A Review of Commonsense Rebellion, Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting
Society: An A to Z Guide to Rehumanizing Our Lives
Radical Psychology
Spring 2002.
By Mel Starkman
Dr. Levine is a Ph.D. clinical psychologist and has been
in private practice for over 15 years. He is on the
Advisory Council of the International Center for the
Study of Psychiatry and Psychology “which fights
against the abuses and corruption of institutional mental
health” (back dust jacket). In this book Levine
calls for a commonsense rebellion against the tendencies
in America that have made lives miserable for all but the
power elite. A large part of the blame he gives to the
psychiatric profession, but does show that society as a
whole has sheepishly followed these pseudo scientists. He
writes it in the form of a self-help guide to bring
American lives back to its local, voluntarism and
democratic roots, which roots he does show some belief
in. This is a protest book in the tradition of citizen
reformers like Paine, Thoreau, and Mumford.
“At the core of Commonsense Rebellion is the belief
that heteronomous institutions promote helplessness,
passivity, fear, isolation, and dehumanization” (p.
99). Heteronomous means being directed by outside forces
instead of being autonomous and pulling one’s own
strings. Large impersonal organizations like health
maintenance organizations (HMOs) and hospitals are
alienating and frightening institutions both for the
ordinary mistakes they make and the reality that means
and end are confused. The hospital becomes the end, not
the patient. That’s where helplessness, passivity,
fear, isolation and dehumanization derive from. If you
don’t feel that way you are considered to fall into
one of the categories of psychiatric diagnosis.
In opposition to the feelings of helplessness and so on
outlined above, Levine advocates self-help featuring
enthusiasm, respectful personal relationships, community,
trust and confidence, empowerment, autonomy
(self-direction), participatory democracy, diversity and
stimulation, human pride, citizenship, and a human-scaled
society (p. 6).
In 26 alphabetically titled chapters with a 27th summary
chapter, this parody of popular culture self-help books
covers a wide range of American domestic, internal, made
in the U.S. problems that face America’s future.
Included in the list of problems are the rising rate of
crime, particularly among the young and the response of
the government, the privatization of punishment (for
example, private sector incarceration), alienating jobs,
psychiatry out of touch with the community of survivors
it works with, and the problems of mass society (not just
the problems of corruption and abuse, which phenomena are
symptoms of deeper rooted systemic problems). Levine does
not deal at any length with the effects and implications
of American foreign policy.
Levine’s perspective is antipsychiatry as would be
expected from a non-conformist psychologist. He even
states in his book that psychiatrists cause trauma to
their victims out of a need to work out their own
traumas. Sartre made the argument that psychiatrists are
also ill. Levine pokes fun at psychiatrists, especially
for their jargon and the use of psychotropic medication
like Ritalin, which is prescribed so readily and has done
so much harm. While he is against electroshock, he could
have dealt more with the debate it has engendered within
society and especially within the survivor culture.
Levine offers his arguments in the manner of a
well-prepared teacher. His wisdom derived from his
reading and practice as well as personal experience is
there to be shared at the free choice of his reader. He
has read very widely in the subject matters he covers.
Most chapters follow a pattern with the exception of 23,
26 and 27. First the topic is discussed with relevant
cases not gone into to any great length, but with
citations from various books. Then follows two sections,
The Institutional Illness Web (IIW) and The Commonsense
Revolution (CR). Basically he argues that institutions
foster illness rather than cure; the systems in hospital
can be seen as being in entropy. Commonsense Rebellion
calls for more human approaches to our problems, such as
local community involvement, voluntarism and other
approaches and attitudes seen above. The last part of
each chapter is a series of suggestions on how to move
from the IIW to the CR. The underlying problem is that
corporate power underpins the IIW.
Chapter 2 is titled Bad Boys and speaks of Oppositional
Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Conduct Disorder (CD).
Low-income kids are likely to land in jail because of
lack of insurance coverage. ODD kids are
“brats” and CD kids are “juvenile
delinquents or criminals (p.29)”. Further in the
late 1990s, with insurance companies and the
pharmaceutical industry influencing hospitals, there is a
class and race confrontation, as of old. The white
well-off spend less time in hospitals and more on
recreational drugs, while the poor and non-white are in
jails or prisons. Bad Boys are treated chemically whether
in prisons or hospitals. As Szasz and others have argued,
at least the stays in prison are determinate although it
is true that release of survivors or whatever they are
called are now clogging North American streets.
Addiction is a huge problem in North America and in the
long run there is little choice between street drugs and
medications like Ritalin which compares to cocaine or
amphetamines: speed with a prescription. Sometimes the
route to illegal drugs comes from first taking
psychiatric medications, which are too easily dispensed.
