OMNI NEWSLETTER #4 ON
MANUFACTURED FEAR USA
AND REMEDIES, March 16, 2013.
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT for a Culture of Peace and Justice.
(First Newsletter on Fear October 22, 2007; 2nd on Nov. 19, 2007; 3rd
January 16, 2011. Go to OMNI’s Web Site
for newsletters.)
See Islamophobia Newsletter.
WHAT DO THESE
STATISTICS TELL US ABOUT OUR LEADERS AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA?
Number of
registered voters in Texas
without a photo I.D: More than 600,000.
Number of alleged
cases of voter fraud in Texas
in the last two general elections: Four. (Cartoon ADG
4-2-12)
Number of
private U.S.
citizens killed in terrorist attacks in 2010:
15.
Number killed by
falling televisions: 16. (“Harper’s Index” August 2012)
Dick’s blog: War
Department/Peace Department
My Newsletters:
(see: Interdependence, Internationalism, etc.)
Index:
http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/
A
knowledge-based peace, justice, and ecology movement and an informed citizenry
depend upon an open democracy.
In addition to elections, for democracy to function well,
information must be free and transparent and not controlled to create fear
through secrecy and militarism, the enforcers of totalitarianism.
Contents
#2
Fear-Up
Technique
Molly
Ivins v. Fear-mongers
3
Local Writers v. Fear
George
Arnold: Ann Write and White Flour Scare
Terrorism
Xenophobia
Nuclear
Enemies
Police
Shoot to Kill
Pentagon/White
House Use of Fear
From
Before WWII to Bush-Cheney
Diverse
Public Fears
CONTENTS #3
Manufacturing Fear
Books
Robert Reich on START and Intolerance
Noam Chomsky
Fear Social Justice?
War on Terror Fear Mongering
More Books on Fear and Critical Thinking
Contents #4
Dick, Religious Discrimination and Persecution
Dick’s Letter to Free
Weekly, Fear-Based Foreign Policy
Donahue’s Film, Body
of War
Engelhardt’s Book on Fear USA
Lieven Review of Mueller, Terrorism Hype
Lean, Fear of Muslims
Wallechinsky, Big Pharmas, Profits from Disease Threats
Horwitz and Wakefield ,
Anxiety or Mental Disorder?
Here is the link
to all OMNI newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
Fear of immigrants, foreigners, others by Dick Bennett
During times of
crisis, doubt, and fear, people and governments turn to fundamentalist
intolerance and the persecution of minority groups. We see this cause-effect throughout
history. The defeat of the Spanish
Armada led to a new Spanish fundamentalism preaching purity and fighting
heresy. The Spanish Christian rulers
proscribed Islam, but of the Muslims who remained living in Spain , called
Moriscos, many continued to practice Islam secretly. And they were increasing
in number, giving rise to the fear they might some day become the majority. This perceived threat of demographic change, growing
diversity, and loss of power was used by the rulers to expel all Muslims from
1609 to 1614 in a heinous exodus of suffering and death.
Domestic US today looks humane
compared to this Spanish example or to the expulsion of the Cherokees in the
nineteenth century Trail of Tears, yet similar fears and persecutions persist
with similar if not such bloody consequences. Just as the Spaniards had made
Islam illegal, now we have designated people seeking a better life illegal
immigrants. Part of the anxiety derives
from ancient xenophobia, a fear of a counter-identity. Some people fear loss of their jobs by
immigrant competition. Apparently the
fear has increased, as reflected by the persecution, for in its first four years, Mr. Obama's
administration deported as many illegal immigrants as the administration of George W. Bush did in his two terms,
Some compassionate,
tolerant Spanish nobles opposed the discrimination, the arbitrariness, the proscription,
and the deportations. One Pedro de
Valencia writing in 1606 called for gradual integration through dispersion,
mixed marriages, and better living conditions.
A few recognized that appropriate incentives would eventually lead the
Moriscos to become loyal subjects. Instead
the majority with the King chose hideous intolerance and cruelty.
