Two Out of Two Pretentious Born-Rich Ivy League Doctors Agree: Psychiatry is Over!

Please consider preordering my next book, All in Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to Be Disordered. I hope that this post will make it clear why I needed to write it.

You know when I wrote about that list of former n+1 editors and their sterling accomplishments, I was trying to force a conversation I can never get going. n+1’s Marxism is almost entirely vestigial, at this point, but it’s certainly still a lefty journal, one filled with people who explicitly embrace politics that are in some sense… anti-hierarchy? You know. Class-conscious. Egalitarian. And what I pointed out in that earlier piece is that these egalitarian politics are a strange fit for the kind of people that n+1 publishes and employs, who are almost exclusively those whose resumes are absolutely festooned with all the markings of elite success. I guess the coarse version of this is a kind of right-wing stereotype - the left is all limousine liberals, or whatever - but I think what I’m saying is more particular and more nuanced than that. And more unfortunate.

I thought about that piece when I read this review of Dr. Khameer Kidia’s new antipsychiatry missive Empire of Madness. (What a title!) The review was written by Dr. Pria Anand. These “Dr.s” are not of the PhD variety, oh no - these two are medical doctors. And their credentials! My lord. You know how people say that they thought they knew what a rich person was, and then they went away to college, and they discovered what being really rich means? That’s kind of how I feel, looking at Dr. Kidia’s and Dr. Anand’s almost comically impressive résumés: I thought I knew what an impressive meritocrat was, and then I was made aware of these two. Ivy League degrees stacked onto Ivy League degrees, awards out the wazoo, publications in both the most prestigious academic journals and the most impressive popular press publications, influence at think tanks and foundations, every pore of their bodies sweating out accomplishment. They give RF Kuang a run for her money. And, of course, they share that very strange kind of 21st century radicalism with so many people who have worked at n+1 and similar publications, that fusion of relentless upper-class