The NY Salon in association with The Rose & Erwin Wolfson Center for National Affairs, The New School presents:

Therapeutic Society or Therapeutic State?

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 ,7 to 8:30pm
Theresa Lang Center, The New School,
55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10011

According to the National Institute of Mental Health over one in four adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year and mental illnesses are the leading cause of disability. Are we indeed all vulnerable individuals susceptible to the whims of our emotional reaction? What are the consequences for political democracy of a more vulnerable sense of personhood?

Participant Biographies

Sally Satel M.D.
Author One Nation Under Therapy

Dr. Sally Satel is a resident scholar at AEI and the staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She serves on the advisory committee of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Satel was an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993. From 1993 to 1994 she was a policy fellow with the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. She has written widely in academic journals on topics in psychiatry and medicine, and has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in numerous magazines and journals. Dr. Satel is author of Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (AEI Press, 1999) and PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001), and is coauthor, with Christina Hoff Sommers, of One Nation under Therapy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

John Hewitt
Author The Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Happiness and Solving Problems in America.

John P. Hewitt is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of several scholarly articles on self, identity, and self-esteem; his books include Self and Society: A Symbolic Interactionist Social Psychology (Allyn and Bacon, 2007), now in its 10th edition; Dilemmas of the American Self (Temple University Press, 1989), winner of the Charles H. Cooley Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction; and The Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Happiness and Solving Problems in America (St. Martins, 1998). He retired from teaching in 2002 and now lives in an adobe house in the Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, Arizona with his wife, Myrna Livingston Hewitt, his Labrador retriever Perry, and numerous coyotes, rattlesnakes, scorpions, and cacti.

Michael Fitzpatrick
Author of MMR and Autism, and The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle.

Michael Fitzpatrick has been a general practitioner in East London for the past twenty years, after training at Oxford and the Middlesex. He has written on a wide range of medical and political subjects, including Aids, addictions and health scares for both medical publications and the mainstream media. He has written columns in The Lancet and the British Journal of General Practice, reviews for the British Medical Journal, Nature and Community Care and is a regular contributor to the on-line magazine, Spiked. He has also appeared frequently on radio and television, and in 1997 produced a critical programme on ‘parenting’ for the BBC. His book The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle was published by Routledge in 2001. His critique of complementary medicine is included in Alternative Medicine - Should We Swallow It?, published by the Institute of Ideas/Hodder and Stoughton in 2002. His latest book, MMR and Autism: What Parents Need To Know (Routledge) was published in 2004.

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