When Did Thinking for Yourself Become a Mental Illness?

When I was a kid, I questioned rules that didn’t make sense. I resisted illegitimate authority. I could be difficult, inquisitive, sometimes arrogant. My dad used to joke that I had oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD, a behavioral diagnosis for kids who are uncooperative and defiant toward authority. But I never saw that part of myself as disordered. I saw someone concerned about the world, unwilling to bow to coercion or incompetent control.

Dr. Bruce Levine, my guest today, might’ve had a similar experience. He’s a practicing clinical psychologist, a freethinker, and an outspoken critic of his own profession. In his latest book, A Profession Without Reason, he examines how modern psychiatry has lost its way—medicalizing natural human traits like curiosity, defiance, and rebellion, often treating them with medication rather than understanding them as rational responses to an irrational world.

Even the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health admitted: “Whatever we’ve been doing for the past five decades, it ain’t working.” So what went wrong? How did psychiatry, which began with noble intentions to heal and support, become a profession that sometimes pathologizes the very qualities we need most: critical thinking, resistance to illegitimate authority, and the courage to point out uncomfortable truths?

In this episode, we discuss:

• How modern psychiatry medicalizes natural traits like curiosity, defiance, and rebellion

• Why oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) pathologizes resistance to illegitimate authority

• The history of psychiatry’s missteps and how the field lost its way

• What the former NIMH director meant when he said psychiatry “ain’t working”

• Why freethinking is often treated as a disorder rather than a virtue

• The dangers of labeling questioners and dissenters as mentally ill

• How philosopher Baruch Spinoza would view modern psychiatric diagnosis

• Dr. Levine’s critique of his own profession and his call for reason over medicalization

This is a conversation about the cost of questioning, the medicalization of dissent, and whether psychiatry has become a tool for conformity rather than healing.

💡 Learn more about Dr. Bruce Levine’s work: www.brucelevine.net

💡 Read Dr. Levine’s books: https://brucelevine.net/

💡 About Curiously: https://www.podpage.com/curiously/about/