Capitalism & The Toll on the Human Soul

Since it is #MentalHealthAwareness Month, I want to explore Karl Marx's theory of human alienation under capitalism. When we delve into the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), we learn that there are at least 4 inter-related reasons people become disenchanted:...

Schizophrenia and the Racist View of Sanity

Black men are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than other subsets of the population. Schizophrenia, according to the DSM-5, is a chronic mental illness that makes it difficult for a person to distinguish reality from falsehood. It...

Architectural Terrorism: Parent-Child Adjoining Bedrooms

Across time and space, human beings have constructed taboos against sexual activity with close relatives. The most commonly stigmatized and legally prohibited incestuous relationships include parent-child and sibling-sibling unions. In the first part of this series, I argued that homes...

Money For Wars But Cant Feed the Poor

Last year, I went to a community meeting in my neighborhood. The goal of this gathering was for local politicians to gauge the concerns of residents. To accomplish this, a chart was posted on the wall listing the following categories:...

How the Pharmaceutical Industry Manipulates Mental Health

The pharmaceutical industry wields an immense amount of influence over both mental health professionals and the general public. With their unmatched power over regulatory processes and direct-to-consumer advertising, pharmaceutical companies create and shape knowledge of psychiatric illness. There are at...

How Freud Might Interpret My Dream

For thousands of years, conventional wisdom held that dreams were either meaningless or were products of a supernatural power. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, Dr. Sigmund Freud (1900) re-calibrates these popular views by arguing that dreams are a...

Laws Are Ego Defense Mechanisms

Our general conception of "law" needs to be completely re-thought. Conventional wisdom espouses the belief that the legal process is neutral and objective. The sheer mentioning of law summons biblical images of Moses descending from the mountains with the Commandments....