Tag - psychiatry

A Black Psychiatrist Examines Racism: An Interview with Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint

There are white therapists who refuse to deal with racism as an issue with black clients. They dismiss it. They see the key issue as how to get along with a mother or father. It's clearly an individual, intrapsychic orientation to most of psychiatry. As long as that's so, therapists will be willing to downplay the...

Mass Psychogenic Illness

The label mass psychogenic directs scientists to look to workers' psyches for causes and solutions, meanwhile ignoring potential physical workplace hazards and stressful conditions. It allows scientists to translate their investigative inadequacies into "respectable" jargon and lets industry off the hook. Poor...

The Worcester Ward: Violence Against Women

I originally entered a mental institution voluntarily, believing I could get help there. At that time I was very unhappy; clinically it's called depressed. In retrospect I would prefer to call it a terrible unhappiness with the state of my life. I was so unhappy that I was unable to get out bed for days and weeks at a...

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Flowers at Buchenwald?

This essay is reproduced here as it appeared in the print edition of the original Science for the People magazine. These web-formatted archives are preserved complete with typographical errors and available for reference and educational and activist use. Scanned PDFs of the back issues can be browsed by headline at...

Violence Center: Psychotechnology for Repression

A multi-million dollar proposal for a "Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence" (CSRV) at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) has been designed to focus on the "pathologically violent individual" and, in the words of its main proponent, is aimed at "altering undesirable behavior." In this time of...

Genocide of the Mind

This paper has been an attempt to clarify some of the contradictions of the techniques now in use to modify and control behavior. Coupled with the brutality and the totalitarian nature of these methods is the destruction that they cause to the individual.