When politics is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle.
Category Archives: Medicalization
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”?
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.
Harvard 30th President’s psyspeak: “a well-laid trap”, “obsessive scrutiny,” and “projecting every anxiety” (2024)
Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me
– The New York Times, Jan 4th 2024
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.”
‘The Last King of America’ and proto-psychiatry (2022)
“Though the incapacity of the King had been discussed in Parliament […] the British Constitution (was) not merely shaken, it (was) dissolved, and the reign (was) given to every revolutionary projector, who may seek to raise himself hereafter upon the ruins of his country,” and the situation makes “the sovereign a slave of his servants.”
“The two accounts” – Jain and Sarin concluded – “preserved in the same set of documents by Arthur Cole, regarding events in Coorg in 1809 and London in 1810, highlight the tension between madness and a sense of political order. The account in the Madras Courier emphasizes that the paramount power of the Regent cannot, and should not, be restricted by any other process, parliamentary or medical, as it was absolute, even though the King was insane. The suggestion that there should be parliamentary oversight was tantamount to treason.”
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.”
If political psychology becomes epidemiology (2020)
As the great doctor Rudolf Virchow used to say “politics is medicine on a large scale”.
‘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.