When Did Thinking for Yourself Become a Mental Illness?

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:03:41)
I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously.

When I was a kid, I was what some may call a freethinker. I had a habit of questioning authority, especially if it seemed illegitimate or irrational. Rules that didn't make sense? I resisted most of them. Sometimes I was inquisitive.

Other times, maybe a little arrogant. In short, I could be difficult. My dad used to joke that I had oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD, a behavior diagnosis describing kids who are uncooperative, hostile, and defiant toward authority. But I never saw that part of myself as a disorder. What I saw was someone deeply concerned about the world around me, someone unwilling to bow to coercion, control, or incompetent authority.

Dr. Bruce Levine, my guest today, might have had a similar experience. Dr. Levine is a practicing clinical psychologist, a freethinker, and an outspoken critic of his profession. He spent years examining where modern psychiatry has gone wrong, and why it sometimes causes more harm than good. In his latest book, A Profession Without Reason, he takes a hard look at the field and the ways it medicalizes natural human traits like curiosity, defiance, or even rebellion—traits that shouldn't be necessarily treated as illnesses. In fact, even the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health once admitted, "Whatever we've been doing for the past 5 decades, it ain't working." Dr. Levine doesn't just critique psychiatry; he offers a fresh perspective grounded in history, philosophy, and reason.

One of his inspirations is the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who likely would have been labeled with ODD himself if he were alive today. Spinoza, a relentless questioner of authority, would probably be horrified to see how modern psychiatry turns traits like free thinking into medical diagnoses, often treated with medication. What I admire most about Dr. Levine is he embodies the very free thinking he writes about. His chapter on free thinkers opens with an allegory shared by a former executive of the American Humanist Association. It's the story of a priest, a rabbi, and a freethinker facing execution by guillotine during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.

Each is given a chance to appeal to their beliefs before the blade falls. The priest prays fervently, and when the guillotine malfunctions, the executioners interpret it as a divine miracle and set him free. The rabbi, too, prays, and when the blade again refuses to drop, he's also spared as a sign of divine intervention. Finally, the free thinker steps forward. Instead of praying, he examines the guillotine and calmly points out, "I see the problem.

There's a knot in the rope." The executioners fix the issue, and the blade drops smoothly. This allegory serves as a cautionary tale, a reminder of the dangers that come with challenging authority or pointing out uncomfortable truths. Dr. Bruce Levine's work is both provocative and inspiring. His books, including Resisting Illegitimate Authority and A Profession Without Reason, invite us to rethink not only psychiatry but also how society defines mental health, authority, and freedom. He's a regular contributor to Counterpunch and has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, and other outlets.

So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Levine about the pitfalls of modern psychiatry and how free thinking can both be a gift a gift and a risk in today's world.

Dustin Grinnell (00:03:43 --> 00:03:45)
Bruce Levine, welcome to the show.

Bruce Levine (00:03:45 --> 00:03:47)
Great to be here with you, Dustin.

Dustin Grinnell (00:03:47 --> 00:04:10)
So I thought it might be a good idea to see if you could briefly kind of explain your journey as a practicing clinical psychologist who over time has seemed to grow quite disillusioned with your field and the practice of psychiatry in general, and then eventually have become like a strong critic of the field. What was that path? What was that journey for you like?

Bruce Levine (00:04:11 --> 00:12:39)
Well, the psych— mental health profession of psychology, psychiatry— that world that I went into when I was an undergraduate in the late '70s and the 1980s when I was in graduate school was pretty different than it is today. So I would say it was like half, uh, embarrassing and half something that I was very much interested in. And These days, the mainstream establishment psychiatry is just totally insane. And psychology unfortunately isn't as split up as different. The clinical psychology profession that I went into was clearly prided itself on being very much different than psychiatry, and it's not priding itself so much that more.

The clinical psychologists are working in psychiatrists' office and believing in a lot of their theories that have no scientific basis. So But it's important, I think, for people to remember, like, throughout the history of psychiatry, just to give you a quick 2-minute version of it— be a little bit of an oversimplification— but throughout a lot of the 20th century, there was a battle among the psychoanalytic, psychodynamic people, like Freudian kind of folks, and the biopsychiatrists, the people who believed that the basis of mental illness was some kind of biological, chemical, electrical part of your body, and therefore the treatment had to be some sort of a biological or chemical drug, or in those lobotomies, or all that stuff. So that was That was the battle, all right, that was going on. And what ended up happening, all right, in that battle was it was a short era, the era that I, that I was in the 1970s, '80s. There was actually psychiatrists.

People think that I trash all psychiatrists, and this is really important. There are— there's establishment psychiatry, which I have no respect for. I think they're doing much more harm than good. But there are a lot of dissident critical psychiatrists who I have a lot of respect for. Also, people forget that in the 1960s, '70s, there were even prominent psychiatrists, not establishment psychiatrists, so they weren't part of clearly those two schools.

There were rigid psychoanalytic Freudians and rigid biochemical, but there were folks who cared a lot, famous psychiatrists in the '60s, '70s, who cared about the sort of interpersonal, interactional nature of why people moved into emotional difficulty. So you have famous people like Harry Stack Sullivan writing about interpersonal psychiatry. You had other folks, right? You know, people like Don Jackson and Solomon Mnuchin, people caring about family interactions. And you have people like Eric Berne writing bestseller books and about transactional psychiatry, and a guy named Stephen Cartman, a psychiatrist, writing about the sort of drama triangle and, and just caring a lot about— that's where you got things like dysfunctional families, identified patients.

So people who are looking, let's say, a little bit more than biological genetic reasons why people are having difficulty, and even a little bit more than, say, Freudians who were just looking looking at people's really their history of their dealings with their parents and Oedipal complexes and all that. People were looking at what's going on interpersonally, interactionally. So they were looking at the context. And in psychology, one of my heroes when I was a kid, a high school undergraduate, was a guy named Erich Fromm, who wrote books called like The Sane Society, who was even looking at even larger pictures. He cared about not only psychology and he cared about philosophy.

He cared about the whole economics. So he wrote books about Buddhism and cared about religion. He cared about Marxism. So he was caring about the whole thing. And this is what I cared about.

I saw all of these things as deeply interconnected. Our emotional suffering, our behavioral disturbance, deeply. It was the psychological part of it. And there was a sociological and there was a historical, there's a political. All these things matter.

And what happened in the '70s, and we can get into detail later on this, why this happened, but psychiatry became a laughingstock because of a lot of different reasons and they were in deep trouble.. And they decided like the only way to kind of get their prestige and prominence and power back in society was not through any scientific means. That wasn't going to happen because their whole basic model and paradigm was problematic. We could get to that maybe later, but they decided literally, and there's, you know, there's documentation of this, that they moved into partnership with drug companies. So in the 1980s, this is what they did.

They became exclusively, at least establishment psychiatry became this exclusive biopsychiatric kind of thing where all they were they moved into— the vast majority of them by 2011, New York Times did a piece saying 90% of psychiatrists don't even talk to their patients and do therapy. They're just— people come in there, they're supposed to spend 15 minutes in these medical managements, sometimes it's 5 or 10 minutes, getting their symptoms, tweaking their medication, you know, keeping them on the same medication. If people complain, they give them more, they give them different kinds of medication. So that's all they really were doing, the vast majority of psychiatrists. And this really started in the 1980s, and now it's completely out of control and insane.

All right. And the problem was that even psychology stopped really talking about— not only they stopped really— a lot of psychologists, they don't even know who Erich Fromm was. This guy was a really famous, prominent figure. He was on television. He was a public intellectual.

They don't even know who he was, but they don't even think about the kind of things that I talk about, about the politics and finance, sociology, and history. It just seems incredibly radical for a lot of people, and it should not be radical. All right. Up happening was psychology not only stopped caring about that, but they really stopped— and this is really a real blow to psychology because the psychology I went into, they care passionately about science. They may not have cared about some of these other things, but they really separated themselves out from psychiatry in terms of, we're gonna look at the science of things.

