High Flyers and Worker Ants

The ants are losing.

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there is a lot to be critical about.

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A paper arrived this week [1] from the Centre for Critical and Ethical Mental Health at Adelaide University (CEMH). This small group are involved in some major projects in critical psychiatry, including uncovering the bastardry that went on when SSRIs were released [1]. Their new paper, a literature review, looks at the relationship between employment insecurity and suicide. It covers unemployment, precarious and informal employment, and the effects of losing a job. After a literature search (detailed in the paper), they found 83 papers from 2014 to the present, 36 coming from Europe with a few from less-developed countries.

Straight away, that says something. When it arrived, I was looking at a paper on the influence of the gut microbiome, meaning the trillions of bacteria in the large bowel, on the development of Alzheimer’s Disease. To me, employment is terribly important, a major source of self-esteem and of family security, so 83 papers over 10 years didn’t seem a lot. I then checked the PubMed source from NIMH in the US, querying: “Depression and Gut Microbiome.” The result, in a few seconds: well over 2,000 papers on this arcane topic: thousands on an entirely unproven notion that our bowels may control our brains, and a mere 83 papers on the how work problems contribute to suicide. That says a lot about psychiatry, none of it complementary.

For decades, I’ve been saying that biological research in psychiatry is driven not by a formal theory of biological psychiatry, but by the latest technology. When a new technology arrives, psychiatrists eagerly grab it and try to find some way to apply it. Today’s hottest technology is genome assays. Thus we now have thousands of studies of the human genome and mental disorders but they’re all inconclusive so researchers are getting a bit desperate. Fortunately, the same genetic technology allows them to chart all the 1,000 or so different species of bacteria we carry, so that’s what they’ve done. The justification is the ancient idea that if you get strange bugs in your bowel, they will release toxic products which enter the bloodstream and mess with the brain. The latest idea, due to rapid advances in immunology, is that it all has to do with inflammation, either by direct inflammation of the brain or chemicals from the bowel bugs mimic inflammatory chemicals and cross into the brain.

I’m not going to read 2,000 papers to find out exactly what they’ve discovered but we already know the broad answer: nothing. That won’t stop them, of course, there are lots of researchers who need to publish or they’ll be forced to get an honest job – and would then be exposed to the risks of getting depressed from employment insecurity. Because we already know that problems with work can cause depression. How do we know? People tell us, which points to the central issue in modern psychiatry: can social factors influence a person’s mental state, or is it all biological? This is not trivial. Our entire approach to mental troubles hangs on that question. But back to the employment paper. The abstract says:

This systematic review takes a narrative synthesis approach. The review is grounded in a social determinants of health paradigm and findings are synthesised into a socioecological model.

This says they believe health is influenced by social factors, meaning what we believe and how society affects us. This is hardly revolutionary but straight away, it’s not standard psychiatry which says that mental disorder is driven by innate biological factors, not by unproveable mental perceptions. As we discussed last week, mental factors can’t be seen or measured or duplicated so, even when they’re clearly causing the problem, they’re ignored. For example, I may be very happy with my job. It’s interesting, I have lots of responsibility, the people are good and it pays well but, suddenly, the company closes and I’m on the street. I’m at a loose end, strugging to make ends meet and forced to go cap in hand to ask for a job. All that is humiliating and hugely irritating, I have trouble sleeping and don’t want to mix with people. Is that depression, or is it a realistic response to a major life event? Mainstream psychiatry ignores the social context and focuses on symptoms alone, just because it has no way of integrating mental factors.

This is true across the board, not just of biological psychiatry. People may say they take psychosocial factors into account, as in this paper, but they have no theory of mind or model of mental disorder that says how this happens. Only the biocognitive model does that. To my mind, what they call a socioecological model is not a true model as it has no explanatory power. It’s just a way of organising the multitude of factors involved into some sort of order but that’s not important. What matters is that their review isolates dozens of factors that contribute to work-related suicide attempts. These form seven loose clusters of factors, even though the different studies they reviewed didn’t look into all of them consistently.

The seven clusters are listed as socio-structural factors; law and policy; insecure employment conditions; working conditions; place and community factors; and individual factors. To me, some of these are arbitrary, e.g. how do we separate law from the actual structure of society? Laws just are the structure. They also point to how time factors influence outcomes, mainly through the accumulation of interacting pressures so that people can become trapped in self-reinforcing cycles of adverse events causing mental problems which lead to further adverse events, and so on.

Under socio-structural factors, they mention, almost in passing, the effect of neoliberal government policies on working conditions such as labour deregulation and anti-union policies, privatisation of government services, etc. I think this seriously underestimates the impact on workers in general. The whole point of neoliberalism is to transfer capital from the working and middle classes to the wealthy. That’s always been crystal clear, the justification being that the wealthy will reinvest their loot and provide jobs for the workers. In fact, as we now see, it was all pie in the sky: “Give us your money and we’ll make some more jobs.” In practice, they took the money and hid it in their overseas tax shelters. I don’t see that as any different from the conduct of the Church in the medieval era selling indulgences: “Give us your money and we’ll get you out of purgatory early.” Pie in the sky.

