Radically Genuine Podcast with Dr. Roger McFillin

Sean (00:01.537)
Welcome to the radically genuine podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. Sean, it's been about two and a half years since I made a conscious decision to publicly speak out against the mental health industrial complex. Although, you know, I've been kind of rebelling in my own community, slowly building a practice that challenges mainstream practices that are harmful. I felt at that time I needed to responsibly speak out. Twitter was a great tool.

for me personally because I could just share my thoughts in real time. It was actually very cathartic. It was an outlet that allowed me to be radically honest and in turn begin to attract a following and allow us to start the Radically Genuine podcast. In retrospect, I never felt like I had a choice to do anything different and still continue to question why more aren't doing the same. To be honest, I'm not.

I was completely ignorant to others who have come before me. Other than a rudimentary knowledge of an anti-psychiatry movement most associated with Thomas Sass, the psychiatrist and reading books by the journalist Robert Whitaker, I had and continue to have a poor understanding of the history of dissenters in my field. The trailblazers, those who were brave enough to challenge the prevailing authorities in our field.

and place themselves on the firing line during times when it was very risky to do so. Those days are over for me. Although I'll continue to leverage social media and podcasting to help contribute to this movement, I believe in part I am a messenger. There are extraordinary men and women who have dedicated their careers to this movement and articulate an understanding and the consequences of a pathologizing, coercive, controlling, and abusive mental health system.

that has far-reaching implications on our society. Today's guest is one of those trailblazers. In fact, I've yet to find anyone who has been able to articulate what I have actually thought and felt for decades better than him. Actually, I'm quite embarrassed that I had not read his work earlier and was not aware of his career. If I had...

Sean (02:21.837)
I would be more advanced in my knowledge and have done a better job of spreading the message because I've been provided opportunities to do so. Although my obsessions into the dangers of commonly prescribed psychiatric drugs, the use of psychiatric diagnosis, and how fraud and corruption has allowed the industry to flourish was absolutely necessary for me, I have yet been able to coherently articulate how society, culture, politics, and the mental health industry intersect.

Our guest today has been doing this for decades, and recently I have been obsessed with his writings, have ordered all his books. He is quoted as saying, my life work has been de-pathologizing noncompliance and rebellion against illegitimate authoritarians.

I want to welcome to the podcast Dr. Bruce Levine. He's a practicing clinical psychologist who writes and speaks widely on how society, culture, politics, philosophy, and psychology intersect. His most recent book is A Profession Without Reason, The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry, untangled and solved by Spinoza, free thinking, and radical enlightenment. His previous book was Resisting Illegitimate Authority.

A thinking person's guide to being an anti-authoritarian. Strategies, tools, and models. Earlier books include Surviving America's Depression Epidemic, How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy, and Common Sense Rebellion, Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations in a World Gone Crazy.

He's also contributed chapters to several other books. He's a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Mad in America, Truth Out, Salon, and Alternet. And his articles and interviews have been published in the New York Times, Skeptics, Adbusters, The Ecologist, and High Times. Dr. Levine is on the editorial advisory board of the journal for ethical human psychology and psychiatry, and he's on the medical and scientific advisory board of the National Center for...

Sean (04:42.441)
youth law. A longtime activist in the mental health treatment reform movement, he is a member of the international society for ethical psychology and psychiatry. I am in awe of his career. It is an honor for him to be on this podcast and I'm really looking forward to kind of deep dive into some questions that I still have and I know our listeners will. Dr. Bruce Levine, welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast.

bruce levine (05:12.484)
Great to be here, Roger and Sean. Great to be here.

Sean (05:16.421)
So our audience is probably well aware of a lot of the subjects that you have spoken out against. I think when it comes to psychiatric diagnoses and drugs, they're well educated. But there's a lot of areas I think that people are just kind of afraid to go down to in our own thinking. Before we do any of that, beyond what my initial kind of review of your background is, I'm more interested in the man.

You know, how do you get to this point to be a dissenter in your own field, to just kind of step out what is taught to us and conditioned by the culture in which we live in our education system. If you can tell us a little bit about just who you are and your background and brought you down this path.

bruce levine (06:02.988)
Well, you know, as listening to you and I, my guess is you guys are in your mid 40s or something like that. And so I had a little bit of an edge over you. So don't feel bad that I was a kid in the late 60s and the 70s, which was a much more anti authoritarian era. And by that, I mean just I should define terms. It's just people who are anti-authoritarians, they don't reject all authority. They just question the legitimacy of an authority, whether they're legitimate or not, whether they know what they're talking about, whether they're honest.

whether or not they're corrupt, all those kinds of things. And if they are illegitimate, they resist, they challenge that authority. And that was much more common in the 60s and 70s. And so, in that era, there was a lot of, and part of like, as you guys mentioned, as you mentioned, Roger, in my intro, that I'm interested in not just psychology, I've always been interested in politics and history and philosophy, and they all connect up. And so probably...

you know, in my, when I was a real young kid, there was the Vietnam War going on, and we had these illegitimate authorities like Kissinger, Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, who were liars, who were bullshit artists. And from a very early age, you know, I learned the tragedy, what could happen when illegitimate authorities are in control. And, you know, by the late 60s, early 70s, if you look at polls, the majority of Americans,

thought this war was a mistake. Some of them thought it was a mistake for moral reasons. Some of them thought it was a mistake because they couldn't win it. But we knew, and history has shown us, that you had leaders who knew that this war was unwinnable and they kept on fighting for their own selfish political reasons. And so that was one of my earliest contacts with these folks. And as I've gone through life, I think what happens, and I think you guys are probably, you're developing, the more you're on the planet, you get a better sense.

of just hearing the tone of these bullshit artists and liars, of which there are many in psychiatry. And even before they get to their actual content of their lives and bullshit, you can kind of smell them and you can feel them. This is what happens. And so when you guys hear, you know, you have these guys Chaney and Rumsfeld lying about weapons of mass destruction and all that kind of stuff, it's the same old game. And I think one of the things that's sort of sad...

bruce levine (08:18.388)
is that even people who are highly schooled, highly educated, they want to fantasize that these same kind of characters, basically these politicians who were just about advancing themselves, who are good at nothing except sounding like they know what they're talking about and they're cutting edge and all that, and they advance to high levels, not just in US government and politics, but in psychiatry. And so one of the other edges, so to speak, I had over you guys is that in the 1970s,

because it was a much more anti-authoritarian era. Not that it was mainstream to be that way, but it wasn't, you weren't that marginalized in all walks of life, including even psychiatry. I think it sort of shocked some people when I talk about that there even were anti-authoritarian psychiatrists in the 1970s. One of the guys I used for an example, there is a guy I met later in life after psychiatry had tried to destroy his career, was a guy named Lauren Mosher. And Lauren Mosher,

was not just an anti-authoritarian psychiatrist, he was somebody who had a lot of power. He was actually director of the Center for Schizophrenic Studies in the National Institute of Mental Health. And it was clear to him through looking at the research, his own personal experience, that all of psychiatry's treatments for schizophrenia, so-called serious mental illness, so-called schizophrenia, all these things, they were doing more harm than good. And so he just

had the power, actually, to create something called the Soteria House, S-O-T-E-R-I-A. And what it was just basically a respite. None of this bullshit hospitalizations, none of the coercions, violence, forced drugging, all that, very minimal drug use. There was a little bit, but it was just housed by non-professionals who just hung out with folks. It turned out the results were much better there than there were in hospitalizations. So what happens to Laura Mosher?

is by the 1980s, by 1980s he's fired as director of the National Institute of Mental Health. They stopped funding for this. And this is the era that I'm going to graduate school in the late 70s and the 80s where I see this great change happening, that there's this anti-authoritarian era within psychiatry, within psychology that is now exiting. And you have to see, like, when you understand politics, you see, the whole

bruce levine (10:35.608)
American society in general was becoming more authoritarian in the 1980s, more corporate controlled. And so psychiatry, psychology, they always follow suit. They're in step. So again, going back to the 70s in psychology, it was easy to be a critic of the psychiatric industrial complex. I mean, you had these things like homosexuality being abolished as a mental illness. This was a big event, not just for gay activists. It was a huge victory for gay activists. But it's real important. I realize a...

when I'm talking to Zoomers and millennials, they're shocked that homosexuality was once a mental illness in psychiatry's diagnostic Bible, this DSM, up until 1973, and it was removed in the DSM-3, which came out in 1980, but they officially abolished it in 73. And it was a really huge thing for folks who were in undergraduates, like I was, and later on in graduate school when the DSM-3 came out, because it was so obvious that you cannot.

protest and get rid of cancer or diabetes and here these gay activists they were way ahead of psychiatry This and this is also another point psychiatry believed that they were offering an upgrade to homosexuality but homosexuals by calling the mentally ill rather than calling them sinners or Abominators or criminals, you know, and of course gay activists said that's no upgrade maybe in some ways it's worse in terms of a stigma and so they

didn't like being called mentally ill for their sexual preferences and they protested and they won. And so again, this was an obvious thing, not just for marginally critical thinkers could see like, well, wait a minute, maybe every of these psychiatric diagnoses are there for not for scientific reasons, but for political, cultural reasons. As I flush out a lot in my last book, it's there because they make a certain group of people authorities uptight. That's what all of those.

so-called mental illnesses from homosexuality. And I know nowadays a lot less folks are uptight around, a lot of more folks have gay friends, gay people have come out. And so it's a lot, but what has made people still uptight are like disruptive kids so we can get into it. So there was no upgrade. When I'm in graduate school, what happens is 1980, DSM-3 comes out and what do they do? They pathologize kids more and more. So that's when stuff like oppositional defiant disorder comes out.

bruce levine (13:00.252)
I go through this all the time with folks, you know, like often argues with adults, often refuses to comply with adults and lots of folks who are anti-authoritarian, they just start laughing because they say, that sounds like me and my friends. And so this was obvious to me in the 19, you know, that when I'm still in graduate school, like, holy cow, these people are getting worse. And so they're lying about the DSM. One of the big events that happened again when I'm in graduate school, they come out with DSM-3, which again, it's supposed to be non-psychodynamic.