They prided themselves on that. And I'm seeing nowadays, with psychologists becoming more and more the handmaidens for psychiatry working in their office, I see them really stopping even caring about science. I get on a lot of these podcasts and I listen to previous podcasts. I I did this with you. You had somebody out there talking about how great ketamine was and, you know, and lumping it in the same boat with all these other psychedelics.

And I mean, I could give you studies about ketamine. By the way, in the history of psychiatry, going back from Freud talking about the magic bullet of cocaine and then being embarrassed about that, 1930s, the magic bullet was all these amphetamines. It goes on and on. Then the magic bullet in the 1980s and early '90s, it was these SSRIs, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft kind of drugs. And now all they finally admit, yeah, these things don't work that great, and they create all these horrible adverse effects.

And now they're moving to— you could go almost every major city in the U.S. to things like ketamine treatments. Okay, that is ketamine clinics, even though it's, by the way, it's not even FDA approved for depression or post-PTSD and all that kind of stuff. But they can use it anyways. Doctors, MDs, they could do whatever the heck they want. They don't— it doesn't have to have an FDA approval.

And even FDA approval is problematic. We could get to that, but they don't even have that. And so, you have people on these podcasts, they start— I listen to the one that you did and you asked a great question. So, what's the research show on this ketamine? And, I was really curious what the person would say and they just had this vague answer.

Oh, it's— they usually use words like robust. Oh, it's robust and they don't quote any research. Well, I know the research on ketamine. There is like all of these things. Yeah, initially anecdotal reports in the whole history of psychiatry from bloodletting to everything else, anecdotally people say, "Oh, yeah, these things work great." And then, when you start doing the science, doing it a randomized controlled trial comparing it to placebo, using an active placebo, doing real science to kind of really tease out whether this treatment actually is benefiting in the long term, in the short term, you know, way more than its adverse effects.

You know, it's not there for ketamine. Now we know that already, and that eventually that'll hit the air. And, you know, I don't know how long that'll take. Usually the course of these things is every time there's some big magic bullet, you know, people who are real researchers know about it, you know, within a few years. And by the time it hits the mainstream media, sometimes it takes 10, 15 years.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:39 --> 00:13:08)
So I think the title of your 2020 book, A Profession Without Reason, it's very clear now why you titled it that way, because you truly feel like contemporary psychiatry has lost its way. It's, it's become— you use the word insane, you know, they've just lost the plot. And with the title of your book, did you really intend to be that strong about your position against what psychiatry has become in your mind?

Bruce Levine (00:13:08 --> 00:14:05)
Well, the funny thing about that title, it was a— it turns into a double entendre. But originally it comes to me— I'm— if you're really immersed in Spinoza, who is this great rationalist, great, you know, love of reason, uh, I was really originally, you know, that title was like, this is oppression that has no logic, it has no empirical evidence, but it also has no reason, logic. And then obviously within about 20 seconds after I came up with that title, I said— I saw the double entendre of like You know, yeah, I'm saying there's no reason for this profession. And I'll leave that up to people who read the book and hear what we're talking about, whether there is a reason, whether the profession should exist or not, or whether you can keep it around as some sort of religion, just like you keep around all different kinds of organized religion and people are into it or whatever. But originally, when I came up with that title, it was saying there is no reason and logic in that kind of sense, no rationality in a lot of a lot of what their pronouncements and a lot of their treatments. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:14:05 --> 00:14:31)
Early in your book, you, you dropped an incredible statistic from the NIH. You wrote that 25% of Americans suffer from some form of mental illness, and then you included a quote from the former director of the NIMH. And I wanted to read what he said because this was a man who, who led this health organization for— was it over a decade or so? This is—

Bruce Levine (00:14:31 --> 00:14:38)
you're talking about Thomas And he was director of the NIH, I believe, from 2002 to 2015. Right.

Dustin Grinnell (00:14:38 --> 00:15:05)
And he said basically whatever we've been doing for 5 decades, it ain't working. And so here is someone who was, you know, a leader in the psychological community. And he basically said there's just no evidence to support that what we've been doing for 5 decades is effective. And that is— that's profound, I think. And I wonder what you You agree with that, I assume, right?

Bruce Levine (00:15:05 --> 00:17:25)
And here you have establishment psychiatry figure Insel who's saying that, yeah, if you take a look at our outcomes— and he went specifically, talked about suicide and hospitalizations and morbidity— that he used words like bleak and he used words like abysmal. So part of what I try to get across to folks is that if you take a look at even establishment psychiatry, some of the most important aspects of psychiatry have been to use his word, abysmal failures. And not only the outcome measures, but also their chemical imbalance theory of mental illness that we've been hearing about forever, that too little serotonin causes depression, too much dopamine causes schizophrenia. This has been now jettisoned by at the very top of establishment psychiatry, and their diagnostic manual has been declared invalid also by INSUL, you know, way over a decade ago. So this is part of the starting point of this book here.

The idea that psychiatry itself has been a failure is not a radical notion. All right. Now, a lot of those establishment figures want to get us to believe that it's this— and this is the line you'll hear all the time— it's a young science that's making great progress. I can't tell you how many times I hear that. But the reality is, is it's made no progress.

I mean, you'd be hard pressed. I mean, I always say, you know, tell me what area it has made progress. Tell me where, what area that their treatments, their drugs are now better than they once were. You can't find it. Tell me one area where they have a theory of mental illness that's superior to their previous.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:26 --> 00:18:10)
Right. Just to zoom out on some of the big ideas that you explore in your book, one of the ideas is kind of how fear rules our ideas about mental illness. And I was wondering if you could talk about— because you have a whole chapter on fear, but fear really goes through the entire book, I think. It's this idea of how fear leads to irrationality and how we treat mental illness. And I was wondering if you could kind of talk about that a little bit. And you also shared your experience earlier in your career when you were working in a psychiatric ER, and you saw a lot how fear led to irrational behavior in healthcare providers and psychiatrists. So I was wondering if you could unpack that idea a little bit of fear and irrational behavior. Okay.

Bruce Levine (00:18:10 --> 00:18:38)
So one of the things of using Spinoza for a foil and a lens was that he was hip to this. I mean, anybody who looked at the human condition for as long as people have been looking at human condition realized that fear in his day made people superstitious, irrational, bought into all kinds of crazy religious notions, dogma, all of that. Because fear is sort of something that stops your, not only your critical thinking, but also your ability to, and your intuition.

Dustin Grinnell (00:18:38 --> 00:18:39)
To reason too, yeah, yeah.

Bruce Levine (00:18:39 --> 00:23:59)
And, and which is understandable. And so they go to a professional, and the professional— and this is really important point for me— what I learned in my graduate training is not much about psychology and not much how to help people, but I learned that a lot of these professionals get real good at looking like they know how that— what they're talking about when they have no idea what they're talking about. It's a lot of like the politicians, like you see a lot of these politicians that get us into these crazy wars and all this kind of stuff they do is like they're very good at like sounding like they know what's going on and that they're cutting edge and all of that stuff. And they're good at that. And it doesn't work for people who aren't scared, who have a good bullshit detector, who are critically thinking, you know, who understand these people.

You know, we've caught them in lies after lies and falsehoods before. It doesn't work. But when you're scared, you're vulnerable. So that's one of the things that when I do these podcasts like I'm talking about with you is I want to get across for people, sort of inoculate them, or this is a vaccine here of sorts, to realize that, you know, you're gonna be scared for yourself, or especially maybe even more so for your children or sibling or whatever, when they're behaving in a way. And you're gonna be vulnerable to some authority out there who's like looking like they know what they're talking about.

And when your gut's telling you like, my god, this person doesn't make any sense, it's not as loud when you're filled with fear. So part of the problem for a lot of mental mental health professionals— I, I also learned this when I was in scary situations. So I worked as an intern in a psychiatric emergency room, then I got a job there for a while— is that when people get dragged in off the streets, you know, sometimes they're dragged in there by the police, sometimes they're dragged in by family members, and they're acting erratically, they're scared. It's scary. It's a scary thing for folks, you know.

