Category Archives: From Citizens to Patients

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.

Trump: “a President should take a cognitive test”, “they say it’s unconstitutional” (2024)

Trump on Biden: “We have this man negotiating nuclear weapons with Putin and with President Xi and he has no idea what’s going on”.

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.

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.”

‘World Revolutionary Elites’, MIT 1965 – book covers (2021)

Contents of such volume and the two book covers of the hardback 1965 and paperback 1966 editions are presented. The importance and “rediscovery” of such book in PsyPolitics is motivated by the extraordinary concordance with some of the themes present in today’s transforming global politics, currently in mass and digital media, as well as in formulations independently developed over the past three years.

The “prodigious transfer.” From outside to inside, anti-politics (2020)

Psychiatrization of politics and Globalist Revolution 

A new global psychiatric power? ‘CNN Talk Show’ – 1/13 (2021)

For Dr. Frances, who was claiming that we should discuss politics instead of psychiatry, language was moving from political to psychological metaphorical, while for Dr. Lee language was moving directly from political to literal technical psychological language and concepts, used to discuss a political theme. Both psychiatrists were moving, despite specific content discussed, language to the psychological sphere, metaphorically for Dr. Frances, literally for Dr. Lee.

While opposing each other on a political theme, the net movement of the two debating psychiatrists is from political to psychological language.

‘World Revolutionary Elites’, MIT 1965 (2021)

“Parallel with these events is the perfecting of conditioning procedures, with or without the aid of drugs and hypnosis. The abolition of privacy – already well along in our day – is placing potent instruments of control in the hands of elites who may see an opportunity to consolidate their position by policing the population medically” – Harold Lasswell

The Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief: “We will be transformed into biopolitical citizens” (2021)

Horton, while clearly and unmistakably espousing a globalist and technocratic view, at the same time introduces themes from an author such as Foucault – who worked largely on topics related to psychology and psychiatry – and even appears to criticize the dangers of technocracy at the end of his book. The risk of recuperation – of Foucauldian themes and tools radically challenging the rising ‘biomedical’ as well as ‘psy’ global power – into mainstream globalist and technocratic discourse is definitely present, in my view, in Horton’s latest book.

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /13 (2021)

“There is no a priori reason why a sustained, even intelligent, study of the phenomena which induce these visions cannot eventually permit us to attain them at will.” “And when a being is in possession of them, he knows or thinks he knows the meaning of life and thus, as a secondary benefit, reduces, by the aid of memory, to their proper unimportance, the sorrow, the tragedy, even the ostensible evil which is woven of necessity into the texture of our temporal days.”

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /12 (2021)

“Society since the beginning has discouraged by means of church, school, and statutory restrictions all experimentation in the domain of spiritual living. The consequence has been a stultification of the intellect, a frustration of the emotions, and a damming up of nervous energy which is bringing many people to the verge of a nervous breakdown. A technocracy would attempt to set free that great surplus of vital energy now burning itself out, uselessly, in the business game, and redirect it into unexplored channels.”

“Research work, directed toward discovering the causes of psychic maladjustments, may prove more difficult than devising a machine to pick cotton; and successful achievement in this field will surely be harder to measure.”

‘Psyspeak’ on PsyPolitics and ‘therapy-speak’ on The New Yorker (2021)

In the summer of 2019, I proposed the use of the terms “psyspeak” or “ideopathological lexicon” to mean psychologized as well as medicalized lexicon used outside of the clinical context especially when applied to the wider societal and political world, during a talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London.

On the 26th of March this year, just a few days ago, The New Yorker online published the following article, under Cultural Comment: “The rise of therapy-speak. How a language got off the couch and into the world” by Katy Waldman, a magazine staff writer.