Part 6 - A Psychohistory of American Psychology: Please DO NOT Mangle, Spindle or Mutilate Me

In July 1979, Jimmy Carter went to Camp David for ten days and came back with the strangest speech a sitting American president has ever given. Officially it was about energy. Functionally it was about the soul. Eighteen months later, Ronald Reagan won forty-four states by promising the opposite, and American psychology received its marching orders for the next forty years.

This episode traces how the apparatus got built. From Mario Savio's "put your bodies upon the gears" speech in 1964 to the dispersal of the counterculture into yuppies, Silicon Valley engineers, Lockheed contractors, oil-patch roughnecks, and the back-to-the-land movement that eventually curdled into the survivalist pipeline. From David Rosenhan's fraudulent 1973 study "On Being Sane in Insane Places" to Robert Spitzer's typewriter parties at Columbia, where two new psychiatric disorders could be drafted between cups of coffee. From the Feighner Criteria and the St. Louis Group to the Medicare Resource-Based Relative Value Scale and the RUC, the secret AMA committee that sets the prices of every medical procedure in the country while the nation tells itself it has a free market. From the academic capture of CBT and the manualization of what could be measured to Allen Frances spending his retirement trying to take back what he had built.

At the heart of it sits the bet the field made and lost. For thirty years, American psychiatry wagered its entire diagnostic edifice on the assumption that biological validation was imminent, that the genes and the imaging and the neurotransmitter chemistry would arrive in time to retroactively justify the DSM. Twenty billion dollars later, NIMH director Thomas Insel posted a blog three weeks before the DSM-5 shipped admitting the categories were not scientifically valid. He later told Wired he had funded a lot of cool papers and not moved the needle on suicide, hospitalization, or recovery for tens of millions of Americans. The cathedral had been built on a foundation that turned out not to exist, and the surrounding infrastructure had become too entangled with it to demolish.

This is the story of how a profession built to listen to suffering became a wall that suffering speaks into. Diagnosis as checkbox, payment as procedural code, research as citation farming, and the Sherman Antitrust Act ensuring that the only people who could fix any of it, the frontline clinicians, are forbidden by federal law from organizing the way that would give them leverage.

 

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