{"id":22718,"date":"2026-06-16T15:23:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T19:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=22718"},"modified":"2026-06-16T15:23:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T19:23:28","slug":"my-40-year-war-on-psychiatry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/16\/my-40-year-war-on-psychiatry\/","title":{"rendered":"My 40 Year War on Psychiatry"},"content":{"rendered":"

My 40 Year War on Psychiatry<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard,\u00a0 June 16, 2026<\/p>\n

Forty years ago, I attended the annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington and my sanity never recovered. Or at least that is what therapists presume based on my writings about their endless fabrication of bogus mental illnesses.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was attending as a journalist to find grist for my weekly Detroit News<\/em> column. That conference spurred zesty protests by Scientologists, feminists, and folks who never forgave the Electric Shock Therapy they endured.<\/p>\n

My \u201cPure Madness from Psychiatrists\u201d op-ed, published on June 5, 1986, listed the latest proposed perfidious labels offered by therapists:<\/p>\n

The first of 1986\u2019s new \u201cmental illness\u201d is \u201cpremenstrual dysphoric disorder.\u201d The APA says symptoms of this \u201cmental illness\u201d include \u201cirritability,\u201d \u201cmarked fatigue,\u201d and \u201cnegative evaluation of self.\u201d According to the APA\u2019s definition, a third of all women go crazy once a month.<\/p>\n

The second newly ordained mental illness is \u201cself-defeating personality type,\u201d previously known as common or garden-variety masochism. The symptoms for this grave disorder include \u201ccomplaints, directly or indirectly, about being unappreciated,\u201d \u201crepeatedly turns down opportunities for pleasure,\u201d and \u201cremains in relationships in which others\u2026 take advantage of him or her.\u201d Bring on the Valium!<\/p>\n

The third \u201cdiscovery\u201d is a humdinger \u2013 guaranteed to raise the APA\u2019s popularity with trial lawyers. The APA has tentatively decided that anyone who persistently fantasizes about or actively forces a non-consenting person to have sex suffers from \u201cparaphilic rapism.\u201d In other words, a person would have to be nuts to rape somebody. The Committee of Women of the APA said the new category would \u201cprovide an instant insanity plea for anyone charged with rape.\u201d The redefinition of rape epitomizes psychiatry\u2019s view of crime: no one is responsible for anything and psychiatrists should have supervision over everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The therapy business has gotten far wackier since then. Psychiatrists concocted labels that leave millions of Americans at their mercy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The American Psychiatric Association\u2019s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders<\/em> (DSM) now lists more than three hundred mental illnesses, five times as many as it specified in the 1960s<\/strong>. Dr. Allen Frances, writing in Psychology Today<\/em>, warned that the latest DSM contained \u201cmany changes that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound\u201d and is \u201clikely to lead to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication.\u201d After the DSM redefined autism in the 1990s, the autism rate \u201cquickly multiplied almost 100-fold.\u201d That has spurred a deluge of squirrely Medicaid contractors and some of the worst federal frauds of the year.<\/p>\n

Thanks to another DSM redefinition, the \u201cnumber of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold\u201d between 1993 and 2004, The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> reported. I met one of those unfortunate twenty-something designees when I was taking a smoke break outside a Maryland brewery a few years ago. She asked if I had any cigarettes; I offered her a cigar instead. I asked about the unusual tattoo on her wrist, and she said that was to memorialize the 18 people she knew who had died. She was as somber as the girl poet that Mark Twain memorialized in Huckleberry Finn.<\/p>\n

She worked creating signs for a local company. She gravely confided that her life was difficult because she had been diagnosed as bipolar. I asked how her bipolar disorder manifested in her life.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome mornings, I just want to lie in bed and not go to work,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n

Shizam, if I was making signs for parking spots, I might feel the same way. But this woman sounded like that diagnosis was a ball-and-chain she would drag behind her forever. University of Southern California clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe warns<\/a> that mental-illness labels have \u201cbecome an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique. . .telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Psychiatrist Laurent Mottron complained in 2023 that the latest version of the DSM \u201cis full of vague and trivial definitions and ambiguous language that ensures more people fall into various, abnormal categories.\u201d Steven E. Hyman\u2014the former director at the National Institute of Mental Health\u2014warned in 2013 that the authors of the DSM<\/p>\n

. . .chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with \u201cnormal.\u201d But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn\u2019t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don\u2019t have five diseases \u2014 they have one underlying condition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A deluge of new mental illnesses is helping to hobble an entire young generation.<\/strong> Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz warned in the last century, \u201cPsychiatrists manufacture mental diagnoses the way the Vatican manufactures saints.\u201d<\/strong> The New York Times<\/em> recently showcased psychiatric \u201cprevalence inflation\u201d\u2014a vast increase in reported mental illness among teenagers because they are encouraged to view normal symptoms as grave maladies requiring intervention.<\/p>\n

Psychiatrists have helped some individuals better understand themselves and deal more deftly with everyday reality. But bogus mental illnesses have turned millions of healthy Americans into \u201cmental patients,\u201d according to Dr. Allen Frances. That debacle explains why Thomas Szasz crusaded against the \u201ctherapeutic state\u201d and the \u201cmedicalization of everyday life<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Antidepressant prescriptions for Americans aged 12 to 25 soared by 66 percent between 2016 and 2022. Roughly one in six adults in America currently take medications for depression or anxiety. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently lamented antidepressants are more addictive than heroin.<\/p>\n

The Americans with Disabilities Act can convert mental illnesses into an entitlement program. People with a mental illness diagnosis become entitled to demand \u201creasonable accommodation\u201d from employers, schools, and other entities. Even before the pandemic, up to 25 percent of students at top colleges were \u201cclassified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams,\u201d the Wall Street Journal<\/em> reported in 2018. A Boston University analysis of students on almost 400 campuses in 2022 found that \u201c60% of the respondents met the qualifying criteria for \u2018one or more mental health problems, a nearly 50% increase from 2013.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Hooking people on bogus labels and antidepressants has already ruined too many American lives. Passing out millions more psychiatric Purple Hearts will not make this nation happier or more sane.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My 40 Year War on Psychiatry by James Bovard,\u00a0 June 16, 2026 Forty years ago, I attended the annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington and my sanity never recovered. Or at least that is what therapists presume based on my writings about their endless fabrication of bogus mental illnesses. I was attending […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4174,645,4483,3197,219,1897,218,114,4620],"class_list":["post-22718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ada","tag-americans-with-disabilities-act","tag-bipolar-disorder","tag-detroit-news","tag-dsm","tag-mental-illness","tag-psychiatry","tag-szasz","tag-therapy"],"yoast_head":"\nMy 40 Year War on Psychiatry - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I have been thumping therapists for 40 years. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22721,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22718\/revisions\/22721"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}