advantage of it, and the more narcissistic and psychopathic they are, the worse it gets. This means there are some very wealthy churches in the US which send money overseas to poor countries to build their empires. It also means there are lots of preachers who believe they’re above the law and take advantage of it.

The same thing happens in Islam, where the fundamentalist Saudi sect, the Wahabists, have access to rivers of money which they use to build religious schools or madrassahs in poor countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. Very often, parents don’t know what they’re agreeing to when they let their sons (only boys) enter them, they think they’re normal schools but they definitely aren’t. Once the boys are in, they’re indoctrinated in an intolerant and socially-regressive form of Islam, but they get very little actual education so it is extremely difficult for them to leave. Practically the only job available to them is as an imam in a dirt poor community where they spread the harsh gospel they’ve been taught, because they don’t know any better. They are definitely not taught to question their teachers (sounds a bit like psychiatry, doesn’t it).

Anyway, more or less since 1945, there has been a widespread religious revival in the US, coupled with a growing secularisation of the mainstream. However, nobody who wants to get ahead in any field dares question the often twisted religiosity as that would invite a massive pile-on from the hard core fanatics. Even Herr Drumpf, who doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, pretends to be on their side. None of this is encouraging as the religious hard right and the crackpot hard right are very much in bed together. We saw this at the January 6^th debacle in Washington when QAnon flags were mixed with signs proclaiming “Jesus is my saviour.” How can this be? Simple: they are united in their hatred of the same enemies. But, you protest, Christians aren’t supposed to hate anybody, turn the other cheek, love your enemies and all that, isn’t that the message? Perhaps it is, in the mainstream, but we’re not talking mainstream. We’re talking of what happened when Hollywood met Madison Avenue in a disused church and got a brilliant idea for making money: new christianity (note it loses its capital). Instead of having little old ladies quavering through monotonous hymns in draughty churches, they realised that the market for hip churches was wide open. Crank it up, get rid of the candles and bring in the strobes, out with the organ and in with electric guitars, make Sunday Funday and the money will come.

In the process, the message morphed. The idea of Christianity as a religion of peace and care was quietly led out the back and strangled, to be replaced by the bloodthirsty and vengeful god of the old testament, the hellfire and brimstone, tear-your-enemies’-heads-off and enslave their children version. The Sermon on the Mount was dumped and the Book of Revelation pushed to centre-stage, complete with its hallucinated monsters and lambs with seven horns and seven eyes (the magic seven again), its battles with demons and plagues and damnation. What is called evangelical, pentecostal or charismatic christianity is a heresy from beginning to end, but the good news is that it has probably peaked. The figures don’t show this: worldwide, charismatic churches are growing rapidly but this is by recruiting people in poor countries, especially by luring them away from the mainstream. In the West, the average age of congregations is rising rapidly as young people refuse to enter, or those born into it leave, sorely aware that the hyped up promise behind the spectacle was hollow.

Meantime, another revival has gone off the rails. The political doctrine of zionism was developed in the 1880s and 90s as a solution to the problem of Jewish people living in Europe being exposed to violence from their neighbours. Note that this was Europe: Jews living in North Africa and West Asia didn’t have an antisemitic problem (even today, there are 15,000 Jews living in Iran, with their own seat in the Majlis). It was decided that the only way they could be safe was to have their own country, subject to their own laws and protected by their own police.

To begin with, they looked at different countries including Argentina and Uganda and apparently also Tasmania, then decided that the Ottoman province of Palestine would be best as that would bring in the religious crowd (with all their money). Orthodox Jews were well-organised and disciplined; without them, the zionist project probably wouldn’t get off the ground. Aided by wealthy Jews like Baron Edmond de Rothschild in France, they started buying land in Palestine but soon ran into difficulties as the locals resented groups of white people who had no intention of assimilating (e.g. learning Arabic) moving in and trying to take over. That soon led to fighting, the uprising in 1936, World War II intervened and, in 1948, the Jewish population, by then 32% of the region, were awarded 56% of the land by the UN and declared their own state. Then the serious ethnic cleansing started, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced off their land, thousands were murdered, and hundreds of villages demolished without trace. As we see, this process of grabbing more and more land has never stopped.

It has to be remembered that, like most groups, the world’s Jewish community represents a wide range of opinions. There is a significant Orthodox movement that says Israel’s existence is a heresy and they will never go there. There are large numbers of secular Jews who are horrified by the actions of the Jewish State and will never set foot there, let alone give them money to buy more weapons. These and others have very little influence as the great bulk of Israeli Jews and probably most in the diaspora have embraced a hybrid religious, political and racist movement called zionism. This has the form of a cult. As it stands today, zionism is a project directed at expanding the borders of the Jewish state to the limits described in their mythology:

Deut. 28:1. Now it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth. 2 And all these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

That’s all pretty clear, except for two points. First, there’s no written or reliable record of this, it’s just what they believe. Modern zionists resolutely believe that they are on a mission from God to recover the lands from the Nile to the Euphrates and to clear it of all defilement, meaning unbelievers. The corollary is that they can’t stop trying to expand and drive the indigenous people off their ancient lands. They also believe that withdrawing from any conquered land or handing it back represents the most grievous of all sins, rejecting God. So they will not hand it back. This matches perfectly with the inherent human drive to dominate others at any cost. But here comes the second point: yes, their mythology says they had a contract with God which would give them all this land but a contract is a contract, it goes both ways:

Deut. 28: 15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: 16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field ... (rest of the curses here)

That is what is called the consideration in the contract: I will do this for you but, in consideration, you will do this for me; if you don’t, here’s the penalty. This particular contract, known as a covenant but it’s the same thing, therefore becomes: “All this I will give to you if you obey my law.” That is the consideration the Jews must pay. Now obviously the modern zionists have jumped for joy at this but then some party pooper looked at the laws and found there are 613 of them, including the well-known Ten Commandments (of which Henry Mencken said: “Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you can’t beat the fact that there were only ten of them”). That’s a lot to remember, and they’re pretty onerous. In fact, they’re so onerous that it’s quite possible that no living Jew today keeps to all of them. Certainly, zionists don’t because one of the rules says “Thou shalt not kill.” Another says adulterers should be stoned to death but Messrs Weinstein and Epstein somehow escaped that fate, perhaps because they were rich.

So it has happened that the zionists pick the bits from their Bible that suit them, ignore lots of others (“Thou shalt not destroy fruit trees,” a favourite hobby of settlers on their cowardly pogroms), and have work-arounds for the rest. How do they slip out of killing a quarter of a million Palestinians in Gaza? Simple: Palestinians are not actually human. They’re animals in human form so they can be killed as easily as we kill a rat. Jewish souls come from heaven, goyim (unbelievers) come from the satanic sphere so they’re fair game for Hellfire missiles. How do they account for the Hannibal doctrine, that killed hundreds of Jews on October 7^th? I haven’t seen a justification for this but I’m sure a rabbi could be found who would devise one. By this means, the original religion of Judaism has been dumped in favour of a heretical version of it.

Another rule says “No idols” but the land has assumed the role of an idol. Similarly, the general thrust of many of the rules is against anything that would constitute criminal behaviour, e.g. theft. However, driving people off their land and annexing it, as in Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, is theft, as is looting by Israeli troops in Lebanon. Because the goal of zionism is to take other people’s land, zionism is a criminal enterprise. It is an heretical, idolatrous, criminal cult but the trouble is, it has found common cause with the christian heresies spreading and financed from the US. There are now millions of people who call themselves “christian zionists,” a contradiction of terms, who actively support genocide and other crimes against humanity. As Blaise Pascal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Even though they don’t pull the triggers or drop the bombs that incinerate children, zoinist gpyim support it and pay for it, so they’re as guilty as though they were doing it themselves. In the process, they have forgotten that Christianity started as a revulsion against Judaism, which had become degenerate. So has Christianity. Granted, there is a lot of argument about just what happened 2000 years ago [1] but there’s no argument over the central message of the Nazarene:

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God (Matt.5:9).

The good news is that all cults eventually either die out or moderate. The bad news is that they kill a lot of people in the process.

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1. Zuesse Eric (2012). Christ’s Ventriloquists: the event that created Christianity. Hancock, MI: Hyacinth Books.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

Another week, another lengthy report, this time from World Health on dementia [1]. Sure, there are plenty of people who would say this is neurology or geriatrics and not actually psychiatry but there’s a big overlap. This is not a report on how common it is, who should manage it or drugs and so on but the rather unusual topic of preventing dementia. That’s a bit unexpected because we tend to think of dementia as both unpredictable and inevitable: we have no idea who it will affect but once it’s started, there’s only one possible outcome. After careful consideration, they say that 45% of the burden of dementia can be prevented by dealing with contributing factors.

The first point to note about this report is that it is the product of many thousands of hours of consultations and research by hundreds of people from a hundred countries around the world. The chances of it being biased by a small group of fanatical people or by private companies or an individual country or doctrine are about zero. Moreover, they did most of it without American money since DJT withdrew the US from WHO because, he said, they were too much influenced by China, it was too expensive and they mishandled the pandemic. He didn’t mishandle the pandemic, of course.

Moving on, despite major research programs, classic dementias like Alzheimer’s Disease or Pick’s Disease (now called fronto-temporal dementia) remain mysteries, so that specific treatment of the disease process is not available. However, there are dozens of other factors that add to the risk and contribute to the progress of the disorder, many of which can be modified. This is important because with ageing populations in so many countries, health services could be overwhelmed by the rapidly rising numbers of impaired old people. The report gives lists of conditions and lifestyle choices that add to the individual’s risk of developing dementia. By implementing these, they suggest it should be possible to delay the onset of dementia and reduce its total incidence by 45%, which adds up to a very significant impact. The bad news is that preventative programs should start early and generally involve sweating while giving up all the fun things.

Research over many years in hundreds of places shows that it’s never too late for lifestyle interventions: eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow, you can sweat it off, but for best results, start young. A healthy, balanced diet is essential, meaning high fibre with low levels of processed food, red meat, saturated fats, salt, sugar. Instead, we need to move to one of the low-carb diets, of which there are many. One from Australia’s CSIRO is popular here, but diabetic groups are also strong on diet. These are not difficult diets to follow, it just involves shopping in a different aisle with weekly trips to the fish market. Regular steady exercise should be part of everybody’s life from puberty at the latest; if there isn’t time, make it because it’s far better to lose a few hours work and TV time now in order to keep out of the dementia wing later. Keep your brain active with reading, puzzles and any sort of intellectual challenge but balance it with a social life. Mixing with people is important but, to my surprise, this report says nothing about the very real value of mixing with animals. Most of the research has been done on pets and “companion animals” but also being involved in studying wild animals, even just the birds in your suburb, is valuable.

Major lifestyle choices include reducing alcohol to safe levels, avoiding tobacco and illegal drugs altogether, and keeping to a healthy weight. Obesity is a significant risk factor for dementia, along with each of its complications: hypertension, diabetes, high blood lipids, poor sleep, respiratory problems and so on. One factor that doesn’t get much attention is the cumulative effect of minor head injuries, now called traumatic brain injury (TBI). Boxing has long been recognised as a cause of early dementia (“punch drunk”) but there are lots of other lifestyles that do it. I don’t know of any research but riding motocross bikes, horse-riding at the rough end of the scale, anything that results in repeated blows to the head, needs to be considered. However, the biggest cause of TBI today is one that nobody wants to deal with: wars. Most of the US troops evacuated from the fighting in the Middle East have a diagnosis of TBI, caused by the concussion of the massive explosions of missiles. We presume the children of Gaza who are regularly exposed to the blasts of 2000lb bombs will also be affected, and their parents, of course. Air pollution is another very avoidable risk factor but governments will rarely do anything about it if it involves spending money to improve the lives of poor people.

Anybody in the health sector who deals with adults needs to be very aware of early dementia as it sneaks up and presents in some strange ways. If there was the slightest doubt in any patient, I got them to complete a brief cognitive test. I don’t mean the mini-mental state examination, that was too crude and didn’t pick up the subtle changes. If screening showed anything, they were referred to a psychologist for assessment before a scan, just because psychometry is more sensitive than scans.

All this is important and needs to be ingrained in people early in life but it doesn’t have to cost a lot. As an example, the Men’s Shed movement, which started in South Australia about 30years ago, is an outstanding success. It’s a charitable movement that provides a venue for retired men to keep their minds and hands busy working in groups of the same vintage. Mostly, they use donated facilities such as an empty shed on an industrial property, stocked with equipment companies no longer need or the members provide themselves. There are about 1,300 sheds serving 50,000 people in this country, and probably the same number in a dozen countries overseas. It provides occupation and socialisation: one of their mottoes is: “Women like to talk face to face but men like to talk shoulder to shoulder.” That’s true. They are locally-managed – some actually have women members – and largely self-sufficient. According to their website, they get about $24million in government subsidies a year. If it delays the onset of dementia in just 10% of their members for even a couple of years, that’s an enormous saving, not to mention making life easier for the sufferers and families.

Unfortunately, this sort of simple, community-based measure won’t get anything like the money that will be spent on research on drugs, but they are also easily captured by commercial interests. Australia privatised the health services sector on the basis that private enterprise is always more efficient than public, but costs have gone through the roof while standards have dropped. Mr Smith had been on disability pension for 20 yrs when he decided he would like a small dog. He mentioned this to his “service providers” who promptly arranged for him to see a psychologist to assess his “need for a companion animal.” This could only be done by a particular psychologist on Saturday morning about 20km across the city. He didn’t own a car so the social worker drove him to the appointment, waited and then drove him home. She didn’t meet the psychologist. Total cost for the morning: about $2000 but when he learned he would have to go to special training for the dog, he pulled out. I told him to go to the local RSPCA and tell them what he wanted, they would find him a suitable dog. However, because it wasn’t an “approved dog,” he wasn’t eligible for a food subsidy or vet fees. Approved dogs, if you’re interested, cost about $8000 each, which is easy money for dog trainers.

At 54, with numerous painful physical problems and mental trouble, Mr Jones was not in a good way. He had no living relatives and practically no social life, so he decided a dog would a good idea. When he heard what the training involved, he withdrew his application but was offered a course with horses. It didn’t involve riding or heavy lifting, so he agreed. For five days, he stayed at an expensive resort and spent the days with two staff and two other men, grooming, walking and feeding horses. That was it, about $4000 and he didn’t get to keep the horse.

And so to the world’s most famous dementia patient. Before you read on, look at this link to understand why this is important. I’ve been saying for at least six years that Trump is dementing but he started from such a low base that it misleads people (here’s a report from March 2024). Disinhibition and loss of social awareness and sensitivity and are among the first signs but these are quite subtle. Sometimes only the family realise that dad isn’t quite his normal self, or granny is getting a bit silly in her old age. The personality becomes, less refined, less aware of the consequences of actions, especially their own. In Trump’s case, he has only ever had the social awareness, sensitivity and inhibitions of an old bull in mating season. He has only had three ambitions in life: money, sex and revenge. The first two drives were designed to conceal his total lack of self-esteem while the last has come to the fore as he has gained power.

Another important early sign is that the person makes more and more mistakes. To start with, they recognise them and can correct them, then they recognise them but can’t correct them, then they don’t recognise them. Just recently, in an interview, Trump referred to the “Islamic republic of Japan.” He didn’t recognise it and just carried on carrying on. Rambling, turgid and over-inclusive speech, only tangentially related to the topic is a give-away, as in all his speeches. His talk always goes back to himself, which is a personality factor but much worse now. He recently talked for two hours in front of a military audience; by the end, they were laughing at him (short version, 75mins here). At the FIFA grand final, he had to be led away so they could take photos of the team (who mocked his silly little wooden “dance”). It’s all about ME, it’s always been all about ME but now it’s worse: “I think I’ll wipe out Iran’s civilisation tonight, or maybe not, we’ll see how I feel.”

As for the sex, he’s too old and too fat. A late night and a hard woman would kill him but, as everybody knows, testosterone is the gift that keeps on giving. Long after the hardware has given up the ghost (due to insensitivity of the pelvic nerves), a surge of testosterone still produces the little thrills that are so exciting, except the only way to get them is by dominating people. So that’s what he does. He orders the military to snatch a head of state which, by some bizarre subterfuge, they manage so Trump waddles around for weeks telling everybody how “We got ‘im, we showed ‘em who’s boss around here.” Every speech is a festering mass of threats, demands, whines and more threats because this produces a buzz. However, due to his accelerating lack of self-awareness (again, from an exceedingly low start), he doesn’t realise he’s making a fool of himself. All he knows is “Hey, threatening to bomb people feels good, I think I’ll do it again, and then I’ll threaten the people who say I shouldn’t threaten people.”

As for the money, the book Regime Change: Trump’s imperial presidency is more or less a catalogue of graft and corruption. There just is no end to it. He’s like grandpa who keeps going back for the icecream even though it’s bad for his diabetes, then lies about it. Any inhibitions on greed have long since dissolved but he is completely surrounded by the most appalling bunch of slime and grubs since the Borgia popes who are only there for what they can get. Finally, the revenge. For Trump, the greatest crime anybody can commit is to make him look like an ignorant, dim-witted and uneducated petty crook from Queens who doesn’t know which fork to use and would grope the waitress as she’s trying to serve. Which, of course, is what he is. His only goal in getting a second run at the job was to get even with everybody, in which he is aided and abetted by a very capable crew of seriously paranoid and seriously corrupt operators, as the book shows in repellant detail.

