Unshrunk: Laura Delano’s breakaway from psychiatry
Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance is more than a memoir of Laura Delano’s journey through pain, survival, and recovery. It is a fearless, forensic examination of a psychiatric system that too often harms those it is meant to help.
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stablishment psychiatry has recently switched the biological cause of mental illness from a “chemical imbalance” to a “brain circuitry defect.” There is no more important institution in establishment psychiatry than the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and in 2022, psychiatrist Thomas Insel, NIMH director from 2002-2015, stated in his book Healing, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.”
Do Critics of Biological Psychiatry Have an Alternative to a Life of “Whack-A-Mole”?
The way psychiatry treats those who deviate from the norm is akin to the outdated and unhelpful way that industry used to understand the assembly line—something that manufacturing started moving away from by the mid-20th century.
While controversy swirls around last week’s mass firing of 1,000 Department of Veterans Affairs’ employees, a far greater threat to veterans’ health care is going completely unnoticed. Powerful leaders in Congress have quietly unveiled their plan to gut VA-delivered care, wrapped in the misleadingly titled “Veterans’ ACCESS Act.” If veterans don’t act fast, they will lose the VA health care system they know and depend on.
The bill appears innocuous enough, with aspirations of accountability. But don’t be fooled. Hidden in its depths like a ticking time bomb is a provision intended to dismantle the integrated VA health care system faster than you can say “privatization.”
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Follow the money, which will hemorrhage from the VA to the private sector. The likely outcome is that the VA will close its inpatient services and instead become a sprawling assortment of outpatient clinics. If that sounds familiar, it is the plan laid out in the Project 2025 playbook. Veterans are being hoodwinked that the VA facilities they rely on won’t be impacted. Don’t buy it for a second.
Previously:
What’s in Store for VA Disability Benefits with New Office of Management and Budget Chief?
Read More »President Trump’s suggestion last month that the tragic Potomac air crash was somehow the fault of disabled federal air traffic controllers was appalling—but it should have come as no surprise. Trump’s contempt for people with disabilities has been well documented, and it’s that animus, combined with the accelerating MAGA assault on diversity throughout the United States, that has disability rights advocates preparing to defend decades worth of hard-won protections.
One month into his presidency, Trump has unleashed a government-wide attack on people with disabilities, from anti-diversity executive orders to proposed special-education rollbacks to threats to slash programs like Medicaid that are lifelines for disabled people across the country. If successful, these actions could have catastrophic consequences for millions of Americans, according to disability rights experts.
Donald Trump’s Next Diversity Target: People With Disabilities
Related:
In the video below, Rep. Jahana Hayes mentions how Trump’s DEIA order is already affecting special education.
DEI (A?) – The Effect of Donald Trump’s DEI Executive Order on Accessibility
On President Trump’s first day in office, he immediately issued a new Executive Order declaring Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DEI”) efforts “illegal.” With this new order in effect, previous mandates that implemented DEI efforts both in the federal government and among federal contractors were revoked.
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While the primary focus is on race- and sex-based affirmative action, the Order lumps together “DEI” and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (“DEIA”) efforts. So, disability inclusion efforts may now be under scrutiny as well.
Congress wants to know if “overmedication” of prescription drugs by VA doctors has been a factor in veteran suicides.
After kicking six different medications, this veteran now studies ‘overmedication’ in VA care
The question of women’s liberation is central to any revolutionary project, and thus so is the question of “sex work.” Esperanza Fonseca’s contribution, although coming from a Maoist political orientation with which we often have differences, [1] makes the stakes of this debate crystal clear, as she combines personal experience, public policy research, and historical materialism to argue that Marxists cannot uphold what she calls “sex-trade-expansionary feminism.”
Content Warning: Descriptions of rape.
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The right of the subordinated classes of men to buy access to women’s bodies has been used historically to break class solidarity in order to maintain the dominant social relations of the time. This was true in feudal Europe and remains true today: when proletarian and petit bourgeois men get to buy women too, they develop a false consciousness and build solidarity with bourgeois men of their own gender rather than aligning with women of their own class. And because the overthrow of capitalism is only possible by the overthrowing of the bourgeoisie, prostitution serves two great purposes: (1) allows bourgeois men access to a reserve army of women for their pleasure, and (2) prevent class consciousness and thus helps stop the proletariat from organizing as a class.
A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work” (2020)
This is from something that I’ve been working on regarding Freudian psychology and social conditioning. Unfortunately, one of the author’s sources is Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which falsely equates Communism with Nazism. To be honest, I haven’t found any “perfect” sources for my project. Even Michael Parenti’s Against Psychopolitics quotes problematic sources (Harold Lasswell was involved with the RAND Corporation). While Karl Korsch had worked for the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which was home to the CIA front Frankfurt School, I like the above quote. I’ll probably end up using a different one when it’s all said and done, though.
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Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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