On his book Break On Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture
Cover Interview of February 12, 2020
The wide angle
Break on Through examines the US-based mental health
profession, activism, and the American mind in the 1970s. It’s quite a large
canvas. I wanted readers to get a handle on the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders and the struggles within the American Psychiatric
Association. At the same time, I wanted to shed new light on emergent and
sometimes bizarre mental health therapies (Transactional Analysis, Primal Therapy),
Scientology, and the rise of parapsychology.
My goal was to move beyond the supposedly countercultural
1960s and closely interrogate control and resistance within the mental health
marketplace from a wider angle. How, I wondered, was the American mind twisted
and turned in the 1970s? What was the role of psychiatry and psychology? Who
were the major actors shaping mainstream and alternative views of mental health
therapy, and what drove continuity and change? How did intoxicants, for
instance, facilitate therapies?
Cannabis is a good example. As many of us know, cannabis is
placing pressure on public health officials, psychiatrists, and others. Just
like it did 50 years ago. Increased marketing, the availability of CBD, new
vaping technologies, and consumer demand force us as scholars to think
critically about the past and the development of proper strategies and policies
in the future. Understanding its links with mental health really matters. In Break
on Through I sketch the theories and debates about cannabis and mental
health – making sure to connect this to the present.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
Break on Through examines the US-based mental health profession, activism, and the American mind in the 1970s. It’s quite a large canvas. I wanted readers to get a handle on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the struggles within the American Psychiatric Association. At the same time, I wanted to shed new light on emergent and sometimes bizarre mental health therapies (Transactional Analysis, Primal Therapy), Scientology, and the rise of parapsychology.
My goal was to move beyond the supposedly countercultural 1960s and closely interrogate control and resistance within the mental health marketplace from a wider angle. How, I wondered, was the American mind twisted and turned in the 1970s? What was the role of psychiatry and psychology? Who were the major actors shaping mainstream and alternative views of mental health therapy, and what drove continuity and change? How did intoxicants, for instance, facilitate therapies?
Cannabis is a good example. As many of us know, cannabis is placing pressure on public health officials, psychiatrists, and others. Just like it did 50 years ago. Increased marketing, the availability of CBD, new vaping technologies, and consumer demand force us as scholars to think critically about the past and the development of proper strategies and policies in the future. Understanding its links with mental health really matters. In Break on Through I sketch the theories and debates about cannabis and mental health – making sure to connect this to the present.