Now, of course, he’s in serious trouble. First day of reckoning is the brutal and absurd attacks on Iran urged on him by the equally dishonest but far smarter and more devious Benny Meliekowsky, aka Netanyahu, meaning “god has given” (presumable Ares, the Greek god of war, violence and chaos). This self-imposed disaster will keep generations of scholars busy as they untangle all the lies and deceit that have led the world to the edge of a dozen cliffs. Trump got himself into this mess but has no idea how to get out of it, he simply doesn’t have the brain power. In the past, as a personality factor, he would simply walk away from his many messes, blaming other people but this time, he can’t. He’s it, he’s the one in the big room with the gold gewgaws everywhere and the big desk, and sitting in the middle of the desk is a gold plate with a huge turd sandwich called “Surrender and pay reparations,” but he is simply incapable of admitting he is wrong, he would rather incinerate the world than do that. Second wall coming at high speed is the mid-term elections in November. If Trump loses the Senate, he’s going to prison for a very long time, and his ghastly children and all the parasites will be down the corridor from him.

We certainly live in troubled times. There have been demented kings in the past and quite a few dictators who were losing their grey matter but I don’t think there has ever been a elected head of state who was clearly losing his marbles before the election. Because people live longer these days, we’re approaching the point where elderly candidates for high office should be compelled to undergo proper psychometry and scans if necessary, with the results reviewed independently. Or all candidates, I don’t mind. Personality assessment would be valuable but, unlike formal cognitive testing (say WAIS-R or similar), which can’t be cheated, clever scoundrels can lie their way through personality profiles (faking good, as they call it). For example, former premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, was widely thought to be very decent but it turned out she was corrupt. I’d say hers was the corruption of stupidity rather than cupidity but the end result is the same.

Dementia is real and coming to your street. Start now to head it off: cut out the booze and smokes, the coke and burgers, exercise regularly, lose weight, join some clubs, do the crosswords and sudoku, early to bed and early to rise, blah blah. Oh, and there is no evidence depression causes dementia [1, p68], which is not what psychiatrists tell tribunals when they want an order for involuntary ECT.

1. Risk Reduction of Cognitive Decline and Dementia. WHO guidelines, 2^nd edition. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2026. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. At: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240123557

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

Three weeks ago, I reported on the UN report on the state of children in Gaza, beginning with: “What follows is utterly repugnant.” Another week, another report, this time from the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) and Progressive International, titled: A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians (available on the PFC site). Be warned: What it contains in its nearly 200 pages is beyond repugnant, far beyond merely “bestial” or “subhuman” depravity, because no animals on earth behave in the way this report describes is routine for members of the Israeli state apparatus.

Starting with background in the Nakba of 1948 and dealing with each decade since, it shows that the most extreme forms of sexualised violence and torture, expressly designed to crush, isolate and humiliate the victims, is neither rare nor the sporadic actions of a few bad actors. Instead, it is institutionalised and protected within the entire structure of the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) including the military, spy agencies, civil police, judicial services, prisons system and, crucially, the brutal civil militias commonly called settlers:

... sexualized violence is a systemic Israeli practice that has accelerated in frequency and scale of brutality since October 7, 2023. We conclude that Israeli sexualized violence is a central method of political, psychological, and physical warfare intentionally deployed to cause mass bodily and mental harm and injury. We further conclude that sexualized violence is intentionally deployed to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part and therefore must be regarded as a genocidal act (p60, emphasis added).

Since the October 7^th rebellion by Hamas, matters have become much worse, with regular reports of rape by trained dogs of male and female prisoners, most of whom are never charged because they are civilians who have no connection with any armed forces. It’s not just Palestinians. After she was abducted from the Sumud Flotilla, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg reported deliberate sexual harrassment and emotional abuse:

If Israel, with the eyes of the world on it, can treat a well‑known white person with a Swedish passport like this, imagine what they do to Palestinians in secret (p108).

The report exposes what they do in secret. We’re constantly told we have to support Israel as an island of democracy and Judeo-Christian liberalism in a sea of barbarians, that Israelis are the world victims who have to be favoured in every respect as victims can do no wrong, and that opposing the Jewish State’s activities in any way or likening them to Nazis amounts to the grievous crime of antisemitism and will be punished for life. I haven’t read the whole of this report and don’t plan to as it’s truly horrifying but the case against Israel is crystal clear. For nearly a hundred years, it has planned and implemented the enforced expulsion of the indigenous population of Palestine, using lethal violence and grotesque humiliation as weapons of genocide. The question is: how does this come about? How can people who suffered grievously within living memory turn into depraved monsters who actually train dogs to rape humans? That would take a lot of effort, it doesn’t come naturally to dogs, which says the dog trainers and the handlers knew exactly what they were doing at all times.

The simple answer would be: that’s what Europeans do, they colonise other people’s lands and treat the indigenous population either as slave labour or as vermin to be eradicated. Look at Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US, where the native people were cheated of their land and driven to the brink, or Australia where the same thing happened. There were about 300,000 Aboriginal people when the British colony was established in Sydney in 1788. Within a few years, smallpox had swept through the Sydney tribes, leaving the land more or less bare for the colonists to seize. This pattern repeated throughout the country, albeit as the product of different diseases. Within ten years of whites arriving in an area, 90% of the Aboriginal population would be dead. 80% of those deaths were due to diseases such as influenza, chickenpox, measles, whooping cough and so on. 10% were usually due to direct white violence and the remainder due to Aboriginal violence, which was standard British policy: set the tribes against each other and move in when they were worn down. More recently, there are the examples of the British opium wars against China, the unspeakable violence of Belgium in Congo and France in Algeria and other parts of North Africa. We are not taught this history, and that’s not an accident. It is simply not mentioned. At school, we learned about the Black Hole of Calcutta (with capitals); we were not told of the Amritsar massacre of 1919 or the Bengal famine of 1943, when 3.5million people died because Britain took the crops they grew for its armies.

That’s one possibility, that white people are incapable of treating people of colour as their equals and will always try to wipe them out. However, that was mostly a couple of hundred years ago, we’re supposed to be more civilised now. We have the example of the Nazi genocide which gave us a body of international law, we have treaties and obligations, so how come Israel is able to act in such a depraved manner? There are a lot of factors involved but one part we can call the curse of zionism although it should really be called the curse of superiority.

The core of the concept of Narcisso-Fascism is humanity’s biological urge to dominate everything in sight. This is largely a male activity and is common to all species studied although women certainly aren’t immune (“Let them eat cake”). This reaches right throughout our existence as social animals. Practically everything we do is built around the idea of dominance hierarchies, starting in infancy and continuing after death when the rich and powerful have grandiose headstones in the cemetary and the poor get just a number on a post. The basis of any dominance hierarchy is the belief that I have rights you don’t have, and I can do whatever is necessary to exercise my rights. What did the British believe that justified their merciless treatment of the indigenes? I don’t know for sure but probably much as Churchill said of the King-Emperor’s unwilling Indian subjects: “A beastly people with a beastly religion.” It would be something like: “We are cultured and civilised people with the true religion while you are ignorant pagans and savages with all this land that you don’t know how to use. We’ll take over and impose our religion on you and teach you our superior language and how to wear shoes, plus we’ve got the guns,” as Hilaire Belloc put it in his satiric poem The Modern Traveller, (1898):

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim gun and they have not..

Trouble is, an attitude of superiority is cursed from the beginning as it has no natural end. It feeds on itself and encourages people to become more and more extreme, rewarding militancy and penalising moderation. Within any movement, there is a moderate branch and an extreme branch. The moderates are motivated by the desire to do the right thing, to be fair and reasonable. Extremists, on the other hand, are driven by the urge to get to the top, to get bigger and more powerful, to crush anybody who stands in their way just because they only feel good when they have their boot on somebody’s throat. Which explains why moderates are always done in by the extremists. If in about 1850, a British politician had said in parliament: “Look, chaps, we’ve probably painted enough of the world red, why don’t we sit back and enjoy it, let other people have some?” he would have been thrown in the putrid River Thames. American politicians were rewarded for crushing the plains tribes into reserves so settlers could take their land. Australians after Federation in 1901 didn’t worry too much about the “native problem” as they were fully expected to die out before long, but also the idea that mere black people could “own” land was too absurd to think about. God gave us “... dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26-30), but He gave it to us true believers, not to them pagans. As Churchill, then Secretary of State for Colonies, said after the 1937 Peel Report on the Palestinian uprising:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

“I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people.” I rest my case. It is the nature of the fanaticism of superiority that it intensifies, it ratchets up but it never ratchets down. By late 1941, the Nazi government realised nobody in the world wanted to help solve their “Jewish problem” by taking millions of Jews from their growing empire. They could have said: “Oh well, looks like we’re stuck with them. Maybe we should just ignore them, or send them to Khazakhstan and they can have their own rotten country,” but they didn’t. The momentum of their own propaganda was such that nobody could back down. After twenty years of yelling that Jews were a mortal threat to the nation and the race, it was impossible for them to choose a moderate path. Anybody who had said “Let’s be reasonable” would have been shouted down, would have lost status, probably demoted and sent to the Russian Front so nobody did. The fear of appearing weak, of losing status in the hierarchy was enough to silence dissent so, at a conference at Wannsee in January 1942, they opted for the unthinkable, extermination. We’ve all done it, we’ve all had a time when we knew we should have spoken up but the gang of rowdy, aggressive people would have turned on us, or they had worn us down, or everybody else kept their heads down so we kept quiet and the extremists won. This is the curse of superiority, and zionism has a very bad case of it.

Is the political movement known as zionism based in the idea that one group has superior rights to another, and is entitled to exercise them? Absolutely, but that’s not how it started. It began in the 1880s and 90s as the notion that Jews could not be safe in Europe as they were always outsiders, always resented by the natives (after 2,000 years, why were they still outsiders? That’s another question). The only way they could be safe would be in their own country, except all of Europe was taken, so they looked further afield. Argentina, Patagonia, Uganda, even Tasmania were considered, then they settled on the Ottoman province of Palestine. That would kill two birds with one stone, as they say, it would appeal to the many Jewish socialists who could set up their idea of egalitarian paradise, and to the religious who had always toasted each other: “Next year in the Promised Land.” Yes, there were about 700,000 Palestinians already there but they could be dealt with by one means or another, as outlined in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall from 1923, which is headed: “Colonisation of Palestine. Agreement with Arabs Impossible at present. Zionism Must Go Forward.” First, they had to get the support of the Western democracies, for which the Great War provided a golden opportunity, quite literally. Britain’s totally illegal “Balfour Declaration” was simply a ploy to get money.

Gradually, this morphed into a religious crusade of recovery of the “Promised Land” from the defiling unbelievers. The older moderates, such as Nahum Goldmann, died out and extremists like Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Kahane, Schneerson, Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and so many others took over. Conquering the land of Greater Israel (from the Nile to the Euphrates) became a combined religious and national imperative, such that failing to do so was either an unforgivable sin against God’s plan or a cowardly humiliation and betrayal of the Holocaust in the face of the mocking Arabs, or both according to the direction of the wind, and nobody dared say “Enough is enough.” Actively aided by the West, meaning the US, UK and France with Germany paying the bills, Israel has continued its relentless, murderous expansion but any morality behind it, like providing a safe haven for Jews who wanted to move there, has long since been lost in the uproar. Now, the religious atmosphere has become near-delusional, with many of the hard core religious fanatics convinced the normal laws don’t apply to them: see here for an account of widespread, institutionalised sexual abuse of children within extremist religious communities; the channel is trustworthy. If this is what they do to their own children, no wonder Epstein thought he could get away with a bit of hanky-panky with the goyim. And it is all now based on the logical progression of the idea of a “Chosen People taking God’s Promised Land,” that anybody who opposes them is satanic and must be destroyed with gratuitous violence. The violence is both cleansing and sanctifying in and of itself.

Each time, the demands increase. From 1937 on, Britain trained and armed the merciless Jewish militias which became the Israeli army, becoming more merciless in the process, as well as disarming and weakening the Palestinian opposition. Israel’s so-called “war of independence” of 1948 was actually a concerted ethnic cleansing operation which the Arab Legion tried to stop with their ramshackle armies. Many of the Arab trucks that entered the territory were unarmed as they were meant to help shift the hundreds of thousands of displaced people but were attacked and destroyed by the well-armed, well-trained and utterly merciless Israeli military on their “mission from God.” Out of that, the zionist leaders decided they needed tanks and jets, all of which were supplied and then used against Egypt in 1956, and then nuclear weapons, with the reactor provided by France, paid by the US and all the scientists trained within the top secret US nuclear establishment.

It just goes on and on, gets worse and worse because extremists accept no limits on their ambitions. If they achieve one goal, they immediately look ahead and select another. Anybody in the movement who objects is dismissed as weak and expelled, or a traitor and locked up or has an accident while checking the view from a 20^th floor window. The other side of it dehumanising the enemy. In elevating myself, there comes a point where I force him off the hierarchy of humans, he becomes a “human animal.” That is the nature of extremism. Extremism has only one end, either its many enemies combine to crush it or it burns itself out from within. That is the curse of superiority.

Zionism exists only because a group of people believe they have the divine seal of approval to do what they like to their neighbours. They are very willing prisoners of the curse of superiority. Because this is historically so significant in the world today, we can rename it the Curse of Zionism and, in a hundred years’ time, people will know just what that means. The end-stage depravity of the moral crime of superiority.

PS See this article. Somebody should point this out to the US, they should get off the escalator before the curse of superiority takes control of them. Or has it already?

****

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.

****

It was my birthday recently so the family gave me a book they knew I didn’t have: Regime Change – inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haverman and Jonathon Swan. There was a reason I hadn’t bought it but it’s the thought that counts. Gritting my teeth, I am working slowly through it. So far, nothing new but it raises a point: every single person named in that book is not normal. What’s normal, you ask, because almost by definition, anybody who pushes hard enough to get a seat in the White House lies outside the bounds of normality. That’s the point: they’re not normal but, with one exception, they’re not “mentally ill” in any sense of the term. The only exception is the emperor himself who could possibly plead mental incompetence due to early dementia but the rest of them are just being their normal selves. That is, what we see is their personalities, all horrible, and at this point, we take off our psychiatric hats because psychiatry has no theory of personality and therefore no model of personality disorder.

The biocognitive model of psychiatry says personality is critically important, that it’s impossible to deal with people without a solid idea of what it means. Remarkably, DSM-5 doesn’t offer any definition or description of personality per se but launches straight into descriptions of personality disorders – on p.645, which tells you how they rate it. Personality disorder is an “enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture.” The disturbances affect emotion, interpersonal functioning, impulse control and cognition, meaning “ways of perceiving and interpreting self, other people and events.” It is pervasive across the individual’s life and causes “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of function.” All good, but what is it? Just what is personality, how does it fit in the mental economy? Crickets.

They recognise eleven distinct categories of personality disorder but practically every study ever done says the categories are artificial. The word category says that the features of one group are distinct from the other groups with no overlap. Sheep and goats look alike but they’re different categories with no overlap. Human personality fails that test as normal blurs imperceptibly across to abnormal, with no natural cut off point. This is also true of each and every personality disorder. That is, categories of personality are not natural kinds, they’re wholly an artefact. The categories listed in DSM-5 are “separate and distinct” only by virtue of artful manipulation of the wording of each feature for each one (see [1, Chap 8] for more detail on this important point; essentially, it says the entire concept of categories of personality disorder is wilfully deceptive).

Psychologists have been aware of these objections for over a hundred years. They too don’t have an actual theory of personality or model of personality disorder, just because they don’t have a theory of mind, but they have a much finer sense of how it all works. They divide the totality of human behaviour into different classes or themes, and then give each person a grade on all of them. There can be a sociability theme, and an orderliness theme, a trust/mistrust theme and so on, where everybody gets a score from 0-100, and 50 is average. That is, personality is distributed along dimensions so that personality disorder is a matter of distance from the midpoint rather than islands of categorical abnormality. Most people cluster loosely around the middle on all the dimensions. People who are far from the middle on one dimension are also likely to be way out on many of the others, which is why psychiatry keeps finding people who meet criteria for two or more disorders (known by the meaningless term ‘comorbidity’).

How many dimensions are there? That depends on who you ask. One of the most influential personality theorists, Hans Eysenck (1916-1997) said there are three, extraversion, introversion and psychoticism. All human behaviour can be listed on one or other of these dimensions which, he believed, were genetic. He was determined to prove this but after his death, it became clear that he had been manipulating his research data to get the results he wanted. It was also shown that he had accepted the sum of £500,000 (about $5million) from the tobacco companies to “prove” that addiction to tobacco was due to personality defect, not to the addictive properties of tobacco (this is all part of the tobacco playbook, now being used by fossil fuel companies to discredit the notion of global warming). Like so many of the Big Names in this type of field, his reputation was kept aloft by his own efforts. The day he died, it crashed.

Much of Eysenck’s career was spent bickering with the biggest and most influential of the personality questionaires, the MMPI, which was first launched in 1943 and has been revised a number of times. The latest version asks the subject to respond to about 500 questions with true or false, as in “I am normally a social person” or “I rarely forgive people if they upset me,” etc. This has a strong statistical basis; analysis yields ten factors which give a more finely grained picture than Eysenck’s lonely three factors. Another widely used questionnaire, known as Raymond Cattell’s aptrly-named 16PF, puts the number of distinct personality factors at sixteen. I liked it but it suffered from some rather idiosyncratic names for the different factors. These tests all came from the 1940s or 50s; these days, we are enjoined to use five factors, known as OCEAN, or Big Five Personality Factors, which measure openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. How do these relate to our general understanding of personality and to mental disorder? Not very well, which is probably why it hasn’t caught on outside the research community.