It's all these checklists that are telling us how valid and reliable it is. And again, it's lies. You know, not only we can, you know, validity is a little more difficult issue to talk about why it's not valid, but reliability is easy. Reliability just means can the same person go to different clinicians and get the same diagnosis. And that's never happened with any DSM. Two, three, four, five, they're always the reliability is low. So these things, these DSMs, it was obvious to me as a graduate student. And by the way, it was obvious to most.

graduate students and even a lot of psychiatry residents in the late 70s early 80s that this stuff was Scientifically bullshit the DSM So there were a lot of other events happening in the 70s to kind of give folks in your audience a feel if they ever See one flew over the cuckoo's nest. This was one the Oscar best picture in the mid 1970s What was that movie about an authoritarian? Abusive psychiatry and a lot of these shrinks seem crazier than the patients who were there

And that was fairly mainstream to talk about that. So just to kind of give you a feel, so you guys don't feel so bad, Roger, about it, that you've come in late to the party, that it was easier for guys my age and Robin Whitaker's age and Lauren Mosher's age to be more part of a climate, a society that was challenging illegitimate authorities. And this has sort of dramatically changed over the last few decades, and we can get to why that's happened and other issues later, but that's sort of.

gives you a little bit of feel for what's happened to me from my earliest days of realizing that the hell that's created by illegitimate authorities and then going to graduate school and sort of seeing all these illegitimate authorities and psychology, psychiatry, and seeing how these people have gained in power and people are taking people seriously who they should not be taking seriously and what hell that's created. And that's a big part of my life and that's why the previous book, I decided all my stuff is written for...

bruce levine (15:20.56)
critically thinking anti-authoritarians, but that previous book, that Resisting Illegitimate Authority, was specifically for this population of anti-authoritarians who were getting crushed more and more by society. And I talk about famous anti-authoritarians, and I talk about a whole bunch of other things in there. But hopefully that'll give you a little feel of who I am.

Sean (15:40.649)
Yeah, that's great. Let me follow up on some of your points that you made. So I just recently wrote a Substack article, drmc and it's titled Benevolence Betrayed How Good People Cause Harm. And I reference sociopaths in society. And there's a, there's a great book called The Sociopath Next Door. I guess it's estimated around 4% of, of people meet that criteria for sociopaths. And

What is that defined by? I think it's kind of defined by like a lack of empathy for others and maybe even a desire to control them, even maybe some pleasure from harm. But there's a disconnect, right? There's a disconnect from each other. The connection that we have that I think that there is a real important biological aspect for it to be able to feel, have compassion and feel sympathy and care for other people. And it's what drives us to take care of each other. But there's always been a subset of society.

that doesn't necessarily experience those normal, full range of human emotions. And what that means is they might not also feel things like remorse or guilt, other things that are really important. Now, what you were talking about was kind of, it's the same playbook really for people who are in positions of power and how clearly they can lie and they can manipulate and control and they provoke fear. And I see that just trying to study history.

It doesn't matter where you go back into countries around totalitarianism, tyranny, fascism, the people are enslaved through fear and through division. My question is in a free society like the United States and in our greater system, it is the bystanders that kind of maintain it.

So I think we can all get into the mindset of somebody who is a sociopath, but what about the bystanders? Our colleagues, those who enter into the system are aware of the bullshit, have the questions, but then continue to practice, act upon, and even financially benefit from the same ideas that are harmful. What has happened to our culture? What goes on in our education system

Sean (18:02.229)
maintains oppressive symptoms systems like this.

bruce levine (18:06.72)
Well, that is usually a question that occupied me going through my graduate training. And we could talk about my guess of that. It didn't change much in yours, you know, 20 years later or whatever. But one of the things that really was clear to me, and this again, if you read some of the kind of critical thinkers about schooling in society, American society, is that a lot of what traditional schooling, conventional schooling, standard schooling, you know,

it teaches compliance, it teaches obedience. So yeah, all of us, I'm sure you, my, we've had some great teachers that we really learned a lot from, but to do really well in school, like you must've done well enough to get into a graduate program. Back in my day, you needed really high grades. So to get these high GPAs, you're eating a lot of shit. You're doing a lot of complying. You're doing a lot of obedience. Now I was aware of that and I kind of resented it, but one of the things that really...

to me when I was in my graduate training was that I had never been in such a population in my life that was so compliant, so obedient, and it made sense. Sort of the selection process and the socialization process for most people who are clinical psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, getting going to med school, is one of folks who've done a lot of stuff, done a lot of compliance. Now there are

Folks who do that, like yourself, like me, like some of my friends, who do it with some resentment, with some depression, some anger, and really like, when they get out, they're going to really not. But I think part of what I try to communicate to the general public is that you're dealing with a population overall that with rebellious exceptions, they're generally more compliant, more conformist, and they're more like politicians. They're more willing to go along, get along.

One of the stories I tell folks, it was sort of striking for me that back in my days in graduate school, just by challenging the silliness of the DSM or the IQ test, and for me that was one of the other things. It was like, wow, this IQ test seems to be measuring the kinds of intelligence that academics are good at, but not a lot of other things. So this is, even before emotional intelligence, people were thinking about it. So just any kind of critical thinking where you were challenging authorities.

bruce levine (20:23.62)
Back in my day, they used the phrase a lot. I heard it a bunch. It was like, you have issues with authority. You have authority issues. And I didn't know whether to laugh or whatever. I said, are you kidding? I mean, if you're calling a guy like me having issues with authority, who did all the things to get A's and did all the stuff you had to get ahead, what are you calling people who really challenge authority much more behaviorally? And so it became clear to me that this was a world of psychology. And that was probably the most useful thing. I mean, I've...

from a couple of renegade teachers and clinicians, I got some valuable clinical ideas, but mostly it was a waste of time and counterproductive. But what I did get was a real understanding sort of journalistically, anthropologically of this culture of psychology, psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers, and that they're much more sort of obedient and compliant. And so they have a kind of bizarre view of life. And for them, it's normal to do what you need to do to get ahead.

And I'm sure this happens to you, that they come over and a lot of them to this day, I mean, there's psychiatrists out there who just, you know, they hate my guts, but there's a lot of psychologists and I'm sure this happens with you, Roger, who like will say privately, I'm glad you're doing this stuff. You know, I agree with everything you're saying, but they're afraid to put their name out there. I was doing a podcast early this year, a great podcast with Molly Adler called Back From the Borderline, and she's not a professional.

Sean (21:47.525)
best.

bruce levine (21:49.028)
You guys know who Molly is. And she's like really helpful, sort of like peer to peer support. She's somebody who's psychiatrized and drugged and who's has a sort of triumphant journey. And we were talking in the interview and she said how all of these mental health professionals come to her and say, wow, you know, how horrible training and all these abuses, but they're under conditions of anonymity. And Molly was being non-judgmental about this. She was just reporting and I just had to say, that's pathetic.

Sean (21:50.756)
What?

bruce levine (22:15.82)
Why aren't they doing things like I'm doing and now I know that you're doing, Roger? It's like, it's really sad that even the ones who, you know, a lot of them are getting it, they're like overly afraid and terrified. And so maybe, you know, what we're doing, what a guy like you're doing, I was thought about this before I got on talking about you, maybe the most, one of the more valuable things we're doing besides imparting information is letting our fellow clinicians know they're not gonna shoot us, all right? We're surviving.

You guys are making a living, I made a living. Yeah, it's true that if you're more anti-authoritarian, especially for psychiatrists and psychologists and even journalists, that it's gonna cost you politically, it's gonna cost you financially, but mostly you're not gonna get shot. Mostly, you're still gonna be able to survive. And you get this thing called integrity, authenticity, you have more fun with your clients. Overall, it's a pretty good deal to be this way, okay? You don't have to be a martyr. But they're so overly terrified.

