“I have seen what happens when standards of decency, human rights and ethics are thrown out in a wave of totalitarian or government zeal.” Steven Reisner, member of the Council, American Psychological Association, and co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology.
A shining moment: On Friday, August 7 in Toronto, Canada, the American Psychological Association voted to bar its 80,000 members from any further collaboration in ‘national security interrogations,’ ie torture by the American government and its agencies.
This historic shift was hard won, after a decade of grassroots organizing to counter APA executive deceit and collusion with the CIA.
Bruce Levine works as a psychologist in Cincinnati, Ohio. By the time he got his PhD, he told me, he felt so alienated from the profession’s dominant goals and practices that he hesitated to tell strangers how he made his living. Eventually he encountered other dissidents, both within the profession and among people who have survived its abuses. As a therapist, activist and writer, Bruce Levine strives to help people, especially adolescents, to find their own way through a society that packages conformity as freedom, and non-conformity as illness.
“Over and over,” he says, “we’re told that mental illness is caused by a biochemical imbalance in the brain, or it’s genetic. I’ve learned to distrust claims like these, especially when it’s going to make someone a ton of money or be used to manipulate and control people. The whole area of biochemical cause and cure is a giant money-maker for the drug companies. And who decides these things? Committees of psychiatrists basically decree what gets listed in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the diagnostic bible of the American Psychiatric Association. If you have any common sense, it’s not hard to see how unscientific that is.
“For example, in the 1970s when I was a psychology undergrad, homosexuality was in the DSM as a mental disorder. Gay activists finally managed to get rid of that, but now we have things in there like ADHD (‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’), and ODD (‘oppositional defiant disorder’). If you look at the so-called symptoms, what you find are kids – huge numbers of them – who are bored, or who question, or argue, or refuse to cooperate with illegitimate authority. So what do you do? You call these kids sick and you drug them. In the Soviet Union, the psychiatrist’s job was to ‘treat’ political dissidents as sick, to hospitalize and drug them. Here we don’t even wait until they’re adults speaking out against injustice, instead we get ’em when they’re twelve and speaking out against some pointless school assignment.
“Given how often the mental health authorities have been wrong, and how much harm they’ve done, people like me have a clear responsibility to question their decisions, their power. In a strange way, the fact that the abuses are so clear actually makes it easier to speak out.”
Bruce Levine speaks out in his blog. And in his books. And other places too, eg:
Michael Riordon 