In chapter 4, dealing with depression, Levine takes on
both the old neuroleptics and the new SSRIs like Prozac,
Paxil and Zoloft, today’s snake oil.
There’s a too short section on ECT focusing on the
Ernest Hemingway suicide case. He had been shocked and
Levine quotes Peter Breggin as to the reemergence of
shock. At this time it is difficult to gather statistics
on the renewed prevalence of shock, especially among
older women and persons of colour, different race, sexual
orientation, recent immigrants and refugees. Also there
is the use of shock as a social control mechanism
focusing on dissidents to the accepted values of our
consumer society. Even psychosurgery is back.
Under Newest Nomenclature Levine questions the value of
the DSM-IV and its 400 odd categories. Are many diagnoses
scientifically valid, or are they marginal or downright
silly? Some silly categories include clumsiness [315.4],
snoring [780.54], grammatical and punctuation errors, or
disorder of written expression [315.2]; the last disorder
I would personally say was iatrogenically induced by the
medications.
Levine's book is a worthwhile riposte to the
anaesthetizing self-help manuals that are flooding the
market place and which praise the elements of the
Institutional Illness Web that are critiqued by Levine.
This is a consummate compendium of the nostrums that
cause rather than cure the problems that Americans are
particularly prone to.
A review of Commonsense Rebellion,
Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society: An A to Z
Guide to rehumanizing Our lives is very well worth
reading and should enlighten the public in regard to both
psychiatry as well as the course of present medical
practice in general.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Mel Starkman is a retired archivist from the University
of Toronto and active in the anti-psychiatry movement.
For more about Bruce Levine see:
LiP's Silja J. A. Talvi talks with Dr. Bruce Levine, the
author of Commonsense Rebellion, about dissident
psychiatry for a dysfunctional society.
--
Thanks to AD for cping
this.
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Liberation Psychology for the U.S. - Are we too demoralized to
protest?
November 2009 Bruce E.
Levine's ZSpace Page
--By Bruce E. Levine
The term "liberation psychology" was
popularized by Ignacio Martin-Baró (1942-1989), the
psychologist, priest, and activist who was assassinated
in El Salvador by government troops. Martin-Baró focused
on the oppression of his fellow Salvadorans, Central
Americans, and Latin Americans. It is increasingly
apparent that U.S. citizens need Martin-Baró's insights
along with their own special kind of liberation
psychology.
Why, in the United States, when the majority of people
oppose the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry and
the military occupation in Iraq, are the streets not
regularly occupied with large numbers of protesters?
Given 47 million people in the U.S. without health
insurance and many millions more who are underinsured or
a job layoff away from losing their coverage, and given
the current sellout by their elected officials to the
insurance industry, why are there not millions, rather
than thousands in Washington, DC protesting this
betrayal?
In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who
risked their lives to protest their disputed 2009
presidential election, few in the United States took to
the streets to protest their own disputed 2000
presidential election. The U.S. corporate media, which
often fails to report many injustices, did not hide the
non-democratic nature of the 2000 presidential election.
It reported that Al Gore received, undisputedly, 500,000
more votes than George W. Bush. It reported that the
Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the
disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme
Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting
Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may
never know with complete certainty the identity of the
winner of this year's presidential election, the identity
of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's
confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the
rule of law."
When people become broken, they cannot act on truths
about injustice or about how they have been victimized by
the government-corporate partnership that can lead to
shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like
fear, is one more psychological way we become even more
broken.
U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices
for the same reasons that people cannot leave their
abusive spouses. The more we don't act, the weaker we
get. Ultimately, to deal with the painful humiliation
over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to
shutdown and escape with strategies such as depression,
substance abuse, television, and other diversions, which
further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of
all abuse syndromes.
Liberation psychology is quite different than the
prevailing psychology that most U.S. mental health
professionals practice—which is to modify,
manipulate, and medicate "malcontents" so that
they are not monkey wrenches for the industrial order. In
addition to Martin-Baró's insights, the U.S. needs its
own version of liberation psychology in which we start by
recognizing that the U.S. population has been broken,
then understand how this has happened, and then find
paths to regain morale, healing, wholeness, and strength.
Ignacio Martin-Baró's Liberation Psychology
As a Jesuit priest, Martin-Baró embraced liberation
theology in opposition to a theology that oppressed the
poor. As a social psychologist, he believed that imported
North American psychology also oppressed marginalized
people and that what was necessary was a liberation
psychology. Martin-Baró believed that much of the
standard, prevailing psychology served the interests of
the ruling class and promoted alienation of oppressed
people. "Generally," he said,
"psychologists have tried to enter into the social
process by way of the powers to be." In his essay
"Toward a Liberation Psychology" (Writings for
a Liberation Psychology, 1994, eds. Adrianne Aron and
Shawn Corne), Martin-Baró points out that, "What
has happened to Latin American psychology is similar to
North American psychology at the beginning of the
twentieth century, when it ran so fast after scientific
recognition and social status that it stumbled.... In
order to get social position and rank, it negotiated how
it would contribute to the needs of the established power
structure."