They're like, you know, just shocked that like you can do something like that. You can actually say what you're thinking and you're not going to get destroyed by the psychological boards or whatever the heck out there. So they are overly reactive to fear. And you're exactly right. That was in one of my last book, That a Professional Without Reason, I have a whole chapter on fear because it was taking a look at how Spinoza, the philosopher in the 17th century Dutch

bruce levine (23:41.36)
He really talked a lot about fear. And he really understood that even 350 years ago, this is the fuel that makes people irrational, it makes them violent, it makes them easily exploited by these authorities who can sound like what they know what they're talking about. I always tell folks, you know, most of these psychiatrists, especially these elitist institutions, they just learn how to sound like they know what they're talking about. They don't know anything, they don't really know anything, but they're very good at.

putting out that aura. You had a guy like that we could talk about later on your show that I happened to listen to. This Hiccup guy. We can talk about him. That guys are just really good at talking, you guys should laugh, good at talking about like cutting edge and I'm in the know and like oh yeah those anti-depressants shouldn't even be called anti-depressants. Oh yeah these, they cause all these sexual difficulties. Yeah, where was your whole profession over the last 20 years talking about? That guys like Whitaker and me and others have like fought like hell to get this out there. But now why are you doing that? You're pushing the next bullshit here.

like how like the wonders of ketamine here, this is what the whole history of psychiatry is, they will at a certain point be like these cutting edge into no guys insults like this too, who will admit crap outcomes, bullshit biochemical imbalance theory, crappy invalid DSM, they'll admit that, but why? They're admitting that only to move on to the next bullshit. And now the next bullshit is like not talking about the scientific and nowhere in your interview. When I went to the guy's website, did he go through the actual research

Ketamine, you know, and we can talk about that later, but I'm just for now making the point that it's like there There's just there's just this history of like a weird culture in Psychiatry psychology where these kind of people who can project this I'm gonna know I'm cutting edge They they can have a lot of power Why is that because a lot of the people who they're dealing with especially clientele are scared, you know They see their for example their kids acting in some bizarre crazy ways

And they're frightening. When you have a scared, frightened population, you know, they're not as good as intuiting that this person's full of shit, he's a bullshitter. And so a big part of like what you wanna do if you're a really good clinician, my gut is from just listening to you, this is what you're doing all the time, is trying to get people less scared. And the less scared that you can get them, the more they're in touch with their intuition, the more they could critically think, the more that everybody could solve their problems together. But...

bruce levine (26:04.036)
That's just, I'm going off on a couple of tangents here, but I think we share an equal contempt and disgust for a lot of what happens to the selection and professionalization and socialization process.

Sean (26:16.097)
Um, I want to comment on the bystanders because I'm going to put myself into that camp. I'm not a clinician, but, um, you know, I think I talked about in the last podcast we had with a Dr. Ben role about many people being aware of a lot of the harms that are happening in there. Uh, but they don't take action until either something's happening to them or they see something happening to a loved one and then they feel motivated to, and I kind of received something in response to my, my comment about that. Um,

About the sin of omission and dr. Levine I don't know if you're a religious man But it this it came to me like two times and i've never really thought about it before. It's uh, james chapter 4 verse 17 it's basically like if It's it's a sin For a person to not take action on something. They know they ought to do That it's with when within your power that you have knowledge and you know something's wrong and you don't speak out against it so

I've been trying to think about how Roger has been the type of person that he is in the last two and a half years and, and the career that you've chosen and the path you've taken. Do you believe it's like your ethical obligation to speak out against subjects like this? So people become more aware? Because some of the things you talk about are sometimes controversial because people are uncomfortable talking about it.

bruce levine (27:30.873)
What?

bruce levine (27:40.204)
Well, the earliest days when I started to talk about these things and, you know, I was somebody, again, when I just graduated, similar to you, Roger, what you were just laying out, I just got the heck away, went into private practice, did what I thought was really helpful to folks. And it was only because in the mid 1990s, that things just got ridiculously worse, like the DSM-4 was coming out. That's how old I am here. Okay. So DSM-4 is coming out and there's more of this past, you know, this

pathologizing and drugging of kids, which by the way, I think will go down in history. Right there with, you know, I mean, I don't wanna rank these things, but we've had some real horrible tragedies in American history from slavery, genocide of Native Americans, house on American activities. There's a long list of really horrible things that now we're embarrassed about. And I'm pretty sure that when we look back, I don't know whether it's gonna be 50 years or a hundred years, this massive.

drugging of kids is going to be right up there with like, what the hell were these people thinking? So I had that sense of history of what was going on. And so when I initially spoke out, it was really kind of selfish. It was like, I wanted to separate myself historically from this profession. I was getting to the point where I would be in social situations and somebody would ask me what I do. And I was embarrassed to say what I did.

Why? Because I figured like, well, if they had a brain in their head, they were going to go like, roll their eyes and I'd have to spend the rest of the night trying to explain that I don't buy into all of this bullshit. And so at some point, my biggest motivation early on in the mid 1990s for starting to speak out and it was a slow process. It was first, you know, articles and talks and then took a while to get a book out and all of that stuff. But it was just really to historically separate myself.

And if you have any kind of sense of history, you want to try to be on the right side of history. And it was obvious to me that the mainstream thrust of this profession, by the mid-1990s, are not only pathologizing stubborn kids and these noncompliant kids, they're drugging the crap out of them. And it was obvious to me as I go through that and resisting illegitimate authority, how many of these incredibly important famous activists, if they were alive in the last 10, 15 years?

bruce levine (29:55.464)
their whole life would have been derailed. They would have been drugged. There's so many smart kids, I talk about that, from Eugene Debs to Malcolm X to like a plenty, there's a whole George Carlin who just didn't like school. And they were able to somehow not get drugged, not get pathologized and move on to have a real okay life. But what was happening here, like that was almost becoming increasingly possibility. So,

When I took a look, and I should also remind folks, I don't know, back in the 1970s, it was still pretty widely known, the Milgram studies, okay? And I see Roger shaking his head, he knows what I'm talking about, but these were studies by Stanley Milgram, maybe I should just give a one minute summary of them for some of the folks in your audience, you don't know, but these are called the obedience to authority studies. And Milgram, he did a lot of these different kinds of studies, it wasn't just one study, but the gist of it was, he would have,

Sean (30:40.983)
Yeah, please.

bruce levine (30:52.084)
on people who are the subjects in the experiment who are supposed to be teaching these people a learning skill and they were told these subjects, well if the person you're trying to teach this thing to, they get it wrong, you have to shock them with a lecture shock. Now of course it wasn't real lecture shock, but the subjects, they didn't know that. And so what he found, and this was terrifying for Milgram, I'll talk a little bit in a second why it was so terrifying for him, was he found the overwhelming majority of folks shocked these subjects.

to like dangerous levels. And Milgram, a big point of why he did that study was that he was very much familiar with the Holocaust and what had happened in Nazi Germany. He actually had some people in his family who had direct connection to this. And so in that era of like the 1960s, people were going like, wait a minute, you know, could this happen here too in American society? You know, what can we could we be that potentially obedient to abuse of authority?

and you know the answers were terrifying so a lot of more people were writing about the anti-authoritarian personality or thought i should say the authoritarian personality that was a famous book back in that year so it's much more in the air people were terrified it was just still in their mind like you have ordinarily okay people in germany who were just going along with the you know with the hot with all these horrific things that they did and so people was on their mind like it could this thing happen in american society or all over the world so that was

That was a big thing. Somehow, like again, people have moved back into this idea, like, oh, certainly, you know, that's not gonna happen. That was just in history. So, you know, I think part of like back in that era, and I still carry that is like, you know, I don't wanna be, you know, one of these people out there, whatever, for my integrity or just my ego or whatever. I don't wanna be one of these people who've been in a profession that's clearly doing horrific, horrible,

things here and haven't at least spoken out against it. So, you know, I don't know if that's morality, integrity, authenticity, or just some ego. I don't know what the heck that is, but that's what my energy is here on this.

Sean (33:01.741)
I do want to plug Molly Adler's podcast back from the borderline. She's actually going to come on as a guest in January, but her interview of Dr. Levine is in the top 10 of episodes on a podcast that I've ever heard. So I do want to actually plug that interview. I'll include a link in the show summary. It was that good. Dr. Levine. So you actually mentioned the DSM form.

And I want to get your impressions on Dr. Alan Francis, who is, who was the chairperson of the DSM-IV. He seems to kind of have made a name for himself for speaking out against, uh, kind of the medicalization of society and like over medicating the population. My problem with Dr. Francis though, is that he, if anyone has had a direct result,

on the harms of our society. I do think we will look back at the mass drugging of children as an evil act that will be looked back upon in history with shock. You know, hopefully the humanity evolves to the point where we can look back at this with shock and horror, and we could have courses on it on, you know, how we can deteriorate as a culture to that extent. But Dr. Alan Francis was in a position of leadership. He could have done something.

about it. He oversaw bipolar 2 disorder, the expansion, the diagnostic expansion of numerous conditions where we have really pathologized an entire subset of society. Bipolar for children really kind of grew in that era. Joseph Biederman, you know, in my opinion, is a criminal. And so I just want to get your thoughts on Alan Francis, who seems to be like

wadded and put up today by people in this movement as if he has done something revolutionary.

bruce levine (35:05.96)
Well, he's not he's not loaded up in the world of Madden America, which is like the go to, again, for some of you folks who may not be aware of it. And that's the publication started by the one of the best. I'd say the best journalist in America covering mental health, Robert Whitaker. And he has a great team over there, too. And he's not loaded in the world of mad men in America. For some of the reasons that you're talking, he's not he's not loaded in the world of the International Society of Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry, which is a real.

critically thinking organization of dissonant mental health professionals. So for what you're saying, it looks like he's kind of a little Johnny come lately to the party here. And again, historically I was mentioning, you know, he's another one of these guys who like, yeah, it became clear at certain point because of the hard work of people like Robert Whitaker and others, um, other dissonant psychiatrists, psychologists, people like Joanna McCree, if he could talk about her, psychiatrists have enormous respect for, I see you shaking your head. You do too.

because of that hard work, the needle has moved to the point where you just, like a guy like Al Francis, you get to be chair of the DSM-IV task force. How do you get to be that way? Well, the whole thing is bullshit. You get to move to that high level because you're a good politician. So anybody in a high level at the American Psychiatric Association is a good politician. And so a good politician like Francis is would recognize that this DSM-V has become even more of a ridiculous joke.