But back to the White House which has one of the most remarkable collections of personality disorder (PD in modern talk) ever assembled in one room: how would they rate on any of these tests? The answer is we’ll never know because they would all refuse to do the tests as it would be too revealing. They may have severely disturbed personalities but, with the exception of the PD-in-Chief, they’re not totally lacking in insight. Trump himself shows an important feature: as dementia proceeds, it strips away the self-control and inhibitions until all that’s left is the raw personality disorder, exposed for all to see. His greed and dishonesty and grandiosity and intolerance just become more and more obvious until it’s embarrassing to the country. Like his stupid reflection pool disaster. He said somebody cut a big gash in the liner. Actually, he did it himself. When the pool was empty, he insisted on his motorcade driving down the centre of the pool. The “gash” is exactly where his 8 ton monstrosity of a car drove. But he never takes responsibility, it’s always somebody else’s fault.

More important is to understand what personality is so we can recognise disorder when we see it as they are very good at concealing it (see [2, Chap.8.2] for more detail). We start with the broadest possible definition: personality is the sum total of interactions between the individual and the environment throughout adulthood.That’s not very practical. First, it isn’t complete until the person snuffs it, which rather defeats the purpose of talking about personality: we want to know what he’s likely to do in the future. Second, it would be encyclopaedic, a vast list of events with no order. Yesterday, he was all sweetness and light but today, nasty and vengeful. How do we tie these together? Oh, seems he got on the booze last night and has a hangover.

So why do pleasant, obliging people drink when they know it will cause trouble? Because his cheerful and cooperative front is all front, which is what persona originally meant: the mask worn by actors in Greek dramas. Underneath his obliging exterior, he is quite seriously anxious, constantly worrying in case he makes a mistake or people criticise him. Periodically, the anxiety builds up so he turns to alcohol because it relieves anxiety and he feels so much better. So does he have an alcoholic personality type, an anxious personality disorder or a mental illness called GAD? Good question because the answer to it determines what treatment he gets. Except psychiatry can’t answer it. It has no idea because it has no theory of personality. In order to come to grips with the notion, we need to hone it down somewhat from the encyclopaedic version. We want to include the subject’s typical conduct and exclude the atypical, such as during illness or under psychological pressure, to read: Personality is the set of habitual patterns of interaction between the individual and the environment. Is she late to work today because something unexpected happened, or is she always late? We tighten it a bit further to read: the habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and the environment, in the stable, adult mode of behaviour.

That raises the important question of when we can consider the person has reached “stable, adult mode.” Most people will avoid making a personality diagnosis under 18, even though it may be clear that the teenager is on a bad path in life. Another important question is: can personality change in adulthood? The answer is yes, but that needs clarification. Moving on, the point of talking about personality is to distinguish between individuals, to emphasise their differences rather than similarities. For example, in a culture where people are pressured to drink on Fridays and fights erupt, are they all disordered personalities? How does religion fit with the definition? Language? We want to exclude common, culturally-determined elements, so the definition has to focus on the uniquely distinguishing elements of a healthy, sober person’s stable, adult mode of behaviour. That’s a good description, so how do we turn it into an explanation? This is what the DSM system doesn’t do, because they don’t know what generates behaviour, they have no model of mind. Because we’re talking about habitual modes of behaviour, there has to be something generating them, and in the biocognitive model, that something is a set of rules:

Personality is the total set of explicit and implicit mental rules (including attitudes, beliefs, etc) that generates the uniquely distinguishing habitual patterns of interaction between the healthy, sober individual and the environment, in the stable adult mode of behaviour [2, p110].

Personality is not a specific place in your brain or a hidden gremlin magically pulling your levers, it is simply a set of rules. We all have rules, lots of them, such as language and sport and cooking, but most of our personal rules are barely conscious as we learned them long ago, even preverbally. A good rule is: “The world is a pleasant place where I can get ahead if I work hard and treat people fairly.” Another common rule, often learned very early, is something like: “The world is a cruel hard place that will crush me if I step out of line and nobody will help. I can only survive by my wits so I must never let anybody know what I’m doing.” That’s one path to criminality but often well-concealed. Even more common is a rule like: “I’m a useless individual, I can’t do anything right, whatever I try will go bad and people will laugh so I’d better stay home and avoid any contact.” That’s often the primary rule in the life of the young adults, mostly men, who stay up all night playing computer games and sleep all day. Trouble is, they will often try to conceal this. If you ask people: “Are you anxious?” they will mostly say No, but if you come at it slowly, asking about specific fears, that will commonly open the floodgates.

Mostly, however, when we’re trying to assess personality, we just look at the behaviour and ask: “What are the possible rules that could generate this constellation of behaviour?” Look at one DJ Trump, who lies constantly, says one thing and does another, cheats on everybody and so on: his primary rule is “I can do anything I like because I’m so smart that I can fool everybody into believing whatever I say at the time. Anybody who tries to stop me is bad and deserves to be crushed. I don’t have to worry about consistency or honesty or any of that mimsy stuff” (see Garrison Keillor: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”). In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt said: “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” Because he was very wealthy (a millionaire at eight), Trump learned he didn’t even have to be consistent. Instead, he learned what has been known since ancient times: “Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.” The world wants to be deceived, therefore give it to ‘em good and hard.

That apart, Trump has no personality. He cheats at golf, he cheats on his wives, he cheats the taxman and in business because for him, being Number One is the only game in town. Being Number One is his motivation, cheating and lying are his stock in trade, his modus operandi, because how he gets to No. 1 is irrelevant. That’s why he puts his name on everything, comes up with stupid ideas then denies them, evades responsibility, surrounds himself with wealthy people, loves gold and so on. His niece, Mary Trump, a PhD psychologist, says of him: “I don’t care what his cult says, I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.” How did he get to where he is? Lying, cheating and stealing, and telling all the other rich people that, under him, there’d be lots of opportunities for lying cheating and stealing so they’d better fund his campaign.

We could go through the rest of his crew but the simple fact is this: They would not have got a seat at the cabinet table if they were decent, honest people. There were a few decent people in Trump’s first cabinet but they didn’t last long. Scoundrels can sniff each other out, they’re much better at smelling other crooks than ordinary people are. Some of them are open, such as the human Clostridium, Stephen Miller, who is obsessed with power and domination:

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world.

Personality is everything. It’s everything in politics, it’s everything in business, in family life, sport, entertainment, you name it. It is a sad fact of life that people who obey rules (the great majority) are easily fooled by people who are prepared to break them. That brings up the ancient question: how does a reasonable person deal with unreasonable people without becoming unreasonable in the process? The answer to that is: Set limits and stick to them. Overwhelmingly, people with disordered personalities will back down if they see their opposition is firm. This is the mistake the world is making with Trump. They should tell him: No, and no means no. He’ll squeal but he’ll back down.

Personality is also everything in psychiatry but has never been given its proper place. Psychiatry is about mental “illness,” about physical “diseases of the brain” but personality disorder isn’t an “illness” in any sense of the word; therefore drugs don’t work; therefore psychiatrists aren’t interested. I’ve outlined a case to say psychiatry is doing its best to rediagnose all cases of personality disorder as “mental illness” and put them on drugs, especially labels like bipolar, bipolar II, ADHD, ASD and a dozen others. The only valid treatment for personality problems is to discover all the rules that are operating in the background and bring them to light. This requires the person’s active cooperation but it isn’t easy as, very often, the rules are humiliating or embarrassing or just painful, but it works. People have to want to change but often, their rules are designed to conceal a deep sense of self-loathing.

At the core of personality resides the self-esteem, the sense of personal worth or, all too often, dislike of self. Self-esteem isn’t inherited, we’re not born with it any more than we’re born with a language already programmed in our little brains. It has to be learned, the result of life experiences. If early life experiences are painful, children have to draw whatever conclusions they can in order to survive. Very often, they’re negative conclusions that get buried deep inside but they do their daily quota of damage for decades. Generally, people don’t want to think about it until life hurts, but by then it may be too late. There is zero reason to believe drugs can ever change the rules of personality, any more than they can change, say, the rules of language. But psychiatrists don’t want to hear that, all too often, their self-esteem is built on dominating all the broken people. For the clown show in the White House, 30 months to go although who knows what damage they’ll do by then. As for the book, don’t bother, it reads like a gossip column.

References:

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

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

****

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 US Secretary of State (= foreign minister), Mr Marco Rubio, has recently announced that the US intends to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague as “the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty.” His concern was that ICE agents posted to the US border to repel immigrants could be arrested and taken for trial before non-American judges. In fact, he’s lying as he knows perfectly well the US is not a member of the ICC so it has no jurisdiction over events in the US. It can, however, take action against US citizens if they commit war crimes in other countries that are members, and that’s what he doesn’t want. The US has already imposed crippling financial “sanctions” on some members of the ICC, including the chief prosecutor, British barrister Karim Khan after is issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others for crimes in Gaza.

While a few US senators praised him for taking on the “corrupt” ICC, criticism was immediate and widespread. Some commentators have been wringing their hands over the “death of the international rules-based order” (IRBO) which the US was largely responsible for establishing after World War II. People point to the UN and its many agencies, the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, the ICJ, the World Bank and IMF which flowed from the Bretton Woods agreement that set the US$ as the world’s reserve currency, GATT (1947), NATO, IAEA, IATA and a host of other bodies. As a result, there have been no major wars and trade and commerce have mostly flourished, to the benefit of all. If the US hadn’t pushed for these after 1945, which generally meant funding them and often providing offices, then chaos would have reigned. But if Narco Rubio (so-called because of his brother in law’s involvement in drugs) has his way, say the hand-wringers, the IRBO will collapse. Now that’s a bit strange because I thought it had been strangled at birth, 80 years ago.

The idea behind an IRBO is fairly clear: everybody agrees on a set of rules for all, then everybody works to apply them themselves and to make sure everybody else sticks to them. Trouble is, there was never any intention of having a single set of rules to apply to all: what about the exceptional nations? Surely they can’t be expected to get down there with the common herd so that their voices were lost in the lowing of cattle and the mewling of frightened pussies? No, the leaders of the world had to be heard, and heard clearly so everything was set up to make sure they remained the unchallenged leaders. In fact, there was only one such country and it made sure from the very beginning that it would run the show the way it thought it ought to be run. So the US awarded the victors of World War II permanent seats on the UN Security Council and the power of veto, including the brutal and egregiously corrupt Nationalist regime in China. Through an arrangement with the ramshackle Saudi autocracy, it arranged for all oil sales to be in USD, which meant that any country that wanted to buy Saudi oil first had to get USD. This led to the “exorbitant privilege” where the US could spy on practically all international commercial and financial transactions, to its great benefit. And because it had lots of weapons for sale, it was then able to offer unlimited credit for arms sales to all its friends, provided they bought American.

While all this was going on, the “war against communism” was in full flight, mostly behind the scenes as in Guatamala in 1954 or Indonesia in 1958 but occasionally reaching the front pages, as in Korea. The principle driving this crusade was very simple: “Unspeakably evil godless communism is trying to take control of your country, we’ll help you fight them. And yes, you do want our help, don’t you.” It was always and only ever a case of diabolical outsiders trying to subvert the innocent peasants and turn the country into a concentration camp, so the kindly US of A would step in to save them. However, what was dressed up as benevolence concealed two points. The first was that communism was almost always home-grown. Peasants suffering under feudal oppression didn’t need outsiders telling them they had to free themselves from the plutocratic yoke, they had eyes, they knew the UN Charter promised self-determination to all people so that’s what they wanted. And if they wanted a socialist government, then they were prepared to fight for it.

Which brings up the second point: the sole goal of successive US governments was for untrammeled access to each and every market by their corporations; the only way this could achieved was through total world domination, and the socialists were getting in the way. Therefore, as in Iran in 1953 and so many other countries, they had to go. Why were corporations so important to the various US governments? Money. Seats on their boards. Connections, influence. And the “international rules-based order” was a major part of it. As the funder-in-chief of the IMF and World Bank, the US was able to decide who got what at what rates. With a few phone calls, they could make or break governments but if the peasants didn’t take hints and clearly didn’t know what was good for them, well, overthrow the government. So simple. Take Cuba, for example. In 1958, home-grown revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro overthrew the ineffably corrupt Batista government and promptly nationalised a heap of American assets, many of which were owned by the US mafia or otherwise stolen. Humiliated, the US imposed a blockade on Cuba which remains in force to this day: 65 years of penury, just because they refused to grovel to Uncle Sam. Two years later, the CIA engineered an “invasion” of Cuba by a bunch of pirates, drunks and crooks that ended in disaster. All of these are examples of how the “IRBO” existed in name only and entirely at the whim of the US government.

There was much the same disaster in the Congo after Belgium limped out in 1960. With the very active support of the US and of Belgium which feared losing its ill-gotten assets, the mildly socialist government under Patrice Lumumba was overthrown by General Mobutu whose unrivalled kleptocracy held power for 35 years. In 1961, the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in an air crash as they were negotiating a settlement; everything says his plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary although you and I will never know the truth. The fighting has never stopped. In the chaos of the war in Eastern Congo in the late 1990s, about 3 million people died, and many more since them. Where were the internationa rules then? And where are they now when the US and Israel freely attack neighbouring countries just because it suits them? Aggressive war is the supreme international crime, that’s all there is to that, yet Trump freely and cheerfully threatens to “obliterate” Iran, to bomb it back to the stone age and wipe out their culture, but there are no repercussions. Genocide is forbidden by every statute and every moral system known yet Israel freely repeats its intention to force the Palestinians out or destroy them (see here for a record of events).

The ‘golden rule’ has always been “He who has the gold makes the rules.” We can supplement that with “... and he who has the guns enforces them.” In threatening to dismantle the ICC, the US is doing nothing that it hasn’t been doing for the last 80 years. It chooses whatever will be to its benefit, it enforces it and the rest of the world can plait its shit. Take the arch-psychopath Henry Kissinger on ovverthrowing the Allende government in Chile:

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves (June 1970).

In fact, there was never any risk of a Soviet government in Chile but tens of thousands of people died under Kissinger’s and Thatcher’s good friend, Gen. Pinochet. The problem was that the Allende government had nationalised the gigantic copper mines owned by the US companies Anaconda Copper and Kennecott, among others. Kissinger never bothered to hide his soulless cynicism, e.g.: “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one” (Washington Post, Mar 5 2014).

The list of countries the US has actually attacked or invaded since January 1946 is truly frightening. Add to that the coups it has staged, the elections in which it has interfered, the totally corrupt and/or evil dictators it has supported and it becomes clear: the “international rules-based order” is a charade. The rules exist when it suits the US to impose them, and they are ignored when it doesn’t. Nobody, however, should think that this is exclusively an American hobby, everything they know they learned from the British imperialists, and the French and Spanish and so on. The urge to dominate is human. We see it in full force in the Persian Gulf today. Iran is not and never has been a threat to the US. Every time Trump, Biden, Rubio and all the others say it is, they’re lying, for the explicit purpose of gaining control over the entire region for Wall St and for their equally corrupt friends in Tel Aviv. To paraphrase Kissinger: “For the West, the demonization of Iran is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” The only threat Iran presents is to the American ego and to the demonic plans of the zionists to reduce every one of its neighbours to rubble.

Is there anything new in any of this? No, unless you still see the world through the monochromatic lens of “Us goodies and them baddies.” The important message is: Stand back, strip away all the propaganda and look objectively at what is happening. In particular, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to people, companies, groups, countries, religions, political parties and so on. The presumption must always be that they’re in it for themselves. If you have time, watch this video by the British rapper Lowkey. I have no idea where this chap gets his information from, he can practically tell you what a politician ate for lunch one day eight years ago. Similarly, Australia likes to present itself as everybody’s good mate, the cheerful helpful kid over the road but corruption is deeply entrenched in this country. Jack Waterford was the leading political reporter in Canberra for decades; he knows everybody and how they got to where they got. This article on systemic corruption in NSW is worth reading; corruption in this country is not quite so much paper bags stuffed full of cash but is the corruption of influence, of jobs for the boys and a few selected girls. The running sore of the $380billion AUKUS submarines has been corrupt from the very moment the idea was spawned by the disgusting serial liar and former PM, Morrisson and his equally febrile evangelical mate, Mike Pompeo.

Another example came to light a week or so ago. The Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Authority (AHPRA) recently adopted the definition of antisemitism pushed by something called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This is a little unexpected. Quite apart from the fact that there was no public discussion that I saw, it is an overtly political decision by a professional regulator. Apparently, we all have to comply with it even though the first sentence on the IHRA website says: “Read the full text of the IHRA’s non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism ...” (my emphasis). It seems this came from a meeting between the CEO of AHPRA, a Mr Untermeyer, and the woman who is anointed Australia’s “envoy on antisemitism,” an exceedingly well-paid job given to a die-hard zionist by appointment. For myself, I don’t see any point in this sort of thing, we already have perfectly adequate laws prohibiting discrimination of all sorts but apparently health practitioners are likely to slide back unless pulled up sharply. As far as I can see, this is a good example (or bad) of the corruption of influence: one group gains or seeks to gain an advantage by back room manipulation. Let’s not worry about that, though, it’s business as usual but it forced me to look at this definition. One example of what may constitute antisemitism caught my eye:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

That’s a bit strange. Even when declared and instituted Israeli policy precisely mirrors material in, say, Mein Kampf, we’re not allowed to say so? But I do that all the time, I show parallels between one group’s statements or actions and the statements or actions of their enemies. In fact, it was only a week ago that I used Mein Kamp (Chap. 15) to show how Nazi policy toward the USSR mirrored that of the British in building their empire. Similarly, the Nuremberg race laws of 1936 were actually based on the race laws of Kentucky and Tennessee, which had been in place long before Adolf was born and, Auschwitz notwithstanding, survived until the 1950s. As for Israel, there are probably thousands of quotes by a dozens of prime ministers and cabinet ministers, not to overlook extreme racist rabbis like Kahane, Kook Jr and Schneerson, that are identical to what became Nazi state policy, e.g. the little book Zionism Decoded in 101 quotes by Canadian historian, Prof. Yakob Rabkin. A few days after Kristallnacht in 1938, a Russian Jew named David Grün declared:

If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel (p37).