The prevailing psychology, according to Martin-Baró, is
not politically neutral, but favors maintaining the
status quo. Reducing human motivations to the
maximization of pleasure fits neatly into the dominant
culture. Martin-Baró astutely observed that most
prevailing psychology schools of thought—be it
psychoanalytic, behavioral, or biochemical—accept
the maximization of pleasure as the motivating force for
human behavior, ignoring other human motivations,
including the need for fairness and social justice.
Prevailing psychology's focus on individualism, he wrote,
"ends up reinforcing the existing structures,
because it ignores the reality of social structures and
reduces all structural problems to personal
problems." Martin-Baró also pointed out, echoing
Lewis Mumford, that when knowledge is limited to
verifiable, observable facts and events, we "become
blind to the most important meanings of human
existence." Much of what makes us fully human and
capable of overcoming injustices—including our
courage and solidarity—cannot be reduced to
simplistic, verifiable, objective variables.
Martin-Baró once quipped to a U.S. colleague, "In
your country, it's publish or perish. In ours, it's
publish and perish." He was tragically prescient. On
the night of November 16, 1989 on the campus of
Universidad Centro-americana José Simeón Canas (UCA),
Martin-Baró, together with Ignacio Ellacuria, Rector of
UCA, four other fellow Jesuits, their housekeeper, and
her teenage daughter were forced out to a courtyard and
murdered by the U.S.-trained troops of the elite Atlacatl
Battalion.
In contrast to Martin-Baró, U.S. American intellectual
activists have a considerable degree of free speech and
it requires no great heroism for U.S. citizens to hear
them speak and discover truths. The U.S.
corporate-government partnership is increasingly unafraid
of its citizens hearing truths because it has increasing
confidence that, even when social inequity is thrown in
their faces, U.S. citizens are too broken to act on
truths.
Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election,
millions saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy
group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves
and the haves more. Some people call you the elite; I
call you my base." Yet, even with this kind of
inflammatory remark, millions of U.S. citizens who came
to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive. Thus,
the focus of U.S. liberation psychology need not be on
U.S. citizens gaining consciousness of injustices, as
many of these injustices are already in plain sight.
Instead, U.S. liberation psychology must focus on how we
can be made whole again, so as to regain strength to
fight for ourselves and our communities.
How U.S. Americans Are Broken
The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its
share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor
union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But
today, most U.S. Americans are broken by financial fears—legal
debt—if we speak out against a powerful authority;
and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the
job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and
fear of having no health insurance. We are also broken by
a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most
of us out of control when it comes to the basic
necessities of life, including our food supply. And, like
many other people in the world, we are broken by
socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic
humanity. A few examples include:
Schools and universities: Do most schools teach young
people to be action-oriented or to be passive? Do most
schools teach young people that they can affect their
surroundings or not to bother? Do schools provide
examples of democratic institutions or authoritarian
ones? A long list of school critics—from Henry David
Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan
Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto—have
pointed out that a school is nothing less than a
miniature society. What young people experience in
schools is the chief means of creating our future
society. Schools are routinely places where kids, through
fear, learn to comply with authorities for whom they
often have no respect and to regurgitate material they
often find meaningless.
In The Night is Dark and I am Far Away From Home (1975),
Jonathan Kozol focuses on how school breaks us from
courageous actions through a series of disconnections:
"The teacher informs us that it is our obligation to
obey our orders and to channel our dissent into innocuous
patterns of polite 'discussion and investigation.'"
Instead of direct action, Kozol explains how our schools,
especially elitist institutions, teach us a kind of
"inert concern"—that "caring,"
in and of itself, without risking the consequences of
actual action, is ethical.
Throughout the Vietnam War, U.S. citizens with only grade
school educations more often saw the war as a mistake
than did those with college educations. Today, U.S.
colleges and universities have increasingly become places
where young people are merely acquiring degree
credentials—badges of compliance for corporate
employers—in exchange for learning to accept
bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted,
"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that
there will be within the next generation or so a
pharmacological method of making people love their
servitude." Today, increasing numbers of people in
the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being
diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with
psychiatric drugs that make them care less about their
boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus
rendering them more compliant and manageable.
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly
popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The
official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively
defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or
rules," and "often argues with adults." An
even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than
the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive
defiance—for example, attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that
virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay
attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that
they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids
are having a good time and in control, the
"disease" goes away.