Is this person going to kill themselves? Are they going to do some damage out there in the world? What's going to happen? You know, they're scared about— they also are scared about the fact that, yeah, they know a whole bunch of people who ended up getting put in the hospital and they got worse, you know, being in a hospital. So it's just filled with fear.

And what I noticed was that a lot of mental health professionals were very incongruent. They lied to themselves about how scared they were. They lied to the patients. And so there was an inauthentic incongruence. Not all.

There were some really impressive people who I worked with there who really grasped that situation and were able to transcend their fear and try to help help not only the family members but the person themselves have less fear. Okay, that, that's really what a good professional is going to do, is want to trust that if we could— a good professional or good helper, a good parent or a good coach or whoever— is want to try to help people have less fear because they trust that if you have less fear, you're going to be able to think better, you're going to be able to make better judgments. And that nobody's God, you know, nobody's perfect, that we— nobody can be sure that you're going to make the best judgment or the best decision But it seems pretty clear that the less fear you have, the more likely. And so they form collaborative relationships with the patient and family members and everybody starts to work together. But what happens with a lot of professionals is if you're dishonest about that stuff with yourself, there's other fears of like liability fears, there's licensing fears, there's all kinds of those kinds of fears that really force you into even more kind of judgments that just sort of like you're judging things to do things that cover your ass kind of stuff.

So that could become deeply problematic. Like, and so a lot of the problem, okay, of the profession is that for a person themselves, for they get scared themselves of some of their symptoms. Say a person, you know, they're, they're, they're 14, 15, or even 25, 30, and they have some suicidal thoughts that go through their head, or they have some other kinds of things that go through their, their head. They have— they're hearing some voices, or they're, they're doing— there's something that they're known, like, oh my God, you know, am I crazy? Am I, am I in deep trouble?

And the more that they get scared— and you talk to people, I've talked to lots of people, and there's lots of research on this— people actually hear voices, and they say that, you know what, if they weren't around people who made them scared of those voices, they wouldn't have ended up in the hospital and been a psychiatric patient for life. Because they know there's other people out there who heard these voices, they didn't tell anybody, and they actually were not only a negative force, they actually I actually learned a few things by them. So, so even, you know, that whole dynamic, most people say, well, that's the most serious mental illness of all. People who are hearing voices, these people are so-called, quote, schizophrenic. But even in that world of if you do the research, you do the empirical research, you do actually talk to people who've gone through that, so much of it for them, I'll tell you, is they wanted to be around people who were not scared.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:59 --> 00:25:05)
Yeah, destructive is an interesting word too, because the tension and fear that someone going through a mental health crisis can evoke in families, friends, healthcare providers can be, it seems, sometimes so strong that it can lead to acts of— you used the word barbarism. And if you look at the brief history of things we've done as a society to to kind of get people to calm down who are suffering from some sort of mental illness, it's really barbaric. You know, the experimental psychiatric treatments, removing parts of people's body like spleen, tonsils. I have other ones here: injecting patients with horse serum, using carbon monoxide to cause convulsions, giving people malaria to heat up their body to cure the virus that that was causing the problem. It's like there really seems to be no end to what modern psychiatry has done in terms of like the horrors. Uh, would you say that's kind of how you feel about it? Absolutely.

Bruce Levine (00:25:05 --> 00:30:32)
But even, you know, forget about the, you know, that a few hundred years ago, you know, you're talking about they were doing lobotomies. And, you know, throughout the, you know, to 20th century, there's doing insulin coma, you know, kind of therapy where their idea was they just flood somebody with insulin. To this day, a lot of people are sort of shocked, I want to say, to learn that they're still doing electroshock treatment. And they're talking about like, and all of these things, once they get them across, that they convince people they're a good idea, eventually they'll even, they do them on children. And these drugs that they're using, they don't seem like as barbaric, but a lot of folks who've gone through them, they call them chemical lobotomies because they just desensitize them to their humanity.

And for a lot of these drugs, they have horrible adverse effects. And, and now you're finally hearing with these SSRIs, these Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft drugs, you know, the final truth about the fact that how severe these adverse effects are, that the vast majority of these people, far greater number of people who take these, have severe sexual dysfunction that then get improved by their depression or anxiety, and that even after they stop taking them, They have something called post-sexual dysfunction disorder. So they, you know, so it's just, you know, on and on. And also too, they're finally talking about, and they always deny this initially, that there's people develop dependence and tolerance. And that's a part that really enrages me because this is, you know, basic science 101 is that the body, when you introduce it to some chemicals, there's homeostasis, right?

You should learn this in high school biology here, and that your body develops develops a kind of— it changes to kind of fit these drugs. And then when you, when you take these drugs away, you know, it's developed a dependence on these things, and you're going to go through likely some kind of withdrawal process. And the withdrawal process for these SSRIs, if you've been on it for quite a while, is really severe, and it could take a long time. And actually, some of the more critically thinking, dissident psychiatrists now that I'm aware of, they specialize in helping people taper to get off these psychiatric drugs because it's not an easy thing to do. So the barbarism is going to always continue.

I mean, that Insel guy, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, he wrote this book in 2022 and he was complaining there wasn't enough electroshock out there. And so what's going to happen is that when they're scared, you know, they're scared themselves, they're, you know, and other people around them are scared, they're very vulnerable to these kind of crazy, draconian kinds of treatment. Treatments. And then what's going to happen— and this is really important— these psychiatrists who administer them, because they're not real scientists, what'll happen to them is no matter what they do— I mean, I guess, I don't know where you are in the Boston area there, is that where you're— I mean, you know, you could come up with a treatment like, let's, you know, let's just drop people 5 minutes in the Charles River, you know, and, and see what— and if they're severely depressed and suicidal, and you're going to get a certain percentage of those people, you know, if you could pull them out in time before they drown, they're gonna say, oh my God, my depression's lifted. This is a fantastic treatment.

You know, thank you, Dustin, you're a genius. You should write a book about this. You know, dropping people in the Charles River and, you know, and almost freezing to death, it just saved me. That's gonna happen with anything you do out there. But a real scientist understands, number one, there's a placebo effect, okay?

You do any kind of thing, people have expectations of something, all right? And you have to kind of measure, you know, the adverse effects versus the, you know, placebo. They're also gonna notice that, for example, it was commonly known when I started in this profession that if you do nothing with something like depression, absolutely no treatment at all, that in a year's time, 85% of people will find their depression lifts. And we know that even in these fraudulent drug company studies, you know, the year-long, you know what, their, their fraudulent numbers are nowhere near as high as that. Okay.

And their real numbers are far lower. So they're actually, if you really look at these studies empirically and know what the naturalistic cost of depression is without any treatment, you realize these, these treatments are not only not helpful, they're, they're doing harm. They're taking episodic conditions and turning them into chronic ones. And so the other thing that a lot of these non-scientist doctors, you know, don't seem to know is that they get people come back to them and say, doctor, this treatment really worked. Thank you.

All right. But they're not, they're not doing this scientifically to realize that, you know, a lot of people who like it was counterproductive. Productive or nonproductive, they're not coming back. All right. And also, they're not seeing those people.

I see them all the time. Also, to some of the people that I see who do come back because they're afraid to completely go off their meds and they want to have a prescriber. So they literally, they lie to these doctors. Why do they lie? Because they're afraid if they tell them, doctor, this, this stuff was worthless, I'm trying to come off of it, what the doctors are going to say to them is like, oh no, we need to give you more of it, or we need to give you another drug or, or whatever.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:32 --> 00:31:08)
It's one thing to intervene with, you know, a treatment that has no science backing its effectiveness. It's quite another thing to justify that by cloaking yourself in virtue. That was another thing that you explored in your book. It's this idea that, like, it's often like the people who stand for tolerance and compassion, they're the ones that often do the most harm because of their moral superiority, their self-satisfied stance. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship and why it's so destructive? Right.