Similarly today,
reasonable citizens recommend a generous enlargement of immigrant quotas. Not of all who seek a better life, not as
Emma Lazarus wrote in her sonnet, “The New Collosus,” inscribed on the pedestal
of the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses.” But
in that spirit we certainly can and should accept significantly more. Many other countries absorb immigrants at a higher rate
than the U.S.
does once you factor in the size of each nation’s population. Using the measurement of permanent, annual
immigrant inflows per overall population, the U.S. in 2009 ranked only 11th out of a selection
of 28 advanced industrialized nations, trailing such countries as Australia , Austria ,
Switzerland , New Zealand , Norway
and Ireland . And using United Nations data on the
cumulative number of resident immigrants as a share of total population, the U.S.
ranks only 25th in the world.
And if Christian US
deportation of Christian illegal workers is less brutal than that of the
seventeenth-century Spaniards’ expulsion of illegal Muslims, the US deports many
more than did ruling Spain. As
Professor Daniel Kanstroom has recounted in his book, Aftermath, since
1996, when new, harsher deportation laws went into effect under the Clinton administration, the US has deported millions of
noncitizens back to their countries of origin, yet hardly any attention has
been paid to what actually happens to deportees. In fact, we have fostered a new diaspora of
deportees, many of whom are alone and isolated, with strong ties to their
former communities in the United
States .
The uprooting of settled illegal immigrants especially with families,
the separation of spouses and children, have caused immeasurable grief. Kanstroom (also author of the
definitive history of US
deportation, Deportation Nation) criticizes the current deportation system of the United States and especially deportation's
aftermath: the actual effects on individuals, families, U.S. communities, and the countries that must
process and repatriate ever-increasing numbers of U.S. deportees. Few know, he
writes, that once deportees have been
expelled to places like Guatemala, Cambodia, Haiti, and El Salvador, many face
severe hardship, persecution and, in extreme instances, even death.
In his letter to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Feb. 20, 2013), Stephen Clark appeals to US clergy to speak out in support of “the worldwide persecution of Christians.” He offers no evidence (but the newspaper restricts contributors to 250 words, or one page), but I join him in deploring any persecution, which has plagued some religions for hundreds of years, including Christianity
In his letter to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Feb. 20, 2013), Stephen Clark appeals to US clergy to speak out in support of “the worldwide persecution of Christians.” He offers no evidence (but the newspaper restricts contributors to 250 words, or one page), but I join him in deploring any persecution, which has plagued some religions for hundreds of years, including Christianity
Mr. Clark
also states that “the persecution is especially severe in North Korea , Saudi
Arabia , Iraq ,
Pakistan , Egypt , and Afghanistan .” If so, I denounce them for it as I do US Christian
bigotry against other faiths, as in the expulsion of millions of undocumented
people since 1996, mainly Hispanics but also Muslims and others. Note the sub-title of Anouar Majid’s
book: We Are All Moors: Ending
Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities. After the death of Jesus, his followers were
nonviolent. But by 420 Christianity was
beginning to persecute heresies. By 436,
Christianity had been so transformed that only Christians could serve in the
Roman legions, and nonviolence was a heresy to be persecuted. Then
Islam arose and moved westward, until the Battle of Potiers in 732, when the Christian re-conquest began and the
Crusades, and today Mr. Clark perceives Christians as the victims and calls
upon Christian pastors to take action..
Had he ended there, no great
intensification of the ancient hatred and bloodshed of the re-conquest would
have been suggested. But he ends his letter
with a quotation from pastor Dietrich
Bonhoeffer warning Germans during WWII that “Silence in the face of evil is
itself evil. God will not hold us
guiltless.” By that quotation, possibly
unintentionally he insinuates that not only are five Islamic countries and one
communist country guilty of “severe” persecution of Christians (no details
given), but that they are “evil” comparable to Hitler. Two of the countries are among the “Axis of
Evil,” President Bush’s war cry, you are either with us or against us.
Such association and call for action can
lead only to continued distrust and conflict.
The last century witnessed endless fear, bitterness, and folly,
resulting in the deaths and impoverishment of millions and grievous damage to
the environment. Now in the
twenty-first century, let us reject hatred and aggression, discrimination and
persecution.
