Arthur D. Hlavaty

Doctoring the election

2016-10-14T11:31:27Z

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was running against Barry Goldwater. A rabble-rousing rag called Fact got a few thousand shrinks, none of whom had a professional relationship with Goldwater, to say that he was mentally unfit to be president. It did not change my vote (all the way with LBJ!), but it did put the final nail in the coffin of the Freudian faith of my youth.

My favorite Horrible Example, unsurprisingly, deals with latent homosexuality, a buggerboo that was actually taken seriously in those primitive times. Goldwater was one because he said he wanted to be able to lob a missile into the men’s room at the Kremlin. That’s it. Really. His equally heterosexual opponent’s remark that “I never trust a man unless I have his pecker in my pocket” was not taken seriously, as of course it should not have been.

If I were running the Secret Shrink Establishment, I would not let my minions do that sort of thing because it gives the game away, like dueling Experts arguing over whether their science says that defendant is Bad or Sick. Now we have another election with a candidate who presents temptations for diagnosis. I suggest heeding the wise words of Dr. Eliot Gelwan:

As a psychiatrist, I’m finding it really difficult to bite my tongue and avoid doing pronouncements about Trump’s evident (and considerable) psychopathology. But there is an ethical mandate in my profession to avoid armchair diagnosis when one has no treatment relationship with someone and has not examined them face-to-face. So I think I’ll just continue to call him names instead.

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Do patients know what they want?

2016-02-25T11:01:18Z

Scott Alexander on two kinds of psychiatrist

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Or maybe not

2014-12-02T11:53:56Z

10 counterintuitive psychology findings

Thanx to andrewducker

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"You're the one with the dirty pictures."

2013-11-12T12:10:34Z

Wikipedia hacks the Rorschach.

Thanx to Avedon's Sideshow.

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Exactly 89.9732% of psychology is crap

2013-10-20T11:38:05Z

Questioning a Psych theory with equations in it.

Thanx to andrewducker

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New rules

2013-09-21T09:55:26Z

10 famous psychological experiments that would be forbidden now.

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Classification

2013-09-19T11:37:34Z

Against Myers-Briggs

Thanx to andrewducker

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Mostly Unsurprising

2012-11-08T01:50:25Z

Which Professions Have The Most Psychopaths?

Thanx to Kat Tanaka Okopnik on Facebook

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Psychiatric branding

2012-06-05T11:04:44Z

Thinking that one is a character in a Philip K. Dick novel is now called the Truman Show delusion

Thanx to Follow Me Here

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My people

2011-12-12T10:24:27Z

10 Myths about Introverts

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Disease

2011-07-12T11:46:28Z

I could do the easy popular, thing and say that evolutionary psychologists have a First Amendment right to their beliefs, but it would be wrong. EvPsych is a contagious disease; let one vector loose, and all around them will start believing that men and women are absolute opposites and that brutal competition is the only way to survive. The Republican Wards are thus a necessary public health measure…

But Seriously Folks. Thomas Szasz never said that there are no crazy people. (Even R.D. Laing didn't.) He said that "mental illness" is a metaphor, rather than a simple description, so we must always examine particular uses to make sure the metaphor works. Maybe the most dangerous misuse is the image of contagion, whereby beliefs and behaviors we don't like are treated not as matters of individual choice but as plagues that can infect innocent outsiders. Treating Judaism as such is seriously out of fashion, but there's still some enthusiasm for applying the image to homosexuality, obesity, (some) drug use, and other offenses. I'm happy to see an allegedly scientific plague scare debunked.

Thanx to Follow Me Here

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40 years after

2011-07-10T11:57:47Z

The Stanford Prison Experiment revisited

Thanx to andrewducker

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Tomorrow, the World

2010-07-29T15:28:25Z

Next DSM may include all of us.

Thanx to novapsyche

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