Tag: donald trump

I have been involved in hundreds of commitment hearings in which psychiatric diagnoses were crucial. In that context, I have never witnessed the presence of all three factors: (1) the transparent (honest) use of diagnostic labels (which includes the acknowledgment of the inherent biases built into the labels as well as their limited validity), (2) allowing full voice to and full acknowledgment of the labeled person’s view of reality, and (3) using the labels in a manner that produced a useful understanding, which in standard mental health practice would require that the understanding be significantly more beneficial to the labeled person rather than the labeler.

By calling Trump 'crazy' for making wildly racist, sexist, and other hateful remarks and out-of-control tweets (among other things), you fail to actually promote an end to such violence and bigotry. Instead, you are simply asking that it be redirected to another group.

Recently the American Psychoanalytic Association reaffirmed its members’ right to pronounce on the mental health of public figures—in particular, the controversial Donald Trump. Like the many objectors to the Goldwater Rule in the APA, our psychoanalysts act as if they’re above such a trivial restriction. They are not.

From the Los Angeles Review of Books: In recent years, liberalism has begun to serve the function of the superego. Like the superego, liberals have...

From The Atlantic: This June, the Supreme Court will make an important decision regarding the role of mental health experts in death penalty cases. The...

In this piece for The New York Times Magazine, Nitsuh Abebe chronicles America's long history with anxiety, and the ways that America's collective societal anxiety...

In this piece for Eidolon, Jessica Wright discusses the ways that labeling people as "crazy" and "mentally ill" has served to justify oppression throughout history....

From Discover Magazine: Using psychiatry and neuroscience to explain President Trump's personality and behavior leads to circular reasoning. "We don’t need these kinds of quasi-scientific analyses of...

In this opinion piece for the New York Times, Allen Frances, chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental...

To illustrate the dangers of Trump's plans to deregulate the FDA, Susan Perry from MinnPost provides a cautionary tale about Tarceva, a drug approved by the...

Insanity is often the result of chronic oppression, trauma, and a sense of injustice and hopelessness. Is it possible we are in the midst of a collective psychosis?

In an open letter to all US presidential candidates published Thursday in the BMJ, a group of global health care experts assert that current research regulations allow drug companies to publish incomplete and misleading results. They ask the candidates to declare whether they support improved transparency measures that would make data on drug studies publically available and open to scrutiny.