That is historical fact. Grün, renamed Ben Gurion, became the first prime minister of Israel. The idea of slaughtering half a million Jewish children worried him not one jot nor a tittle, and this was before the war. One of the most important of the architects of Israel, the cultured Nahum Goldmann, said of Ben Gurion:

… 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 [1, p94].

So I don’t think AHPRA need bother too much about the very rare antisemitic comments from Australia’s million or so health practitioners, the zionists do it themselves. Another item on the IHRA definition caught my eye:

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Let’s look at this more closely. Firstly, Israel is not a democratic nation: by its own constitution and laws, it is a “Jewish” state. It has two sets of laws, one for its Jewish citizens and one for everybody else. For example, foreign Jews who have never set foot there have the “right of return” whereas the millions of Palestinians, many of whom were born in Israel proper, have no such right. But the point here is not that people require Israel to behave as a sort of enclave of saints, all we want is that it should adhere to the huge body of international humanitarian law and stop killing children [2]. We don’t demand a higher standard from Israel, we’re just sick of it getting away with subhuman behaviour. So in view of the overtly political nature of AHPRA’s decision, and because I don’t support the idea of “regulation by litigation,” it would be helpful if the Agency could give some clarification where Israel’s conduct seems to fall well below acceptable international standards, i.e. using double standards to excuse them. For example:

1. Is it “antisemitic” to expect Israel to adhere to the minimum humanitarian standards expected of any other wealthy country, e.g. not dropping 2000lb bombs on tents crowded with refugees who have no air defences, or refraining from dropping white phosphorous explosives on clearly-marked hospitals?

2. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the UN OHRC report, cited above, as established fact?

3. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to and quote the many Israeli government ministers who openly advocate total ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of the ethnic Palestinian populations of Gaza, of the West Bank, of South Lebanon, the annexed Golan Heights, and of Israel itself?

4. Is it “antisemitic” to describe as pogroms the constant attacks on indigenous Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank by heavily armed gangs of Zionist “settlers,” aided and abetted by the Israeli police and military, which, over the past 30 months, have resulted in hundreds of deaths including many children?

5. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that Israel meets the definition of an apartheid state, specifically that laws applicable to Jewish citizens do not apply to non-Jewish citizens, and vice versa, e.g. the recent law imposing a mandatory death penalty on non-Jews for convictions that, if the accused were Jewish, would not apply?

6. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to the fact that the current prime minister of Israel and other senior Israeli officials are the subject of arrest warrants by the ICC for the crime of genocide in Gaza?

7. Is it “antisemitic” to refer to Israel’s recent military action against Iran as “unprovoked, illegal and immoral” in that it meets the standard of “aggressive war” as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunals?

8. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the behaviour of Israeli military and prison guards toward illegally-detained Palestinian men, women and children, including sexual assault by trained dogs, amounts to torture? [1].

9. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government and military command structure are fully aware that unconvicted and often uncharged Palestinian prisoners are routinely subject to torture and, in the case of several MKs and the minister for internal security, are strongly in favour of it, and that perpetrators of the torture are not penalised?

10. Is it “antisemitic” to express the view that if anybody treated Jewish detainees in the brutal manner described in numerous reports, that the Israeli government would react with incendiary rage, i.e. that it applies double standards in its daily activities?

11. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Israeli government enacted its “Hannibal doctrine” on October 7^th, 2023, thereby deliberately causing the death of hundreds of Israeli and other citizens?

12. Is it “antisemitic” to say that the Dahiya doctrine is a crime against humanity?

13. Is it “antisemitic” to say that mobs of Israelis regularly rampage through Palestinian areas in their cities screaming “Death to the Arabs” and damaging Palestinian property while the Israeli police stand by?

14. Is it “antisemitic” to show the clear parallels between the freely expressed plans of the current prime minister of Israel regarding his vision of a “Greater Israel,” e.g. standing before the UN General Assembly with a map showing Israel occupying ethnically-cleansed territory from the Nile to the Euphrates, and the Nazi vision of an ethnically-cleansed “Gross Deutschland” extending across to the Urals, as outlined in Mein Kampf (Chap. 14, pp398-408), especially as both plans are expressly based in the idea of a hierarchy of races?

15. Is it “antisemitic” to say that one looks forward to the day when somebody does to Israel what Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran and other places, i.e. attacking and illegally occupying other countries’ territory and, as part of the plan, destroying the civilian infrastructure, especially water and sewerage facilities, schools, hospitals, energy sources, agriculture, etc., leaving the remaining civilian population huddled and starving in rat-infested rubble?

Hmm. Seems you can’t contact AHPRA, and nobody is allowed to go to their offices. Oh well, no doubt they’ll come for me. I asked a friend to cosign this to send to AHPRA. She agreed, then had to change her mind: “I asked a colleague about the letter, and they said this would likely mean I would not be renewed this year for my academic appointment, although that would not be explicitly acknowledged. It has become such a pernicious issue. I am sorry but I will have to decline to be a signatory, I don’t want to lose my academic position.”

I agree, she’s more use in her post than out, but when you have to legislate what people must believe, you know you’re losing the war.

References:

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

2. UN Human Rights Council Report: The essence of childhood has been destroyed. June 18^th 2026, document A/HRC/62/CRP.2.

****

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 when I arrived in the Kimberley region of West Australia as their first psychiatrist, there was no internet. Before I left Perth, I signed to join the journal circulation list for half a dozen psychiatric journals. The first bundle arrived 18 months later, along with a letter saying that due to increased costs, journals would no longer be sent around (predictably, they had been sent to the “executive suite” of MHS first for them to read during office hours; I was on the end of a long list). That meant that if I wanted a journal article, I had to wait for one of my irregular trips to Perth and then spend as much time in the medical library as possible, photocopying anything that might be of interest (I had to pay myself as the librarian didn’t think philosophy or anthropology were necessary for psychiatrists). BTW, the first fax machine was installed in the hospital the week I arrived but it was kept under lock and key by the hospital manager.

How times have changed. These days, the problem isn’t insufficient information, it’s a case of too much. A large part of the deluge is junk, especially advertising disguised as “valuable learning experiences.” What are called medical newsletters are simply marketing arms of the drug industry. They’re mostly disguised as teaching material that allow people to get their brownie points to keep the medical board happy but don’t require any intellectual effort. There are dozens of them, mostly from the US, and the psychiatric weeklies push a rigidly biological line. However, they’re all facing a common problem: they don’t have anything new to say. Psychiatric Times is based in Boston and churns out articles bursting with the sense that psychiatry is teetering on the brink of major breakthroughs, but they’re always the same old same old with occasional novelties, e.g. psychedelic drugs as the latest fad to brighten the otherwise dull landscape.

This week, in an interview, the editor of PT, a Dr John Miller, talked about something that bothers him, tribalism in psychiatry (it starts at 2.45). Tribes, he said, are very much part of the human scene, there’s always been this sense of them and us: “That dynamic,” he says, “seems to have to exist in all cultures.” He uses the example of sport, how people get fanatical about their teams: “We want to win and (want the other team) to lose, that’s tribalism in its essence.” After 40 years, he feels psychiatrists are becoming walled off from each other. At the beginning of his career, he quickly became involved in giving lectures and seminars for the drug companies which were very well integrated into academic psychiatry and organisations such as the NIMH. He thought this helped spread knowledge and improve patient care and it was all very exciting (an lucrative, he didn’t say).

Here, the interviewer interrupted to say she too had been involved with representing drug companies and it gave her the sense of being at the cutting edge of science and up to date, which made her a better clinician. She was able to tell patients something good was coming so they should hang on and gradually they got better. Dr Miller added that knowing innovation was “always there” also helped keep psychiatrists well (7.00): “When I started, we had very limited tools, you could learn psychopharmacology in a week.” He began his career as a biochemist and was intrigued to see how “innovative molecules” (i.e. new drugs) were developed and released to great benefit (there is in fact only one). These days, however, prescribers are so flooded by paperwork and administrative demands that there’s no time for self-education (9.30). Clinicians don’t know about all the advances but there’s the additional problem that they don’t want to be compromised by conflicts of interest, so they keep away from drug companies. This has led to the system becoming fragmented (12.20):

Every decade, we have these paradigm enhancers that are helping us understand circuitry and systems and the integration of neurotransmitters ... the drug companies and NIMH and prescribers, we all need to be in the same tribe, working together to move the pendulum forward ...

Despite huge numbers of prescribers, not everybody is following the same script which means the epidemic of untreated mental illness (16.50) isn’t being addressed efficiently. It would be much better if everybody in the field, academics, researchers, funding agencies, clinicians, etc. worked together. “Wow,” said the interviewer, ending the session (17.45), “these are such great points. We could do five more sessions like this. Thank you for your insights. And for the viewers, if you have something on your mind, email us and we’ll get back to you.”

Mercifully, this wasn’t one of the sessions that counts as “education,” clearly just a word from the sponsors. First, as editor-in-chief, Miller is aged 66 and started psychiatry in 1986, i.e. well after the ideological convulsion that dumped psychiatry in the biological “stream,” discarding the notion that one’s life has anything to do with mental trouble. At the time, technology was racing ahead on a dozen fronts: scanners, genetics, viral research, neurotransmitters. Everything seemed so clear and exciting, just study the brain and, with a bit of money and time, all will be revealed. As a biochemist who then studied medicine, Miller was thrilled by this febrile atmosphere but, what at first seemed a stream limpid and clear has turned dark and run into the sand.

Thirty years ago, he says, everybody was pushing the same barrow, kindly provided by the drug companies and funded by the US taxpayer. Now, people object to drug company ties but it’s what he didn’t say is most revealing. He didn’t mention how the “genomics revolution” hasn’t delivered a single benefit to psychiatry. He didn’t mention how drug companies have largely given up on psychiatry, with no new “tailor-made chemicals” in the pipeline to fiddle with people’s neurotransmitters. He certainly didn’t say a word about the destruction of research wrought by the wierdo Secretary of Health, Mr RFK Jr, or the loss of Medicare and Medicaid cover for poor people pushed by the Trumpists, meaning they can’t afford treatment, and he didn’t show any suggestion that he needed to ask WHY there is “an epidemic of untreated mental illness...” (16.50). That would seem to be fairly basic. The only thing that concerned him was that everybody involved in mental health should start to sing from the same hymn book, the one that says “Drugs, glorious drugs, don’t care what they do.” The whole talk was just boilerplate drug company propaganda. The introduction said:

Both (the interviewer) and Miller advocate for a more integrated and supportive system among all health care professionals to address the epidemic of untreated mental illness ... The psychiatric field needs to work together more cohesively, Miller emphasized, sharing that we need a unified approach among psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and physician assistants to address the mental health crisis effectively.

First point to note: for all his academic appointments and so on, Miller doesn’t know what tribes are. If he did, he wouldn’t use it because “tribes” are always in some sense ideological and never rational (as scientific) or even anti-rational. Most tribes are self-appointed (political parties, religions and their myriad sects, sporting teams, languages and so on). Even when the tribe is race-based, it’s still a matter of ideology, as in “We’re superior to them.” Miller is right to say that tribalism is a fundamental part of human nature (it’s actually higher primate nature) but it’s a bad part, based in our innate xenophobia: without fear of The Other, there would be no urge to cluster among familiar faces. Whereas in the good old days, he says, everybody involved in mental health was happily riding together on the biological train, these days, they want to sit in separate carriages. For example, nobody wants to be seen sitting in the same compartment with the drug companies. He simply doesn’t get how people could object to them, they’re so helpful in producing all these amazing chemicals for prescribers to spread around, what’s wrong with drug companies, after all? Heavens to Betsy, they gave him lots of speaker’s fees and free airline tickets to travel around and spread the word, why are people today so anti drug companies? Why has the field of mental health split into tribes that don’t talk to each other? Part of it, as he pointed out, is the flood of paperwork and the pressure to push patients through to meet “productivity measures” but for the rest? No idea.

Compounding his error, he thinks the solution to tribalism is for everybody to join his tribe, then there’d be no arguing. That’s true, and there are heaps of historical examples of how different political or religious groups settled the arguments with their neighbours by forced conversion. But they can do that because their differences are ideological, not rational. Miller simply doesn’t grasp the concept of science as a process of rational enquiry, where differences are brought into the open, discussed and resolved. Certainly, the question of mainstream psychiatry’s relationship with drug companies has to be examined closely but that’s a matter of scientific ethics, i.e. metaphysics, and not one of empirical or evidence-based science. In fact, all the evidence says that psychiatrists, even at the highest levels, are easily seduced by the rivers of money flowing from drug companies, as the sleazy Joseph Biederman showed. The only way to resolve that is to keep drug companies well and truly locked in a separate carriage.

Miller is correct in saying there are separate tribes in psychiatry, but they’re not what he thinks they are. There are two major tribes, labelled according to their ideological positions on the question of the causation of mental disorder. The dominant tribe today is the biological tribe, whose card Miller carries and treasures. They say “Mental disorder is brain disorder; a full understanding of the brain will tell us everything we need to know about mental disorder.” From this unproven and openly ideological stance flows the belief that physical treatments (drugs, ECT and so on) are both necessary and sufficient, i.e. physical treatment is necessary for recovery, and physical treatment alone will guarantee recovery. That, however, is wholly a matter of opinion, not of science. You either believe it or you don’t but don’t waste your time looking for their justification because they haven’t got around to it yet.

Opposing them is the tribe that says mental disorder is a primary psychological phenomenon, that there is nothing wrong with the brain and that drugs are only going to conceal the true nature of the problem and create further physical problems of their own. That’s much more difficult to prove as psychiatry doesn’t have a theory of mind on which to base their opinion. The biocognitive model for psychiatry is intended to fill this gap but is meeting a bit of buyer resistance. Turns out psychiatrists would rather stick to their three-word non-models than try a new one, especially as it fills an entire book.

The major point is that the mere existence of ideologically-based tribes announces to the world that psychiatry is in a pre-scientific position. That’s the charitable conclusion; I say modern psychiatry is a pseudoscience, meaning it has the trappings of science (journals, professors, conferences, expensive studies and so on) but it lacks the substance (an agreed ontological position that entails a research program and treatment modalities) and that, at some level, the institution is aware of this but keeps it quiet. The reason psychiatry is splitting into tribes, and the tribes into subtribes is crystal clear: there’s nothing to stop them. There is nothing to hold them together, no central theory or doctrine or dogma that says “This is what you must believe and everything else is verboten.” Even their so-called bible, the DSM, is revised regularly as the various warring parties force their latest hair-splitting diagnoses on the mainstream. Of course psychiatrists will split into bickering tribes, all humans have an urge to get to the top by forcing everybody else to accept their views, and everybody else has an urge to resist. That’s what humans do, and psychiatrists are no different. Would it help if they all had to undergo psychotherapy? It didn’t stop the Freudians from tearing themselves to bits.

The interview with the eminent Dr Miller is a good example of how the pseudoscience of psychiatry is perpetuated. A senior member of the fraternity delivers a talk which, superficially, is full of interesting points and good sense, but closer inspection shows it’s essentially cliche-riddled drivel. The interviewer closed with the usual fawning stuff, adding: “And for the viewers, if you have something on your mind, email us and we’ll get back to you.” I’ll email them but I know they only like complimentary emails. Their attitude is that critics should shut up and learn the correct script that will let them join the dominant tribe. Their script, of course. In politics or religion, this sort of thing is called brainwashing.

****

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 NATO conference in Ankara this week, it was announced that European countries would collaborate on building an entirely new, highly accurate, long-distance missile system for $50billion. Britain, meantime, has announced that it must reduce social security and NHS payments in order to pay for a new fighter jet, four new nuclear missile submarines and the AUKUS attack nuclear submarines. The first of these are due for delivery in about 8 years although design work hasn’t even started. Germany will boost its military budget massively and the US (i.e. Trump) has threatened a trade embargo against Spain as it has announced it will not be increasing its military budget. That’s in between him suddenly firing 81 accusations of “communism” against people he doesn’t like, such as the Democratic Socialists (DSA), of which Mamdami is a member (see Robert Reich’s rejoinder). That says Trump is losing his grip.

All this is despite the very obvious failure of conventional warfare in the Persian Gulf this past few months, but they say that generals are always ready to fight the last war. So what’s going on? Actually, it’s nothing new, just another attempt to rerun the Crimean War against everybody’s favourite monster, Mother Russia. At 17million sqkm, Russia is far and away the largest country in the world and immeasurably wealthy in natural resources, as well as having major advantages in its huge coastline (37,600km) and borders. For people who like conquest and colonisation, Russia is and always has been the prize of all prizes. Trouble is, the Russians don’t particularly like conquest and colonisation directed against them and refuse to cooperate in the Great Game.

