Remembrance of Apocalypse Past: The Psychology of True Believers When Nothing Happens - CSI

So depending on which kind of nut you follow, the end of the world is once again upon us.  Like the numerous predictions of doom prior, I expect this one to fall by the wayside as well. 

As is fairly obvious by now, the much-heralded end of the world in 2012 didn’t happen. Quetzalcoatl didn’t return on his raft of snakes. The earth was not torn asunder. Alien overlords did not materialize. It didn’t even rain very much that week.

We were privileged to publish an article in the Skeptical Inquirer last year (Sharps et al. 2013) concerning the psychological factors that made it possible for modern human beings, even with modern access to scientific information, to believe in this type of baseless nonsense. We found that disturbingly high numbers of university students either believed in or entertained the likelihood of the “Mayan end of the world.” We found curious incoherencies in their patterns of belief: for example, many believers in the Maya “prophecies” did not believe in what those prophecies predicted. The idea expressed is completely illogical, but this illogical incoherency was in the minds of a great many people who were attempting to think about the 2012 apocalypse before it didn’t happen. Whether the believers expected world peace and a new age, or world destruction and apocalyptic doom, logical inconsistency was very commonly observed.

This type of incoherency didn’t die with the nonexistent apocalypse; it’s still there, ready and waiting, in the minds of enormous numbers of True Believers.

Remembrance of Apocalypse Past: The Psychology of True Believers When Nothing Happens - CSI

The emotional roots of conspiratorial perceptions, system justification, and belief in the paranormal

As some of you may have gathered, I have some unusual interests.  In regards to people, on one end of the spectrum, there are individuals like Alex Jone; as a contrast, Steven L.Anderson comes too mind.  In the "events" or "things happening in the world  category", the so-called Truthers come to mind.  But yet the Sovereign Citizen Movement fascinates me.  For beliefs we have anything with a cultic group think, like Patriarchy and Quiverfull; but yet, at the other end are people who seem to think the Genesis 6 giants are real and still among us.

In essence, I am fascinated by what motivates people to buy into crazy worldviews. Is it a means of compensation for feeling powerless?  Is it a measure of self-worth, a meaning or purpose for life?  And one I didn't consider prior to reading the attached study, the need for order, or "structure".

So the Whitson et al. study shows,

This research has several important implications. First and foremost, our studies establish that external or world uncertainty can have the same effects as lacking control. This is critical to test and establish because uncertainty and lacking control are conceptually distinct and may, as a result, produce different effects. This research establishes that uncertainty and lacking control represent one broad construct that incites the need for structure. Furthermore, by using emotions which differ on uncertainty and valence, we are able to provide the first evidence that uncertainty alone is enough to drive compensatory control strategies, regardless of valence. Lastly, these experiments extend the literature on appraisal tendencies of emotions by establishing that emotions characterized by uncertainty appraisals don't simply lead to systematic processing. Rather, they lead to structure seeking.

What Whitson et al are saying, emotional uncertainty creates a need to compensate. Uncertainty in an emotional state – regardless of whether it is positive or negative – leads to a desire for structure and a sense of control.  So, in our attempt to achieve a sense of certainty, to make sense of things, a conspiratorial mind think or a harsh, punitive religions (like Patriarchy and Quiverfull) can become attached.

In other words, there is comfort in the conspiracy theory.  Seeing real or illusory patterns, provides an explanation for why things are the way they are. There is comfort in overbearing religious dogma or a tyrannical government, as both purport how things ought to be.  Mapping out our fates and providing predictable structure in our ever changing world.  As the authors put it,

“Whether one finds comfort in a strong government, astrological predictions, or vast conspiracies , all are responses potentially driven by the uncertain.”

Even without evidence, people faced with uncertainty or fear will gravitate move toward something that makes sense of things -- even if that something is harmful or makes no rational sense

The emotional roots of conspiratorial perceptions, system justification, and belief in the paranormal

It's Not Always Depression - NYTimes.com

One innate response to this type of environment is for the child to develop chronic shame. He interprets his distress, which is caused by his emotional aloneness, as a personal flaw. He blames himself for what he is feeling and concludes that there must be something wrong with him. This all happens unconsciously. For the child, shaming himself is less terrifying than accepting that his caregivers can’t be counted on for comfort or connection.

To understand Brian’s type of shame, it helps to know that there are basically two categories of emotions. There are core emotions, like anger, joy and sadness, which when experienced viscerally lead to a sense of relief and clarity (even if they are initially unpleasant). And there are inhibitory emotions, like shame, guilt and anxiety, which serve to block you from experiencing core emotions.

Not all inhibition is bad, of course. But in the case of chronic shame like Brian’s, the child’s emotional expression becomes impaired. Children with too much shame grow up to be adults who can no longer sense their inner experiences. They learn not to feel, and they lose the ability to use their emotions as a compass for living. Somehow they need to recover themselves.
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Many psychotherapies focus on the content of the stories that people tell about themselves, looking for insights that can be used to fix what’s wrong. By contrast, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy focuses on fostering awareness of the emotional life of the patient as it unfolds in real time in front of the therapist. The therapist is actively affirming, emotionally engaged and supportive. She encourages the patient to attend not only to his thoughts and emotions but also to the physical experience of those thoughts and emotions.