And by the way, too, there's other things why he started speaking out with his book, you know, that he critical of the DSM-5 was that he was insulted, that he was left out of the process. You know, Mr. DSM-4 was left out of the DSM-5 process. So they shot back and it's really funny politics. I cover this in.

in the last book and real funny politics. So the big shots who were head of this DSM-5 Bible, they started making fun of Alan Francis as well. You're just pissed off because you're gonna lose your royalty from DSM-4. That's why you're pissed off at DSM-5. So it's really funny. You get some trues listening to these infighting, among each other. And just like listening to some primary, some sort of debate among the Republicans or Democrats, all you get are you do hear some trues about the other side. So that's what happens.

bruce levine (37:20.472)
But yeah, I mean your general point is the guy's like pretty late to the party. I mean you weren't 20 years old here when you were like putting your rubber stamp on this bullshit DSM-4 here that was pathologizing more and more people here. You were already pretty mature guys, very older than you. And it's like, and it's like now because the politics has shifted, you're going to try to write, get this book out there and be this apostate psychiatrist here. Well, you know, it's, it's a little too late and not too little and too late.

So I'm glad he's out there, because it's fun to use some Alan Francis quotes. I mean, he calls, I use one of his quotes in that last book where he basically says mental disorders are bullshit. And so for me, it's a useful thing when I go on and I do a show like this to the general public and I say, look, this is not just a guy like Roger, a guy like Bruce Levine or Robert Whitaker or Joanna McCree, this is establishment psychiatry. You can't be more of an insider establishment psychiatry than Alan Francis. And he's calling these diagnosis.

He used the word bullshit. And so it's helpful for me in that sense, but other than that, he's of no value to me.

Sean (38:26.725)
Speaking of mainstream psychiatry, and this was a quote in your May 5th article of this past year, one's radical critiques of psychiatry are now mainstream, so what remains taboo? And this is in the counterpunch. In 2011, Thomas Insel, who's the director of the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 to 2015, acknowledged, whatever we've been doing for five decades, it ain't working. When I look at the numbers...

the number of suicides, the number of disabilities, the mortality data. It's abysmal and it's not getting any better. In 2017, Insult told Wired, I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders. And when I look back on that, I realized that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at a fairly large cost, I think 20 billion.

I don't think we move the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness. I'll go a step further. Move the needle. It's gotten worse. It has gotten substantially worse. And if we do think that it's starting to change and we're able to have conversations like this, it is not being able to make a difference with the general public.

We have more and more people attaching the psychiatric labels as if they're legitimate and discreet medical illnesses. We have more people going on psychiatric drugs, including young people. Everything is getting worse and a recent survey, 85% of people still believe in a chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. And so my question for you, Dr. Levine is given this, right? Even when mainstream psychiatry.

has spoken out against the harms. How does this continue to be the dominant narrative in healthcare in the United States?

bruce levine (40:34.656)
Well, that's a question that I spent a lot of time on, you know, thinking about. And, you know, the obvious simple things that I won't spend a lot of time on it because they're just obvious reasons. I mean, is once psychiatry went to bat, once they were in trouble in the 70s, their way of getting out, since they had no science, the only way political solution for them was to team up with drug companies. And they actually talk about it. They don't hide this. They, they're

I have quotes where their medical director in the 19 of eight of American Psychiatric Association brags about their partnership with drug companies. So drug companies have enormous amount of money. I mean, it's just hard for people to grasp. I mean, this just got ridiculous after the SSRIs. Each one of these drugs like Prozac and like 20 billion, 20 billion dollars after it's been out for 15, 20 years. And, you know, there's just an incredible amount of money these drug companies were making once they started teaming up with psychiatry.

You know, that allows these drug companies to spread that money around. You mentioned Biederman before, Joseph Biederman, you know, who recently died, you know, and I guess he's not going to be creating any more childhood psychiatric disorders, but he's the father of this idiotic thing called pediatric bipolar disorder, juvenile bipolar disorder with crazy symptoms, three, four-year-olds getting diagnosed with like this bipolar disorder because they're intensely silly and happy or they talk too fast or…

I mean, you're talking about three, four year old, this is insanity, right? And so, you know, but he in the congressional hearings in 2008, they exposed him to having taken $1.6 million from Johnson and Johnson, from drug companies in general, a lot of it for Johnson and Johnson because he was pushing risperdol. And so there were other big shot psychiatrists who were taking tons of money. So there's a psychiatric pharmaceutical industrial complex where these pharmaceutical companies spread their money around.

and to these big thought leader psychiatrists. And then the other thing that happens, maybe more to your point, is that once these drug commercials became legal, which happened in the late 1990s, again, these drug companies had so much power to control these politicians, to allow these commercials to be on TV. When I was a kid, you'd never see psychiatric drug or any drug commercials on television. But once those got on television and on magazines, and once...

bruce levine (42:50.384)
that you have this what they call direct to consumer advertising, then all of a sudden what happens? The major media who are dependent on these advertising dollars, they don't want to get these drug companies upset. You think they're going to run too critical a story on Pfizer or Eli Lilly or Johnson & Johnson, and these guys are going to just say, hey, I guess we'll put our advertising somewhere else. Sorry, buddy. And so they know that. So that's what they've been able to do. So their drug companies, you know, there are a lot of things, but they are certainly not stupid.

and they realize just again it's an old playbook. If you have a lot of money, if you're making billions and billions, you spread a million here, you spread a million there, and so you have control. But there's bigger pieces to this picture that I talk about more recently is like what else retains this thing? So there's other, besides these direct financial obvious reasons, there's big political reasons that a society in general doesn't want to deal with this. So one of the things is that if you're at the very top of the heap,

you know the cult ruling class the powers that shouldn't be whatever you want to call these you know the guys at the one tenth of one percent they like the way society's function they don't they're those are diseases of despair you know like they're not you know that nobody's like you know in their little world killing themselves because they can't pay their bills and you know you know they like the whole way the things running they want to maintain the status quo let's just put it that way and so if you're on the top of any kind of ruling class elite

What you want is people to believe that there's emotional suffering, their anxiety, their depression, their substance abuse, their suicidality, that it has to do with some individual defect. Now, the top of the heap, the ruling class, they don't care what mumbo jumbo bullshit psychiatry comes up with, whether it's a biochemical imbalance theory or now insult Thomas Insel's switching, finally admitting, oh yeah, I guess there is no biochemical.

So he's switching to some electrical circuitry theory. And if you read his 2022 book, he's talking about electroshock not being used enough. I mean, it's pretty scary. But I mean, so they don't care, though, at the top of the heap. They don't care whatever. They come up with, as long as it's some individual defect. And this is very similar. That's one of the reasons I talk about with the Spinoza era, 350 years ago, there was a symbiotic relationship between monarchy and the organized religion that the people who are the monarchs.

bruce levine (45:11.464)
like to have these folks who are in these ecclesiastic clergy authorities who are telling people, well, the reason why you're miserable is you're not going to church enough, not because you have no money and you have no political power. So this symbiotic relationship between psychiatry, drug companies, and the ruling class, that's it. There's also at a more micro level in families. And this is, again, this was widely talked about in the 1970s and 80s, was things like family systems theories. This was a...

common one of the things in my profession that was going like, wow, I want to go into this profession. They're talking about some real psychological political issues that create people who are called chronically mentally ill. So again, for folks in your audience who've never heard of this, hopefully most of them have, but this is widely talked about in the 70s that what would happen in families, you'd have a dysfunctional family. Maybe mom and dad really hated each other's guts and shouldn't have been staying together.

but nobody wanted to deal with it. It was an enormously stressful, miserable family. Maybe it was a lot of abuse and neglect going on, but there would be one kid in the family that would quote act out, all right? Maybe, and they would usually, because they're a kid or a teenager, they would be acting out in ways that might be self-destructive and they would get labeled mentally ill. And so this was a way that the dysfunctional family had a way to like not deal with, stay in denial of their dysfunctionality by saying like, well, there's nothing wrong with us.

There's just this mentally ill person here. And so really psychologists, back then these family system theorists, folks who had some integrity who didn't want to throw these people under the bus, would say, wait a minute, man. Yeah, they're doing their suicidal, they're acting crazy, maybe they're cutting themselves, but let's take a look at what's going on here in this family. And so you have macro gigantic political level, micro political levels. There's also another issue that I always quote David Cohn, a dissonant social worker at UCLA. He talks about...

coercion and he has this article that I love called it's the coercion stupid and he said look the reason why Psychiatry will all has always gotten a free pass will always get a free pass that they could just assert bullshit and nobody challenges them or very few people except for guys like us challenge them is because this Coercive value that they have in society that a lot of our society likes the idea that if somebody's creating discomfort whether it's in a family or whether it's somebody who's talking too loud in a

bruce levine (47:33.812)
you know, in a rich neighborhood and he's not doing anything illegal, but he's creating discomfort and tension. You know, you can't have the police arrest them necessarily, but you can have them drag them to a psychiatric emergency room. So his point is that this is like you have this sort of institution that has sort of extra police, extra legal policing power here to get rid of a or to control a population that's creating discomfort. And that's why.

A lot of society loves psychiatry and psychology. So those are some big reasons. There's other reasons that I get into societal technology worship and others we could get into, but those are some of the big reasons why you have something that has zero scientific value. Crap outcomes that are getting worse, as you pointed out, Roger. Not getting better, getting worse. You have no diagnostic bubble or DSM, even insulin. Way back, over a decade ago, saying like we should jettison this thing.

The chemical imbalance theory is now being, you know, even mainstream establishment psychiatry is admitting is bullshit. Their whole system of medicalizing people who are having major difficulties actually creates more stigma. We could go on and on. It's a total disaster scientifically and morally, but it has all of these political forces that maintain it. And again, you know, what was useful for me as a kid growing up was back to the old Vietnam War. Everybody knew.

like a lot of folks did, was they knew it became clear that the politicians even knew that you aren't gonna win this thing. But why? It kept on going on and on. A major big reason was there was no politician from the Republican Nixon to the Democrat at Lyndon Johnson before him, who had enough guts to be quote, the first president who would like not win a war. And they were terrified of the political downside of that. And so this horrible tragedy is bullshit goes on. So I think that's a big thing that I try to get across to people.

that just because something is obviously scientifically bullshit, immoral, worthless, that there's a lot of political, financial reasons that can maintain something.