REFERENCES
Kanstroom, Daniel
. Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American
Diaspora 2012. Deportation
Nation: Outsiders in American History. 2012.
Majid,
Anouar. We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and
Other Minorities. 2009.
Shear, Michael. “Advocates Push Obama to Halt Aggressive
Deportation Efforts.” New York Times (Feb. 22, 2013).
Smith-Christopher, Daniel, ed. Subverting
Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions. 1998.
Letter to Editor [US Foreign Policy Constructed Out
of Fear]
Terrah Baker, Free Weekly
361 words
Thank you for “Truths from
Terrah” and your suspicion of the power of fear and fearmongers over your
personal choices. “I want to live in a
society where my fears are based on reality, and not agendas of politicians or
corporations. . . .” (8-23-12). Fear also directs our foreign policies.
Unfortunately, US imperialism
and militarism thrive on fear of manufactured threats and enemies: the Westward
movement against the “savages,” against the Mexicans, and then across the
Pacific (Hawaii, Guam, Philippines, Okinawa, South Korea, Australia, Jeju Island
to contain first the Japanese and then the Chinese); and Cold War, Drug Wars,
War on Terrorism: over 50 illegal, unnecessary invasions and interventions
since WWII, now over a thousand bases abroad in a hundred countries. The Empire feeds on threat and fear, powerful
suppressors of resistance.
Through the nine Unified Combatant Commands of the United States Armed Forces--Africom the latest--the Pentagon has planned the
planet for domination, according to a New
York Times story about Central America, “to confront emerging threats while
it draws on hard lessons learned from a decade of counterinsurgency in
Afghanistan and Iraq.” (i.e., killing people resisting invasion and occupation
by a foreign power).
Who and where are these
enemies, according to Army chief of Staff Ray Odierno interviewed by Charlie
Rose on CBS (6-15-12)? “Well, that’s
the thing. . . .It could be a state, it could be a nation state, it could be
insurgents, it could be nonstate actors, it could be terrorists, it could be a
combination of all of those, frankly. . . .and it’s translating into potential
future military operations that we might have to conduct.” For the Pentagon our “enemies” are now
possibly everywhere and everybody.
So, Ms. Baker, as you say
about medical marijuana, speak up people.
The actual hard lessons learned are the benefits of marijuana contrasted
to alcohol, and the benefits of bringing our soldiers home instead of killing more
tens of thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of our soldiers. For more
information: jbennet@uark.edu; Blog: It's the War
Department, http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/;
Newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/, see Index;
and attend the Book Forum on US Empire, September 21, 2012 at OMNI.
Dick
Bennett
442-4600
References:
William Blum. Killing
Hope and Rogue State .
Phil Donahue. Film Body
of War.
Tom Engelhardt. The United States
of Fear.
Seth Mnookin. The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine,
Science, and Fear.
John Mueller. Overblown:
How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats,
and Why We Believe them.
Tomgram:
David Vine , U.S. Empire of Bases Grows
Posted by David Vine July 15,
2012.
Josmar Trujillo. “Radicals, Terrorists and Traffickers—Oh My.” Extra! (September 2012) 14.
Josmar Trujillo. “Radicals, Terrorists and Traffickers—Oh My.” Extra! (September 2012) 14.
Also see the books listed in
the Book Forum on US Empire news release.
And Dick’s Newsletters: US Fear Culture (now four numbers); US
Imperialism and Militarism (five different newsletters, over a dozen numbers in
total); many more related topics.
DONAHUE’S FILM BODY OF WAR
Dear Dick,
I’m very pleased to be partnering with The Peace Alliance
for a Fall campaign around a film I produced and co-directed entitled Body of War.
I hope you will join us by hosting a movie watching party to
get the word out about this important story of a political rush to war and the
tragic consequences for one young man.
Tomas Young, 25 years old, was paralyzed from a bullet to
his spine - wounded after serving in Iraq for less than a week. Body of
War is in part Tomas's moving coming home story as he evolves into a new
person, coming to terms with his disability and finding his own unique and
passionate voice against the war.
