David Cohen

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David Cohen studies psychoactive drug effects in the light of an irrational medicine-drug divide across which drugs move regularly: from proscribed to prescribed, and back. His qualitative and epidemiological studies in Canada, France, and the United States — on patients’ and professionals’ representations of drug effects, the expansion of drug markets to children, and mutations of drug knowledge within national cultures — question assumptions that psychoactive drugs’ properties determine their socio-legal status. This line of investigation parallels Cohen’s scrutiny of evidential claims regarding the efficacy of biological treatments for, and neuro-essentialist explanations of, psychological distress, misbehavior, and extreme states.

Cohen also studies harms of mental health treatments, and the deliberate spread of ignorance through the capture of scientific activities by corporate interests and reigning ideologies. Charting the rise and fall of schools of thought in mental health over time, he considers what this means for ethical care, informed consent, and trying to do no harm today. His comparative research on involuntary psychiatric detentions leads him to explore governments’ meager efforts to provide basic accountability for coercive care, the oldest mental health policy.

As a mental health practitioner, Cohen focused on withdrawal reactions from psychiatric drugs and person-centered methods to reduce or discontinue drug use. He proposed guidelines for therapists’ role in psychopharmacology as medications shifted from medical tools to consumer products. He designed the CriticalThinkRx Critical Curriculum on Psychotropic Medications for child welfare professionals, shown in a longitudinal controlled study to reduce prescriptions to children in foster care. Cohen has consulted with governments, research agencies, courts, media, religious institutions, professional and community groups, and individual practitioners, on reducing harms of psychotropic drug prescriptions, from institutional care to private practice.

Cohen has authored or co-authored over 120 articles and chapters. He edited Challenging the Therapeutic State (1990), Médicalisation et contrôle social (1996), Critical New Perspectives on ADHD (2006), and co-authored Guide critique des médicaments de l’âme (1995), Your Drug May Be Your Problem (1999/2007), and Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs (2015). He received awards for writing, research, teaching, mentoring, and advocacy.

From 1988 to 2000, Cohen taught at University of Montreal (where he directed the Health and Prevention Social Research Group focusing on the nascent social-determinants-of-health paradigm), and from 2000 to 2013, at Florida International University (where he was PhD Program Director and Interim Director of the School of Social Work). In 2012, he held the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair to France. At UCLA Luskin, he held the Marjorie Crump Chair in Social Welfare from 2013-2018, served as Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development between 2018-2023 and is currently Associate Dean.

Selected recent publications

Discontinuing Psychiatric Medications from Participants in Randomized Controlled Trials: A systematic Review (2019)

Incidences of Involuntary Psychiatric Detentions in 25 U.S. States (2020)

Withdrawal Effects Confounding: Another Sign of Needed Paradigm Shift in Psychopharmacology Research (2020)

Stuart A. Kirk

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Stuart A. Kirk is a distinguished professor emeritus in Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in mental health policy and services, particularly the interplay of science, social values and professional politics in the evolution of mental health professions. In 9 books and 140 articles and chapters he examines how professions try to make clinical practice more scientifically based. Many of his articles were co-authored with doctoral students. In scores of articles and three co-authored books–The Selling of DSM, Making Us Crazy and Mad Science–he challenges the scientific claims made about the foundational document of the psychiatric enterprise, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) often called the “psychiatric bible.” His critical views have appeared in columns in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek Magazine.  Some of his books have been translated into French, Italian and Japanese.

After receiving his doctorate at Berkeley in 1973, Professor Kirk taught at the Universities of Hawaii, Kentucky and Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and at 35 was appointed Dean of the School of Social Welfare at the State University of New York at Albany (1980-88). He was a Professor at Columbia University School of Social Work (1988-94), before joining the Department of Social Welfare at UCLA as the first occupant of the Crump Endowed Chair. He directed the PhD program for eight years and chaired the Department for three years. He served on the editorial boards of many journals and as Editor-in-Chief (1992-96) of the NASW journal, Social Work Research.

Among his honors are the Doctoral Alumni award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship on the 50th anniversary of the School of Social Welfare at Berkeley (1994); an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to be a Scholar-in-Residence at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy (1995); a Book of the Year Award for Making Us Crazyfrom MIND, the largest non-profit mental health organization in the United Kingdom (2000); the annual award for Significant Lifetime Achievement from the Council on Social Work Education (2003); and induction as a Fellow in the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, an honor society of distinguished scholars (2010).

He retired in 2012 and resides in Santa Fe, NM, where he has published a book and a series of magazine articles about his passion for motorcycling.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

 

The Selling of DSM
Kirk, S.A. and H. Kutchins. The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992.

 

Social Work Research Methods
Kirk, S.A. (Ed.), Social Work Research Methods: Building Knowledge for Practice. Washington, D.C.: NASW Press, 1999.

 

Making Us Crazy
Kutchins, H. & S.A. Kirk. Making Us Crazy: DSM–the Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorder. NY: Free Press, 1997.

 

Science and Social Work
Kirk, S.A. & W.J. Reid. Science and Social Work: A Critical Appraisal. NY: Columbia University Press, 2002.

 

Mental Disorders in The Social Environment
Kirk, S.A. (Ed.), Mental Disorders in The Social Environment. NY: Columbia University Press, 2005

 

Mad Science

Kirk, S.A., D. Cohen, & T. Gomory. Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013.

Laura Alongi Brinderson

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Laura Alongi is a licensed clinical social worker whose interests lie in mental health issues with children, adolescents, and their families. She is also interested in parenting education and training, and the early childhood bonding process.

As a practicum consultant with the California Social Work Education Center program, a statewide program that trains social workers to become professional public child welfare workers, she works with first- and second-year students, and is involved in recruiting promising child welfare candidates.

Alongi has worked as a social worker in community mental health clinics including South Bay Child Guidance, the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center, and Aviva Children and Family Services. She worked primarily with emotionally disturbed children and their families, both in individual/family and group modalities. She was also a supervisor for several years, and was involved in program development and administration when she served as a program director for the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center.

Currently, she has a small private practice, and provides supervision and consultation to new and unlicensed social workers.

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