Bruce Levine (00:31:08 --> 00:34:23)
There's a quote when I first got into Discover This World in the mid-1990s, and got into this world of ex-psychiatric patient activists and, and dissonant mental health professionals, there's a quote that I heard, I started to hear a lot, the C.S. Lewis quote, of all tyrannies, you know, those sincerely exercised for the good of the victim may be the most oppressive. And that's off the top of my head, I think that's right. Yeah, exactly. But it speaks to what you're talking about, and you sort of see this in the whole history of mental health professions.

So like we were talking about gay activists who got rid of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. Well, if you You take a look at American society, you know, 1940s, '50s, people who were homosexual viewed as criminal, they were viewed as sinners, and psychiatry had this idea, a lot of this progressive idea, well, like, it's gonna be more— create more tolerance if we make this into a mental illness, okay, not a sin or not a crime. But what they were not hip to, psychiatry, was that by the mid-1960s, certainly late 1960s, a lot of gay activists were saying that's no upgrade at all. At all. Gay activists want to say that their sexual preference was just a normal human variation.

And what they understood was that it wasn't progressive at all to label what they were all about as an illness rather than a crime. In fact, some of these folks would say, like, I'd rather be called a criminal than to be called mentally ill and defective. A lot of these folks would say that. And so what they did in the early '70s was start to fight real hard against the American Psychiatric Association, publishes this DSM diagnostic Bible. And at one of their conferences, they were there protesting.

And through political protest, they finally were able to get homosexuality eliminated from the DSM. And in the 1980 DSM, there's no homosexuality, sort of. It's a little bit, but generally, you know, psychiatry, at least today, will say, oh yeah, you know, that they try to cover up this idea that they were so wrong on that kind of thing. And you know what they ended up doing, I should tell you, is that psychiatrism expanded much more into kids, much more into children. So that's where you start having every kid who's bored at school being labeled with this ADHD disease and being put on amphetamines.

This is where you have things like oppositional defiant disorder, where you're pathologizing kids who are arguing with adults. So they started to do that, and I don't think they actually went through this thought process, you know. I don't think they're that bright to do this, but it looks to be like they figured out, like, well, let's start pathologizing more kids because they're not going to organize and protest at the American Psychiatric Association like adult gay activists did, but that's what it looks like. I think that just sort of happened. I'm not claiming any kind of conspiracy theory, but they certainly have moved into the points of more and more each one of those DSMs that come out, they get larger and it gets easier to qualify, to the point where the guy who was the task force director of the whole DSM-IV, which came out in 1994, he was so embarrassed by the expansion, the imperialism of the DSM-V, which came out in 2013.

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:23 --> 00:35:31)
You talk a lot also about consensus reality, what everybody kind of agrees on, or conventional wisdom, and the role of someone who's challenging that consensus reality. And And, uh, you know, we're reading your book, I, I really felt like we're kindred spirits in a way, uh, independent thinkers, free thinkers, not prone to getting taken advantage of by religious dogma or doctrines or corporate control or anything like that. And I often find it disillusioning and kind of upsetting to get harsh pushback whenever I question shared beliefs because I'm usually just trying to help. I'm usually just trying to kind of search for truth. And yet it's been my experience that people just want to hear what supports the things they know. They want to hear the things that can support consensus reality. Why is this so difficult for those who challenge consensus reality? Why is that always going to be true? And, and what has been your experience, uh, doing so?

Bruce Levine (00:35:31 --> 00:36:27)
Well, I think that has been the case historically, and I think it always will be true. And depending on how scared a society is, you're going to going to have less of that go on. But there's always going to be people who— they're not philosopher, critical thinker, scientist folks who really get a buzz off of greater truths and are not addicted and attached to their bias. They're going to be— that's Spinoza, that's Einstein, that's what we're talking about here, free thinkers, the people in this Spinoza fan club, people like Bertrand Russell and all of these folks. There's going to be these free thinkers, but there's also going to always be people who, let's call them dogmatists, or you can call them ideologues or religious folks who they're attached to it and they're attached to— for those kind of folks, when they hear something that's different than the way they're thinking, that doesn't sort of excite them. That creates a sort of tension that's really upsetting for them, that it creates a kind of dissonance that's unpleasant experience for them.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:27 --> 00:36:32)
It's like uncertainty. It creates an uncertainty that creates tension. Right.

Bruce Levine (00:36:32 --> 00:39:09)
So, for example, say there's somebody out there in their audience that I'm saying to them that, Look, difficulty paying attention, you know, in, you know, and maybe costs you getting, you know, not being able to get through high school or costs you losing your job. It's certainly a problem, a serious problem, and there's a lot of different solutions to it, but it's not a mental illness. That creates a lot of dissonance for a lot of people out there because what they hear me immediately saying, they're attached to this idea that I finally found this explanation, this ADHD explanation for why I'm not paying attention. And that explanation made me feel better. It did all of these things for me.

And now you're telling me that you don't see any evidence at all that it should be put in the same category as cancer or diabetes or any of these things that are real diseases? That in other words, there's all these sociological, political personality reasons why people can, you know, not paying attention. And these same people are getting labeled with ADHD. You put them in different circumstances, they pay great attention. And I could go along or on.

But if you're attached to the idea that this is a disease and now, you know, other people become attached attached to it because it's getting them certain things. It gets them, you know, they get— they're able to get prescriptions for amphetamines. And for some of these people, cynically, they have all of these Adderall and Vyvanse, and they've now even sell— can sell them to their friends. And so there's certain people who are actually even morally with it. But for whatever reason, if you're really attached to this idea that of something, it's giving you a lot— a guy like me, what we're talking about, this conversation is going to create dissonance, and they're just gonna— they're gonna attack, you know.

They're gonna usually— what my experience is, and this happened to Spinoza, happens to other guys in my— in our movement— they're gonna ad hominem attack. They have a hard time coming up with scientific arguments, so they're gonna, you know, call me a menace to society. They're gonna call me something— all kinds of— I could give you the whole list of things that they'll do rather than deal with the issue. And, you know, one of the things I tell folks is that I know a lot of younger folks, guys your age and younger, you know, 40s, 30s, who are in this movement of kind of critiquing what's problematic about psychiatry, and they, and they spend time trying to debate with these dogmatist psychiatrists. And it's beyond frustrating.

They tell me it's— we're not getting anywhere because why? It's not a dialogue. It's not a conversation like you and I are having here right now. It's like people like totally attached to a point of view. And one of the things hopefully you get with wisdom is that you intuitively feel, is this a person who really is open to a dialogue to get to a greater truth, or is this a a person who's attached to their bias, and you don't waste your time trying to have a dialogue with somebody who's attached to it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:39:09 --> 00:40:32)
At least I don't. I was going to ask you, actually, you know, what does one do, uh, as a free thinker sitting across the table from an ideologue? And also, how have you dealt with just the animosity and the resentment and the attacks? I think nowadays it seems fashionable— I've seen this in the workplace— to kind of pathologize them, to call them a narcissist or call them a psychopath if they're not getting with the program, or they're questioning shared beliefs, or they're expressing doubt. And I found it to be very hurtful to be on the receiving end of that type of animosity, because it just doesn't— my inner experience is that just trying to get to some reality that makes sense, you know, and try to make everybody feel better, but you just end up talking past these people. And then you just get hurt by them. And I've kind of gone back and forth in my ability to engage productively in these situations versus what I think you said, which is, you know, maybe the best answer, which is you just— why would you even engage at that point? You know, there's not like— it's not like you're going to change their minds. So yeah, I was wondering how— what wisdom you have to share for, for people who are a little bit younger maybe, and they're in the fight and they're trying to question shared reality and try to get to some sort of truth?

Bruce Levine (00:40:32 --> 00:41:24)
Well, actually, I should say everything has its value in a way. And being around a lot of these folks who will attack ad hominem, personally attack folks who critique psychiatry, has this value for me. It makes me even more empathic and more understanding on a real visceral level for a lot of these psychiatric patients in hospitals, because they tell me stories like if they would tell a psychiatrist like they would disagree with their diagnosis or disagree with their treatment, they would get labeled with a worse mental illness treatment. They would, they would be viewed having lack of insight. I mean, this psychiatric jargon term is something like anosognosia, and this is what would happen to them. So it would be like whatever they did, they would make things worse. And so I— that was my experience too. Like even when I was in graduate school, if I would disagree with something, you would hear all the time, well, you have issues with authority, you have authority issues.