Their history is long and fascinating but the overwhelming theme is one of endless destruction. As long as there have been records, invading armies from east and west have swept across the limitless steppes, back and forth, just because there was nothing to stop them. For hundreds of years, Russia has steadily expanded its territory, down to the Caucasus and especially east, across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. The hostility of Western Europeans to their eastern Slavic brethren goes back forever but took its modern form when Napoleon was chased out of Russia, allowing the Czar’s armies direct entry to Europe and to the settlement conferences. For the West, the problem was clear: they wanted to dominate the world themselves, and were well on the way to doing it, but then this gigantic empire of oafs suddenly thrust themselves into the party and threatened to spoil it for the countries that thought they had the right to dispose the world. Panic, which spilled into war in Crimea and various other places in 1853-56. This was the first true modern war, fought under appalling conditions, and Russia’s defeat forced it to modernise, e.g. emancipation of serfs (aka slaves) in 1861, modernisation of education, the military and so on.

In the first half of the 20^th Century, Russia and USSR were attacked or invaded six times. During the Great War, about 3.5million Russians died but nobody really knows the number. In the Civil War after the Revolution, from 7-12million citizens died; in Stalin’s Terror and the Holodomor, another 20million; during the Nazi invasion, at least 25million more. The country suffered unbelievably during each of these disasters. In 1945, the Soviet leadership swore: Never again. Nobody ever will threaten us again. This was a bit of a problem as Marxist theory said that as long as there are capitalists, they will try to destroy socialism. The US promptly obliged by surrounding the USSR and later China with some 850 foreign military bases, all aimed at the Eurasian heartland. Accordingly, the Soviet leadership pushed to develop nuclear weapons as a defensive measure and felt it had to match the West bomb for bomb. In the West, this was broadcast as “Soviet aggression”: “Look at those dreadful commies, they want to destroy us, quick, they’ve opened a missile gap, we have to beat them.” Truman thought that the US would be able to keep the peace with 200 nuclear bombs. At its peak, it had about 15,000 and still has about 7,000, of which 1,700 are actively deployed (China has 640, with 34 deployed).

We know why Russians fear and mistrust the West, there are tens of millions of skulls buried in the rich dark earth as proof. Trump’s perfidy is simply the icing on a bitter cake. They believe that the West helped the Nazis to gain power, helped them stay in power and did heaps to encourage them to invade the USSR. Trouble is, they’re right. There is a book called Conjuring Hitler, by Guido Preparata (2005, available online), which argues that the British MI6 and other spy agencies chose Hitler as their man in the early 1920s when he was still in Munich and fostered his career thereafter. I think that wildly overstates the case but it is beyond question that, given the instability in Germany from 1919 to about 1936 or 37, every politician in the West saw the choice as “anybody but the Bolsheviks.” They were delighted when the Nazis took power and immediately began throwing communists and socialists into the new KonzentrationLager. They knew Hitler’s hold on power was very weak but they also knew that if they made any sort of move against him, he would be toppled and the Reds would take over. And that was the nightmare in their nightmares: a Bolshevik alliance stretching from the Ardennes to Bering Strait. True, Churchill warned against Hitler but it was only because he threatened the British Empire, not because of all the Slavs he had earlier announced he wanted to kill (Mein Kampf, Chap 15).

Accounts in the West of World War II more or less ignore the fact that the European war was essentially a land war in the East. All the rest was a sideshow. 85% of German casualties were on the Eastern Front, 90% of their tanks left the factories and headed east, and so on, but we never hear this. It’s all a mixture of plucky Britain and Hogan’s heroes (which I’ve never seen) interspersed with the Final Solution, quite forgetting that Germany’s goal in the USSR was 30million Slavs exterminated in the first year of the invasion. They tried, but didn’t quite make it. From the time of the invasion in June 1941 to the end of that year, 3.25million Soviet troops were captured. 97% of them were dead by the end of December, 20,000 a day, the greatest single slaughter of humans in our ghastly history. I could say “All this is ignored” but it’s not ignored, it’s actually carefully suppressed. We are told the Nazi war was a war to exterminate Jews in Europe but it wasn’t, it was a war to colonise the USSR in the same way Britain had colonised India and North America, France in North and West Africa or Belgium in the Congo. Do our esteemed leaders in the West tell little fibs? Most emphatically they do. The recent American War on Everybody, Chapter 386 (Persian Gulf rerun) was on the basis the Iranian government was hanging on by its fingernails and just needed a push to fall over. Lies, lies, lies, from beginning to end. See this report from Patrick Henningsen who is currently in Iran for the Ayatollah’s funeral.

At present in Europe, there are two themes trending. The first is terrified shrieks echoing through the media: “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, get more guns.” The second is: “Russia is on the verge of collapse, they’re incompetent barbarians and we just need to push a bit and they’ll fall over.” Unstated: “... and then we can loot them to our heart’s content.”

If indeed the Russians have any military designs on Western Europe, which I seriously doubt, there are a couple of points to remember. First, all things being equal, at their present rate of advance in Ukraine, fighting a much smaller and less industrialised country, it would take them about 2,600 years to reach the Portuguese coast. Fighting a combined population and industrial production many times larger than their own, on a front about twenty times larger, we could expect to see the Tovariches jump into the surf at Nazare in about 28,700 years.

Second, all things aren’t equal. As Iran and Hezbollah have shown, the days of conventional war, where more tanks and bombers and troops means more victories, are well and truly over. In a few months, Hezbollah has destroyed over 400 Israeli Merkava tanks, costing about $5million each, using $300 home-made drones. Iran took out two high end American radar systems costing $1billion each with a couple of indigenous cruise missiles costing about $100,000 each. Once they were blinded, the Iranians launched hundreds of Shahed drones at its attackers, costing about $20,000 each, forcing their opponents to fire Patriot missile defences at $4million a pop. Iran shot down about 34 American drones, costing $30million each although the most expensive, Triton drones, cost up to $200million each. Their cheap drones destroyed air fuelling tankers costing $200million each and forced the $8billion aircraft carriers to rush to safety. The USS Gerald Ford (which cost $13billion to build and $7million a day to run) suffered major damage from a fire starting in a laundry and will be out of action for a year at a cost of a mere $25million (I don’t believe that figure, that’s a rounding error in the Pentagon).

Is there a message in this? I think so but I also think our politicians and generals are incapable of seeing it. First message: we can no longer afford militarism. We can’t afford the $19trillion (with a T) that military activity costs each year, in direct costs to build the weapons, pay for the fuel, pay the troops and so on, plus the destruction of civilian infrastructure, plus the myriad deaths and injuries and pensions and so on, plus the “opportunity cost.” That is, if we spend $1 on a bullet, that’s $1 we didn’t spend on some tomato plants to grow food. If we put one young person in uniform, that’s one industrial or nursing or farming or building or mothering job unfilled, so no production. If we buy one nuclear submarine, that’s about 800,000 public housing units we don’t build and so the ranks of the homeless swell steadily, meaning more people to look after them or put them in prison or mental hospitals. Crucial point: militarism consumes the country exponentially. If you double the size of the military, it consumes not twice as much but four times as much through the opportunity cost.

Second, and despite the overlooked fact that aggressive war is a crime against humanity, the advantage has always been with the defenders, except now that’s magnified a hundred fold. In a few hours, kids can build a drone to destroy a tank and its four crew. Iran’s marine drones, both surface and subsurface, are a match for any $2billion destroyer in the Western navies, and its home-grown missiles will deal with the really big ships. Britain was very wise not to send its navy to “assist” in the Persian Gulf. While the Iranians may have hesitated over sinking an American ship, they would have fought each other for the chance to sink HMS Dogspoop. And Trump wouldn’t have lifted a finger.

Third, we can no longer afford to pretend that Russia is a danger but global warming isn’t. So far, the war in the Persian Gulf has dumped something like 350million tonnes of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The devastation in Gaza and South Lebanon would easily double that. Every jet taking off, every missile fired, every bomb dropped or rifle fired injects poison into the air. Every military jet produced, every tank, every pair of military boots, every meal delivered to a soldier in the field, every operation to remove shrapnel, every element of this industry of death is quietly pouring deadly gases and chemicals into the biosphere and, above all, diverting attention from the looming disaster from climate change. Europe and the US have had several weeks of heat wave and they don’t like it. Good. I hope it hurts because until it really hurts, all the Trumps and Netanyuhas and Kushners and Epsteins who have the world’s steering wheel in a death grip won’t take their eyes off their bank balances to do something about it. Better still, we should throw all of them in the dumpster and lock the lid.

Final message: Who wants war? When Hitler marched to occupy Czechoslovakia, he expected ecstatic crowds to line the streets but they stayed home and wept. The troops marched through dark and silent roads as the population did not want war, even though they got it later. EU president Ursula von der Leyen and various other pollies are running around telling everybody they have to get ready for war with Russia within five years but it’s an uphill battle for the poor dears. Most Germans do not see Russia as a threat (23% although 35% see the US as the major threat to world peace). How many citizens actually think war is a good idea? None. If so, how are they convinced to pay for the military and send their sons to be killed? Simple: they are told over and over again that the bad people over there, the sinister Other, are evil subhumans who are secretly plotting to attack in the middle of the night, so we goodies need to arm ourselves to the teeth and conduct lots of military exercises which consist of sending heavily armed fighters straight at the enemy’s borders then pulling them back at the last second. The West does this all the time then wonders why the other side gets angry.

Even though the overwhelming majority of people want to live in peace, this ploy works because the fear of subjugation is so strong in humans that they can be led to do stupid things by clever operators manipulating their emotions from behind the scenes. And it has to stop. But it won’t stop until the common people rise up and take power from the 1% of unmitigated scoundrels who are running the show to suit themselves. The won’t give up power easily.

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Further evidence of the deliberate targeting of children in Gaza.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

An article by psychologist Richard Sears in last week’s Mad in America is headed: “Minorities Face Higher Rates of Restraint, Chemical Sedation, and Psychiatric Detention.” He summarises three papers on how people from racial minorities face significant discrimination in public health services. The first, from the US, shows that people with limited proficiency in English are more likely to be restrained and/or sedated than native speakers. They investigated over 132,000 discharges over 54 months from a major medical centre in Boston, not a psychiatric unit. About 10% of patients had limited English but they were 30% more likely to be physically restrained and 12% more likely to be given antipsychotic drugs. The average age of all patients was 65 so drug abuse and alcohol withdrawal, which attract restraint and sedation, were less of a problem than in an emergency centre.

The second paper was a meta-analysis of papers from Europe covering nearly 39,000 admissions to psychiatric units. People from ethnic minorities were about 50% more likely to receive “rapid tranquillisation” (“chemically restrained”) than native-born admissions. This covered a number of countries in Western Europe so public health services were generally of a high standard. The third described a study in England from an area with about 12% of the population identified as “Black,” which they say is three times the national average. They interviewed staff regarding attitudes toward managing Black men in emergency setting. The intention was to explore the effect of epistemic injustice as it influenced the men’s experiences of mental health services. This is a sociological term, rarely used outside their field, which concerns wrongs inflicted on people because they are assumed not to know their own minds. They are wronged in their “capacity as knowers,” and it’s rife. It can be because they’re old, or young, or foreign-born, or struggling with English, or uncooperative, as in not wanting to be there, or just plain wierd. Instead of pressing on with a difficult interview, staff just give up, scribble a few notes and order drugs and seclusion.

An example from my training many years ago comes to mind. My supervising psychiatrist was a bit hard of hearing and the patient, a Calabrian lady in her 50s, hardly spoke English. I was struggling along with my schoolboy Italian, which she understood perfectly of course as it was Tuscan, whereas she spoke the southern dialect which I could hardly understand. The lady was born in the 1920s and life in Italy during the depression, the war and its aftermath was terrible. It was a laborious interview and the psychiatrist was obviously in need of a cup of tea. From time to time, he would interrupt with “What’s she saying?” Finally, he harumphed and headed for the door: “That’s the trouble with these mental patients,” he snorted over his shoulder, “if only they would stop mumbling.” That’s it. Mumbling is the cause of mental disorder. Elocution lessons for all. In fact, he liked patients, it was other psychiatrists he didn’t like. But the point is that the assumption is always: “If I don’t understand you, it’s your fault, not mine.” This is the dominance hierarchy in operation.

In 1987, I left Perth to move north to Western Australia’s remote Kimberley Region. It’s one of the most isolated parts of the Anglophone world, routinely cut off by cyclones or floods during the wet season and a long way from anywhere the rest of the time. The climate is harsh, monsoonal subtropical on the coast ranging down to the edge of the desert in the south. Temperatures are extreme – the first time I went to Wyndham, it was 48C (118F) and 90% humidity. Cyclones are common, bringing massive floods but droughts are even more common. The region is about 420,000sqkm and had a population of about 24,000, one person for every 18sqkm. For comparison, Victoria has 7.2million jammed in 220,000sqkm, and New York state has about 20million over 140,000sqkm, or one third the size of the Kimberley. The Kimberley population was then a little over half white, a lot of whom were transients: school teachers, police, miners and, of course, hospital staff. There were very few white people aged over sixty as they moved back to the southern states to retire. Mostly, the Aboriginal people lived within their traditional areas, even those who had travelled for education.

Housing was provided but was generally overcrowded and often damaged in drunken brawls. Each of the twenty or so main communities had a nursing post and a school but in the main, people lived traditional life styles. They spoke their own languages at home and their traditional belief systems were largely intact under a veneer of Christianity. This extended to health, of course, in paticular, the idea of preventive health. They were very fatalistic and just accepted as normal standards of health that white people would never accept. Coughs and colds, chronic bronchitis, ear and nose infections, bowel parasites and so on were seen as the normal course of events. All too often, they would simply put up with a chest infection until they were seriously ill with pneumonia and had to be flown to hospital. Respiratory disease was common as during the cold season, they would all sleep in the same room with the windows closed to keep warm but also because of smoke from the camp fires. They saw smoke as cleansing and therapeutic because it kept mosquitoes away. Alcohol was a major problem and other drugs were just starting to arrive but the fundamental issue was the lack of work. Apart from a bit of mining and the slowly dying cattle industry, both of which were highly mechanised, there were no industries sufficient to support that population. However, they couldn’t move away. They were tied to their land in the totemic structure, they struggled with English, their education was elementary, theirs was an oral culture so reading was simply not part of their lives, they hated cold weather but disliked working indoors, so where could they go? I don’t think things have changed very much since then.

The reason for putting a psychiatrist in that distant region was to deal with mental problems on the spot rather than have them sent to the mental hospitals in Perth, 2,200km away (almost the distance from London to Moscow). They would not go voluntarily so they were always detained but once they went south, it was very difficult to get them home again. The average stay was about six months, four times as long as for southerners. There was no follow-up so they would often relapse and be sent back to Perth again. My job, as the first isolated psychiatrist in the country and, it turned out, the most isolated in the world, was to ferret out looming mental problems in the region and fix them. Great, not a problem, can you send my magic wand to this address? But isolated meant isolated. It meant no office, no staff, no facilities of any kind and, above all, no support. In the six years I was there, I was never once contacted by the health dept or by the college of psychiatrists, even to see if I was still alive. There was absolutely no interest so I got on to build what I thought a remote service should be like: no service, just a psychiatrist roaming around in a 4WD vehicle or coming in with the flying doctor. I drove about 60,000km a year and had about 15 flights to the remote communities, such as Balgo, on the edge of the Tanami Desert or Kalumburu on the Timor Sea. And it worked. In the first full year, the number of admissions to Perth dropped from 52 to 2. Because they had to go by plane, either commercial or flying doctor, that represented an enormous saving alone, plus the cost of admission because they were managed at home, not in hospital.

The idea of a mobile psychiatrist was alien to the psychiatric culture and I could not convince anybody of its value. Traditionally, the psychiatrist sits in an office in the inner city area or in a large and forbidding mental hospital, and patients have to travel to be seen, which means they often don’t get there. If you see them at home, you see exactly where they live, you meet all the relatives and the neighbours who will be delighted to tell you what they think is wrong (with no mumbling) and they all get to see that the shrink doesn’t have two heads. Next trip, it’s a lot easier and after a year, patients would push their brothers or cousins who were “silly in the head” through the door to see the doctor. This was the model I have used since.

Back in Brisbane in about 2014, I compared my costs as a private bulk-billing psychiatrist with the traditional mental health service 2km down the road. It was traditional in the sense that they would only see patients who were “case-managed,” meaning chronics who had been in hospital. Ordinary cases who didn’t need admission had to go to the city 16km away which, for women with young children, was traumatic in its own right. This was a working class area jammed between two industrial areas, with a lot of immigrants and Aboriginal people, high unemployment, a lot of broken families or single parents, drugs and alcohol, the usual. Bulk-billing means I was paid by Medicare to see public patients, but only 85% of the scheduled fees, out of which I had to pay rent, staff costs, vehicle, phones, insurance and so on. Most private psychiatrists head for the city where they can charge privately-insured patients 200-300% of the scheduled fees. Using figures from the Health Department, I showed that the cost for half an hour of a well-qualified psychiatrist’s time was $73.50. The cost for half an hour of non-medical staff time down the road was $274.50. When I sent these figures to the Health Dept, I was told it was impossible, I must have got it all wrong. That was built into the system, both the grossly inflated costs and the denial.