Sean (49:37.177)
I think the most tragic aspect of this current era is how many kids who were reacting to dysfunctional environments were identified as ones who were mentally ill and then pushed to psychiatric drugs where they were numbed, subdued at best just to become more compliant and obedient in those abusive environments. This stuff runs really deep here. You know, it's really difficult as a practicing clinician to be...

within these communities and see people trying to legitimize these conditions is ADHD, this oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder. The other aspect I don't think we talk about enough is the diversity that exists in society. One, those who are emotionally sensitive, those who are artistic, especially females. I think being female is pathologized in our culture. I've seen so many really sensitive, kind, creative.

artistic people whose their expression of their emotion was devalued and invalidated in an environment who saw that as weakness or as a form of weakness. And then you go into the medical system or the mental health system and it's kind of confirmed with that diagnosis. You see bipolar two disorder, borderline personality disorder, two pseudoscientific concepts.

where a person's experience and expression of emotion within the context of relationships is pathologized. And then they're pushed down a treatment road in which they view what they experience internally as disorder or broken. Like there is something wrong with who I am. And that in itself will manifest as mental illness.

bruce levine (51:25.624)
Absolutely, I mean, you know, you have self-fulfilling prophecies. I mean, and I think one of the other things that people was a little bit more widely understood before my profession. I joke around about like with the profession of mental health psychology profession, psychiatry has always been almost completely worthless. And if you're not a completely dissonant psychiatrist, you know, I don't want to hang around with you. But the psychology profession that I went into was more of a mixed bag. And so there were like a lot of great

kind of research that was going on. And one of the ones to speak to, one of the points that you made was, and I talk about this in my early, 2007 book about depression, was that people who were, there were studies done on people who were more critically thinking. So in other words, they would give them, there'd be an experiment. And which group could more easily identify how much control they had in winning or losing a game? Or they would have people who they'd ask them, you know, what their, did they, you know,

their understanding of how people viewed them. And to the extent that they were more accurate, they were labeled as more critically thinking. And it turns out the more critically thinking people were more prone to depression, more prone to anxiety. And if you have a kind of understanding, like yourself, you're a real clinician, you understand that a big fuel of depression is like overwhelming pain. This is not as mumbo jumbo biochemical imbalance bullshit. It's obvious, and we know this again.

If you're a clinician, this is obvious, but you know, the research shows us that people who are overwhelmed by financial poverty, if they're hooked up or connected up with their criminal justice system, that pain from being on probation, or if they have some major physical issue or if they're in a horrible relationship, that all of these different overwhelming pains are going to be more likely to like fuel depression. And this was obvious stuff. So a big part of, you know,

A big part, I think, you know, wanted to kind of go on a little tangent is, is like one of the great horrors, there's so many great horrors of this, what's happening here with current psychiatry, that, you know, we tend to, you know, guys like you and me, we want to get the word out on the major bullshit, like things like the chemical imbalance theory. But a lot of it is like what you're talking about, these poor folks out there, they buy into these diagnoses for whatever reasons, to get attention, to get people to give them some compassion. There would be all kinds of reasons. But the other thing that's really sort of sad.

bruce levine (53:48.288)
And again, I have the advantage of going in and being in, starting out my career in the late 70s, early 80s was that we have to spend so much time debunking all this bullshit. We can't really talk about all these psychological, philosophical things that people really do out there that get better and it was much more varied. So back then, people would talk a lot more about like, there'd be lots of studies on like.

You know, like a lot of folks, there would be all these different schools of therapy, cognitive therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is still around. Less talked about nowadays are family systems and interpersonal therapies and interactional therapies and gestalt therapies. And people would talk about it and everybody would like, you know, say, well, this, my technique is the best. And so people would do studies and say, well, how really important is the technique? You know, guys like Bruce is thinking like, well, his little technique is really what's winning the day. All his patients are getting better. Roger's thinking his thing. But really is it much more?

about what Roger's all about? Is it really what we call back then these non-specific variables, these personal variables? Is it much more important, his authenticity, the client's experience of being cared about, their respect for his intelligence, are those things far more important than technique? So I'm just, we can go back to this specific issue. This is an issue interesting in and of itself, but what I'm trying to kind of lay out in this context is like one of the great tragedies of all this.

psychiatric bullshit that's taken over society is that the whole field of psychology, a lot of people are not talking about some of the stuff that could be most interesting and most valuable in actually helping people.

Sean (55:27.137)
That's a really good point. And one of the things that happens when you begin to develop experience, providing therapy as a psychologist, as any type of therapist, in the beginning, you're having to provide what you're trained to do. And you're actually kind of conditioned to believe what you are doing is the most effective, which is most empirically sound. And someone who's board certified in behavioral and cognitive therapy is, I fell into that camp for a while. And then your, your patients teach you a lot of lessons.

and you learn your lessons. And you understand that what really is curative is everything that you know about human potential, every experience you have, the connection you have with people, the expression of love, the expression of caring, having a high tolerance for emotional distress, allowing your clients to self-validate and understand what they're going through and what they have been going through. Heal in that regard.

but also consider life as something that's consistently evolving, that the one constant is always change, and empowering people and motivating people to actually make changes that are in the best interest of their relationships and their health and their life, despite what they've gone through. And that only occurs in the context of somebody who knows them really, really well. And there's a trust that's established. And you try to push your learning onto somebody.

where you're dominating the conversation, you're gonna fail, you're gonna get fired. And that's exactly what happens. I actually think the schools of therapy are problematic because people, again, it becomes another industry. You try to have the best therapy, the best technique, you try to prove it and you develop a career around it. Instead of being able to also reflect on, we've got hundreds and thousands of years of wisdom, collective wisdom, and cross-culturally, we have wisdom.

from indigenous societies and other cultures from around the world in the manner in which they feel connected to each other and spirit and universe. There's so much there that in our small capitalistic kind of society that we've forgotten. We had a guest on here, Sean. Remember Dr. Leland Stillman? Yes. He said something that I thought was great. And it's reminding me here talking to Dr. Levine. He says, I feel like sometimes my job is to remind

bruce levine (57:29.686)
Okay.

Sean (57:52.997)
people that's what's already been written and spoken about but now forgotten. You know, and that's like the importance of generationally being able to communicate from elders to be able to share collective wisdom. And I think this podcast movement is great. Dr. Levin, you're probably close to 70 years old at this point, right?

bruce levine (58:13.464)
not quite my late 60s.

Sean (58:16.565)
Yeah, so you're in your late 60s and you reach a generation, now you go on Molly Adler's Back From the Borderline podcast, you now reach a large audience of a younger generation. You come on radically genuine, that's now in the top 1% of global downloads. You're now reaching other people, but this is a collective wisdom that you've experienced, that you've learned, you've written about, you've spoken about in a different era when we didn't necessarily have mass communication in the way that we have.

And so your messages are, you know, they're resonating right now with a lot of people, I think around the world who've never heard this. They're hearing it for actually the first time, not that this hasn't been written about, not that this hasn't been spoken about, it's just it's forgotten. And there are so many forces that are incentivized to push this out of mainstream. Let me ask a question to Dr. Levine that connects to that wisdom.

You had written a blog post, I believe it's also on Madden America, psychiatry's control freak medical model versus healing and healers. And in there you wrote, genuine healers are uncontrolled by someone else's pain, not detaching with coldness, but with warmth. And others feel that they care about their pain. This wholeness and lack of fear allows genuine healers to have a special kind of humor that is extraordinarily sensitive to pain.

adept at knowing how to lighten its burden. When I read that the word humor jumped out at me. So I'm wondering if you could weigh in like how does humor allow a clinician to navigate pain without appearing detached or dismissive?

bruce levine (59:57.58)
Well, it's certainly very tricky. I mean, it's very tricky. That's why, as Roger was saying, you better have a good relationship with a client, and you better have a good feel because you certainly don't want to feel like you're invalidating dismissive cavalier. Those would be horrible. But, so humor is a risk, okay? But it could be, you know, it could be enormously helpful. I'll give you an example that I'm sure if some of my young guys who are clients are watching right now, they're going to go like, oh, yeah, I know Boots did this with me.

you know, around a year or so, I don't know when it happened, I just started realizing guys, especially in their 20s, are just so horrified of being failures and losers and fucking up their life. Okay, that was just, you know, just it's just like almost like it's gonna be a shame to fuck up their life. And, you know, I can have just a kind of rational kind of discussion about that. But, you know, if you've been doing clinical work for a while, sometimes you realize, well, you can make all these intelligent points and

do all these kind of things and people are getting it cognitively and blah, but you're not doing what you need to do to kind of make an impact, you know, and have somebody maybe just kind of like open themselves up to some new possibilities. And so, you know, I just, for one guy, only because I wouldn't do this with everyone, but it was one particular I had a very long relationship with that I kind of knew how this, there was a good chance that this might be freeing, this might be liberating. And I just, you know,

said to him, I said, do you think like, there's adults walking around out there who like, don't like having fucked up their life in one shape or another, some which way? And he just didn't say anything. And I said, you know, and at some point he said, so basically you're trying to like make me like, not fuck up my life too much. And I just looked at him and I said, no, not really. I'm just trying to help you fuck up your life in a more interesting way than most people.

