Since the end of the second World War, mental health and mental illness in the United States have become progressively politicized. As a result, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party nor any president could oppose the struggle against mental illness, for fear of appearing to oppose mental health itself. In the past 30 years, increased […]

In 1979 when Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency, he did so as a Conservative, with a capital C. The liberals were hippies who smoked marijuana, got abortions for their girlfriends, and neglected their children. Such, at least, was the image into which conservative Republicans cast liberal Democrats. In contrast, Conservatives—exemplified by Ronald […]

Hitler recognized that the direct takeover of private property provokes powerful emotional and political resistance. One of the secrets of his rise to power was that he managed to portray the National Socialist movement as opposed to such a measure, indeed to Communism itself. As Robert Proctor notes, Hitler understood that there was no need […]

“I kept my promise”. —Michael Schiavo, June 2005 “Terri didn’t die an awful death. I laid a red rose in her hand and said goodbye”. —Michael Schiavo, September 2005 I TO which of his promises does Michael Schiavo refer in his inscription on his wife’s gravestone? In 1992, during a deposition in his […]

Let us regard the story of Adam and Eve not as literal history but as a poetic hint at the psycho-social transformation of man and human nature. What does it tell us? After indulging in his morally expensive meal, Adam was never the same again: Henceforth he knew right from wrong! In brief, his self developed […]

A recent murder case offers a striking example of the refusal, by legal and psychiatric authorities, to treat a person as a contracting individual; and of their attempt, instead, to treat him as an inferior, defective object, in need of repair—that is, as a psychiatric patient (Wiseman, 1961). In this case, the person refused to accept […]

AT THE BEGINNING of the seventeenth century, there were no mental hospitals, as we now know them. To be sure, there were a few facilities— such as Bethlehem Hospital, better known as Bedlam—in which a small number, usually less than a dozen, of pauper insane were confined. By the end of the century, however, there was […]