Maverick perspective. On the morning of June 25th, 2005, Tom Cruise appeared on the Today Show to promote his new movie, War of the Worlds, where he told Matt Lauer, by the way, there is absolutely no empirical evidence supporting the notion depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. Also, while we’re on the topic of psychiatry, which is pseudoscientific bullshit, drugging kids for things we don’t understand is wrong, and we’re overprescribing Ritalin. The American public was already reeling from another famous Cruise interview, in which the man expressed his love for actress Katie Holmes a little too enthusiastically, thus acquiring the label “crazy.” But now he was challenging medical consensus, an unthinkable taboo. He was condemned by the psychiatric community, and eviscerated by the press. For over a decade, media personalities reflected back on this exchange with Lauer as absolutely deranged, forever associating Cruise’s work with the forbidden stink of “doesn’t trust the science” — that is until last week, when the clip resurfaced for a different reason. Long story short? Looks like our lunatic cult leader was right about pretty much everything. Oops!

Seventeen years after Cruise’s morning “War of Words,” a comprehensive umbrella review of psychiatric studies has definitively concluded there is no evidence supporting the notion depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. This is not to say depression isn’t real. This is not to say drugs don’t help many people. This is only to say despite all panicked screaming from the “mental illness is my personality” sphere of the internet, it does appear SSRIs neglect to treat the underlying cause of depression, which is a condition we still basically don’t understand. But on finally rewatching the interview, what I find most striking about the exchange has nothing to do with the content, or even the ensuing controversy. After so many years rehashing Cruise’s mental health “meltdown,” in which a famous actor calmly told a now-disgraced journalist to educate himself, I’ve got to say the strangest thing about it all is just how common it seems in 2022.

Over the last ten years, we’ve watched famous personalities yell at journalists about contentious, ‘forbidden’ topics with increasing regularity. Sure, there are cancellations, and actresses who buck consensus are occasionally fired (by Disney, for example). But the raging debate over whether such cancellations are morally acceptable actually seems to indicate we’re not living through a moment uniquely hostile to dissent. It rather seems we’re living through a moment in which the establishment is uniquely hostile to dissent, because establishment voices are scared the weirdos are winning.