Sean (01:01:53.628)
Hahaha!

bruce levine (01:01:54.772)
Exactly, exactly. Now, of course, I say that in training or in Grand Rounds, something like that, it sounds like totally inappropriate, totally wrong, whatever. But you guys, you know, you've been around young people, you know that could be a liberating thing. Like there's this old guy like me who's like, just given who I am, maybe I couldn't get away with that from 30 years or whatever. So there's certain variables. And so humor can be a real powerful thing. I think more to the point, a lot of what really good

clinical work is not, I don't want to oversimplify this, this is all of clinical work, but a lot of what happens for clients, for people in general, this happened to me, okay, is that when you get depressed, anxious, probably the peak of my depression and anxiety was in graduate school, hanging around, forced to hang around a lot of people who I really had no respect for. But when you're in that world, when you move into depression and anxiety,

You know, you tend to get real self-absorbed. You tend to really focus in on your own pain, your own hurt, resentment, anger, frustration. And it's a vicious cycle. The more that you kind of move into your own shit, you know, the less likely you are gonna be like caring about the world around you, other people. And it could be really a vicious cycle. And part of the reason one or more...

Other reasons why psychiatry, mainstream psychology is so bad, besides the obvious bullshit of these drugs and electroshock and all that is, even in the old days with some of the stuff with psychoanalysis, it would just have people just focus and focus and focus on their own shit. Now, I'm not saying it cannot be maybe sometimes a value to understand what went on in your family and how you're really feeling about your parents and all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying that's not valuable. But...

What can happen to a lot of people is that they get so locked in to their own hurt and pain. And so therefore a big part, it's not the only thing that's important to do in clinical work and trying to do therapy and help people. But I know for myself, just say for myself personally, if I'm around somebody who I know really likes me, who's not mocking me, who really cares about me, and they can sort of do something.

bruce levine (01:04:02.532)
to kind of get me out of my own head here, to care about something else except my own anger or my own pain, my own disgust with my profession or whatever, that and to care about something, that's gonna be a value. So that's to that extent, that's why, I mean, just explaining why something like humor could be a good thing.

Sean (01:04:21.305)
To that same article, I wrote down a quote that I was actually interested in you expanding upon.

quote unquote here, most people who enter the mental health profession truly want to help others, but they are often naive to the reality that the selection, socialization and training processes are fear-based aimed at creating control freaks who then become unhelpful.

Can you expand on that?

bruce levine (01:04:53.848)
Right. I think that a lot of folks in the profession, you know, if they don't go in with like all of these fear-based things that we've talked about before here, you know, they've been scared enough to, you know, do well in classes that they hated and they've done a lot of fear-based things just to get involved in these training programs and to get ahead and get their degrees. You know, what also happens as part of the professionalization process is they're, they hear stories, they're terrified that they're going to lose their license or they're going to get sued.

And so they're in this kind of fear-based mode, which is ultimately gonna be a control freak mode. If I'm in a fear-based mode, if I'm afraid, you know, I'm seeing Sean, you're my patient here, and Sean's telling me like, well, I have these suicidal thoughts, you know, I mean, and my gut's telling me, my intuition, Sean's just being honest with me, this is good therapy. I'm not really sitting here worried about Sean's gonna knock himself off in the next 10 minutes here.

But if I'm totally fear-based, I move into a control zone. At the very least, I start asking questions like, on a scale of one to 10, how suicidal are you? Do you have a plan? I do all these things that I'm supposed to be doing. And someone's sitting there, you can tell me, I'm just guessing, how most people are going like, oh man, I guess I'm dealing, I just told this guy some thoughts going through my head and I got him all scared shitless here. Boy, how health? Right, exactly, exactly. That's my point. And so part of it, being a real clinician,

Sean (01:06:08.921)
Yeah, you'd freak me out. You'd freak me out.

bruce levine (01:06:16.404)
is just like having some confidence that you can sustain some potential scares. That's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be people, unlike say a family member, it would make much more sense to society if a mom or a dad heard their teenager even saying anything about suicide, it would freak them out. Our job is to deescalate, not to escalate, which unfortunately our profession is. So you were talking about a lot of these artsy.

kind of kids and I don't know what they're calling themselves nowadays, goth kids or mojik kids, I don't know what the term is. But there's always been some kids who've just been dark kind of kids, you know, and a lot of them grow up to be, you know, really great artists and, you know, comedians because they're comfortable dealing with not only the dark side of who they are, you know, for them to have a suicidal thought is not that big a deal. They, you know, it goes through their head. They're not likely going to be acting on it. You know, for other folks, it is more of a bigger deal. And so, so.

having some kind of comfort level, when those kind of people, unfortunately, these kind of darker kids start just innocently revealing all these thoughts that go through their head, you know, whether they're like, who, what teacher would they be happy if they found out was dead or something like that? You know, they're not gonna go and kill anybody or anything like that. But if you've got some freaked out, totally scared mental health professionals going, oh no, do I have to report this? And they're not even in touch with you, they're good, the kids just being honest with you. They're not gonna go out.

I'm not going to kill anyone." It's like part of what you want to be able to do is, which they don't teach in school at all, they're just teaching rules and what you're supposed to do. But really to be a good clinician, there's no substitute for wisdom and your intuition and understanding like, hey, none of us are God. But when I work with families, I work with teenagers, I used to do a lot more than I don't do as much of that nowadays, but I still do some.

is that you want to build a trusting relationship where everybody's deescalating their anxiety and fear so that everybody that I could ask a parent, like, okay, what's your gut really telling you? Are you really worried that this kid is acting so differently that they really are gonna do something horrible? And sometimes they say, yeah, I really am scared shitless. And I say, well, okay, well, maybe we have to do that. But most of the time they're going like, well, no, really, they're saying that stuff, but it's just their mouth off. But at the end of the day, knowing that look,

bruce levine (01:08:38.74)
None of us are God. And certainly there's no psychiatrist with any kind of diagnostic instrument that's going to be able to tell you the truth here. In fact, all we've got are each other collaborating our own instinct, our own experience, our own wisdom, and helping each other reduce our fear so that we make better judgments. But that's, as Roger can tell you, how often is that kind of stuff going on in mainstream mental health institutions? I know you've worked in some of these places.

Sean (01:09:06.221)
Constantly and what I found is just this continued intolerance for emotional experience. It's very hard to interview a higher staff member who is not, you know, completely fear conditioned, where they're just afraid of what their clients could do and they would be held responsible. And that's why you see such a dramatic increase in psychiatric hospitalizations, especially for young people. It's not like I really believe that there's just...

more intense to die by suicide. There's a cultural factor with young people where, you know, they're using certain language more, it's learned, there's a social contagion effect. But the fear reactions, the reactions from the environment have changed to such an extent. I mean, that's part of being exposure to media, a fear based media. It's part of the sick care system that we live in. We live in a culture of fear, it certainly has extended to the entire mental health treatment community, if anything, as Dr. Levine said.

We need people with greater wisdom and compassion and kindness who can actually deescalate these situations, be able to accurately assess what if someone is at imminent risk or not, or at least create a holding environment, create an environment for people of safety and acknowledge that there's reasons that they're feeling that way. There's reasons they're thinking that and help them solve some of the problems that are solvable. We've lost our way.

dramatically in how we train, how we understand, and you know, how we respond to common mental health problems. I'm sorry, go ahead, Dr. Living. I wanted to keep it in this fear space. And this is just this is me personally speaking now about this podcast and the messages we communicate out there. I'm constantly torn between recognizing how important it is for Roger to speak out on the things that

bruce levine (01:10:39.02)
What? No go ahead. No no go ahead.

Sean (01:10:59.021)
He feels passionate about to prevent harms and help more people. But then at times he may push back on the authority and use the words resist and push back and you know, now's the time to, to take action. And I guess my concern is always about how pushing back and resisting could be misinterpreted by someone in our audience listening, or where they may feel threatened and actually take violent action. And I stumbled upon.

Uh, the excerpt, uh, on, um, Ted Kaczynski on your blog that was in your book on violent anti-authoritarians. Is there anything that you could share with me in terms of to overcome maybe like that anxiety about somebody misinterpreting, is there anything that we can do in our message to try and prevent somebody from thinking that this, this can be interpreted as a violent action?

bruce levine (01:11:52.072)
I don't think Ted Kaczynski would go after Roger. But, you know, here's what I mean, just a couple of tangents over your mention in that article, because it was like a O bit kind of because he died recently. And so in that resisting illegitimate authority, I didn't want to romanticize anti-authoritarians because there were a lot of folks I talked about. Most of the folks I had enormous respect for. They were authoritarians who had done some great things. Anti-authoritarians.

Sean (01:11:55.808)
Hahaha

bruce levine (01:12:20.292)
But there were some folks in there who moved into violence and moved into self-destructive behaviors. And I wanted to kind of talk about them to kind of help people understand that like, how did that happen? How did, like, so the story of like how Ted Kaczynski moved into becoming a very violent guy is really instructive. I mean, and it's not, again, it's a story that's not mainstream. The mainstream view, and this was like, well, this guy is just a mental case. He's just a nut.

