When politics is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle.
Category Archives: Biopolitics
NYT: “all plans and policies in Washington”, “global events”, and Trump’s “psyche” (2026)
Although the New York Times presents itself as radically anti-Trump, its language and framing, when viewed from a psypolitical perspective, ultimately reflect the same anti-political, technocratic logic as the Trump administration.
The cyber-psychedelic transformation of capitalism and the economics of ego death [slides] (2026)
Originally presented at the Capitalism and Mental Health Workshop, Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, 15 January 2026
November 5th: Trump and hallucinogens (2024)
Many of the figures close to Trump as major supporters both politically and in the media have a singular characteristic in common: they are public supporters, if not declared users, of hallucinogens. Substances such as ketamine, peyote or mescaline, magic mushrooms or psilocybin, LSD and the like.
What explains this incredible concentration of people in favor of powerful drugs like hallucinogens – including candidates for the coming second Trump administration – around the 45th and now 47th President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump ?
To attain visions at will? Loeb, 1933: “When a being is in possession of them, he knows or thinks he knows the meaning of life” (2024)
Harold Loeb’s utopia as the source of “capitalist realism” and “acid communism”?
V.R. and the Tranquilizing Chair of Dr. Benjamin Rush (2019)
Are we moving from the Tranquilizing Chair to Virtual Reality?
The former involves sensory deprivation and coercion, while the latter represents non-coercive, sensory overstimulation.
This shift could be seen as more cooptative.
Putin vs. Biden, February 8th: spectacle and psyspeak (2024)
Putin’s “paranoia” and Biden’s “memory”. Two extracts from Putin’s interview and Biden’s press conference, both aired on the evening of February 8th 2024 on American media outlets.
“The Hallucinogens”, 1967 treatise by Hoffer and Osmond (2024)
“It seems appropriate to continue using the term hallucinogens for a variety of substances which can produce reactions which may be psychotomimetic, psychedelic, or delirient, depending upon many other factors”.
Hallucinogens “may produce marked changes in our society”.
Hallucinogens: antidepressants hype, cubed (2023)
Such hype involves substances furthermore that by their very nature cannot be blinded or masked in rigorous clinical studies – think of masking or blinding a study participant for an hallucinogen – and about which the political hype is very high instead. At the end of each study, participants should routinely be asked a simple question, or a variation of it – entirely free of additional costs or time for researchers – which is not asked in major studies including the first randomised clinical trial published recently on this topic in the most prominent medical journal in the world, the New England Journal of Medicine, April 2021:
“What drug do you think you were given, the actual hallucinogen or the sugar pill?” Such type of question might perhaps help sedating the hype a little.
Totalitarian “medicine”. George F. Will in the Washington Post, 1987 (2022)
“The Soviet regime applies ‘scientific socialism’, within which psychiatry has a special place.”
“Historian Paul Johnson notes that in 1919 the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced an anticommunist leader to treatment in a sanatorium.”
“Glasnost has not involved the release of any dissident from a psychiatric ‘hospital’.”
“Neal Ascherson, in the New York Review of Books, says German doctors were dazzled to discover that, under Hitler, medicine was ‘the central intellectual resource of the New Order’.”
“Since Freud postulated that the self is a fractious committee — the ego, id and libido — there has been ‘scientific’ doubt about the importance of reason in the individual’s life.”
“As Khrushchev said in Pravda in 1959 about people ‘who might start calling for opposition’ to communism: ‘Clearly the mental state of such people is not normal’.”
“Psychiatry, with its expanding arsenal of drugs, can be abused as a brutal instrument of social control. And the official Soviet premise, that only the psychologically disabled could fail to love socialism, enlists psychiatry as a rationalization for the regime.”
‘Entheogens’ and ‘The Road to Eleusis’ (2022)
“When the recent surge of recreational use of so-called ‘hallucinogenic’ or ‘psychedelic’ drugs first came to popular attention in the early 1960’s, it was commonly viewed with suspicion and associated with the behavior of deviant or revolutionary groups.”
“Not only is ‘psychedelic’ an incorrect verbal formation, but it has become so invested with connotations of the pop-culture of the 1960’s that it is incongruous to speak of a shaman’s taking a ‘psychedelic’ drug.”
“We therefore, propose a new term that would be appropriate for describing states of shamanic and ecstatic possession induced by ingestion of mind-altering drugs.”
‘Hallucinogens, not psychedelics’. A letter to the Editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (2021)
“Narcotics that induce hallucinations are variously called hallucinogens (hallucination generators), psychotomimetics (psychosis mimickers), psychotaraxics (mind disturbers), and psychedelics (mind manifesters).
No one term fully satisfies scientists, but hallucinogens comes closest. Psychedelic is most widely used in the United States, but it combines two Greek roots incorrectly, is biologically unsound, and has acquired popular meanings beyond the drugs or their effects.”
Leading London psychiatric hospital starts a partnership with Nasdaq-listed hallucinogens company (2022)
“South London and Maudsley has announced a new partnership to launch The Centre for Mental Health Research and Innovation to accelerate psychedelic research and develop new models of care for mental health in the UK.
Working together with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, and COMPASS Pathways, a mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health, this pioneering collaboration will provide patient access to cutting edge research studies in multiple areas of high unmet need in mental health.
The Centre will accelerate research of emerging psychedelic therapies, support therapist training and certification, evaluate real-world evidence, and prototype digital technologies to enable personalised, predictive and preventative care models.”
Fanon, Third World revolutionary and psychiatrist between Moscow and Washington, D.C. (2022)
“Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric career was crucial to his thinking as an anti-colonialist writer and activist. Much of his iconic work was shaped by his experiences working in hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia. [His psychiatric writing] from 1951 to 1960 in tandem with his political work reveals much about how Fanon’s thought developed, showing that, for him, psychiatry was part of a much wider socio-political struggle. His political, revolutionary and literary lives should not then be separated from the psychiatric practice and writings that shaped his thinking about oppression, alienation and the search for freedom.”
“It was out of desperation and his lack of success with Soviet doctors, Fanon’s biographer David Macey reports, that Fanon had agreed to American offers to fly him to the United States.”
Biden: “A phenomenal negative psychological impact that CoViD has had on the public psyche” (2022)
“As Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, points out, I think one of the significant things we are going to find ten years from now is a phenomenal negative psychological impact that CoViD has had on the public psyche.
And so you have an awful lot of people who are, notwithstanding the fact that things have gotten so much better for them economically, that they are thinking, but how do you get up in the morning feeling happy – happy that everything is alright?
Even though your job is better, even though you have more income.”