About Jan Haaken
I’m Jan Haaken - professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, clinical psychologist, and documentary filmmaker. This newsletter brings reflections on politics, culture, social justice movements and creative forms of resistance.
My work - in both writing and film - focuses on sites of public anxiety and places where survival is often precarious: refugee camps and war zones, abortion clinics and pipeline protests, drag bars, dairy farms, and hip-hop clubs. Across these projects of storytelling, I enlist participatory action methods to bring a fuller picture into view of these people and places than the degraded versions circulating in the dominant media.
My recent films include Our Bodies Our Doctors, the two-part Necessity Series, and Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance. In 2025, I released The Palestine Exception and its sequel, Sumud: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza. My most recent book is titled Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down.
In this newsletter, you can expect short essays, commentary and behind-the-scenes reports from documentary field work—guided by critical traditions of psychology, psychoanalysis and feminism.
In solidarity,
Jan Haaken
❤️ Help us bring these films to more communities around the world. You can host a screening or make a donation to support our global release and ensure these stories reach the audiences who need them most.
