Psychiatric News is the official publication of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).  The publication recently reported on the annual election of officers of the APA, featuring the new president-elect, Petros Levounis, M.D.  The article reports Dr. Levounis's priorities and that "he plans to do the following:  Amplify the psychiatrist's voice on critical social issues, such as systemic racism, homophobia, and climate change."

Let's deconstruct this trinity of social issues, which are of paramount concern to the incoming leader of American psychiatrists.

Systemic racism.  A senseless term that alleges race-based enmity in "the system."  What system?  There is no major organization in America, not on any level or in any branch of the government, not the major private corporations, not the mainstream religious organizations, that is systemically racist.  In truth, systemic racism is verbal manipulation to evoke the idea that European-Americans ("whites") are perpetually hateful to Americans of other races, especially African-Americans.  The APA is engaging in the worst kind of divisive, destructive race-baiting in claiming there is a crisis of systemic racism in America.

Homophobia.  Understanding phobia is the bread and butter of psychiatry.  Phobia is a severe anxiety disorder in which the patient flees from and goes to sometimes extreme lengths to avoid the feared object.  To claim that specific phobia toward homosexual people is a leading social crisis is not merely insane, but purposefully slanderous against the America people, who are a tolerant, adaptive people.

Climate change.  This all-encompassing anti-scientific nonsensicality may be the most destructive of all.  Consider autism, a neurological disease that may indeed have environmental multi-toxicity factors.  Unlike the Wuhan virus, which, by design, intentional or unintentional, does not affect children much at all, autism is a pandemic of children.  Virtue-signaling about climate change obscures and delays the science that someday may provide useful answers to the real crisis of autism.

Dr. Levounis is based in the New York metropolitan area.  He may have little connection to the American mainstream, to our faith, character, and goodness.  The organization that he will soon head calls itself the American Psychiatric Association.  It is truly the Anti-American Psychiatric Association.  Its foci go to irrational lengths to despise the American people, to think of us as racist, as bigots, as bad people who drive trucks and cars and riding lawnmowers.  What do they get from this rigid blindness?  A great deal.  They get an unassailable sense of moral superiority without self-awareness or selfless service to anyone.

When I was a young psychologist, I briefly worked at the Oregon State Hospital where the movie One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest was filmed.  In the basements of those dread buildings, there were still heavy metal rings where mentally ill people were chained to the wall in the dank darkness.  Science alone ended that cruelty.  It was not ended by recycling plastic bottles or by gay-bisexual-queer pride.  Science found ways to muffle the demons in the skulls of the mentally ill.

In this time of a tidal wave of mental illness in America, it is a disaster that psychiatry is turning away from the rigors and sacrifices of scientific medicine to fall into the quicksand of anti-scientific, self-serving progressive dogma.

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