And, you know, it's, we just got to get him in prison and all this sort of stuff. And not really dealing with the reality of how, like, Kaczynski was one of those kind of guys growing up, a sensitive, super brilliant kind of guy in math. And he grew up kind of, you know, his family didn't know exactly how to deal with him. But he actually tried to make some friends. And he goes off to Harvard, and he isn't this loner guy. He's trying to make friends. This is people have written biographies about him.

and gone into all this stuff. And what happens in Harvard, all right, the prestigious places in America, is that he gets himself as a, I think, freshman or sophomore, he, you know, part of what he has to participate in some psychology experiment. And he gets himself involved in this experiment, this guy who's trying to trust people more, get out of his own head, socialize, all these things he's trying to do. And in this psychology experiment, it turns out what he's supposed to do is,

talk about or write down what he cares most about, his personal philosophy. So he's making himself somewhat vulnerable. And in this experiment, this person who's like actually an attorney, humiliates him. They videotape this stuff. They show it to him over and over again. For God knows what they're trying to do in this experiment. But in terms of Ted's point of view, it was enraging. I mean, it would be enraging for any of us. But given the fact that he's a pretty vulnerable guy.

You know, it just set him off. That wasn't the only incident, but there were some other incidents that just moved him into this state of unbelievable rage. And he moved into such a state of total rage that he targeted some of these people who he had clear philosophical reasons to dislike. But it got so out of control. He was just like sending these bombs out there to like, not randomly, but completely innocent people were getting hurt. And so that's kinda, you know, I'm not.

bruce levine (01:14:40.152)
I don't write about Ted or do this stuff to have people gain sympathy or affection for him. I mean, it was horrible. And not just for the people, his victims who he killed and injured, but also for his family members. His brother was a social worker kind of guy. I think he was a social worker, but it's sort of like one of those kinds of guys who had to turn him in because he was in a situation. What do I do? Turn my brother in here or like had him do more violence. So he put his, I'm sure he messed up his brother for life. Had he overcome something like that, that you had to...

turn your brother in. And it's sort of, so there's a lot of really, and that's why I call that a bit, the tragedies, multiple tragedies of Ted Kaczynski. But, you know, in terms of somebody out there who, you know, somebody out there, I could, going after a guy like Roger, I, you know, I'm sure, I mean, the people I know, like, who have been dissonant major public figure psychiatrists, I mentioned Lauren Mosher before.

The other guy, probably the most well-known critic of psychiatry now is a journalist, Robert Whitaker. And, yeah, it's cost them all kinds of, you know, career-wise. They've had to constantly deal with ad hominem, idiotic attacks, you know, being called a menace to society, and blah, blah. And I've had some of that stuff too. But so far, so far, the only violence we've had to worry about is from the psychiatric establishment, not from regular people out there.

Sean (01:16:03.333)
Mm-hmm.

Sean (01:16:06.753)
Yeah, to clarify, so Sean doesn't turn me into the authorities. I advocate for nonviolent resistance. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, nonviolent resistance. Listen, freedom is fragile. And like, when I say we're gonna have to resist, we're gonna have to resist, for example, forced mass vaccinations or medical interventions that haven't been studied on a human population.

bruce levine (01:16:10.756)
Ha ha!

bruce levine (01:16:15.311)
Hehe

Sean (01:16:36.449)
We have to resist ideas. We're doing that right now, especially around psychiatric labels, diagnoses that can be used to oppress people, especially people who are dissenters. There's more of us than there is them. We're talking about the top 1% of the top 1%, and how so many of these ideas serve them. And it does serve their power. And we even ventured into a depopulation movement and transhumanism in a previous podcast because it's being written about.

because people in the top 1% of the 1% are advocating for this, a pretty dramatic decline in human population. And there's no doubt that there's a viewpoint of many human beings, us included, are nothing more than parasites who are just kind of consuming resources. These ideas are prevalent and they're not new. You can go back and look at, you know, Adolf Hitler, you know, the extermination of groups of people, the eugenics movement is not a new one.

And it's a powerful one. And I just choose not to live in, deny reality, right? You mentioned your optimism. I just don't want to deny reality. These things exist. We have to talk about them. That's why history is important. And so nonviolent resistance is important. Ad hominem attacks, I mean, I've been called dangerous to our risk. You called me dangerous in this room. Dangerously naive. Okay, whatever. That's different.

bruce levine (01:18:02.863)
Hehehehe. Hehe

Sean (01:18:05.473)
You're the bystander. You're the dangerously naive. I want to transition just for a second. For our listening audience, this episode is being released on Thursday, December 28th. And I recently flew out to Phoenix, Arizona to be interviewed by Alex Clark on her spillover podcast. So if you're listening to this podcast right now, the day that it's released, that my interview with Alex is coming out tonight, midnight Eastern time, 9pm.

specific. So the 29th. Yeah, but the 29th, you'll be able to access it from YouTube. She has a large audience. Anyway, I stated on the on the podcast that antidepressant drugs are a scam. And any benefit received from the drug is a placebo response. Given the popularity of her podcast, there inevitably is going to be backlash and I will be vilified for those who actually know little about the subject. But going back to

Leland Stillman's attempt to make things known that other people have forgotten. Dr. Levine had this study published on one of his articles, I'm so into all of them that I can't remember which one sorry about that. In April 2002, the Journal of American Medical Association JAMA published a study that investigated whether the herb St. John's wort purported at the time to be an antidepressant was more effective than a placebo. In this randomized

clinical controlled trial, RCT. In addition to one group being given St. John's wort and the second group given a placebo, there was a third group that received the standard dose, which we gave the term antidepressant to, which is the SSRI Zoloft. What were the results? The placebo worked better than both St. John's wort and Zoloft.

Specifically, a positive full response occurred in 32% of the placebo treated patients, 25% of the Zoloft treated patients, and 24% of the St. John's warts treated patients. So those who've been listening to me know how you can get a drug to market when it doesn't outperform placebo. But here's the next level question. Why is the placebo response so powerful in mental health?

Sean (01:20:30.517)
And how can we best utilize this to actually help people?

bruce levine (01:20:36.812)
Well, I think that's really the great question. I mean, that's funny because that's what Irvin Kersh, who wrote the Emperor's New Drugs and who did basically the bigger study looking at using the Freedom of Information Act to get 47 antidepressants found in aggregate. I mean, a lot of these, they were unpublished. So that's what drug companies, they won't publish a lot of studies that make their drugs not look good. And it showed in aggregate that the placebo

the antidepressant majority of times. And so the thing about it was interesting what Kirsch was like, really, he wasn't like some psychiatry critic, anti antidepressant guy. He's much more his whole career has been about exactly what you're talking about, looking at the placebo and looking at what, just the idea of like, you could call it, I think maybe one of the phrases he uses, just looking at expectations. And you know, this is a dramatic thing. And if you're trying to really be a good helper, a good clinician,

therapist, teacher, coach, all of those things. What you're trying to do is to like work, you know, use that to your advantage. That because you know, like what you expect, it's gonna have a strong, it's incredibly powerful in terms of what's going to happen. If you expect to fail, you expect.

You know you're out there and let's like guys in sports. You know they know this real well It's like you know that's why nobody's negative in that world They don't say like well I think this guy's you know you hit a home run the last three times against you I would expect like he's gonna be running around the bases on you again. Nobody in sports does that They'll come up with stuff that makes no sense statistically to say look There's no way he is gonna hit a home run against you because he's already done that it can't happen again statistically Which make none of these things you guys know enough statistically none of these things make any sense

but they're trying their best in that world. They know very well of how you're caring about creating expectations for the benefit of who you're trying to help. And the real, the tragic thing, the other of the zillions of tragic things and not just psychiatry, but some other parts of medicine too, is that old time docs, they would routinely do things like, especially with kids who were depressed who demanded a pill.

bruce levine (01:22:51.844)
fix their depression, they would give them a sugar pill. They'd give them something. You know, I'd tell them, oh, this is usually powerful. You don't want to use the green one. Use the red one. The red one is really powerful. Yeah, whatever, sweet tarts or M&Ms. I mean, you know, whatever the heck. You know, and it could work. And so the fun of that was for these old time, you know, primary care folks was that they knew that there was no downside. There was no danger. It was only going to be positive they can use the effect of a placebo.

Whereas in psychiatry, that really crazy, of all the crazy things that they have made ethical, like all these, like by the way, in that study that St. John's Ward Zolov study that you were just quoting, as like, I wanna, by the way, in that article, I hyperlinked to the article, so people don't have to trust me. They could go hyperlink to the exact study. But in that article, the guy, the reason why, you know, the Preston pointed out about the St. Zolov being in that study was that the guy who ran the study,

was, you know, had stock options and speaker fees from Pfizer who makes Zola, this guy named Davidson, you know, and so that but that's ethical as long as you put that on the bottom of your article that well you had financial relations with drug companies. So these morons have decided to make that ethical and you know these moral cretins.

But it's not ethical for a primary care doctor or psychiatrist to give them something like a sugar pill or M&M or whatever the heck it is. That's not ethical. You're not allowed to do that. That's just absolutely insane. So a lot of what you're doing, not even with using pills, a lot of what a good clinician, a good therapist, like I say, not just even a good teacher, a good parent, is like you're trying to like, without lying, without being, you know, you realize there's a...

There's a lot out there in the world that's just in the unknown. And people can move into having negative expectations, or they can move into having some expectations of possibilities. So I've had people, the Adverse Childhood Experience Scale, given they've seen their score. And if you have over a 6, 7, 8 of like, I'm sure you guys are aware of that A score, where you get a point for every kind of abuse, neglect,

bruce levine (01:25:04.844)
whatever the heck, you know, a brother beating you up. No, I don't think that's on the, on the, on the, on the, I don't think you get one. I don't think you get a point for that. If Roger ever beat you up, you don't even get a point for the A scale on that. But I mean, so, but, but.