Dustin Grinnell (00:41:24 --> 00:41:27)
You've heard that a few times.

Bruce Levine (00:41:27 --> 00:44:31)
If you fall into the game, especially with authority, And you, you can argue with them, then they go, there you go, you're proving my point. So it's like you disagree with any authority and they tell you you have authority issues. And you just— so, so that's the game. And you can't win those games. You can't win these— there's certain kind of games.

And this is what we were— I was talking about before, this interpersonal interactional psychiatrists are talking about these drama games. That's the kind of interesting thing. Once you get caught in one of these kind of games where somebody is persecuting or they're claiming victim status or whatever the heck it is, they're gonna pull you into a role that you don't want to be in. You're gonna go away, and before you know it, you're bullying or persecuting them. I mean, it's just, it's just a crazy, crazy game.

And, you know, if I got and debated American Psychiatric Association president for long enough, I could try to keep my cool and keep it to science. But after so many times of hearing them accuse me, or some of the games they play— I'll tell you another game, one of their most evil games, is they'll imply somebody— the only critics of psychiatry psychiatry out there are Scientologists, you know, to really— that's their major ad hominem weapon. And so I've actually had to write articles that Scientology and psychiatry are two sides of the same unscientific coin, you know. And, you know, I have to like— they, they put me in a position where I have to like clearly separate myself from some other kind of religious dogma thing. So that's what they'll do.

And, and, and, but I don't want to be in those positions, you know. And that's what they'll do the time. If you're getting attacked in these ad hominem ways, eventually you're going to fall into like counterattacks and you're going to move into defensiveness and you— it's just not worth it. I've had enough of this kind of experience. And so, yeah, I tell folks, it's like there's a lot of people out there.

Maybe you've been just surrounded in your life by a lot of these dogmatists, a lot of these authoritarians, you know, who you can't have a conversation. But trust me, there's people out there, probably the minority. I can't tell I can't tell you if it's 5% or 20% or whatever the number is. It varies in different kind of historical periods, at least people who are willing to get out there with this. But that's what you want to spend your energy doing.

At least that's what I want to spend my energy doing, having those kind of dialogues. So what's going to happen, from my experience, you and I are talking, you're going to have some of the people, you know, who are like, if they're listening here and they're ego attached to, there is a biochemical imbalance theory, you're wrong, or they're ego attached to the DSM, they're enraged, or maybe they turned off this thing already. But the other— there's other people out there who already sense this. They already intuited a lot of stuff that we're saying. And so that's why I do these things, because for those people to hear this kind of conversation, to hear what we're talking about, it just sort of gives them a little bit more energy.

Dustin Grinnell (00:44:31 --> 00:46:12)
Well, I will say before I kind of get to my next question that your other book that I read first, Resisting Illegitimate Authority, that book was very helpful for me as someone who's, I guess, been labeled like a rebel in these like rigid environments. Because the thesis you outlined, it seemed, that I remember to this day is is that it's not that I rebel against authorities. I don't necessarily have a problem with authorities. It's a problem with illegitimate authorities. It's a problem with authorities that are incompetent or untrustworthy or trying to coerce or control.

That is where I become a quote-unquote problem. And I think maybe the best way to deal with them is just to be in a different room, to not fight them, because there's really no winning that. So yeah, I just wanted to mention that other book. I mean, that's how we first met, actually, because I just felt validated reading that book and felt like it was useful in the sense that it helped me change the way I looked at myself. Being in corporate settings, it started to make me feel like, am I some sort of asshole or something like that?

Why do I keep calling people out? And why am I being labeled a troublemaker? Not in any really dramatic way, but I created a little bit of tension in situations where I would just question, why do it that way when we could do it this way? And this undermined traditional ways of doing things. People just didn't want to hear any of that.

Bruce Levine (00:46:12 --> 00:50:14)
And you think about it, to get into most of these programs, you have to do really well in school. Okay? And these people may want to believe that was because of their intelligence, but really, you and I know that a lot to get straight A's, you're eating a lot of shit, right? Maybe some of these classes you really enjoy and it was fun to get an A, but to really get straight A's, I can tell you from a experience that, you know, that you're doing a lot of cognitive compliance. And some folks like myself, they're complying with some resentment and anger.

And I remember, but a lot of these other folks, again, for their dissonance, to want to believe that they're intelligent and that's why they got into med school, that's why they got into PhD clinical psychology program, which is harder to get through into than med school and all that. They want to believe it's their intelligence when it's really a lot of their compliance and their conformity. So that's the selection process. But when I was in going through this training, here I was, I never really viewed myself as this extremely rebellious person. Not compared to the friends I grew up with.

I wasn't getting in trouble with the cops. I wasn't even, you know, there wasn't like, there was no dramatic things in my life that somebody would say, oh, oh, this person's like a delinquent, a rebel or anything like that. But in that world, which was really sort of surprising for me, was in that world of psychology, psychiatry, all that, I was getting viewed as this rebel, this guy with authority authority issues and just for just like willingness to challenge some big shot professor, which for me felt like no big deal. Isn't that— that's what you're supposed to do. If something doesn't make sense, you question it, you challenge it.

But in that world, what I learned was that created an enormous amount of tension. And so then later on, it didn't take long for me to figure out, well, if you're viewing me with authority issues, I guess you didn't give me a DSM diagnosis yet. But what happens what happens to you when you're dealing with other really more noncompliant folks like that kid out there who's saying, you know, I hate my teacher, I'm not going to school. You know, what are you going to do with that kind of thing? Well, you're really going to pathologize that.

That kid's gone beyond authority issues. They, they have a mental illness for you because you can't understand that. And so part of what I came to was that these people are essentially bigots, just, you know, they're not racial bigots, but there's personality bigots. And part of why I wrote that Resisting authority was to say like, look, there's all of these personality types over the years that are viewed with inferior status or they're criminalized or pathologized. And we have for quite a while sort of done that to these people who are basically anti-authoritarians.

And as you put it, well, they're not anti-authority. So anti-authoritarian just means you question and you challenge authority. And if it doesn't make sense there, they don't know what they're talking about. They're immoral. Exploited, then you resist and challenge.

But if they're an authority that you're getting some value of, they're not that kind of authority, you listen to it, you take it seriously. And so I go through that at length in the book. There's people that I've known, mechanics I've had, car mechanics who I really respect their authority, other parts of life that I really respect their authority. And it's not like I'm anti-authority. And even people talk about, well, a parent is acting like an authority.

Authority when they grab their kid who's running into traffic. I mean, who could be against that? You're not— that's a legitimate use of authority, right? But a parent who's like lying and beating the crap out of their kids or emotionally abusing them, they're not a legitimate authority, right? So that's really the issue.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:14 --> 00:51:52)
Really speaking in truths and being funny about it so you can sort of wash it down. But I couldn't talk to you and not talk about like the big lie at the heart of psychiatry. You've already touched on this, and that is that mental illnesses are the result of chemical imbalances. And that's what Big Pharma has used to justify the chemical treatments. And you've explored the harm of this.

And maybe a little bit about the origin of it, but it's become patently false. And yet it still persists. You know, I could go to my PCP right now. It's like 50/50 that they would think about a mood disorder the same way as diabetes. It's just a deficiency in serotonin or whatever.

Schizophrenia is a problem with dopamine. And that chemical imbalance theory has such a stranglehold on society and that's conventional wisdom. And it just— how do we get out of this? Are we coming out of it? Because a lot of people are starting to say, oh yeah, maybe that was wrong.