The film also takes a
bold political review of the build-up and rush to war. It spotlights President
Bush's perfect campaign of fear and shows a fear-filled Congress whose members
actually read aloud the White House talking points -- word for word. A shallow debate and political vote ensued
that killed thousands of Iraq
citizens and over four thousand Americans.
"A blotch on the Congress and the Executive that will
live forever."
- Senator Robert Byrd
This film shows the danger of political complacency and puts
a human face on the consequences.
I hope you will join us to show this film and use it as an
opportunity to urge people to take actions that can help avert future wars.
Maybe you will show this film in your home. Or maybe you’ll rent a theater in your
community, or show it at a local church, synagogue or university. Our young draft age youth especially need to
see this movie.
Learn more and sign-up to host a movie party here.
We hope you will join with us. Each of us needs to stand and
take action for smarter alternatives to war and violent conflict.
-Engelhardt,
Tom. The
United States
of Fear. Haymarket, 2011. Advert.: Following 9-11, “How the
country—gripped by terror fantasies—was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite profited while America quietly burned.”
--Mueller, John.
Overblown: How Politicians and the
Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe
them. Free P, 2007. Rev. NYT
Book Review (Feb. 18, 2007).
A State of Terror
By ANATOL LIEVEN,
February 18, 2007 [REVIEW OF MUELLER]
It is a common experience for
journalists covering low-intensity conflicts to see masses of civilians running
from the mere rumor of far-off attacks. They flee in motor vehicles driven at
high speed down narrow, overcrowded roads, often at night without lights for
fear of enemy fire. The result is a death rate from accidents that often dwarfs
the losses from enemy action. Yet despite the wrecks littering the sides of the
roads, nothing will persuade the drivers that they are making a false
calculation of risk. They think they know how to drive. They do not understand
the relative risks of war.
Guy Billout
OVERBLOWN
How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National
Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.
By John Mueller. 259
pp. Free Press. $25.
Related
First
Chapter: ‘Overblown’ (February 18, 2007)
Readers’ Opinions
In this important book, John Mueller
dares to raise this issue with regard to the United States: whether the entire response to 9/11 — not just the
war in Iraq, but the “war on terror” itself, and the monstrous security
bureaucracy it has spawned — is, in his word, “overblown.” He suggests that
9/11 was probably a one-time event that cannot be repeated; that the threat
from domestic terrorist groups in the United States is almost
nonexistent; and that the administration, politicians, security bureaucracy and
news media have whipped the American population into a state of terror over
terrorism that is simply not justified by the facts.
In
his words: “Which is the greater threat:
terrorism, or our reaction against it? ... A threat that is real but likely
to prove to be of limited scope has been massively, perhaps even fancifully,
inflated to produce widespread and unjustified anxiety. This process has then
led to wasteful, even self-parodic expenditures and policy overreactions.”
As
Mueller explains in “Overblown,” fear of flying after 9/11 led to increases in
long-distance driving that probably killed far more people in accidents than
died on the four hijacked planes on 9/11. More Americans have now been killed
in Iraq
than were killed on the day of the attacks, while the number of Iraqi and
Afghan deaths exceeds the 9/11 figure by orders of magnitude.
Mueller
points to the pathetic results of domestic antiterrorism efforts compared with
the rhetoric accompanying them. In six years, with the exception of the 9/11
conspiracy itself, no serious terrorist cell on American soil has in fact been
identified, and no serious terrorist attack has occurred in the country itself.
Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio
State University and the author of several books on international
affairs, admits that tightened immigration
security may have been partly responsible for the failure of international
terrorists to penetrate the United States, but he suggests that the notoriously
porous character of the Mexican border would have given them ample
opportunities had they really been determined to exploit them.
A
good deal of the domestic war on terror does indeed provide material for
merciless fun — like the 80,000 potential terrorist targets in the United
States listed by the Department of Homeland Security, including the
Weeki Wachee Springs water park in Florida. Except of course, as Mueller
observes, none of this is a joke in terms of money. Domestic security has
proved a magnificent porkfest for a great range of beneficiaries, some of them
even more unlikely than Weeki Wachee Springs. The expense in taxpayers’
dollars, in turn, pales beside the damage caused by sometimes illegal
antiterrorism measures to the Constitution and to America ’s prestige in the world.
