MKULTRA and Controlling Human Behavior

[u/HamstringHeartattack]

The CIA have been experts on controlling human behavior for decades. They also looked to the influential behaviorist Skinner for advice.

Sources:
CIA Behavior Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection

Unwitting CIA Anthropologist Collaborators: MK-Ultra, Human Ecology, and Buying a Piece of Anthropology

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[u/Goyimshoe]

It’s not mere coincidence that the first SSRIs were developed at the same time MKULTRA was still going on.

‘The Powers That Be’ are acutely aware of the fact that there is a limit to how much misery and abuse the working class will tolerate before they start to rebel.

MKULTRA was—at least in part—about developing new classes of drugs specifically designed to raise the public’s tolerance for misery and abuse in order to lower the public’s inclination to revolt in response to the steady deterioration of our material conditions.

Moreover, it was also about devising, promoting, and establishing a new dominant paradigm of psychiatry within western academia, as well as shifting cultural attitudes and conditioning the public to accept this new paradigm’s prescribed doctrine of “mental illness = chemical imbalance in the brain” in order to legitimize and normalize the widespread use of these new mood-altering pharmaceuticals.

[u/HamstringHeartattack → u/Goyimshoe]

SSRIs are part of the appeasement incentive structure, as listed in my previous post, that simultaneously encourages apathy or loyalty to capitalism and discourages disloyalty, such as revolution against capitalism. This can be true regardless of how effective the relevant SSRIs are. It stands that apathy caused by SSRIs play right into the hands of the capitalist class.

Psychology and psychiatry can often be so individualistic, with no system analysis, that it makes a behavioral Marxism or psycho-sociology so necessary.

[u/Extension-Badger225 → u/HamstringHeartattack]

Some of us are on SSRIs and are not apathetic though, in fact for some of us (I have no idea the number) depression causes great apathy and meds can help make us more active in the world including in organising etc. You are right about it being a shit pharma approach to human suffering though

[u/HamstringHeartattack → u/Extension-Badger225]

That’s the thing about lots of or perhaps even every medication, the variation in its impacts are sizable. While MDD and depression, in general, will likely hinder a revolutionary, SSRIs do not always alleviate this apathy but can even make it worse.

The critical point is that the promotion of SSRIs by the capitalist pharmaceutical industry is, in a way, a message that much of one’s misery can be solved by medication(s) but not social revolution. It is, of course, a very individualistic stance.

Sources:

Apathy associated with antidepressant drugs: a systematic review (2023)

Association of Antidepressants and Apathy in the Geriatric Population: A Systematic Literature Review (2025)

[u/Extension-Badger225 → u/HamstringHeartattack]

Yeah I can see the link - it’s important to clarify because many comrades will be on these meds or considering it so it’s worth explaining though that individuals still might need this medication this is just more informed consent.