Bruce Levine (00:51:52 --> 00:52:35)
Well, if you take a you look at it, just a real quick, quick history of it, I mean, by the 1990s, they knew the researchers had shown that this wasn't true. And they obviously, they held on to this idea because it was a great marketing tool. If you got people believing that their depression was caused by low levels of serotonin, they're going to take these drugs. And so, you know, that was part of the, the power and the reason. And they, and these drug companies spent millions and billions of dollars with their propaganda efforts. I mean, that's really what they were with thought leader psychiatrists, with journals, with all kinds of stuff to kind of— and if you even if you listen to the commercials very early on, they would say maybe related to chemical amounts because they knew it wasn't.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:35 --> 00:52:39)
They had the legal teams weighing in on those marketing efforts.

Bruce Levine (00:52:39 --> 00:58:52)
Right. So it was really interesting to kind of by way of answering your question, just a little bit of history of like how these things move through sort of like the cycle of them. So what ends up happening with all of these theories and all these drug treatments, you have something comes out, theory or drug treatment, and immediately researchers, science, say, you know, have the answer to that. But it lags. And then eventually what happened was like by around 2010, 2011, a few prominent psychiatrists started speaking out.

And then these were like the prominent psychiatrists— one of the establishment psychiatry journals that's a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of— they're still establishment psychiatry, but something called the Psychiatric Times, and they're a little bit ahead of the rest of establishments like IJN. So you had a guy there who's editor emeritus, a guy named Pies, P-I-E-S, who wrote this piece there saying that no well-informed psychiatrist has ever believed in this chemical imbalance theory, and he called it an urban legend. And then the next year, there was a story on NPR, this Lee Spiegel that I always talk about because I thought it was really one of the few mainstream stories where she had been diagnosed with depression, told the story of Johns Hopkins, where her upper middle class family took her, got put on Prozac, and then she finds out later that this chemical imbalance theory is not true. And she talks to people and finds out why and how they— the reason why they perpetuated this theory, all kinds of ideas about noble lies and, you know, wanting people to take their drugs. And so it's all a bunch of mumbo jumbo.

But still, this is still about 12, 13 years, and still most people are not hearing about this. So the way the process works, eventually I think a lot of these establishment psychiatrists— and this is an important point— that they're not there at the top of the American Psychiatric Association or the National Institute of Mental Health because they're great scientists. They're there at that top position because they're politicians, and they're excellent politicians. And a good politician knows which way the wind's blowing. And so they want to anticipate.

And guys like— they started to anticipate— a lot of these big shots at at the top, that word was eventually going to get out. And they're terrified that the whole profession, you know, it's going to look like a joke, like again what happened with homosexuality in the '70s. So let's get out in front of it and start to talk about it. So they started to talk about it a little bit more. Insel started to talk about this chemical imbalance theory wasn't true, and you heard all that a little bit more.

And then in 2022, a critically thinking psychiatrist, dissident psychiatrist named Joanna Moncrieff at UK, she does this paper, what we call a meta-analysis, which, you know, you know what that is. But for folks in your audience, it just means she does an analysis of all the studies she could find out there trying to relate serotonin levels to depression. So it's a review, basically an analysis of all the studies that are out there, and it's definitive. There's— she writes this, you know, there's no relationship at all between serotonin levels and depression. And for the political cultural reasons, which we could get into, which I've sort of already alluding to, finally the mainstream Mainstream media picks it up and it hits all over the headlines and it gets put on mainstream media all over the place.

And then what does psychiatry do? This is the interesting thing for me. What did they do? They don't deny it. What they say is, we always knew this.

And why is everybody making a big deal about Joanna Moncrieff? And what, you know, this is no big deal. And, and they go on to say— and then they go on to attack her. There was an article in the Rolling Stone where they attack her. They don't call her a Scientologists, but some for no reason, for they just making— make sure they include Scientology in this article, that they shouldn't mention this stuff at all.

So they do this article to kind of hatch a job part, and then ultimately what happens is psychiatrists start to put out this idea that, yeah, well, these antidepressants, we know now they don't correct a chemical imbalance, but they still work great. So they change their whole theory as to why these things work, which we could get into. I mean, for me, it's these antidepressants don't work great, you know, when you really do real science on them. But that's what they switched to. So to kind of generally answer your question here about like what's the cycle of these, you know, false ideas, false theories, false drugs, that gives you a sense.

It starts out in the 1990s, they do research, and by 2022 they're finally owning up to it. It gets to the mainstream media. And now though, people who aren't paying attention, like you say, Maybe, I don't know, I haven't seen a poll recently, but I'm with you. I still think a significant number of the population and GPs, primary care doctors who are doing most of the prescribing, they probably still, a lot of them still believe it. So it takes a while and it's just like any propaganda.

People have heard it 1,000 times. Part of why it's kind of almost a little boring for me to talk about, but I still believe it's part of my duty to talk about it because I understand the way propaganda works. If people have heard it 1,000 times, 1,000 times, they have to hear it at least a couple hundred times to question us. Because I know one of the funny things for me is I was telling friends about this falsity, lack of science between the scientific imbalance theory 20 years ago. And when it finally hit the mainstream media, they were saying to me, Bruce, did you know that chemical imbalance theory is not true?

I told you this 20 years ago. And they— but they had heard it thousands of times from all these other places so that they kind of vaguely remembered I was a critic of this, but they didn't remember all the specific I told them. So it's just, you know, any good propagandist from Goebbels onward, you know, knows that if you just drum this stuff out there— and, you know, the scientist Carl Sagan, who I quote in the book, he talks about people get attached to the bamboozle. That's his phrase. They get attached to their bamboozle.

And if you've heard things over and over again, you believe them. It's a hard thing to say, like, oh, you know, I was bamboozled. You know, this, this thing's not true. And so it takes a while for that. But unfortunately for me, psychiatry is already working on— get ready with the next mumbo-jumbo biochemical bullshit theory.

And that's what they're just doing. They're finally owning up to this because they're creating another one to throw out there. I mean, in that— in his 2022 book, he's talking about electrical circuitry difficulties. That's the new thing. And that's why we need more electroshock, I guess.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:52 --> 00:59:34)
So when you— this is a, like, a huge question, but like, so if it's not chemical and balance. What is it? What is mental illness fundamentally? You talked at the beginning of the conversation about, you know, it's sociological, it's political, it's, yeah, maybe it's biological, it's, yeah, maybe a little genetic, but it's interpersonal as well. Like, how do you, if you encounter someone who's mentally ill, if they're going through psychosis, if they're experiencing a mood disorder, schizophrenia, like, how do you conceptualize what they're going through? You wouldn't say that they have a deficiency in serotonin. You would say what?

Bruce Levine (00:59:34 --> 01:03:30)
Okay. Was that really a helpful term to explain these things? Now, in modern society, if you're not using that term, you're minimizing— you're minimizing the seriousness of people people's problems, which is not logical at all. There's a lot of things out in life that are illnesses, like common colds, that aren't a big deal. And there are a lot of things out like that are major problems that are not illnesses.

Okay, so I think that's a first thing. The second thing is a good idea to do is to start talking about these symptoms, whatever they are— suicidal thoughts, all of these things— instead of talking about them as symptoms, talking about them as reactions. And so I think once you start moving in the ballpark of like really understanding what a human being is, which I know this It sounds radical to say, but a lot of psychiatrists, they don't understand what a human being is. They don't really understand that human beings have all kinds of reactions that are very human, but that are not— they're not diseases, they're not illnesses. And so you have— hopefully most of your audience could say, you know, there's a lot of kids out there who aren't scared of getting an F and they're bored in school, and so they're not paying attention.

You know, is that a disease or is that like a reaction of a kid who's bored, who's not terrified of getting in trouble? With authority, a certain kind of personality, maybe a more anti-authoritarian personality? Or is it really a symptom of, you know, or all of these things are just reactions? And then if you understand, like, you start thinking about reactions, you start thinking about, like, why is that person reacting this way and that person doesn't react that way? You start understanding people have different dispositions, personalities, and that's part of it.