Sean (01:25:11.945)
Sorry, Sean get like three points for that

Sean (01:25:18.361)
What if it's repeated, beat it up?

bruce levine (01:25:25.176)
But you know, so people can look at that stuff and they can get like, oh my god, I have no chance at all. If you've got over a seven, you're going to be an IV drug user for the rest of your life. And so, you know, that could be problematic as opposed to like, oh, well, there's plenty of people who've had these horrific, you know, kind of traumatizing backgrounds out there. And you're not doomed, not only are you not doomed by your biochemical genetic bullshit, which is like definitely has nothing to do, but you're not even doomed by your trauma history.

it does statistically on a general level make it more likely that you're going to have some serious emotional difficulties. But again, part of the role, a huge part of the role of folks who are clinicians and helpers is trying to increase expectations or make them without doing any kind of lying or bullshitting about them. That's quite possible to do.

Sean (01:26:16.217)
We've kept you for quite some time, but I do have to kind of conclude, because we get so many questions about, all right, solutions, right? Like what are your solutions? And sometimes solutions are just, don't do that. Don't do what is causing harm. But I like to do the genie in the bottle thing, right? So, you know, I'm the genie here, I grant you three wishes. Now these three wishes, you can use, you can...

alter society that's going to improve humanity, right? It's not we can't just think about things limited to like, how do we change the mental health system? Now, this has to be like an entire culture, society kind of question. If you had these three wishes, and you could transform society for the better, which would have the consequence of improving our mental well being, and there would be less emotional and behavioral disorders as a result, how would you use your three wishes?

bruce levine (01:27:10.796)
Well, generally one thing to go back to what I was talking about before is like, we know the fuel of lots of these serious so-called serious emotional difficulties with their living mental illness is overwhelming pain. And these pains come from financial poverty and they come from economic injustices. You know, they come from all those things. So one thing that you can really do is create a society where there's less pain going on. So we're just talking about these adverse childhood events.

So here's the thing, that it's really great that that's been brought attention to, at least in the late 1990s, people are more and more trauma informed and they understand how important trauma is in creating all these so-called serious mental illnesses, which are emotional suffering, that they realize that, but they're not kind of thinking in terms of like, well, what is it about our society where you have, by the way, in that Kaiser study, they asked,

women, and these were middle-class, upper-middle-class women who had insurance, they, 30, 25 percent of them had been sexually abused, sexually molested, and that's what they reported. So it's probably a lot higher than that. 30 percent of the men had been physically abused. Again, that's just what they reported, and these are middle-class, upper-middle-class folks. And so the question that hasn't been asked enough is like, what the hell kind of a society do you have that so much of that stuff is going on? You know, that there's so much abuse and neglect.

and all these traumas that are being created in families. And the answer to that, a big part of the answer to that is, is you take a look at the way people are living. So again, if you're a parent out there, I'm sure you've worked with some family members there, you know, and they're maybe both parents or it's a single parent, they've got this horrible dehumanizing alienating job that they're just trying to hold together all of their anger and their rage and feelings of unfairness.

And so when their kid comes around, kids just normally being kids are gonna do things that are frustrating, right? That's just what kids are. And if your life is pretty chill, you're pretty okay. You're doing, you're having some fun. You know, there's, you know, you're not worried all the time about finances. When your kid does something obnoxious or exasperating or frustrating, you can have a human response to it. But it's much more likely when your life is completely messed up.

bruce levine (01:29:30.2)
that when your kid does something that's just the kid, that you do something abusive, you do something neglectful. So you could sort of see how important it is to really think about, like, if you really wanna care about, you know, doing something about our emotional suffering, on, is to really care about the nature of society and having more social economic justice in a real sense. So that's one big area. Other areas, just rethinking the whole mental health deal. All right, just completely understanding, accepting.

What we've been doing here, the main course of it, their major model, the so-called medical, mechanical model of trying to view people as defective and trying to manipulate them with your various psychic, it's just totally a failure, more so than a failure, it's counterproductive, and you've got to completely rethink it. And part of rethinking that is like, talking about some of the things we were talking about before, rethinking the kind of people who you want to be half a therapist and psychologist, so you don't want to have.

like the fact that a guy like Roger, a guy like me, has to be sort of dissonant rebel, the kind of folks who, like, I don't know if he's had any, I had friends that were more similar to us, and they just quit. They said, this whole profession is too bullshit. I'm moving on. Molly was like, you'll talk to Molly. She went into being a therapist for a while, and she just walked. And I had a lot of friends like that. Molly Adler I'm talking about. So, you know, so rethinking like who you, what kind of people do you want to have in this profession?

For me, I've run into some professionals who, if I was emotionally suffering, completely fucked up, suicidal, I'd want them to be around. But the vast majority were like, God, get them away from me. And the kind of people, there would be more people who were in other lines of work who I've run into who would be more comfortable with overwhelming emotional pain. So just the kind of folks who you would involve.

changing the whole idea of like what mental health treatment is, changing the kind of, what kind of people who would go into that, those would be big things, you know. All of these things are just, you know, going to be really hard. I don't know what my wish is here if I use them all up, but a lot of like the nature of the whole society, that's what I wrote that first book, that Common Sense Rebellion was about, how if you take a look at all the spokes in the societal world, unfortunately, it's just not, we just don't have one fucked up spoke in psychiatry.

bruce levine (01:31:51.94)
There's in the school systems and our prison systems. And they all sort of work together. I called it like the institutional illness web. And so part of the dilemma is, is that there's some major kind of mentality. It's not just capitalism. It's just kind of a technology worship, a kind of ideas about that are essentially dehumanizing that are kind of going on in all our societal systems. So, you know, you take a look at schools for most people I've ever known.

I mean, I did really well in school. I hated most of it, you know? And I talk about a lot of anti-authoritarians and resisting a legitimate authority, who they all hated, even the ones who did really well in it. And so, you know, school fits a certain kind of narrow group of people, standardized schools, okay? For some people, they're very happy there, you know? They don't care about getting, you know, whatever. They're fine with their Bs and being cheerleaders or whatever the heck it is. It works out for them. But for the vast majority of people, this is a miserable place. And so...

Even a lot of cool teachers know this stuff, that they're mostly in studies show this, they're turning kids off from independent learning, from kids stop there if they do less reading for leisure when they're in high school than they did when they were in grade school. It's just, you know, so there's, I guess my point here is I could go on about a lot of the other spokes in the wheel, but it's not just psychiatry. And that's why part of what I try to do when I'm out there is there's a limited amount of people who are critical thinkers.

like Roger and like some of these other folks I've mentioned in this Madden America orbit and that other, you know, International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry. There's a limit on people, but there are other critical thinkers, anti-authoritarians in reforming schools and other spokes of the wheel who that's more fun for me to connect on. And when they listen to a show like what we're doing right here, they may not know any of these things that we're talking about, but intuitively they're not going to immediately go.

Oh, this can't be right because they know they're spoken the wheel, whether it's schools or prisons or something else. And they're going, yeah, I get this. This fat feels like the same playbook. So I don't know if I've answered or given you three wishes or four or whatever I've done there, but I tried to give you some ideas.

Sean (01:34:01.213)
Yeah, it's well said. Well said. I know personally, I really hope that you do more podcasts. You know, this is the way that worth information is kind of being spread now. And you can just see the data around this how many people are getting information through podcasts, because it's passive, the mainstream media is so discredited. I mean, you don't really trust it in the same way. So you're looking towards like independent experts or

people just who were willing to have a conversation on these ideas. So Bruce, I really do appreciate you coming on our show. And I hope you do more. Because I think that Back to the Borderline podcast was amazing. I thought this was entertaining and informative. And there's so many different directions we could continue to go in. But just, you know, we're limited with time, I'm sure, you know, if you're willing, if you could come back on and address some of these other subjects that

I certainly am going to have more questions on because I'm just now I'm just so much into your work. You know, really just a lot of brilliant ideas that you just don't hear too many people anymore, you know, really talking about and I think it does take someone from a previous generation to be able to influence current generations. So I really do appreciate you coming on. How can people access your work right now?

bruce levine (01:35:17.232)
Well, the easiest way is just I have a website. It's my name bruceleveen.net. So bruceleveen.net. And what I do, I post all, like I'll try to get this on when you guys got on. I have video links there. I try to put whatever I'm doing podcasts. I've got all my articles are there. And so people can look at that and I will list my books and all that. But there's a ton of articles.

People don't want to pay any money. They just want to read things for free. They're all there. And that's the main way. Like I say, these days, you've listed a lot of the different places that I write at. Probably I'm writing more the places that I feel best about writing these days are at Madden America and at Counterpunch, which is kind of an anti-authoritarian sort of left, but they do some libertarian, but they're more.

open to anybody who, you know, more critical thinking. And, you know, unfortunately, some of the other places I've written in the past that were more open to criticism of mental health, they're getting a little more timid and a little more scared. So it's a weird thing on one level, we're making more progress in getting the word out there and getting some of these establishment mental health figures to sort of alter themselves, guys like Alan Francis and Insull and all these characters. But on another level, our society is just even more kind of being dominated by these BS,

and even some of the so-called progressive media is intimidated. So it's a great thing what you're doing. And last point, I agree with you completely. I'm not somebody attached, you know, I like writing books, I like reading books, but I realize, you know, this is this era here. It's, you know, people are getting a lot more information from podcasts. And so I'm with you. And I enjoy doing these things. I try to do them wherever I can. And this is kind of, it's a lot of fun for me to do as well. A lot of fun hanging out with both of you guys.

Sean (01:37:06.617)
Right. We really appreciate it. It was certainly a radically genuine podcast. Keep up the great work and I'm going to spread the message and try to get you on some other podcasts. Take care, Bruce.

bruce levine (01:37:18.98)
Take care.