Television: In his book Four Arguments for the
Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after
reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell,
Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a
list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the
Flowering of Autocracy." Television, Mander claimed,
helps create all eight conditions for breaking a
population: (1) occupies people so that they don't know
themselves—and what a human being is; (2) separates
people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation;
(4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with
prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug
use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a
drug-like effect, in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration compounded this by relaxing the rules of
prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge
and information; (7) eliminates or "museumizes"
other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8)
redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
Consumerism: The primary societal role of U.S. Americans
is no longer that of "citizen," but that of
"consumer." Consumerism breaks people by
devaluing human connectedness, socializing
self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating
people from normal human emotional reactions, and by
selling the idea that purchased products—not
themselves and their community—are their salvation.
A Liberation Psychology for the U.S.
Mental health professionals—at least those who have
not rebelled against their professional socialization—are
the last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing
a demoralized population. They, for the most part, are
impotent in the craft of remobilizing the demoralized
because they lack the most important attributes necessary
for the craft. Most mental health professionals are not
risk takers and they have little faith. The craft of
remobilizing demoralized people is about distracting the
immobilized from their vicious cycle of pain, shut down,
immobilization, and shame over immobilization. For that
distraction to be distracting enough, it often must be a
little silly, funny, crazy, or even outrageous.
It is my experience that people who are not mental health
professionals often know more about remobilizing the
demoralized than mental health professionals. Rather than
any psychology textbook, the craft of remobilizing can
best be learned through the lives of people who are
accomplished at it. In Lincoln's Melancholy (2005),
Joshua Wolf Shenk described how Lincoln, like many
sensitive critical thinkers, had a tendency to become
deeply depressed, including two periods where Lincoln's
friends felt compelled to have "suicide
watches" over him. Lincoln developed several
antidotes, one of the most important being humor. Shenk
concluded, "Humor gave Lincoln protection from his
mental storms. It distracted him and gave him relief and
pleasure.... Humor also gave Lincoln a way to connect
with people." Lincoln also combated his despair by
finding meaning for his life.
Many other people have discovered how finding meaning can
be a powerful antidote to despair and immobilization.
Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning (1959) describes
a harrowing tale of his survival in Nazi concentration
camps. He states that in the concentration camps,
"The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly
everyone.... A very strict camp ruling forbade any
efforts to save a man who attempted suicide....
Therefore, it was all important to prevent these attempts
from occurring." Frankl talks about the help that he
provided for two men who seriously talked about suicide.
He said, "In both cases it was a question of getting
them to realize that life was still expecting something
from them."
Even when conditions make it impossible for immediate
change, great morale builders can inspire people to keep
trying. Rabbi Tarfon, for example, during the era of the
Roman Empire saw the big picture and reminded his people,
"It was not granted you to complete the task and yet
you may not give it up."
Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and
feelings often create patients who take themselves and
their moods far too seriously. In contrast, those
talented in the craft of maintaining morale help others
to resist this kind of self-absorption. In the question
and answer period that followed a Noam Chomsky talk
(reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable
Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized person in the
audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a
phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah,
every evening.... If you want to feel hopeless, there are
a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you
want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance
that the human species will survive for another century,
probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point?....
First of all, those predictions don't mean anything—they're
more just a reflection of your mood or your personality
than anything else. And if you act on that assumption,
then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on
the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they
will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those
alternatives, is to forget pessimism."
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is
not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the
early 1960s, when the vast majority in the U.S. supported
military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of the
few U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at
this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in
the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible
that [we] would ever have any effect.... So looking back,
I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too
pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding.
I was sort of believing what I read."
Immobilized people are often so controlled by painful
demons that they act compulsively and destructively to
flee their pain and one such demon is shame. People can
let go of shame when healing conditions are present, but
mental health professionals are not routinely selected to
provide these conditions. Furthermore, healing conditions
such as compassion, acceptance, kindness, gentleness, and
love are certainly not objective or quantifiable and not
scientifically measurable; and many mental health
academics are more comfortable with observable and
measurable techniques, and thus may completely ignore the
craft of healing.
An elitist assumption is that people don't change because
they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of
solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have
done something useful by informing overweight people that
they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric
intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never
been broken by his or her circumstances does not know
that people who have become demoralized do not need
analyses, pontifications, and the prevailing psychology.
Rather the immobilized need morale, healing, and a
liberating psychology.
--
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical
psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression
Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a
World Gone Crazy
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
zcommunications.org/liberation-psychology-for-the-u-s-by-bruce-e-levine
Thanks to AD for cping
this.
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