And then you start looking at what are they reacting reacting to? Are they reacting to things that are going on in their family? Are they reacting to things that are going on in their general culture, their general society? So you start to look at this whole idea of like why people are doing things that are maybe destructive or not adjusting to their society. You start looking at them in a very different way and you start thinking like, well, some of these things that being labeled as mental illness, disease, whatever, there's nothing mentally ill at all about them.

Like for example, folks who were once labeled homosexual, who's just a volume and variation, or kids who are arguing with adults who don't know what the hell they're talking about. This is nothing wrong with it. But then there are other things, like, for example, somebody hearing voices or somebody wanting to kill themselves. What's behind who they are and what are they reacting to? So you're looking at things in a very different lens, in a very different paradigm than this idea of the way these psychiatrists, these MDs are trained to look at people as individualistic defective.

You know, they're trained to sort of see these troubling symptoms. This is what they're— they go through these, I got troubling symptoms here. They're, they're, they're, you know, they're not sleeping, they're sleeping too much, they have no energy, they have all of these symptoms, and, and they view that as this individual defect. Okay, biochemical genetic defect. Oh, you hear them all the time.

They'll say stuff like, maybe, you know, the more liberal progressive ones will say, well, the genetics are the fuel and the environment is the trigger. That's the best that they could come up with. Stuff like that. But, but ultimately they're viewing it no different than the cancer. I mean, you could say the same thing about cancer, you know, it's like, so that's the way they're viewing these things as biochemical genetic defects.

And then what do we do to fix this? But they're not doing things like saying like, okay, somebody's acting in a way that's a little scary. Like, how do we create a safe enough situation here where they could feel understood and we could kind of work together here to kind of like help them navigate their life? That's not what they're doing a lot, mostly, certainly not psychiatry. And, you know, maybe Some other mental health professionals are doing that, but not the majority nowadays.

Dustin Grinnell (01:03:30 --> 01:05:09)
Yeah, I remember I used to work for Brigham and Women's Hospital in the kind of communications department. And I remember talking with a doctor once, and she used the phrase, not what's wrong with you, but what happened to you. It's just a different way of looking at thinking about their illness in the context of their life and circumstances. But also what you were saying, it reminded me of the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, where you have a character, Jack Nicholson, who is a, I guess, a sane man who is really just a troublemaker, and he's trying to like skirt punishment, skirt going to jail or something. So he kind of gets himself into a psychiatric ward, and that ward is run by an authoritarian leader, Nurse Ratched, and she drives him crazy.

With some of her rigidness. And she obviously just demands obedience. And there's one scene where he just asks her if they can turn the music down because he's trying to play cards with his friends, basically. And she just won't listen. She doesn't hear him.

And he feels invalidated because she just kind of responds by saying, you know, these are the rules. They're just the rules. That's the way they are. You know, there's other people who have bad hearing, and, you know, the music needs to be this loud, and it just, it just makes him crazy. It makes him very angry.

Bruce Levine (01:05:09 --> 01:07:38)
And I think they didn't like my feelings because they hate their own feelings. I thought like, wow, let me think about that one for a while. And it was— and it was, I think, one of the things that it's difficult for me to do is to get people to wrap their hands around something as large as the idea that not not only is this profession deeply problematic, but that a lot of the mainstream, again, to say it the third time here, not the dissonant critical thinkers in it, but the mainstream of these folks of this profession just do not know what a human being is. I mean, that's a hard thing for people. What are you telling me that, Bruce?

Well, most of our establishment politicians really couldn't care at all about who the hell you are. They just want to get elected. So there's a lot of things like that in life that are just horrifying things about what authorities really are all about. But, you know, that's the reality. And, you know, that's part of like, I think, why something told me to stay in this training program.

I mean, many times I wanted to just leave the entire profession because it was like I was not getting much out of it and it was enraging. And then it got scarier and scarier as more people were getting pathologized in drugs. But part of like what I I got out of it was just this deeper sense of like, not only— I know a lot of patients feel this stuff, but even if you're, if you're hanging out with these people, there's something missing. There's something where they're like kind of disconnecting from like— and, and either they're, they're lying about it, they feel it and they're not putting it out there because they feel like it's unprofessional, you know, or they really have severed themselves from that feeling you get when somebody's trying to coerce you to be something that you're not. That feeling they have They've really done a good job.

Dustin Grinnell (01:07:38 --> 01:08:15)
I was wondering if you could imagine for a moment where your views on psychiatry, your views about the human condition, mental illness and the analysis you put forward in your book. Imagine that reforms were made, you know, you had a magic wand and all of a sudden we started looking at people as human beings and putting their troubles in the context of their life. What does that world look like for you? How do we view sick versus healthy in that world where all of your, the reforms you would've you would like to see happen actually happen?

Bruce Levine (01:08:15 --> 01:10:08)
And I should tell folks that in the, you know, again, in the 1960s, '70s, it was, you know, it wasn't that radical. There were some prominent thinkers that were talking about just how problematic this kind of belief, this worship of unlimited economic growth and industrialization, this worship of technology, you know, this idea, you know, like of not paying attention to this crazy increasing institutionalization of every part of our society, from schools to healthcare, where people were losing autonomy, they were losing community. So all of these things, there were a lot of prominent thinkers. I'll just rattle off a few guys like Mumford, people like E.F. Schumacher, people like Ivan Ilyich. And I'm going through this list.

I have to add Wendell Berry. I'll tell you, I have to add Wendell Berry to this list, the champion of the small farmers and critic of agribusiness. I have to add him because every time I go through this list, I've recently recently forgotten to mention his name. And there's, there's this New Hampshire farmer who gets really upset with me, you know, for not mentioning Wendell Berry. So maybe we'll throw him a commercial in here too.

This is, this is the, you know, Winnipesaukee Woods Farm commercial. I'm from New Hampshire, from the north, northern New Hampshire, so I've been to Winnipesaukee many times. Yeah, so you know, Winnipesaukee Woods— I'll tell you what, he's an honorable guy. If he gets any extra business from this commercial, he'll he'll send you some garlic and he'll send you some of his salsa sauce that he makes or whatever. I know he'll do that.

Dustin Grinnell (01:10:08 --> 01:10:11)
You got a commercial on your show.

Dustin Grinnell (01:10:11 --> 01:10:12)
I'll excerpt this portion.

Bruce Levine (01:10:12 --> 01:13:52)
Yeah, we've got air conditioning and we've got a lot of these great consumer products that have made our life more comfortable, but at what price we pay? Okay, so people were really focusing in on that heavily. And then when you understand that, you realize that there's a lot of incredibly unhappy people who have a lot of material stuff and a lot of comfort in our society. And if you just got rid of psychiatry, so if you just got rid of that spoke in the wheel, it would be real hard to replace it with something real healthy. So I know this is kind of dark when I'm what I'm saying here.

But this is part of why, in general, a lot of people— you fantasize when you're young, we just need a revolution and everything's going to be greater. But what a lot of— when you looked at some history and you understand that after the French Revolution you had Robespierre, after the Russian Revolution ended up having Stalin, you know, that if you just had a revolution, if you were able to abolish psychiatry, what would replace it that would fit in, that would do what it's doing, which was to give people— dogma, this idea of individual defect. Also, the place that psychiatry is, it's this force, like kind of an extralegal police force that could pull people off the streets who are behaving in ways that people didn't like so much. And who would replace that? You know?

And so the idea— it's not— I guess it's one of the real important points for me is the idea that psychiatry is just one problematic thing, that if we just replaced it with something more humanistic, you know, we could do And I think, again, people were doing this a lot more that you have to take a look at our school systems. You'd have to take a look at our whole general healthcare, that all of these folks work together in a deeply problematic way. So you've got increasingly anti-educational school systems, for example, places where kids are going and we have statistics, empirical evidence. The more they go to school, the less they care about reading. There's all kinds of research that I quoted in my last article.

People want to go to my website, all these things I'm talking about. I'll share that with you, by the way. They don't have to buy the book. They go to my website, go to these articles. I have hyperlinks to all of these, all of the references for these things.

