I KNOW KA-RAZY
Rejecting the Capitalist Road to Twisted Mental Health

A 2026 Book by Bernard Nicolas, MA, LMFT

Introduction
The author explains why the title was inspired by a line from the James Brown song, The Big Payback: "I don't know karate, but I know ka-razy!" Examples are provided of recent completely insane behavior by people who never had any contact with mental health facilities or treatment. By way of establishing a clear point-of-view, the author promises to explain why and how we must protect our sanity by replacing the dying capitalist system with a creative form of socialism built from the bottom up.
Chapter 1: 20/20 - It's Normal to Have Issues
After disclosing his own mental health issues, the author explains why it is normal for all of us to have issues such as those related to attachment, gender, race, sexuality and class. The author's practical definition of good mental health is: knowing what your issues are and what you need to do to manage them.
Chapter 2: Mangled Care
Here some statistics and history are provided to explain why the health care system is best described as "Mangled Care". Some examples are provided illustrating how the system has failed middle-class individuals while providing a totally different quality of care for rich people.
Chapter 3: Coping Strategies
In an unhealthy environment, most people have trouble coping. Some flip-out and their behavior is considered crazy. Some crazies are considered heroes while others are put to death. This chapter is mostly about unhealthy coping strategies, yet it seeks to bring attention to the causes and conditions more than the crazy behavior that they generate.
Chapter 4: Concepts of Mental Health
The healthcare industry has failed to embrace the holistic, communal nature of mental health long recognized by many cultures. Emotions and well-being exist as phenomena between people rather than within isolated individuals. Mental health exists on a spectrum often impacted by family trauma, the collective unconscious, and social conditions such as alienation. The unprecedented epidemic of loneliness and the psychological harms of addictive social media platforms further impede good mental health. Mental health must be treated as a collective responsibility, requiring genuine democratic control over technologies and institutions that profoundly shape human connection and psychological health.
Chapter 5: Mental Health as Public Health
The United States faces a deepening crisis that requires thinking of mental health as a fundamental element of public health. This crisis is driven by inadequate access to care, extreme inequality, and systemic failures in policing and other social policies. Most people do not receive meaningful mental health treatment and often face racial disparities in access and reliance on primary care doctors prescribing psychotropic drugs without specialized training. As psychiatric beds have disappeared, jails have become the nation's largest failing control mechanism for the mentally unhealthy. Police officers have poor mental health and high suicide rates. They often end up fatally shooting mentally unhealthy people, who could have been helped more effectively by appropriate crisis intervention teams. Broader issues such as lack of insurance, prohibitive medical costs, and worsening inequality further undermine mental health, with unequal societies showing higher rates of psychosis, narcissism, and social distress.
Chapter 6: Guidelines for Good Mental Health
For-profit health-care companies, aided by compliant politicians, have undermined public understanding of true universal health care by promoting Medicare Advantage - and industry driven program that restricts care while generating enormous profits. Medicare Advantage illustrates how a profit-centered system consistently delivers less care while claiming to offer more. This chapter emphasizes the need for clear, widely accepted indicators of good mental health and identifies empowerment, access, and prevention as essential components of quality mental health care. It denounces the capitalist health system for discouraging consumer autonomy, limiting access, and prioritizing profit over well-being, noting that real reform -such as a universal single-payer system - faces obstruction from corrupt political and corporate elites despite wide-spread public support.
Chapter 7: The Capitalist Road - Artificial Sugar
This chapter argues that capitalism repeatedly seeks cheap, mechanized, and profitable substitutes for genuine human care-whether in artificial sweeteners, addictive drugs, or mental-health treatment-and that this pattern has produced dangerous cycles of harm, from the marketing of legal heroin and OxyContin to the over-prescription of psychotropic drugs, especially for children. Profit-driven medicine favors chemical solutions, loose diagnostic criteria, and emerging AI or robotic "therapists" over the human support and healthy environments people actually need. This chapter warns that this devaluation of human wellbeing extends into politics, enabling what scholars call a "psychopathocracy," in which leaders with zero empathy rule over populations burdened by poor mental health.
Chapter 8: Dare to Dream
Visualization-a key tool in psychology-can help us imagine a hopeful socialist future rather than the dystopias promoted by capitalist media, which distract the public and suppress independent thought. Using examples from films like Rollerball and real-world patterns of exploitation, this chapter critiques capitalism's history of harmful "miracle solutions," from artificial sweeteners to addictive pharmaceuticals, and its tendency to replace human care with profitable but inadequate technologies. We can envision socialism grounded in worker-owned cooperatives, equitable wealth distribution, and the humane use of automation to expand leisure and community wellbeing. Capitalism's abstract assumptions, concentrated corporate power, and fragile financial structures reveal it to be a con game sustained by illusions, while socialism offers realistic, existing models for healthier societies. Ultimately, we can cultivate bravery, optimism, and collective imagination to build a democratic system that prioritizes mental health, cooperation, and human flourishing.
Chapter 9: Psychology of Liberation
This chapter explores the psychology of liberation, arguing that radical social change requires a mindset capable of confronting violence, trauma, and identity upheaval while ultimately aiming to build a more humane society. Drawing on thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Edward Tick, Aaron Beck, and Ernesto Guevara, it describes how both oppression and revolutionary struggle shape the psyche-sometimes healing internalized inferiority, but also producing deep wounds that demand communal care. Humans are driven by identity and belonging, and that twenty-first-century movements must forge new collective identities beyond nationalism, rooted in empathy, solidarity, and what Che called the "New Man" and "New Woman." This chapter warns that the true enemy is not other groups but the tiny elite-the "one percent"-whose power depends on violence and division, and argues that creative, cooperative strategies, not hatred, will drive successful transformation.
Chapter 10: Maintaining Mental Health
Sustaining mental health-before, during, and after revolutionary social change-requires grounding ourselves in practices long understood by ancient cultures: community connection, spirituality, ritual, and disciplined self-care. It emphasizes that individuals must take responsibility for their own wellbeing through habits such as daily self-care, enforcing boundaries, managing negative self-talk, avoiding substance-based coping, nurturing spirituality, seeking appropriate medical diagnostics, following necessary treatments, avoiding isolation, processing anger into constructive action, and ensuring adequate rest. These practices help counter the harmful pressures of capitalist culture, which encourages overwork, addiction, shallow distraction, and neglect of personal needs. True mental health depends on balancing acceptance with courageous action, cultivating emotional and spiritual maturity, and making each day meaningful-so that individuals can thrive personally while contributing to collective liberation.

 

 

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