Mueller
looks to history to demonstrate a tradition of American overreaction to vastly
overblown domestic and international threats. These included the supposed
threat from German-Americans during the First World War and Japanese-Americans
during the Second, and of course from American Communists during the McCarthy
era and beyond.
Internationally,
Mueller correctly notes episodes like the — entirely artificial — “missile
gap,” exploited by John
F. Kennedy and the Democrats to win the 1960 elections; and to the
belief that the fall of South Vietnam to Communism would inevitably lead to the
fall of countries across Asia. He talks of the tendency of the American
establishment, all too often backed by the news media, to pick “devils du jour”
like Sukarno of Indonesia (remember him?), and build them up into great
Hitlerian menaces to American interests and well-being, when in many cases
these were tinpot figures barely capable of controlling their own countries.
We
know from the historical examples Mueller cites that there is a great deal to
this picture. And if we had doubts about the capacity of today’s Americans to
behave in the same way, the campaign for war with Iraq should certainly have
dispelled them. So Mueller’s critique is in general accurate, timely and
necessary.
Unfortunately,
he partly spoils his case by a lack of realism, and by a failure to relate
American behavior to that of other countries. A particularly drastic example of
these failings is in his discussion of America ’s
response to Pearl Harbor , an attack he
compares to 9/11. He suggests that the United
States had alternatives to all-out war with Japan after Pearl Harbor ,
and should have adopted a limited strategy of military containment and
harassment. But the recommendation is absurd. The result of such a strategy
would have been a victory by Japan
and its long-term hegemony over most of Asia .
A
better argument would be to say that in the cases of both Pearl
Harbor and 9/11, an all-out response was absolutely inevitable —
just as it would have been by any major state capable of fighting back. But
after Pearl Harbor, the United States
fought imperial Japan ,
and — following Hitler’s
declaration of war — Nazi Germany. It did not veer off to confront other states
completely unconnected to the attack.
This
is the mystery that Mueller’s book does not fully address: The fact that the
Bush administration’s response to 9/11 has not been an all-out struggle against
the perpetrators. On the contrary, Osama
bin Laden and his chief lieutenants were allowed to slip away and
are still at large. The high command of the Taliban
was also permitted to escape, and is now engaged in a ferocious counteroffensive.
One critical reason for this was that within weeks of the Taliban’s overthrow,
the Bush administration, with the support of much of America ’s
political class and news media, was already diverting troops and attention
toward planning the war with Iraq .
If,
God forbid, Islamist terrorists do succeed in launching another major attack on
the United States ,
then Mueller will be accused of having underplayed the danger. There is
something to this. He is, in my view, too complacent both about the inexorable
spread of the technologies of mass destruction and the spread of extremist
ideologies, especially among the Muslims of Europe. These threats need to be
taken extremely seriously. Where Mueller is quite right, however, is in arguing
that all too many of the responses to terrorism adopted by the Bush
administration have ranged from the pointless to the disastrous.
Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and the co-author, with John
Hulsman, of “Ethical Realism: A Vision for America ’s
US NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
FEARMONGERING
“100% Scared, National
Security Complex Grows On Terrorism Fears”
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Excerpt: "The National Security Complex has, in fact,
grown fat by relentlessly pursuing the promise of making the country totally
secure from terrorism, even as life grows ever less secure for so many
Americans when it comes to jobs, homes, finances, and other crucial matters. It
is on this pledge of protection that the Complex has managed to extort the
tidal flow of funds that have allowed it to bloat to monumental proportions,
end up with a yearly national security
budget of more than $1.2 trillion, find itself encased in a cocoon of
self-protective secrecy, and be 100% assured that its officials will never be
brought to justice for any potential crimes they may commit in their 'war' on
terrorism."
ISLAMOPHOBIA
Lean, Nathan. The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right
Manufactures Fear of Muslims. Pluto Press, 2012.
