Tom Cruise is right, Brooke Shields wrong

by mim3@mim.org

Hollywood movie star Tom Cruise took some good shots at capitalist psychiatry in a dust-up involving Brooke Shields. On television, Cruise laced into the culture of overprescription and medicalizing of social problems. He said Brooke Shields would be better off with vitamins, minerals and exercise than psychiatric treatment for post-partum depression.(1)

After Tom Cruise's criticisms received air play because of his fame, the network television stations trotted out white males in laboratory coats to suggest that maybe Tom Cruise does not know what he is talking about since he is not a psychiatrist.(2) In actual fact, what Tom Cruise did was valuable and an example of how the outside world has to police the medical profession.

Tom Cruise is in excellent company with some psychiatric professionals in agreement with him and statistically trained intellectuals in various fields able to see the truth. In fact, what is often considered the leading intellectual competitor to Marxism these days called "post-modernism" has produced a leading light named Michel Foucault who also denounced psychiatry as a flim-flam.

99% of psychiatry could be abolished and the remaining legitimate 1% can be easily absorbed by primary care givers. The money in the profession comes from attractive mostly female upper-middle class clients concerned about their sexual lives, parents concerned about their children's discipline problems and various people properly depressed by the capitalist system. The extreme cases where medical attention has warrant are quite rare.

The New York Times actually paid to distribute its article from Brooke Shields on the Internet, but in typical incompetence, NYT failed to direct its link readers correctly. The article that the New York Times put on its editorial page is an example of how corporate instigated entertainment pollutes the reasoning abilities of the public. In the unabridged edition for the July 1 New York Times not run in all the syndicated papers, Brooke Shields said, "I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Mr. Cruise has never suffered from postpartum depression." The fact that the New York Times allows that to pass as reasoning shows that the New York Times simply places entertaining bromides on its editorial page for the sake of circulation. Obviously her reasoning about men not suffering postpartum depression would rule out the male psychiatrists who generally invent, regulate and prescribe her and others psychiatric drugs. Worse still the subjectivist so-called reasoning that Brooke Shields employed destroys a lot more medical science than Cruise took aim at! If no therapy is correct because the therapist has not experienced the condition in question, we are going to be doing without most advances in medicine.

Others warmed up to defending Brooke Shields. Typical was this supposedly so convincing argument in the Denver Post against Cruise's so-called ignorance: "The cause isn't known for sure, though doctors believe it's caused by a hormonal imbalance, an alteration in brain chemistry, stress or isolation. My hunch is that it's all of the above,"(3) said a womyn trying to validate a disease of unknown causation yet supposedly affecting one in ten wimmin. It does not even occur to the author that if the cause is isolation, then the relief of the problem is also social.

In the United $tates, the corporations pay and run their own studies of their own drugs' effectiveness on conditions that they define with government regulation. It's known as the fox running the chicken coop. So when something like Paxil comes along, the proof of its effectiveness comes from professionals with a self-interest in saying psychiatry is effective to begin with.

Psychiatrists are not going to go through years of graduate education and necessarily realize that their profession is ineffective relative to socially caused change. There's no money in that.

Karl Marx commented on the phenomenon of how professions organize themselves under capitalism and create space for themselves where it did not exist before: "'The great mass of so-called 'higher grade' workers-such as state officials, military people, artists, doctors, priests, judges, lawyers, etc.--some of whom are not only not productive but in essence destructive, but who know how to appropriate to themselves a very great part of the 'material' wealth partly through the sale of their 'immaterial' commodities and partly by forcibly imposing the latter on other people--found it not at all pleasant to be relegated economically to the same class as clowns and menial servants and to appear merely as people partaking in the consumption, parasites on the actual producers (or rather agents of production). This was a peculiar profanation precisely of those functions which had hitherto been surrounded with a halo and had enjoyed superstitious veneration.'"(4)

Generally the same professionals in charge of researching diseases and therapies own stock in the drug companies and the regulators are in a revolving door relationship with the drug companies as with any other industry and the u.$. government. Combined this self-interested profession has decided that 10 million Amerikans have "social anxiety disorder" requiring Paxil that Cruise rightly ranted against.(5)

The self-interest of professionals not to mention capitalist corporations bribing people to see things their way is a reason that the Cultural Revolution under Mao in China points the road forward for science production. People should not have to worry that their drugs serve the self-interests of professionals and corporations, but under capitalism they do worry about that or surely play the fool.

One blogger did get it right: "Their logic goes like this: 'Tom Cruise is an actor. Therefore, he has no right to state his beliefs about anything other than acting.' Wow! Since I work at Guide Corp., I guess I'm limited to having viewpoints only about headlamps and tail lamps."(6)

Psychiatry persists despite its weak record because of the class structure. Individualism and the belief that individuals can be treated individually is a near-religious dogma of Amerikan society. It's rooted in the settler pioneer days of each individual having his or her own farm.

The Scientology that Cruise has taken up is itself an ideology of individualism seeking to fill in for psychiatry's inevitable demise. Scientology does damage to the struggles against racial, national and gender oppression, but on this question the Scientologists are right and their cult is much preferable to psychiatric therapy for the vast majority of cases. Instead of writing our own article on the statistical ineffectiveness of psychiatry, we recommend the following link:

antipsychiatry.org

Also buy our magazine with the article "Abolish Psychology"