Bruce E. Levine is an Americanclinical psychologist, often at odds with the mainstream of his profession, in private practice in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has been in practice for more than three decades. Levine writes and speaks widely on how society, culture, politics and psychology intersect. Levine's most recent book is Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti- Authoritarian—Strategies, Tools, and Models. Levine describes how the capacity to comply with abusive authority is humanity’s “fatal flaw,” but fortunately there are anti-authoritarians—people comfortable questioning the legitimacy of authority and resisting its illegitimate forms. However, as Resisting Illegitimate Authority reveals, these rebels are regularly scorned, shunned, financially punished, psychopathologized, criminalized, and even assassinated. Profiling a diverse group of US anti-authoritarians—from Thomas Paine to Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Lenny Bruce, and Noam Chomsky—in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, Resisting Illegitimate Authority provides political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological tools to help those suffering violence and vilification in a society whose most ardent cheerleaders for “freedom” are often its most obedient and docile citizens. Discussing anti-authoritarian approaches to depression, relationships, and parenting, Levine makes it clear that far from being a disease, disobedience may be our last hope. His previous book was Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite. It calls for a new kind of politics to help Americans overcome what Levine sees as political demoralization. Published in 2007, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy argues that by not seriously confronting posited societal sources of depression, American mental health institutions have become part of the problem rather than the solution. The book provides an alternate approach that encompasses what Levine describes as the whole of our humanity, society, and culture, and which redefines depression in a way that makes enduring transformation more likely. Levine is also the author of Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations and a World Gone Crazy, a protest book. The 26 alphabetically ordered chapters of Commonsense Rebellion detail Levine's contention that the high national rates of mental illness in the United States are really just natural reactions to the oppression of what he terms an "institutional society," which he argues causes many to break down psychologically. An earlier edition was released in 2001 with the subtitle Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society — An A to Z Guide to Rehumanizing Our Lives. His article Troubled children and teens: Commonsense solutions without psychiatric drugs and manipulations was also translated into the German language and published in the same year with the title Gestörte Kinder und Teenager. Sinnvolle Lösungen ohne Psychopharmaka und sonstige Manipulationen in Statt Psychiatrie 2. Levine is a regular contributor to AlterNet,CounterPunch,Z Magazine,Truthout, and The Huffington Post, and his articles have appeared in Adbusters,The Ecologist'' and many other publications. Levine is a member of MindFreedom International, a group opposed to what they describe as coercive mental health treatment, and on the Advisory Council of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry.
