Senator Cory Booker and Outside the Box Thinking

Psychiatry & Society

From March 31 to April 1, 2025, Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, delivered a speech to protest Donald Trump and the operations of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. This became the longest recorded speech in United States Senate history. It demonstrated some "outside of the box" thinking.

H. Steven Moffic, MD, suggests psychiatry must do more, must think outside the box, to address the current pressing societal issues too. He has a few suggestions to start:

1. To do away with the Goldwater Rule so that psychiatrists can ethically and responsibly stand up against injustice by government officials and public figures.
2. To have more psychiatrist or physician rallies and protests, demonstrating that organized psychiatry and medicine will not be silent in the face of injustice.
3. To develop ad hoc groups that specifically focus on combatting social issues.
4. To have an Ethics Code for 2025, which he shares.

Do you have suggestions for how psychiatry can "think outside the box"? Write to us at PTEditor@mmhgroup.com!

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.