The problem is, the overwhelming majority of psychiatrists and other staff are scared of leaving their institutions. They like the feeling of being part of a powerful system, of having keys on their belts and the security men a minute away. They feel safe and reassured that they’re on the right side of the glass wall but again, it’s a domination thing. Psychiatrists like it because they can stroll around knowing they’re at the top of the foodchain and everybody has to smile and step aside; nursing staff because they have absolute job security and they know they all stick up for each other; psychologists start to talk about chemical imbalances; and social workers are the enforcers of last resort. In one hospital years ago, by reducing the admission rate and shortening the average stay, we were able to close a ward and shift staff into the community. Who objected loudest and most violently? Nursing staff, of course.

How did we get onto this? Oh yes, epistemic injustice, the injury that comes from power imbalances that lead to discounting what a person knows. This is built into modern biological psychiatry. The patient says:

I’m a mess. My early life experiences weren’t good and my recent life has been terrible. I need somebody to show me how to get out of this mess otherwise I may as well be dead.

Psychiatrist smiles knowingly:

Don’t you worry about all that stuff. You’ve got a chemical imbalance of the brain caused by your genes. Your DNA has caused you to have bad experiences, not the other around. Take these tablets and this ECT and you’ll be fine, all your bad luck will disappear [1].

This is the ultimate epistemic injustice. It says that anything you believe about yourself and your life is of no consequence. The only thing that counts is what we believe about your mental state, and we always believe that you can’t get yourself better, you can only get better by doing as we say. And if you object, we have ways of dealing with that, too. Take an example of Billy, a 19yo single Aboriginal man from a remote community. He is full Aboriginal, reads at about Year 4 level, can drive but knows nothing about mechanics apart from changing a wheel, drinks erratically and smokes a bit of weed. His English is limited as he normally speaks his own language at home but his accent is very thick and he uses a lot of slang terms from his culture so it’s hard to understand him, especially when he gets upset. He has been diagnosed with a paranoid psychosis and is scheduled to get depot antipsychotics because everybody knows he won’t take tablets at home and it’s easier for the nursing staff to give an injection each month rather than chase him to take tablets. He doesn’t like the tablets because, he reluctantly reveals, they affect his sex life and he thinks they are trying to change him into a girl. The main problem is that he believes he has been “sung,” i.e. somebody who doesn’t like him has used a “kadaitcha man” or shaman to sing a curse on him. He thinks it may be some of the other boys at home who don’t like him because once or twice, they have called him a “poof,” or homosexual. He feels people talk about him and sometimes when he has been drinking, he is sure he can hear their voices coming from just outside his house. On the basis of auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions, he was given the diagnosis of psychosis.

Over several days, it becomes clear that he has always been anxious and insecure. He has no idea who his father was. His mother was an alcoholic and left him to be raised by her elderly mother when she went to the city years before. When he was about nine, his grandmother died so he went from one relative to another, with one spell in care. His schooling was broken by frequent moves and he has never had regular work, only a couple of work placements but he didn’t do well as the other boys made fun of his poor reading. He had a lot of social fears and was also scared of water, dogs and snakes. Water wasn’t a problem where he came from but dogs and snakes were. Over time, he started to believe all this was being done to him deliberately, which made him feel worse.

Culturally, Aboriginal men don’t like talking about their mental state and definitely don’t like admitting fears or loneliness. Aboriginal culture itself is like classic Greek culture, i.e. anything bad that happens is the result of machinations, not chance. It is a paranoid culture, not unlike modern American culture. For example, a certain president wanted the reflection pool in Washington dolled up for his appearance at the 250^th Anniversary, so he gave the job to some unqualified friend who did what the president wanted, paint it blue. As predicted, it has turned into a major cockup, the water has turned green and the blue plastic liner has broken into bits. Now the president says it wasn’t his fault, it’s vandals and saboteurs what done it and they gotta be strung up. That is, “Nothing is my fault. If anything goes wrong, somebody did it to harm me.” That is part of the classic paranoid stance.

Anyway, back to Billy. He is seriously anxious as a result of his early life experiences; his teenage years have been miserable; he feels a lot better if he drinks but he is left with fierce hangovers and the sense of hearing people plotting against him. He thinks that if this is all he can expect from life, he may as well be dead, at least he’d be reunited with his grandmother again, she was the only person who had ever cared for him. He takes his frequent panic attacks as proof of the singing ritual directed against him but he can’t talk about it to Aboriginal people because that’s forbidden; he is allowed to talk to a white person, especially a doctor, because he knows it will not go back to the people who have done it.

Cross cultural psychiatry is very interesting, the first thing it teaches is that everything you’ve been taught is completely wrong. That’s always the first step in correcting epistemic injustice: come down from the hierarchy. Epistemic injustice derives from one person misusing power over another person but the urge to dominate is innate and immensely powerful. With its unsubstantiated doctrine of “biological psychiatry” and its rigid institutional structure, mainstream psychiatry licenses dismissing the other person as “sick in the head” and not somebody who actually knows what has happened but can’t express it or is too scared to reveal it. That is a direct product of biological psychiatry; it cannot be otherwise.

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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

What follows is utterly repugnant.

On June 26^th, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (ICI), submitted another report to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR) which “examines Israeli violations and crimes against Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as their short- to long-term impact on children, between 7 October 2023 and 31 March 2026.” The 94 page report, titled “The essence of childhood has been destroyed,” is available at UNHQ online, click this code: A/HRC/62/CRP.2.

In language rendered all the more damning by the lack of emotion, it provides forensic detail of the carefully planned and executed attacks on Palestinian children, mainly in Gaza but also the Occupied West Bank, by members of the Israeli military. The Commission chairman, Mr Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, of India, also gave an interview on RT India in which he described how Israeli troops deliberately target babies, to the extent of shooting them through the head while they are being breastfed without injuring the mother. This requires considerable skill and determination. Mr Muralidhar said:

When you shoot a 10-day-old baby breastfeeding on his mother… through his head, you can by no means label such a baby as an enemy of the State of Israel and justify these kinds of attacks.

Their systematic, genocidal cruelty is one side of the matter. For the tens of thousands of murdered children, their families will never see them grow up, a monstrous crime in its own right. The other side is the destruction of the surviving children’s lives. They have had no schooling for three years and their schools and universities have been deliberately destroyed, even bulldozed. They live in a demolition zone, deprived of all but the barest essentials of life, unable to play, unable to see their relatives or friends. Their families are devastated, their health blighted, even their teeth ruined, and there is no recovering. Mentally, they will suffer to the same extent that Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide suffered, although we could hope their communities are more forgiving than Israelis were of survivors of the Holocaust.

This report cannot be dismissed as a case of rogue troops defying orders, or of antisemitic propaganda. It proves at the level of criminal responsibility that these appalling crimes are the direct result of deliberately-formulated and freely-broadcast Israeli government policy. Time and time again, senior Israeli officials including cabinet officers state that the destruction of the Palestinian people is their life’s ambition, and part of that is eliminating every Palestinian child since they will grow up to hate Israel, they can’t help themselves. This stems from the pervasive Zionist fantasy that all gentiles hate Jews as an innate compulsion, and disregards the twin facts of ceaseless brutal Israeli aggression and that the great majority of gentiles around the world who do not hate Jews. These include large numbers of very powerful people in the West, such as the leaders of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, so-called Christian Zionists and many others, who are actively aiding and abetting the ceaseless Israeli wars against the Muslim nations of West Asia. The US and other countries are not sending weapons to Israel and funding their military because they are in the grip of an uncontrollable hatred of Jews. That is a lie. If anything, their barely-concealed racism is directed against the indigenous populations of West Asia.

Every fair-minded person should be familiar with this report, although not everybody will be able to read it. It is the latest of many issued by ICI in the face of frenzied opposition from the Israeli government and their powerful supporters in the West. For example, ICC prosecutor Mr Karim Khan, who issued the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others, has recently revealed threats that were made against him if he did so. He went ahead anyway. But when the “essence of childhood is destroyed,” what does it tell us about the whole “Greater Israel” project, as implemented by the “most moral army in the world”? We are told that the reason Israel is constantly pushing beyond its borders, driving millions of people from their ancestral homes and destroying everything so they can’t return is that Zionists are fulfilling God’s plan for them. That’s all very well but as Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion said as early as 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? [1, p99].

Nobody should ever doubt that ethnic cleansing is and always has been their plan, to take the “promised land” back again and to clear it of any “defilement.” Once they take control of it, they will not return it. Recovering the land is a divine mission but ipso facto, the idea of handing it back again is inconceivable as it would be the most grievous sin, a denial of the divine plan. That’s interesting, they’re certainly not the first people on earth to believe they had a stronger claim on land than its indigenous population. All the European countries in their many colonies, the US expanding into native tribal territories, the Nazis pushing into the USSR, Japan invading China, on and on. They all had a reason based on the idea of a hierarchy of races, religions, etc., in which their tribe was on top and all the others down below. Humans do this, the joy of dominating others is hard-wired into us and, without strong social restraints, it takes control just because being on top is so exhilerating. This is so fundamental that hierarchies are built into practically every aspect of every human society that has ever been. In addition, Israel is the only country in the world that has not defined either its borders, so they can keep expanding them, or its citizens, so it can deprive non-Jews of civil rights. By this means, domination is covertly written into their constitution.

Israel’s drive to dominate is perhaps a little different from say Nazi Germany as they say: “We’re special because God appointed us to be, he made a covenant with our ancestors and we have to fulfill it. By expelling our neighbours, we are actually doing good works.” However, on the ground in the rubble of Gaza and for the people being expelled, that’s no different from Hitler’s view that unless Germany could reach its proper place as leader of the world, humanity was likely to slide into a new dark age. However, we’ll put that aside and focus on the Covenant, which said: “I will give you this land if you keep my law” (Deuteronomy 11:8-32 among others; emphasis added).

If you keep my law. For a devout Jew, this isn’t quite the cakewalk it seems to be. Turns out it’s a covenant with a catch as there are 613 laws they must observe, 248 positive (Thou shalts) and 365 negative (Thou shalt nots). Since the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70AD, a lot of them have fallen into abeyance, also burnt offerings and stonings seem to have gone out of fashion. However, that still leaves an awful lot of very strict laws. Negative rule No. 57, for example, from Deuteronomy 20:19 says “Do not destroy fruit trees.” Regardless, the first thing the marauding bands of “settlers” do on their regular, carefully planned and state-protected pogroms do is destroy the olive and orange groves in Palestinian villages. Similarly:

Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour’s wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour’s (Deuteronomy 5:21).

Coveting just is the essence of Zionism, that’s what it’s about: remove the coveting of the neighbour’s land and there is no Zionism. Above all, Deuteronomy 5:17 states simply “Thou shalt not kill.” There doesn’t seem to be much wriggle room in that, so when the Israeli army rock up to a Palestinian village and announce, “Hi folks, we’re God’s little helpers and he says you gotta F off but just to prove the point, we’ll shoot a few of you and set fire to your houses and farms,” there would appear to be a bit of cognitive dissonance. Except they don’t show it. In all the videos the troops post of themselves blowing up schools and hospitals, they seem to be having a whale of a time, laughing and joking with no sign of upset at all. In the UN OCHR report, troops even report that they are commended for shooting children. How does this happen? 92% of Israeli Jews fully support their government in its genocidal activities, and plenty think they should do more. How can they say, on the one hand, “By destroying Gaza and Lebanon and Iran, we’re doing God’s will,” and on the other, break every known divine law, including sex with animals (Leviticus 18:23)?

There is an answer but it isn’t widely known among gentiles: in simple terms, non-Jews aren’t actually human. According to the Kabala, Jews come from the divine sphere but goyim come from the Satanic sphere so, by wiping them out, Jewish troops are simply cleaning out pollution and paving the way for their messiah. Among many others, historians Shahak and Mezvinsky mention the enormously influential American Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994), leader of the Chabad sect (of which J Kushner is a powerful member) and mentor of one Binyamin Mileikowsky (aka Netanyahu):

The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies (of Jews and non-Jews) 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 [2, Chap 4].

That’s pretty clear but it’s not isolated: they quote the Rabbis Kook (father and son) who believed:

… the Lurianic doctrine that non-Jews have satanic souls: ‘Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge’ [2, Chap 4].

When Zionists say that all goyim hate Jews as a natural phenomenon, it is what the Freudians call a projection: attributing to another person motives or beliefs which one holds oneself but which are in some sense forbidden or prohibited. The proof of the projection is that if all gentiles hate Jews in their DNA, there would be no Christian Zionists. End of story. Speaking of DNA, Shahak and Mezvinsky continue:

Rabbi Ginsberg, supporter of Chabad Hassids and Goldstein, ‘… speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based, spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of the Torah ... If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA … There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.’ (Baruch Goldstein was the fanatical Jewish American physician who murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in 1994. He is widely revered as a great Jewish hero in Israel and in the diaspora and people make pilgrimages to his grave).

This is the mental set that encourages perfectly healthy, sane, intelligent, educated young men (and quite a few women) to use children for target practice. The troops have been raised in the atmosphere that constantly denigrates and debases their neighbours as subhuman, animals in human form, satanic, defilers of the divine plan and so on, as described by educator and professor, Nurit Peled Elhanan (sister of Miko Peled). This sort of brainwashing, this abomination of one’s neighbours is human. This is what humans do. It has absolutely nothing to do with race, religion, intelligence, education, nationality, tribe, wealth, size, you name it. Humans are hierarchical animals, we love to dominate but at the same time, we will fight to the end for freedom from domination. If the Zionists think they can pound their neighbours hard enough, they will give in and either accept a form of slavery or disappear quietly, they’re completely wrong. The Palestinians will not accept it, any more than you or I would accept it. Moreover, worldwide, a generation is now coming of age who have seen that the entire Zionist project is a crime from beginning to end. The self-styled “most moral army in the world” turns out to be a bunch of cowardly murderers.

Zionism is a political movement. It is not a religion, it is not a race, so it is subject to the same criticism as any other political movement (see this recent decision by an Australian court that antizionism is not racism). Zionism is heretical as it purports to use their Torah (first five books of the Christian bible) as the justification of their expansion yet they ignore the most basic rules: “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t open to interpretation. That is, they pick and choose the bits that suit their innate drive to dominate, and laugh at the rest. Zionism is idolatrous, in that it elevates the land previously known as Palestine to the level of an idol, the pursuit of which is more important than following the vast majority of rules of the religion, thereby overriding the main message of Judaism, which is a religion of peace and contemplation. Zionism is a criminal endeavour, in that it deliberately sets out to steal other people’s land and to kill them if they resist. These are crimes as defined in the UN Charter and in many other points in international humanitarian law. Israel is a member of the UN and has signed the Charter but routinely breaks it: expansion was written into the Zionist plan from the very beginning and has been elaborated a million times since.

Everybody should have a copy of the ICI report on the destruction of childhood in Gaza and the occupied territories by Israel. Not everybody will want to or be able to read it but when your grandchildren ask: “What did you do for the children of Gaza?” what will you tell them?

PS. If you can face it, here is an interview that sets out part of the endless corruption of the Kushner/Trump branch of the Epstein class. It is completely insane. I’ll correct that. The insanity is that these people don’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing and fully expect to be able to keep getting away with it. The day of reckoning is approaching.

References:

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

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

(Both of these works are available as pdf on line. And yes, I am aware of the controversy surrounding Shahak, most of which was hasbara).

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

Fascism is not a political doctrine in the sense that democracy, aristocracy, autocracy, theocracy or kakistocracy (government by the worst) are doctrines dictating how a government is to be organised and acquitted. It is not an economic doctrine, as socialism and capitalism are. It is essentially a technology for gaining and maintaining power, based on the innate, hormonally-driven human urge to dominate others, to gain more and more power, territory and possessions, even at the expense of others – or deliberately at their expense, to subjugate them. A sense of power and domination is its own reward: it feels good but, at the same time, being forced down the dominance hierarchy or out of the tribe feels bad in and of itself. This is the paradox of hierarchy: essentially equal and opposite urges operate in each and every member of Homo sapiens but if one person’s urge to dominate is satisfied, then a hundred miss out.

Fascist technology is any technique or action that increases or encourages the urge to gain power or amplifies the rewards of being dominant. The technology can be applied to any group of people organised according to a dominance hierarchy: politics of course but also armies, religions, big companies, academia, and definitely football clubs. Because the urge to dominate is based in the hormone testosterone, it is strongly male-oriented but women are quickly swept up and form an important part of the background of any fascist movement. Crucially, the technology is directed at building and expanding the hierarchy; the drive to dominate is easily switched on but, apart from defeat, there is no off-switch. We have in us a lust for more and more but no innate mechanism to say “Enough is enough, I’ll leave some for others.” That’s a learned, moral matter but it is not innate and most people who want to go up the ladder slept through that lesson.

In practical politics, this means that fascism is a self-amplifying movement, powered by ever-increasing excitement, driven more and more to extremes, to want more territory, to see more enemies to crush. Because it is based in the idea “We are the greatest,” no member is allowed to say: “Actually, it’s not that important. Let’s be satisfied with what we’ve got” or “Really, we’re no different from everybody else.” The winning team of last year’s grand final doesn’t choose to spend this year surfing, no way, they’re straight back into the fray to prove who’s top dog. Politically, any fascist group is locked into a one way path: To the extreme and beyond, to paraphrase Toy Story. There’s an up escalator, but no down; it ratchets up but there is no rappell rope to come down again. Moderates are replaced by extremists, reasonable demands by unreasonable, realistic plans by unrealistic and so on until ... until what? Once under way, how does a fascist movement end? To answer that, we have to look to history but in the main, the answers are not pretty, a Götterdämmerung imposed from without or exploding within.

