When politics is constructed for the public as a psychiatric spectacle.
Category Archives: Psychiatrization
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.
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”.
Charles Reade, the Medico-Psychological Association, and “conspiracy theory” (2021)
“The theory of Dr. Sankey – the President concluded – as to the manner in which these injuries to the chest occurred in asylums deserved our careful attention. It was at least more plausible that the conspiracy theory of Mr. Charles Reade, and the precautionary measure suggested by Dr. Sankey of using a padded waistcoat in recent cases of mania with general paralysis – in which mental condition nearly all these cases under discussion were – seemed to him of practical value.”
“The only wonder is that in public asylums – Dr. Tuke added – considering the savage nature of some of the half-educated victims of mental disease, and the liberty which the non-restraint system allows them, accidents do not more frequently happen; that within the last few years several superintendents, and many attendants, have been seriously hurt, would show there are two sides to this question. The fact is that in the refractory wards of our public asylums the attendants, too few in number, carry their lives in their hands. The remedy is to increase their number, and add to the surveillance over them.”
The “prodigious transfer.” From outside to inside, anti-politics (2020)
Psychiatrization of politics and Globalist Revolution