Welcome to the Loony Bin

Welcome to the Loony Bin tracks attitudes and approaches in psychiatry and the law over 55 years. The cases illustrate miraculous cures as well as blundering repetition of harmful excesses. Bell's book (autobiography) is certainly does not shun from calling the whatever, whatever. For decades he has taken iconoclastic and often unfashionable positions in relation to what he has regarded as fads and unscientific trends of the day.

Dr David Bell is a well known Sydney neuro-psychiatrist, who has run a psychiatric research unit, developed a therapeutic community, pioneered addiction rehabilitation, been a driving force in forensic studies.

Workplace mobbing is complex and real

Workplace mobbing is a complex phenomenon with negative outcomes for individual, group and organizational effectiveness.

In Australia, a government inquiry revealed that calls about workplace bullying had increased by 70 percent in three years. Statistics show that bullying affects one in three employees; what is really worrying is that one in two have witnessed bullying but have done nothing about it. Moreover, the actual incidence of bullying is likely to be much higher: for every case reported, eight to 20 cases are going unreported.

For targets of workplace bullying who suffer severe psychological and social pressure, there are many resources and trained professionals to help them. But for targets of workplace mobbing, which is a form of group bullying that can have even greater impacts on one’s psychological well-being and career, there are far fewer resources. Moreover, few mental health professionals are trained to recognize mobbing, much less address its impacts. Our response to this parallel (understandably) those emotions of grief and loss; the five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Recently Current Psychiatry, part of the US Frontline Medical Communications Inc. published a letter describing Mobbing as more prevalent and the consequences more dire for a victim who is feeling pressured to leave his or her job when there is little hope of getting another one or is taking on responsibilities previously held by others who have been laid off.

Gathering collateral information is critical for diagnostic accuracy and well-articulated interventions that may be recommended. Evaluators who do such assessments at the behest of corporate clients should insist that they have access to employee files investigative reports, and if appropriate permission to interview supervisors, employee assistance program representatives, and human resources personnel familiar with the case.

Mobbing is real and deserves much greater attention by researchers and clinicians in the United States (and one suspects elsewhere too.)

Doing away with the is word

Now I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, reading and writing about the quantum. More and more I’ve been searching for  connections that seem to bind elements of the quantum with  consciousness and our perceptions of reality. At the same time, I am a huge fan of Albert Ellis and his work in rational emotive behavior therapy. Of course we shouldn’t expect to be loved just because we love.

Albert Ellis also advocated the use of E-Prime, especially in writing, as a way to avoid muddled and blame-based thinking that distresses psychotherapy patients. According to Ellis, rational emotive behavior therapy "has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime."

E-prime you ask?

Alfred Korzybski, in 1933 proposed that we should abolish the "is of identity" from the English language. And, in 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. went further and proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be.” An English without "isness" now known as E-Prime, or English-Prime.

By and large, however, E-Prime has not yet caught on either in learned circles or in popular speech.

Oddly, most physicists write in E-Prime a large part of the time, due to the influence of Operationalism -- the philosophy that tells us to define things by operations performed -- but few have any awareness of E-prime as a discipline and most of them lapse into "isness" statements all too frequently

1. The photon is a wave can be re-written to read - The photon behaves as a   wave when constrained by certain instruments

2. The photon is a particle can be written such as:  The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

3. John is unhappy and grouchy can be re-written to read John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office.

Sure, the first example becomes an operational formulation when rewritten in English Prime and may appear of interest to philosophers and scientists of an operationalist bias, but consider what happens when we move to the second example.

Clearly, written in Standard English, "The photon is a wave," and "The photon is a particle" contradict each other, just like the sentences "Robin is a boy" and "Robin is a girl." Nonetheless, all through the nineteenth century physicists found themselves debating about this and, by the early 1920s, it became obvious that the experimental evidence depended on the instruments or the instrumental set-up (design) of the total experiment. One type of experiment always showed light traveling in waves, and another type always showed light traveling as discrete particles.

3.         To be or not to be,

            That is the question. Hamlet

Become

To live or to die,

I ask myself this.

While teaching at the University of Florida, Korzybski counseled his students to eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when ..." or "I tend to make myself depressed about … demonstrating the application of general semantics to psychotherapy.

The Mask Of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-Called Psychopathic Personality

The Mask Of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-Called Psychopathic Personality

During a case discussion involving patients in custody recently a colleague made reference to Milton Cleckley’s  “The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-called Psychopathic Personality.” I’d heard of the book given that it’s considered to be a seminal work and the most influential clinical description of psychopathy in the twentieth century. I had to read it…

Right off, the book starts with a poem – not a poem by an antisocial but perhaps one for an antisocial. The poem is reproduced in many forums including an internet-based Psychology and Mental Health forum. Here it is:

“From chaos shaped, the Bios grows. In bone and viscus broods the Id. And who can say Whence Eros comes? Or chart his troubled way? Nor bearded sage, nor science, yet has shown. How truth or love, when met, is straightly known; Some phrases singing in our dust today. Have taunted logic through man's Odyssey: Yet, strangely, man sometimes will find his own. And even man has felt the arcane flow. Whence brims unchanged the very Attic wine, Where lives that mute and death-eclipsing glow. That held the Lacedaemonian battle line: And this, I think, may make what man is choose. The doom of joy he knows he can but lose.” Cleckley

This book is now in its fifth edition – first published in 1941. Cleckley recalls how the first edition was based primarily on experience with adult male psychopaths hospitalized in a closed institution. During the ensuring decades a much more diverse group of people became available. Female patients, adolescents, people who had never been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, all in large numbers, became available for study and afforded an opportunity to observe the disorder in a very wide range of variety and of degree.