What has happened is that under neoliberalism, jobs have been shifted offshore and the welfare state has been severely trimmed, e.g. unemployment benefits now come with onerous reporting restrictions. Above all, workers are shamed for needing to rely on the state for a while. These are precisely the policies that increase the difficulties faced by people in insecure employment, thereby converting unhappy people into mental casualties. We can talk about what we need to do to ameliorate their position but while governments throughout the West are competing to see who can be meanest to workers, none of the mooted changes will happen. Meantime, psychiatry, psychology and social work have to deal with the people who fall through the cracks but but it doesn’t end there. The neolibs, in the form of the drug companies, have colonised psychiatry: mental disorder, according to them, is not a sign that society is failing the people but that the individuals are failures in themselves. In mainstream psychiatry, all responsibility for mental trouble is relocated from the society to the individual, which meshes neatly with the neoliberal project: “If he killed himself after he was sacked, it proves he was genetically predisposed to depression.” This is the same argument the military used to say about soldiers breaking down in combat, e.g. the infamous incident when US General George Patton slapped two soldiers in hospital.

Currently, labour relations and incomes are heavily biased in favour of the employers, not the workers. In order to rebalance the workplace to provide greater job security, the authors of this paper say it is necessary “…to reverse the growth of the precarious labour market, and instead bolster stable and secure employment opportunities” [1, p18-19]. Their suggestions are laudable but, in the current political climate, they’re not going to happen. For example, unions were developed to protect workers but since about 1980, government policies around the world have rolled them back and are determined to keep going. Other unions have become corrupted although a lot of them didn’t require much persuasion, which brings us to another point. I wasn’t sure whether to put this here or on the Narcisso-Fascism file but the person involved got a chapter to himself in Theories in Psychiatry [2, Chapter 7], so this is probably the right place. Also, it confirms the central message in Narcisso-Fascism, that human politics is nothing other than individual psychology projected on a bigger screen.

Readers will no doubt be as sick of the slowly unfolding Epstein business as I am. In Britain, the heads are rolling steadily, starting with Andrew what was; his ghastly ex-wife; former ambassador and ex-peer, Peter Mandelson; and now Starmer’s chief of staff and éminence grise, Morgan McSweeney, leaving plenty of space in the tumbrils. Speaking of Mandelson, a member of Scientists for EU said: “I know Peter Mandelson… everyone knows what (he) is like. He is very charming in person but he is ruthlessly out for his own power and will hunt power wherever it it and any morals be damned.” That, of course, is the definition of a psychopath. Meantme, across in the US, Epstein’s main playground, the recent dump of 3 million files snared another high-flyer, no lesser figure than the beatified Professor Noam Chomsky. In 2023, Chomsky suffered a severe stroke and is apparently disabled so we won’t hear what he has to say for himself. However, the files show that almost to the end of Epstein’s life, Chomsky was supporting him and providing advice on how to deal with all the flak from being a charged with child sexual abuse: ignore it, they’ll get over it.

Author and journalist Chris Hedges, who knew Chomsky well and respected him, has written of his shock and dismay on learning that such a revered figure had willingly paddled into Epstein’s orbit. His comments on his sense of betrayal on Substack are brief, please pause to read them. I regard Hedges, who was banned from speaking in Australia last year, as unimpeachable but I wasn’t surprised to learn that Chomsky was leading a double life. He has been an immensely influential figure, a “public intellectual,” whatever that is, for half a century. He first gained attention during the Vietnam War (the American War, to Vietnamese) with his biting and accurate criticism of his government’s policies and of Israel. All good, there’s plenty to criticise, but when I was researching him for my chapter, it became clear that all was, in fact, not good. The details are set out in that chapter [2]. I haven’t had any indication that I misunderstood his work at any point or that my conclusion was wrong: as a linguist, Chomsky’s anti-dualist project failed:

Anti-dualism has been promoted to the level of a cult and, as Chomsky’s work shows convincingly, it has failed spectacularly … I suggest his work will not long survive his passing and will eventually be seen as part of the death rattle of antidualism. However, we must not underestimate the tenacity of cultists: they never give up … [2, p156].

It gets worse: rather than admitting the failure of his project, it seemed to me he was actively concealing it. That was worrying so I looked further afield and came across something called The Anti-Chomsky Reader from 20 years ago [3]. This showed that a lot of his political output was simply deceitful, that what he said yesterday he would contradict today and deny tomorrow. That was pretty shocking but it confirmed what I’d already concluded about his scientific work: his recent stuff, which is published in books and therefore not peer reviewed, is one step away from charlatanry. That’s a matter for history to judge but it seems his later output was designed to keep his reputation aloft. Now that he has been silenced, I expect it will crash.

What is now clear is that his willing involvement in one of the great criminal conspiracies of our time will speed his journey to the memory hole but it forces us to confront a vital question: If power corrupts the apparently incorruptible, what do we as a society need to do to prevent the accumulation of great power and wealth? This is where workers’ rights come into it because a core part of the neoliberal project is to reduce workers to the level of worker ants: mindless, interchangeable and disposable. While that remains government policy, we can talk about programs to reduce work-related suicides but don’t expect anybody in power to listen. They’re too busy feathering their own nests.

References:

1. van den Berg M., Aboustate N., Freeman T. et al.(2026). Insecure employment and the social determinants of suicide: a narrative synthesis review. Global Health https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12992-025-01185-6

2. Le Noury J et al (2015) Restoring Study 329: efficacy and harms of paroxetine and imipramine in treatment of major depression in adolescence. BMJ 2015; At: https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4320

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

4. Collier P, Horowitz D (2004). The Anti-Chomsky Reader. San Francisco: Encounter Books.

https://www.encounterbooks.com/

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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.