It is extremely rare for people to give up power voluntarily. Even very old people tenaciously hang on to their offices or wealth, long after they are able to do anything beyond look at it. It doesn’t make any difference whether they built the empire themselves or inherited it, their gnarled old hands have to be prised off the treasure or the throne, even their dead hands. Politically, people with serious power – or wealth, it’s the same thing – would rather die than give it up, especially to their enemies. They’re certainly keen for other people to die so they can hang on. But as a system that rewards the in group or the leader above all others, there are always lots of people who want to take top spot themselves. Fascism is inherently unstable but Orwell foretold a grim stability, a balance of terror between huge and massively-armed states:

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity [1, p26].

In this essay, You and the Atom Bomb, from late 1945, and presaging his 1984, he coined the term “cold war” to describe the state of unwavering hostility, a “peace that is no peace” that had split the wartime anti-fascist allies, essentially the US and USSR as Britain was prostrate. This is important, because one way fascism ends is when the external enemies it has created overcome their differences to form an alliance to defeat it. The alliance to defeat Napoleon was another example. On the large scale, those days are probably gone because nuclear weapons are great levellers, but smaller examples still happen from time to time, e.g. when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge.

More commonly, fascism tears itself apart from within. This might be when the founders die and the new generation fight over who is going to rule, or they can’t agree on a single course, or when the ultra-extremist group decides to eliminate a more moderate group or vice versa, resulting in civil war. This happened in the USSR in 1989, leading to its collapse. In China, when Mao died in September 1976, his wife and a small group (the “gang of four”) attempted to seize power but were thwarted by moderates led by Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiopeng and others.

Today, we see this playing out in two important far-right states, the US and Israel, both of which have largely turned the world against them. As bad as they are, I don’t think anybody is yet thinking of invading two dangerously unstable nuclear states. Everybody is hoping nature will take its course and they implode from within. In the US, Trump regained power by an artful alliance of frustrated nativists and working class people, his MAGAts who provided the votes he needed, and money invested by mainly Zionist billionaires (note invested, not donated). These groups are not natural allies. The American right wing is traditionally antisemitic, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. In the 1930s, the US had strict quotas on immigration of Jews. Thomas Szasz recounts the trouble his family had in migrating from Hungary, and how, despite having excellent marks, he struggled to enter medical school. At that time, many states had strict race-based laws, mainly directed against African-Americans but easily stretched to cover Asians or Jews as the fancy took them. This was normal then but the reality is, vulgar racism has never really gone away, it has simply hidden itself in Smalltown, USA.

So Trump’s political machine, such as it is, had wheels going in opposite directions and, to nobody’s surprise, the wheels are falling off. By trying to satisfy the Zionists with a war on Iran, he has infuriated his nativist, America-First base, the “deplorables” who actually vote for him. By signing a capitulation with Iran, he is haemorrhaging support from the billionaire Zionists such as the bizarre Miriam Adelson who gave Trump $250million and is now shitty he isn’t doing what Israel wants. With one supremely stupid war, he has managed to alienate both bases and he is now in serious political trouble. When he was elected, I predicted he would be pushed out by the end of 2026; that’s still looking very likely but we’ll see how much more damage he can do before then.

All this is proceeding according to Fascist script 101: take advantage of the sense of decline and immiseration to gain power; appoint external enemies (Muslims, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and China) and internal enemies (immigrants, antifa, lefties of various shapes and colours) and then start pogroms to neutralise them; build a sense of national crisis; appoint yourself as the saviour of the nation and its moral heritage and so on. This is textbook stuff, straight from Mein Kampf per courtesy of the reptilian Stephen Miller (and yes, unfair to snakes). Where Trump has failed is his corruption. Ordinary people don’t like corruption. They don’t like the sense that their superiors in the national hierarchy are using their power and influence to enrich themselves in ways ordinary people can’t and wouldn’t.

Overwhelmingly, people appointed as treasurer of the local church or golf club wouldn’t dream of stealing money or giving advantages to their friends or relatives, and this is the standard they demand of their leaders. For the German people, one of Hitler’s electoral strengths was that he was decidedly ascetic with no interest in accumulating wealth for himself; also, he was not promiscuous and was always courteous to women. The contrast with the Trump crime family just couldn’t be greater (see Kevin Walmsley today re the Trump sons’ investment in a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan which has just been given $1.6bln in Federal grants; interesting article; we won’t start on the loathsome Kushner’s diabolical plans for Albania but if you really want to ruin your day, watch Patrick Henningsen here). Another reason Trump is on the slide is his erratic behaviour, which comes from trying to bignote himself all the time while stealing the family silver and handing it to his rich friends and making sure nobody ever sees the paedophilic dirt in the Epstein files. That’s too many balls for a dementing man to juggle.

Fortunately, there is something called the midterm elections due in November. At this stage, Trump is heading for a shattering defeat but nobody should underestimate the capacity of the wealthy to swing things in their favour. He knows that if he loses control of the Senate, he’ll be heading straight to a federal prison for a long time. There are still four months to go; trapped rats are the most dangerous. He could easily pull some stunt out of his hat that normal people wouldn’t think of and, because of the imperial American political system, he could impose it. Politically, the US is an anachronism, a hangover from the French Revolution that modelled the Republic on the Ancien Regime, and the US simply copied it (Ben Franklin had been ambassador to France for nearly 10 years, and Thomas Paine was strongly aligned with the revolution). It’s not at all like the Westminster system, where Britain has just defenestrated yet another prime minister for being a bit aimless. In the US, the presidency holds immense power and is not so much the pinnacle of a pyramid as the peak of an extremely high pillar, with the rest of the country milling around its base, following orders as they drift down from on high. If Trump were PM in the UK or Australia, he would have been out on his fat arse in his first term. It would be easy to say “That’s their problem” but it’s also our problem. All we can do is watch but there will be more trouble. Let’s hope it doesn’t spread our way.

Meantime, Israel is no longer drifting toward fascism, it’s a full gallop. In Narcisso-Fascism, I listed the features of a fascist movement (pp30-34) and how Israel meets them (pp165-171). Remember that was written in 2023, before the current ultra-fanatical government took office. There are 22 criteria. We can give each country, political party or social movement a score on each feature, where 0 = not at all, 1 = a bit, 2 = quite a lot and 3 = a great deal. Israel is right up there at the top, a bit below North Korea and Nazi Germany. Even though they have fairly open borders and tolerate opposition newspapers, what pushes them up the scale is the overtly genocidal nature of their political program. North Korea doesn’t plan on killing all the South Koreans. Israel makes no secret of its genocidal intentions; au contraire, they boast about it and then get enraged when anybody objects and try to smear them as “antisemitic.” Truly amazing that apparently intelligent and educated people could be so far out of touch with socio-political reality without actually being psychotic.

In any event, their show is falling apart. They are seriously isolated in the world with, as Vance says, only one friend, DJ Trump, who has one foot in prison and the other on a banana skin. Israel’s secret alliances, e.g. with the UAE and Albania, are falling apart (see the Henningsen interview above); their allies in the West are being pushed out (Starmer and his gang) and so on but, above all, their unitary state is cracking. Most readers will know that religious students in Israel are exempt from military service (nobody else is, it is the most militarised state in the world). The army is running short of troops so they want to conscript the ultra-orthodox who are objecting violently, thereby splitting Netanyahu’s entire base of support. If he persists with this plan, and he has little choice if he wants to hold all the stolen territory, then he will lose the clerical-fascist parties in his coalition. He will lose office and the public prosecutor is waiting around the corner to nab him on charges of corruption. No wonder he seems to be losing weight. Either way, we can all sit back to watch as the plot twists and turns but I don’t think we are going to see a moderate, sane government take over. The different pretenders to the throne all hate each other violently (Israel Shahak: “The hatred of the gentiles for the Jews is as nothing compared with the hatred of Jews for each other”). Their only policy difference is how much land they steal and how quickly they wipe out the Palestinians, not whether they should withdraw to their own borders and start to be sensible.

We live in interesting times, unfortunately. I don’t think anybody can predict what will happen over the next twelve months. If the US political class had any brains, they would remove Trump and the trumpists, settle with Iran, tell the Israelis to STFU and F Off, and quietly sort out their financial mess before it engulfs them. But collectively, they don’t have any brains. They are obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of nations, which is the logical development of their earlier and still current obsession with hierarchies of races and religions. It is now written into the national charter that they have to be Numero Uno in every respect, “full spectrum dominance,” they call it: see that word? Domination. It’s all to do with testosterone. Trump’s rantings about being the most powerful nation on earth is the same psychobiological phenomenon as bull elephant seals fighting on a beach.

Israel, I believe, is a lost cause. An interesting question: In giving Israel carte blanche for 75yrs, has the West done it any favours or simply encouraged the growth of clerical-fascist regime where 80% of the population support actual genocide? Is it the product of a benign neglect coming from crude self-interest? 50% of Republicans under 40 are now opposed to Israel, and everywhere else it’s worse for them. The US will have to cut them off financially because the working class are being forced to choose between supporting the Zionist wars or Medicare For All. That’s a no-brainer but never underestimate the capacity of the American power elite to convince the average Joe and Josephine Voter to vote against their interests (Aneurin Bevan, architect of the British NHS: “The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power”).

If and when the torrents of US$ stop flowing to Israel, it will collapse in a heap. The remaining intelligentsia will pack up and leave; the secular Jews in the military will wonder why they’re being blown up to keep the religious fanatics chanting safely in their schools; the wealthy will take their money and run to their mansions in Monaco and Manhattan; the Epstein-Kushner class will slide out of sight in the murk and just keep on doing what they do best; and the rest will have to realise the party’s over, the Chosen People will have to choose peace – or oblivion. We live in interesting times although I never had any problem with boredom.

1. Orwell G (1945) You and the Atom Bomb, in Collected Essays Vol 4, In Front of Your Nose. London: Penguin. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

Following the post on Reprising Mesmer (June 9^th), a reader commented: “But most pseudosciences fade quickly - this one is being funded to the tune of colossal amounts by both state and private funding.” He wondered why: is it a hidden aim, such as anaesthetising the population to the horrors of the our endless colonial wars? “Perhaps there’s a real aim behind all this experimentation, and it’s not what is claimed. Which is why the funding never dries up on this pseudoscience.”

The next week’s post asked: “When is a Science?” (June 16^th), which quickly brought up a discussion on “neurodiversity.” A PhD psychology candidate, who is presumably stuck in the thick of this movement, did not see that it had any scientific basis, just another of many fads: “The problem with neurodiversity is that is provides no explanation for the diagnoses (which basically includes everything) it assumes it can explain.” He gave a long but incomplete list of all these terms, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, dyslexia, dysphasia, aphantasia (a new one for me), rejection sensitivity dysphoria, etc:

Psychologists turn these, as I see them, prejudices or dislikes into biological conditions which we must find the “neural correlates” for so then they can…..do what? A neurosurgeon would just laugh if asked to medically act on such “findings”. This is how I see psychology works, lurching from fad to fad (EMDR, Power Posing, Resillience) which they must find the neural correlates for (basically meaning we must give someone a lucrative career in doing nothing of lasting value except to indulge their own career/narcissism).

Another reader asked: “is there another blanket term that refers to intellectual, perceptual or sensory handicaps?” The short answer is Yes, and we’ll come back to it but these discussions raise the crucially important point of how psychology and psychiatry get away with this. Can anybody name another field claiming to be “scientific” that, as the reader noted, “Despite having two ‘sciences of the mind’ (which we don’t have for any other science such as physics/biology) ...” shows no intellectual development? This is the question right at the heart of critical psychology/psychiatry: Where’s the science? Show us your articulated theory of mind and the model of mental disorder that flows logically from it, and your theory of personality as a subset of the theory of mind and the model of personality disorder it generates, and then we can judge whether psychiatrists and psychologists actually know what they’re doing or whether the whole thing is a vast exercise in using pseudoscience to dupe the general public for financial and other base reasons.

We can agree that, in the complete absence of an articulated theory of mind, psychiatry and psychology are hobbled from the start. The best they could do is stick to questionnaires like intellectual testing, which presumes nothing. For example, you don’t need to know anything about how birds fly to work out which one can fly furthest or fastest. That’s pure performance. Same with IQ tests, they test performance on that day and nothing more. Psychology can get a long way by keeping to its concept of the mind as a “black box” but that’s not available to psychiatry, which wants to label people as “functional” or “dysfunctional” and then do something about the dysfunctional, i.e. its practice is based on value judgements. Perforce, the next step in the process is looking inside the black box: is the brain itself sick, or is the mind malfunctioning purely as a psychological unit? To answer that, there is a logically prior question: How does that lump of squishy pink stuff between your ears give rise to the sense of being something that functions in the psychological realm? Here we are again, back at the same question that exasperated Descartes 400 years ago, now known as David Chalmer’s “hard problem of consciousness.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, these two traditions, of trying to explain human behaviour by psychological means or simply assigning it to biology (details to be provided later), were alive and well and poles apart. In Leipzig in 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, the first person to call himself a psychologist, opened the first dedicated psychological laboratory. He planned to use the quantitative methods pioneered by Hermann von Helmholtz to study the mind but he didn’t see any limits on his subject matter. In addition to important work on what we now call biophysics (perception, etc), he gathered a huge amount of information on folk psychology, meaning how ordinary folk talk about psychological matters. This quickly led into a morass so, by 1913, the American psychologist John B Watson felt justified in saying there was no hope for a psychology that allowed non-physical matters (i.e. metaphysics) to intrude:

I do not wish unduly to criticise psychology. It has failed signally, I believe, during the fifty-odd years of its existence as an experimental discipline to make its place in the world as an undisputed natural science ... We have become so enmeshed in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content that I, as an experimental student, feel that something is wrong with our premises and the types of problems which develop from them ... 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 [1, pp163,166; I use this quote a lot, it set the path for psychology for the rest of the century].

This was the opening shot in the behaviourist revolution that led to conditioning, reinforcement schedules, Skinner boxes and, ultimately, nowhere. As a sort of “brave new world” non-mentalist science of the mind, it failed, as parodied in the film “Clockwork Orange.” Since then, as reader PC describes, psychology has fallen into line as a sort of psychiatry manqué, more concerned with the biology of how people experience emotions than with the psychology of why they experience just these emotions and what to do about them. All of this is in keeping with the broad thrust of positivist science, the notion that there are no values or emotions in science, just plain hard facts. Science can only deal with observables; the mind is in principle unobservable; ergo, discard the mind and build a valueless and mechanistic psychology, manifest as CBT.

Psychiatry, meantime, luxuriated in the idea that it had caught the slipery imp of mind in a biological net. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was, as he loved to remind people, an entirely new science of mind, unlike any that had gone before. This stripped away the veneer of civilisation, leaving only the raw and brutal basic drives that powered our minds behind dark curtains. These, he believed, were of the same nature as instincts in animals, the only difference being that we conceal them, from each other and, more importantly, from ourselves. Thus, our basal instincts can work their mischief in the dark, causing unpleasant emotions and disturbed behaviour without the subject knowing why. Freud claimed that, using his technique of “free association” and by analysing dreams, it is possible to bring them to full awareness and then deal with them maturely.

This was accepted as valid science by the early positivists and even mid-century. In 1949, Gilbert Ryle, one of the most influential of British philosophers, referred to Freud as “psychology’s one man of genius” (he was having a dig at behaviorists like Watson, Skinner and Eysenck). Why were they so accepting of what we now see as a classic pseudoscience? The only people who can answer that are long gone but it seems that removing all human values until all that remained was primitive urges, much the same as those of animals, swung them. They were satisfied with a theory that saw humans in the same light as cattle, fighting and mating in the paddocks; Freud promised them that in a sort of hydrodynamic form (the dominant science of his age) so they were let him through the door of science. It didn’t last. By the early 1970s, the psychoanalytic world was falling apart, leaving psychiatry to be captured by the men in white coats, the biologists.

The important point is that while they keep up a flood of claims to be the “true science of mental disorder,” biological psychiatrists have managed to take control without ever once showing their scientific credentials. Now if you tell them that, they get shirty and stamp off, muttering angrily about “ridiculous antipsychiatrists.” Crucially, they don’t stand their ground and say: “Here are our credentials. Here is our theory of mind, here our model of mental disorder and why it should be seen as biological. And this, if you can understand it, is our theory of personality and the model of personality disorder that flows from it. Are you satisfied now?” No, that’s exactly what doesn’t happen.

It’s probably unique in the history of science that people can be given so much power and so much money to inflict themselves on so many disadvantaged and defenceless people without justifying it. For example, and the one that annoys me so much, is this: Where is the justification for taking from their homes people who have broken no laws, detaining them in generally awful surroundings, denying practically the whole of their human rights, and forcing them to take very unpleasant drugs they don’t like and don’t want that shorten their lives? These are very big moves, you know, it’s not trivial to lock a person away and refuse them permission to communicate with their relatives, as happens. The people who are doing it wouldn’t like it if it were done to them, so where’s the theoretical justication? It simply doesn’t exist. It happens for historical reasons only, plus the urge to have a quiet, ordered society, so how do they get away with it?