Since the first edition of this book, revisions of the nomenclature have been made by the American Psychiatric Association. The classification of psychopathic personality was changed to that of sociopathic personality in 1958. In 1968 it was changed again to antisocial personality. Like most psychiatrists I continue to think of the people who are the subject of this book as psychopaths and will most often refer to them by this familiar term.

One of the most striking things about this book is born in its seemingly incorruptible America – an era where deals are considered legal contracts by handshakes and man’s word is gold. The government seems to care about its citizens. Here,  lawyers and judges and police officers have a certain amount of sympathy for the patients he’s worked with; they know these people aren’t quite right because they keep committing idiotic crimes that really have no pay-off, but they aren’t legally insane.

What I found most interesting about this book, perhaps it’s just me, the overwhelming sense of paternalism and male chauvinism. While women are mentioned as having jobs, it’s understood that of course they do that until they follow the natural course of life and get married and have children. A case study of one woman was particularly curious. The woman was considered to be a “deviant” and show signs of psychopathology merely because she was a lesbian and had the audacity to say that she did not want to be married. No worries—she was soon “cured” of those two unnatural conditions. Deviant behaviour abounds in this book. There is even a  chapter titled: “Homosexuality and other consistent sexual deviations.” Sure this is written in the early twentieth century but the incredible stereotypes are noteworthy to say the least. Sections deal with The psychopath as businessman, The psychopath as man of the world, The psychopath as gentleman, etc where are fascinating.

Time paradoxon

For the great part of this past summer I’ve been talking and writing about what we have come to understand of time. Not so much about the passage of time, or our perception of time but rather, the more lofty notions, space-time. We know for example time slows at higher speeds of the reference frame relative to another. This (time dilation) is explained in special relativity theory. But what of the psychology of time? We have all, at one time to another; acknowledged how quickly time seems to be breezing by. Time seems to pass by quicker as we grow older. Time flies when we’re having fun, where did this year go, etc.

Time paradoxon is relevant for understanding our perception of time. It seems, according to Bruss and Ruschendorf of Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Universitat at Freiburg that while time periods which are filled with interesting activities pass by quickly, these periods are felt in retrospection as having taken longer than less eventful periods. Hence, in retrospective, the feeling of time duration is in general different from its perception at the time of the very same period. One convincing explanation of this is that human beings remember, first of all, major events of their life. Periods of these major events are memorized in a particular way and leave an accessible track on the human mind. Moreover, the meaning of a major event changes naturally in time. A first event of a certain type has a greater chance to be felt as major than similar events later on in life. Therefore a month in childhood or adolescence is usually felt much longer than a month in adult age. The feeling of time is thinned out in a quite natural way. On the whole the phenomenon seems almost unavoidable. Taking these arguments together gives additional support to the idea that important or new events and their pattern of occurrence in life play a dominant role for the individual perception of time.

More than clear minded - a see-through brain

Karl Deisseroth, neuroscientist at Stanford University and his colleagues reported that they had developed a way to replace the opaque tissue in brains (harvested from lab mice or donated by people for research) with “hydrogel,” a substance similar to that used for contact lenses.

The result is see-through brains, their innards revealed in a way no current technique can: large structures such as the hippocampus show up with the clarity of organs in a transparent fish, and even neural circuits and individual cells are visible. This may make it possible to study intact brains, and give us a better chance of examining connections over large distances, which would help determine structure-function relationships.

The Stanford scientists are able to visualize the thalamus and the brainstem, the cortex and hippocampus with the naked eye. Using a microscope revealed the white matter that serves as a brain’s transmission lines, carrying signals from one neuron to another in far-flung circuits that underlie mental function.

It turns out that hydrogel is not only transparent but also permeable thus allowing scientists to infuse fluorescent dyes into the brain and other molecules that attach to specific brain cells, and even to individual proteins and other molecules, turning the circuitry a neuroscientist wants to study into can’t-miss hues when viewed in special light.  Deisseroth says “we could see structures down to paired neurons on each side of a synapse.”

When Happiness and Depression Meet

About a year ago I wrote about happiness and what it is that makes us happy. It turns out that what makes us happy, what motivates us, follows the philosophy of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. We do things for ourselves that help grow us and are important to us, we do things that we have to struggle with to improve ourselves, and we do things that make us part of a bigger world, and all of these three things have the capacity to make us happy or happier. Follow link below.

http://appliedpsychologyresearch.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/happiness-is-synthetic-so-why-not.html

I wanted today to check, basically, how users of Google search for information associated with happiness and depression. This is essentially search volume index over time. As you can see above there is a fascinating convergence between these two search volumes. As the search volume for Depression decreases over time, the search volume for Happiness has increased to almost the same volume matching Depression. Even when you ask Google to extrapolate these trends (in dotted lines) the trend continues.