The Failures of the Mental Health Drug Revolution | David Cohen
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
An estimated one in six American adults today are taking some form of psychiatric medication. Yet it seems mental health outcomes across America have seen no significant improvement, despite the promises of the psychopharmacology revolution.
David Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, argues that many of the core assumptions of modern psychiatry are flawed.
Cohen is known for his research on psychotropic drugs and coercive mental health treatment.
In our interview, we also discuss why it is that America has one of the highest involuntary mental hospitalization rates in Western countries, and what it means that suicide rates are exceedingly high among people who were just released from a mental hospital.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The highest suicide rate in any known community or group of people that you can separate |
| 0:06.5 | is immediately after a psychiatric hospitalization. |
| 0:09.9 | They certainly could have been suicidal to begin with, but certainly that hospitalization did not help. |
| 0:15.6 | In this episode, I sit down with David Cohen, a professor and associate dean at UCLA. |
| 0:21.4 | We have close to half the population on some kind of painkiller, a psychoactive drug and so forth, |
| 0:26.3 | as prescription drugs that you ought to take given by our medical men. |
| 0:30.0 | And the needle has not moved. |
| 0:33.0 | He argues we're approaching mental health all wrong. |
| 0:36.0 | What exactly is this disease that you don't even put your stethoscope on me? |
| 0:42.8 | You're just talking to me. |
| 0:44.3 | What kind of disease is diagnosed this way and is like any other disease? |
| 0:48.7 | It's obviously not like any other disease. |
| 0:51.4 | This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellick. |
| 0:59.3 | David Cohen, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. |
| 1:01.4 | Thank you. Pleasure to be here. |
| 1:12.6 | America has one of the highest involuntary incarceration rates for psychiatric patients in the free world. Tell me about why that might be. Involuntary incarceration is a glue that holds the social world together. |
| 1:22.6 | It's one of those mechanisms that we in most Western societies, in fact all societies, |
| 1:29.8 | we depend on it as an ultimate measure of control, of keeping people in the same community, |
| 1:40.1 | sharing the same values. |
| 1:43.1 | An involuntary hospitalization is what you call your final backup |
| 1:48.3 | that a society always has always keeps it in reserve to use to keep the society the |
| 1:59.1 | group going now why would it be a high rate in one country versus another? |
... |
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