The answer is they distract everybody, away from these basic questions to a glorious vision of a society relieved of mental disorder. One after the other, they wheel out promises of “bold new treatments” and “imminent breakthroughs” which occupy the airwaves and beguile the grants committees, allowing them to ignore fundamental principles of human rights. This is psychiatry’s variant of what the philosopher, Karl Popper (1902-1994), called “immunising a theory against refutation,” the clever word games ideologues use to avoid having to admit they’re wrong. In Objective Knowledge, from 1972 [2, p30], Popper analysed the steps taken by people who are always able to deny they’re wrong with another “Yes, but...” (sometimes known as “yesbuttery,” similar to “adhockery”). This is typical of religions and of supposedly scientific movements such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. It doesn’t matter what evidence is put to them, they can always wriggle away with another bit of the theory. Robert Colls found a quote by Marx on this:

Engels once wrote to Marx saying he had made an “ass” of himself in something he had written on India. Marx reassured him that “in that case, one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have of course so worded my proposition as to be right either way” (here, p97).

Psychiatrists are a bit different in that, having never committed themselves to an actual theory or model, they can’t be proven wrong. Instead, they keep everybody looking ahead to a golden future. If anybody is so rude as to point out what they said last week, they sneer: “Oh, but that’s so very last week, you have to keep up with the science.” We can call that “saltatory immunisation,” meaning avoiding refutation by constantly jumping ahead of the disconfirming evidence (I made it up).

The history of science isn’t quite my thing but I’m sure psychiatry’s liberties are unprecedented. I doubt that any professional group has ever got away with so much money and so much influence with so little justification. If this sort of deception happens in finance, people go to prison, and rightly so, but psychiatrists? No, they just keep on spouting pseudoscience and the world throws money at them. Part of the problem is the fact that criticism of mainstream psychiatry is suppressed by the people who control the journals, other mainstream psychiatrists. Instead of forcing researchers and opinion writers to justify what they’re doing by providing a formal model of mental disorder, they allow them simply to change the subject, away from this year’s failures to the promise of next year’s breakthrough. We have all sorts of prizes and awards for psychiatrists “forging ahead” but none for the quietly determined people who, years later, manage to get something published that exposes a major error – or deception. It can take decades to expose the falsity in psychiatry, and there are no thanks for doing it.

So back to “neurodiversity.” First point: any term that starts with the prefix “neuro-” is crap until proven otherwise. Second: our reader asked: “... is there another blanket term that refers to intellectual, perceptual or sensory handicaps?” Yes, there is. There is a single word for a very well known mental factor that causes all sorts of subjective disturbances in higher mental functions. Trouble is, psychiatry hates it and it doesn’t fit with the biological ethos so they ignore it. It’s common, it’s psychological and there’s no chance of making a career or money from it, so psychiatry doesn’t want to know about it. It’s called anxiety. Personality-based anxiety alone can produce a huge range of fluctuating disturbances in higher mental functions. With anxiety, there’s no need to talk about a “sick brain,” especially when there’s no other evidence of brain failure.

But nobody wants to know about anxiety, almost universally it’s seen as a moral failing: “Get a grip, stop being a girl, there’s nothing to be frightened of, it’s all in your mind.” That doesn’t help one iota as, on the other side, the sufferer is saying: “I’m such a failure, I’m letting everybody down, they must really be disgusted by me, I’ve got to get a grip.” For these people, getting a “neuro-label” means “There’s nothing morally wrong with me so I don’t have to work on myself or change. It’s society’s fault, they have to adjust to me and stop picking on me.” This is precisely why the “neurofad” is spreading so fast, it’s the ultimate “get out of censure” card. Also, there’s the huge pressure of practitioners creating a “lucrative career in doing nothing of lasting value except to indulge their own career/narcissism.” There is huge money in ADHD, why shouldn’t they get their share?

Moreover, the idea that we have to keep inventing new “diseases,” as the reader noted, falls foul of another rule in logic, Occam’s razor, aka the principle of parsimony. This says: The number of explanatory entities must never expand beyond the minimum needed to do the job. By the simple move of adding “neuro-” or “dys-” to some mental function or other, we start a whole new industry of unnecessary explanatory entities. The creator is invited to talk at conferences and is offered book deals, probably a university post; the “sufferers” escape moral pressure to “pull themselves together”; and lots of people make money out of YouTube channels talking about it (don’t ever search YouTube for anything starting with ‘neuro-’, it will drive you mad).

So: is there one “hidden aim” behind this industry? I don’t think so. To me, it’s sufficiently vague and flexible to satisfy all sorts of emotional needs, social ambitions, career goals and business plans in patients and practitioners, families and businesses. They just come together and head off down the road for a while until the wheels fall off the whole deal, then the supporters scatter and reform behind another guru or saint or scientific genius. That’s why it’s so durable. To paraphrase that mawkish film, “Being atheoretical means never having to say you’re wrong.” It’s great while you can get away with it.

References:

1. Watson JB. Psychology as the behaviourist views it. Psychological Review, 1913; 20:158-177.

2. Popper KR. Objective Knowledge: an evolutionary approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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Trump has declared victory in his illegal war of aggression on Iran and is now walking back to his golf cart, waving graciously to the crowds who never wanted another forever war. To celebrate, I will coin a new term: “A Trumpian Victory.” This differs from a pyrrhic victory (“One more victory like that and we are undone”) in that he was defeated but is telling everybody he won and is generously accepting the vanquished Iranians’ terms. In other words, he is lying (Henry Mencken: “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars”). Overlooked in the applause is the crucial point that, in glaring contrast to the blood-stained Americans and Israelis, Iran won their chapter of The Great American War on Everybody by non-lethal means. This will keep historians and sociologists in jobs for decades: in defeating the obscene coupling of “the most powerful country in history” and “the most moral army in the world,” Iran did not incinerate 100,000 civilians, or even a dozen. As promised if they were attacked, they simply took the world in a squirrel grip and squeezed. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, they exerted the only sort of power that governments understand, the power of economics.

Trump, as he makes crystal clear, has no comprehension of morality but money always makes his nose and other organs twitch. Netanyahu, Trump’s BFF, is ably filling the role of nuclear-armed mad dog from hell doing his best to sabotage everything but even he has his fatal weakness: that Israel, as Trump finally blurted out, exists wholly and solely because the US pays for it to exist:

If it weren’t for the United States of America, with me … Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, one hundred percent — and every smart person in Israel knows that.

Since Day 1 of the Israeli state in 1948, every smart person in the world who watches these things has known that. Israel exists just because, every year for nearly 80 years, it receives from US government and private sources, as well as the German government and many other Europeans, a flood of money, about $10billion a year and often far more. Without that loot, the Zionist state would be on the same economic footing as Jordan, meaning on its knees. Instead, and on their perpetual life support of foreign lucre, Jewish Israelis live like kings, with free education, free health care, full pensions and a myriad other benefits, subsidies and grants, none of which are available to ordinary Americans. How come?

The details of these arrangements we don’t know and probably never will but we can summarise them with one word: corruption. Corruption and criminality at a truly cosmic level reach deep into every government in the world (even puritanical China), into every bank and every major company, into armies and spy services, all the big universities, many churches and religious foundations and so on. But it’s certainly not just Israel, it’s a mesh of interlocking criminal enterprises with no defining division between the good and the bad. Israel is simply a node, albeit a centrally placed one, in a vast subterranean network of corruption. Granted, Trump and Netanyahu are fairly extreme examples but they have shaken hands with, sat next to, eaten and partied with, laughed and plotted with, and taken money from many of the century’s most accomplished and enterprising criminals.Tellingly, where they lead, everybody else follows.

To her credit, Whitney Webb has lifted a couple of manholes on the vast, interconnected sewers of illegal money and influence that ceaselessly pulse and flow beneath our unwitting feet [1]. Her story goes back about a hundred years to the beginnings of organised crime but we are then forced to ask: Was it ever thus? Was there always this huge hidden economy of vice sucking at the vitals of ordinary people? I think there was but for most of human history, it wasn’t the underworld at all, it was right out in the open: the Atlantic slave trade; Britain’s vast drug trade, moving shiploads of opium from forced labour plantations in India to poison the Chinese population; Leopold II’s monstrous criminality in the rubber trade in Congo; invasion and annexation of native lands in North America, Africa and Oceania; genocide in a dozen places, on and on.

Western wealth was built on wickedness, lauded either as the civilising influence of Christendom or the nobility of Western arms subduing the unruly savages. Stealing somebody else’s land or enslaving their children wasn’t crime as it was out in the open and everybody was doing it. The British occupation of the Subcontinent (now seven countries) lasted 250 years. In that time, the Poms extracted some $45trillion (modern value), caused the premature deaths of 145million people and reduced their standard of living from among the highest in the world to the lowest, from which they will probably never recover. And they still won’t hand back the Kohinoor diamond.

I doubt that the conduct today of the wealthy and powerful is any better or worse than it ever was. They’ve always believed in droit de seigneur, their right to have whatever they want when they want it, e.g. the comically disgusting behaviour of one Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as exposed by historian and author Andrew Lownie. The only differences these days are the extent and reach of crime enabled by the prodigiously complex, computerised, neoliberal economic system, which means it’s all hidden. Anybody who tries to expose it gets either a sentence for spying (e.g. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden) or a bullet in the back of the neck (see [1] for examples). You and me, we’re fools. We work hard for our living, we pay our taxes and bills, we help with charities, we clean up our mess, and we get nowhere. Meantime, Herr Musk is now the world’s first private trillionaire even though his DOGE closed a quarantine and veterinary surveillance service in the Agriculture Dept. to save $15million, and the US now has an outbreak of the dreaded screwworm that will cost at least $1billion to eradicate and will push up the price of beef. As though the rich care or even know how much food costs. Suggestions that Musk should pay the $1billion have been laughed off. How does such inequality exist, and what is its likely effect? Consider this:

Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens.

That was written in 1912, well before the Russian Revolution, by the French-British author, poet and politician, Hilaire Belloc [2, p62]; nothing has changed. We should not, however, complain too loudly as, according to neoliberal doctrine, massively unequal individual wealth is a necessary precondition to a general rise in living standards. As ourlined by economists such as von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Friedman, only private citizens know enough about their needs and resources to make the crucial decisions that lead to successful businesses. By the simple expedient of reducing government regulations and red tape to a minimum, individuals should be allowed and, indeed, encouraged to amass personal wealth because, once they have made their pile, they then have to invest it. This will produce jobs for the working classes whose standard of living will therefore rise (“the rising tide lifts all boats”) and all will be well. It sounds wonderful, so why isn’t it working? Two reasons, the first explained in another of the revealing posts by China-based American businessman, Kevin Walmsley.

In his latest post, Mr Walmsley looks at the impending birth of 6G telephone systems. This will be thousands of times faster than today’s 5G, too fast for household and personal use, as he notes: “To download a 21 terabyte-sized file will take 5 hours on a 5G network, and just 18 seconds on a 6G.” That, however, is ideal for industry, science and, unfortunately, spying agencies and the military. However, almost the entire development is taking place in China because China alone has the supplies of gallium nitride needed to manufacture the ultrafast chips 6G relies on. The wily Chinese will have the rest of the world in the ultimate squirrel grip, as China produces 99% of the entire world’s supply of gallium, just because neoliberalism. Gallium is almost entirely a by-product of aluminium smelting, which is dominated by China, Russia and, until a few weeks ago, the Gulf petrostates.

Decades ago, western businessmen decided it was cheaper to import gallium than mine the stuff so, strictly in keeping with the clever economists mentioned above, that’s just what they did. It would take the West at least a dozen years to get to the stage of producing enough gallium of their own to bring their 6G systems to where China is today, by which time China will be a dozen years ahead of them anyway and will have set the standards itself. And to add insult to injury, gallium is essential for the precise radars used by the F-35s that bombed the girls’ school at Minab, and by the billion dollar radars recently destroyed by Iran’s cheap drones (read Kevin’s article; he shows a picture of the ballast now being installed in F-35s in place of the radars to stop them flipping over). The US now needs to build lots of missiles to replace the expensive gear they fired in their recent war but China holds the essential ingredient to make them work. And it is not releasing it.

So that’s one reason why we shouldn’t have trillionaires, or even billionaires: they will adjust the world economy to make themselves richer and more powerful while leaving us to sort out the consequences, because that’s what the rich and powerful do. We have strong, biologically-determined inclinations to gain property, power and status. We switch these drives on because they’re incredibly exciting but the off-switch takes all the fun out of life so, unless we’re compelled to, we rarely choose to “do the right thing” and stop trying to grab all the cake. As the example of gallium shows, neoliberalism is producing and reinforcing inequality but this time, and unlike the imperial examples mentioned above (slaves, opium etc), this time, it’s the West that’s getting its nuts squeezed, and they don’t like it. Tough shit, sunshine, pigeons come home to roost.

The second reason untrammelled wealth and power aren’t a good idea is seen in a quote from Trump’s immensely powerful deputy chief of staff, the man who was recently likened to a rectal polyp, Mrs Miller’s little boy, Stevie (check the picture; a reader suggested the polyp looked benign). In an interview soon after Trump 2.0 was let out of its dungeon, he said:

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower ... We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world.

Unlike his boss, who can’t read, I’d say Miller has read Mein Kampf, which says:

...the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist [3, p182].

The whole thrust of neoliberalism has been to let the Stephen Millers, Trumps and Epsteins of the world loose, to remove any legal or, above all, moral shackles from them and license them to pillage the planet until they are forced to say “No more, I’ve got enough.” Except they never do. Neoliberalism justifies “more, more, more for me.” It authorises cruel disdain and contempt for those who are stuck in the mud and can’t escape just because the wealthy and powerful have recast the economic and legal systems to suit themselves. Over the past 35 years, the US has lost at least 18 million well-paying industrial jobs. The great majority of these have gone to China where the standards of living for the common people are fast approaching those of the US. A reader of Kevin’s Substack commented:

China has a socialist free market economy where the government builds the infrastructure and businesses must learn to survive under intense market competition. The USA has a corporate welfare economy, where corporations feed a price-is-no-object government demand, and corporations deemed “too-big-to-fail” are continually bailed out by the government.

I think it’s time to declare the neoliberal experiment a failure and go back to the idea of fairness, which Hilaire Belloc championed as the “distributive state” [2]. The reason neoliberalism failed is as clear as daylight: the economists who wrote it, known as the Austrian School because most of them came from Vienna, had no idea about humans. Not a clue. That’s a bit strange as several of them had served in the Great War so they must have had some notion that humans aren’t the nicest creatures around. In particular, their model of human psychology was palsied as they assumed people are ordered little robots who go through life checking prices and demands and making calm, rational decisions as to what they should produce, buy or sell. They thought that what they called “rational self-interest” was enough to explain human economic behaviour and, critically, to keep it in line with human interests. They forgot about war. That parody of psychology is the entire basis of the economic policies directly or indirectly running most of the world today.

They didn’t think that, once given the green light, businessmen would look to invest their wealth where it produced the greatest returns, not the greatest benefit. That is, they would immediately look overseas to poor countries with low-paid workers, lax environmental and commercial regulations, and easily-bribed police. As long as they made money, they didn’t care that it impoverished their own working classes. They certainly didn’t think far enough to realise that shifting critical supply chains overseas exposed their country to the ultimate squirrel grip. And as the Austrian economists were probably quite decent bourgeoisie themselves, they had no idea what arseholes the wealthy and powerful actually are. They didn’t understand that, blessed with minimal regulations and oversight, crooks like Trump, Kushner, Epstein, Netanyahu, MBS, MBZ, Boris J and so many others would move in and quickly reshape the legal and financial systems to suit themselves, because crooks. They should have listened to Lord Acton, who said: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control” (1887). The old boy was absolutely right. Power attracts people who are hungry for power, and people who hunger for power will never willingly switch off their hunger, they’re incapable of saying “Enough’s enough.”

This is the heart of the problem: war is about domination and domination is the most pointless and destructive game in town. Only when we view war with the same intuitive abhorrence as we look upon bestiality, incest or paedophilia will we start to bring it under control.

Just a suggestion: Can we leave the neolibs in control for a bit longer, until they’ve completely wrecked the American and zionist capacity to launch aggressive wars?

References:

1. 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.

2. Belloc H (1912). The Servile State. London: TN Foulis.

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.

How scientific is the DSM?

How do we judge whether a system is scientifically sound?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

Mao Zedung knew this too well:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medical expertise: Psychiatrists apply their medical knowledge, specialist clinical skills and acumen in the provision of person-centred care. They understand the impact of ‘biological’, ‘psychological’ and ‘social’ factors on mental health and the causation of mental illness. This ‘bio-psycho-social’ model is a holistic approach that recognises the impact of social adversity and physical health on mental well-being [2]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not our primary goal, sir,” booms the professor. “We are clinical scientists searching for abstract knowledge but yes, that will happen. We stand on the verge of major breakthroughs in understanding mental disorder. Armed with the biomedical model and, of course, the biopsychosocial model, we understand the impact of ‘biological’, ‘psychological’ and ‘social’ factors on mental health and the causation of mental illness. This ‘bio-psycho-social’ model is a holistic approach that recognises the impact of social adversity and physical health on mental well-being.”

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

“Sentiment,” replies the group’s leader.

“Sentiment?”

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

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

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

“A model of mental disorder?”

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

4. McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry

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

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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

Disaster (here, at 1.30).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spent 13yrs at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that, I realise that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs - I think $20billion - I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalisations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness [3].

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

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

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

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

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

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

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

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

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