And so we have basically schools a place where it's not really an educational place for most people. I mean, you've got your teachers out there, your rebel teachers who are really acting like teachers, but it's not the institution itself is problematic. So that works together with psychiatry. So kids are, a lot of kids are not doing well in school and it's like, okay, let's pathologize them and let's put them drugs. And so, you see, so a lot of these systems out there are kind of deeply problematic.

And you don't even have to get into capitalism, although that's part of the thing. If you've elevated your society to care more about money and capital and consumerism than you care about people's humanity and their true diversity, real diversity— I mean, people care about some kinds of diversity today, but they're not caring about personality diversity. They're just not caring about that today. And so all of these things need to change. And I know that feels like overwhelming and hopeless for some people.

And all I could tell people is it is kind of overwhelming. But what I'll tell you, there's a lot of folks out there. You may not know anybody who will be talking a lot this way. You may be thinking this and you say you have no friends or anybody else you could talk to like this, but there are people out there. I find them all the time.

Dustin Grinnell (01:13:52 --> 01:14:19)
We've been talking a lot about mental illness, psychiatric diseases. Um, how do you conceptualize wellness? Like, what to you is, um, serious mental wellness? What factors come to mind? You talked in your book about, like, getting in touch with your aliveness. I know that interesting. Um, developing healthy relationships, finding someone who believes in you. When you see someone mentally well, what are you seeing in, in your mind?

Bruce Levine (01:14:19 --> 01:16:07)
I don't care how happy or well I am. People have a right to do whatever they want. But when you were rattling off, I think for me, to feel energized, to feel vitalized, to feel curious, to be in relationships where people are caring and respecting what you're thinking about and you're caring and respecting what they're thinking about, all of those for me feel like the kinds of stuff that makes, let's just put it, makes life worth living. As opposed to all this crap you have to do in life, pay your their bills and all these other zillions of things that make life feel pretty miserable, worrying about money and all this other kind of stuff people have to worry about. So, there are things out there that what I try to put out there are things that make life worth living.

So, you were talking way back, we were talking about the whole idea of free thinking. For certain personality types, that's part of what makes life worth living, okay? The joy, the actual joy of letting their mind go and be curious about certain kinds of things and to interact with other curious people. Out there. That is one of the things that makes life worth living, but not for everybody.

Dustin Grinnell (01:16:07 --> 01:16:41)
What you were saying made me think of, um, sort of a dark thought, but it's, um, I heard once that suicide notes, generally what is said in them is usually a feeling of like uselessness or worthlessness. So it seems to be like a theme in people who are experiencing suicidality. What is the role of just being useful in society? We were talking about despair a lot these days, especially in working-class men and middle-aged men. And what, in terms of like mental well-being, what's the role of feeling worth something and feeling useful in your society?

Bruce Levine (01:16:41 --> 01:18:46)
Well, we'll give that Winnipesaukee Woods guy another commercial for his Wendell Berry, for him and Wendell Berry, is that he wrote, you know, a book, What Are People For? And it was a collection of essays. And part of it is like, you know, like understanding that he understood that part what's happening. He really cared about the loss of family farmers and traditional culture and all that. And he realized that people were more and more— yeah, they were getting more consumer items in their life.

They were making their life easier, but they were losing throughout society that sense of feeling useful, which a lot of traditional cultures, people had that feeling much more. Okay. And so that is usually what you hit on is one of the huge big components of, again, example for me of what makes life worth living is you feel useful to yourself, to other people, to your community, to whatever. I mean, even to your cat. There's one story of one dissident, critically thinking psychiatrist who tells a story where he was at the point where he was going to thinking about killing himself.

And he had a cat and he thought to himself, oh my God, if I kill myself, who's going to feed my cat? Cattle die. And then he realized he was useful, right, for that cat to live. And that stopped him. In this, he gives us— it's somewhere, you're gonna hear the story.

But, but he, he, you know, he's, you know, so, so this idea of being useful is a huge component. And, and so yeah, again, a real therapist, a real therapist who's trying to help people who are depressed, who are suicidal, they're thinking about that, that one of the problematic things that happen to depressed people is they get so overwhelmed by the by their pain. And shrinks can make this worse. Not just your drug-pushing shrinks, but even some lousy psychotherapy gets people more, more self-absorbed, and they're not thinking about other people, and they're not thinking about how they can be useful, which is a great antidote to being depressed. So part of a real therapist is like, you know, caring about that, is recognizing like, well, how could— what could I do here to energize these folks to do some things that might be useful for other people?

Dustin Grinnell (01:18:46 --> 01:19:51)
Because that's that actually help their depression? Yeah, so much is, um, relatively basic. Not easy, but basic, you know. Make friends, uh, get a hobby, you know, do pottery if you want, get a pet, you know, check in with your family, uh, work a job that makes you feel like you're exercising some of your natural talents, you know. But when we're disconnected, those things can feel hard.

What you were saying made me think of the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger, and he talked about how the interaction between civilized society and the Native Americans, and there was this really interesting phenomenon that there were a not-so-insignificant amount of people who come from the cities that moved in with Native Americans. They assimilated with Native American tribes because they found something about the traditional culture appealing, the connection and community that they had. But there was not one instance of the reverse happening. No Native Americans went into the cities. Wow, that's fascinating to me.

Bruce Levine (01:19:51 --> 01:21:27)
Something's going on there, right? Right. I mean, there's arrogance among illegitimate authorities all the time that they know what they're talking about when they don't. But there's an arrogance that happens in cultures and societies, people who have no sense of history. You know, that's why, you know, in addition to caring about psychology and philosophy and politics, I think it's important to have some basic sense of history, to know that at any given time in history, a culture, society is just unbelievably arrogant about their idea about what I call consensus reality, what is reality.

And so you see that from this idea that it was reality that white people are superior to Black people, that European culture is superior to Native Americans. These were consensus realities of an arrogant society that created enormous damage, untold amount of horrors and harm. And, and that's generally the thing, again, for a real free thinker. They're, they're thinking about this on a micro level, on a macro level, that all of these things that people are attached to, that they're attached to— they think about, what am I attached to? And they question that, they challenge that, because it may not be true.

Your own personal ideas about yourself may not exactly be true. Your own, certainly your society. So, you know, that's hard for a lot of people to do, I understand. And it's fun for some people and it's scary for other people. But I think you got to have some people in the society who are doing that, who aren't getting thrown in jail, who aren't getting locked up in mental hospitals, or you're going to have a pretty crappy society, which is where we're heading, where we're already at.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:27 --> 01:21:45)
So we have been talking about your 2002 book, A Profession Without Reason. Also, Resisting Illegitimate Authority is a great book that I recommend for people. Before we end, where can people go to find out more of your work, websites, and anything else you want to say as we end, please do.

Bruce Levine (01:21:45 --> 01:22:42)
And people can go there and whether they want to go get them or at Amazon or wherever, at my publisher's AK Press, who's an anarchist collective, bunch of good guys over there at AK Press. They published Resisting Illegitimate Authority in 2018. They asked me to do that book. And then this recent book, A Profession Without Reason, is a 2022 book. And so there's a lot of stuff there.

I know some of you people in your audience, they don't have much money and they just want to get information. There's a lot of stuff on that website, just articles they could read for free and videos they could watch for free or podcasts. I'll try to get this one on there when you get it out there. And so that's what I'm doing mostly these days. I still keep the clinical practice, but I do a lot of writing and doing this kind of stuff, talking to folks like yourself.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:42 --> 01:23:04)
Yeah, and I'm reading everything you put out, and I thank you for it. You know, thanks for making this time. And, um, I'm someone who finds the exercise of exploring ideas exhilarating, and, uh, I'm going to be thinking about this conversation for a while, so I just want to thank you again, and I really appreciate your thoughts and your time.

Bruce Levine (01:23:04 --> 01:23:04)
Thank you, Dustin.

Dustin Grinnell (01:23:06 --> 01:23:28)
Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Bruce Levine. If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review. They encourage people to listen and help attract great guests. If you like what you've been hearing and would like to sponsor the podcast, please consider supporting me on my Patreon account.

Thanks again for listening. Stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.