Rising tide of Islamophobia in US and Europe ,
in context of long history of national and international fears and
phobias.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Drug Companies Increase
Profits by Creating Fear of Diseases
David Wallechinsky, AllGov, Dec. 14, 2011, RSN
"Aggressive and creative marketing has permitted drug
manufacturers to convince millions of people they have a problem that requires
treatment and medication. Depression has been the poster child of this
successful selling of ailments, and served as a catchall diagnosis for everything
from sadness to anger to fear to remorse. But like any trend that has marketing
to thank for its existence, depression became passe. So nowadays the big drug
companies have been telling as many people as possible that they have adult
ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The industry even took out
billboards to spread the news of the disease by lighting up Times
Square with questions for consumers about lack of focus and
over-agitation."
Here is the link
to all OMNI newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and
ecology movement and an informed citizenry as the foundation for change. Many of these newsletters report on aspects
of US social control, of which the construction of fear is an important weapon.
All We Have
to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural
Anxieties into Mental Disorders
Allan V. Horwitz, PhD Jerome
C. Wakefield, DSW, PhD
ISBN13: 9780199793754ISBN10: 0199793751Hardcover, 320 pages
Description
Thirty years ago, it was estimated that less than five percent of
the population had an anxiety disorder. Today, some estimates are over fifty
percent, a tenfold increase. Is this dramatic rise evidence of a real medical
epidemic?
In All We Have to Fear, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argue that psychiatry itself has largely generated this "epidemic" by inflating many natural fears into psychiatric disorders, leading to the over-diagnosis of anxiety disorders and the over-prescription of anxiety-reducing drugs. American psychiatry currently identifies disordered anxiety as irrational anxiety disproportionate to a real threat. Horwitz and Wakefield argue, to the contrary, that it can be a perfectly normal part of our nature to fear things that are not at all dangerous--from heights to negative judgments by others to scenes that remind us of past threats (as in some forms of PTSD). Indeed, this book argues strongly against the tendency to call any distressing condition a "mental disorder." To counter this trend, the authors provide an innovative and nuanced way to distinguish between anxiety conditions that are psychiatric disorders and likely require medical treatment and those that are not--the latter including anxieties that seem irrational but are the natural products of evolution. The authors show that many commonly diagnosed "irrational" fears--such as a fear of snakes, strangers, or social evaluation--have evolved over time in response to situations that posed serious risks to humans in the past, but are no longer dangerous today.
Drawing on a wide range of disciplines including psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book illuminates the nature of anxiety inAmerica ,
making a major contribution to our understanding of mental health.
In All We Have to Fear, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argue that psychiatry itself has largely generated this "epidemic" by inflating many natural fears into psychiatric disorders, leading to the over-diagnosis of anxiety disorders and the over-prescription of anxiety-reducing drugs. American psychiatry currently identifies disordered anxiety as irrational anxiety disproportionate to a real threat. Horwitz and Wakefield argue, to the contrary, that it can be a perfectly normal part of our nature to fear things that are not at all dangerous--from heights to negative judgments by others to scenes that remind us of past threats (as in some forms of PTSD). Indeed, this book argues strongly against the tendency to call any distressing condition a "mental disorder." To counter this trend, the authors provide an innovative and nuanced way to distinguish between anxiety conditions that are psychiatric disorders and likely require medical treatment and those that are not--the latter including anxieties that seem irrational but are the natural products of evolution. The authors show that many commonly diagnosed "irrational" fears--such as a fear of snakes, strangers, or social evaluation--have evolved over time in response to situations that posed serious risks to humans in the past, but are no longer dangerous today.
Drawing on a wide range of disciplines including psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book illuminates the nature of anxiety in
Features
·
Offers
a fundamental, yet constructive, critique of psychiatric diagnostic criteria
while at the same time recognizing the existence of genuine mental disorders
·
Uniquely
combines perspectives from a wide range of disciplines that include psychiatry,
evolutionary psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history
·
Avoids
both the sweeping dismissal of psychiatry found in many current attacks on
definitions of mental disorder and the widespread acceptance of calling any
distressing condition as a "mental disorder"
·
Appeals
to academics, clinicians, and the lay reader
Reviews
"Finally, a book about anxiety disorders that is based on a
deep understanding of normal anxiety! I wish every mental health clinician
would read it. Its spectacularly clear prose reveals the landscape of normal
anxiety like an airplane's radar reveals the ground beneath the fog." -- Randolph M. Nesse, MD, Department of Psychiatry, The University of Michigan ,
Ann Arbor , MI
"The area of anxiety disorders has needed a thorough review
and a shake-up for a long time. In this bold and thought-provoking work, Allan
Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield have relied mainly on the insights from the
evolutionary theory to provide a critical and powerful analysis of the modern
concept of anxiety disorders. Regardless of whether or to what extent one
agrees with them, their book rightly challenges the prevailing notions and is
likely to perturb current thinking about fear, anxiety and anxiety disorders.
It will certainly add more substance to much-needed discussions and debates
about the nature of these conditions, psychiatric diagnoses, and an
often-imperceptible boundary between normality and psychopathology." -- Vladan Starcevic , MD ,
PHD, Department of Psychiatry, Sydney Medical School ,
University of Sydney , Australia
"does an excellent job at explaining the history and calling
into question the present state of anxiety diagnosing." San
Francisco Book Review
"The most intriguing aspect, though, is the authors'
discussion of how anxiety and social judgments can and have been so easily
intertwined and what the implications might be from labeling and medicating
anxieties instead of seeking to alter their underlying causes." San
Francisco Book Review.
"In their new book, Horwitz and Wakefield offer the same incisive analysis
that they brought to psychiatry's medicalization of sadness in their first
book, The Loss of Sadness, to explain the
reasons for the soaring prevalence of anxiety disorders over the past 20 years,
namely that psychiatry has been mislabeling normal anxiety and fear reactions as
disorder... Most importantly, they bring their analysis to bear on the actual
definitions of anxiety disorders that are enshrined in the American Psychiatric
Association's manual of mental disorders, pointing out the various weaknesses
and flaws with regard to construction of definitions of anxiety disorders that
effectively delineate normal anxiety and fear from abnormal anxiety and
fear." -- Michael B. First, MD, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University , New
York , NY
"does an excellent job at explaining the history and calling
into question the present state of anxiety diagnosing." Journal
of Psychosocial Nursing
''Horwitz and Wakefield
manage to make a strong case for the prosecution" LA
Review of Books
"This book presents some excellent arguments about the
overdiagnosis of anxiety disorders and the pathologizing of normal anxiety
states...There certainly has been an explosion of the diagnosis of anxiety and
depression and a concurrent massive increase in the use of medications such as
the SSRIs - and the authors explore that thoroughly in the second section. They
propose a harmful dysfunction (HD) model of diagnosis that incorporates both
the degree of harm and degree of dysfunction that has some potential. Overall
this book is worth the read for anyone in interested in mental health,
particularly as it relates to the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety
disorders." -- Brett C. Plyler, M.D., Northwestern Memorial Hospital , Doody's
"The most intriguing aspect is the authors' discussion of how
anxiety and social judgments can and have been so easily intertwined and what
the implications might be from labeling and medicating anxieties instead of
seeking to alter their underlying causes... it does an excellent job at
explaining the history and calling into question the present state of anxiety
diagnosing." -- Evelyn McDonald, Sacramento Book Review
Also reviewed by Simon Wessely in The
Lancet
"As a non-specialist in anxiety disorders, I found this book
informative and illuminating...I would recommend it to any psychiatrist as a
provocative survey of this difficult area." -- Philip Timms, The
British Journal of Psychiatry
About the Author(s)
Allan V. Horwitz is Board of Governors Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University .
His books include The Social Control of Mental Illness and Creating Mental Illness. He is the
recipient of the Pearlin Award for lifetime Achievement in the Sociology of
Mental Health from the American Sociological Association.
Jerome C. Wakefield is University Professor, Professor of Social Work, and Professor of Psychiatry atNew
York University .
He is the author, with Allan V. Horwitz, of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed
Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder--named Best Psychology Book
of 2007 by the Association of American Publishers.
Jerome C. Wakefield is University Professor, Professor of Social Work, and Professor of Psychiatry at
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