It's Not Always Depression - NYTimes.com

Baby used in notorious fear experiment is lost no more - health - 01 October 2014 - New Scientist

You'll have heard of Pavlov's dogs, conditioned to expect food at the sound of a bell. You might not have heard that a scarier experiment – arguably one of psychology's most unethical – was once performed on a baby.

In it, a 9-month-old, at first unfazed by the presence of animals, was conditioned to feel fear at the sight of a rat. The infant was presented with the animal as someone struck a metal pole with a hammer above his head. This was repeated until he cried at merely the sight of any furry object – animate or inanimate.

The "Little Albert" experiment, performed in 1919 by John Watson of Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, was the first to show that a human could be classically conditioned. The fate of Albert B has intrigued researchers ever since.

Hall Beck at the Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, has been one of the most tenacious researchers on the case. Watson's papers stated that Albert B was the son of a wet nurse who worked at the hospital. Beck spent seven years exploring potential candidates and used facial analysis to conclude in 2009 that Little Albert was Douglas Merritte, son of hospital employee Arvilla.

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Powell and his colleagues decided to reinvestigate the case. They focused on another woman who had worked at the hospital – teenager Pearl Barger, who, they claim, Beck had discounted after finding no evidence that she'd had a baby while there.

Powell's team uncovered new genealogical documentation, of a Pearl Barger, married and known as Pearl Martin. A US census later revealed that Pearl Martin had three children with her husband – however, one was delivered in 1919, before they married. That child's name was William Albert Barger, but hospital records showed he went by his middle name. "Albert B," says Powell, "it all added up."


Baby used in notorious fear experiment is lost no more - health - 01 October 2014 - New Scientist

The Most Dangerous Idea in Mental Health - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

Troublingly, 43 percent of practicing clinical psychologists still think it is possible to retrieve repressed memories. Those therapists are profoundly out of step with the thinking among research psychologists.

Reading this was a bit like walking down memory lane. Not so much for me personally, in regards to actual treatment, as I have never had a treatment provider go to the extremes cited in this article.  But I did "suffer" with a diagnoses of MPD'DID concurrent with my Bipolar.  I now believe that misnomer was applied because I am a cutter and back in the day, self injury was not well understood.  But I did and still do have friends that are "caught" in this morass, I got sucked into the "belief" of alter-personalities to the point where I began to question my literal sanity.  If not for the excellent care from my last therapist, who knows where I'd be today; probably still locked in one of the nut houses I was a visitor too.

(To be clear, I say that in jest.  There are some excellent facilities helping many individuals.  But there are some not so good ones as well.  I experienced both, the initial 3 years after experiencing my first psychotic episode, I spent 18 months in and out of hospital.  I am crazy and I have the papers to prove it.  Both the good and the bad is part of who I am and  I have no problem making light of it.)

My interest with this article besides the obvious concerning Castlewood, is Cara's reference to belief in "cults [that] roam the country, ritualistically traumatizing children."  In other words the "Satanic Panic" that led to this travesty as well as this one which I prefaced with this comment:

For those that may not remember, it began in 1983 (my sophomore year of college) with the McMartin Preschool case out of California.* Fuel was added by the likes of Mike Warnke, John Todd, Jack Chick, Michelle Smith and of course my buddy Bob Larson; the list is an endless whose who of Christian fundamentalism. Though the flames began to die down in the 90s, the 'San Antonio 4' was one of the  last big cases to sweep the nation. About damn time that some true justice has come for Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh and Cassandra Rivera. Now all they need is a declaration of innocents to complete the process.

Some may think that Cara is being hyperbolic, or that my interest is a bit over the top.  But when one considers the rise in popularity of demons, deliverance ministries and of exorcisms, I don't think neither of us are delusional in our reporting.

It has been two years since Tom Mitchell last saw his 20-year-old daughter, Anna. “She was planning to come stay with us right after she came back,” he says, gesturing toward her bedroom in his Craftsman style home in New York on a recent afternoon. “We’ve kept everything the same, except for the boy-band posters.”

Nearly four years ago, Tom and his ex-wife sent their daughter to an eating-disorder clinic called the Castlewood Treatment Center, outside St. Louis. In her five months there, Anna grew to believe she had recovered memories of a deeply abusive childhood that she had previously banished from her conscious mind. Since then, Mitchell has lived in the shadow of a horrific accusation: that he sexually abused Anna for more than a decade.

Child sexual abuse is, of course, a serious and widespread issue in America. Researchers agree that it occurs far more often than official statistics indicate, because children so often decline to report their abuse out of embarrassment, a desire to protect members of their family, or in an attempt to avoid the memory altogether. But the idea that people can immediately banish abuse from their own consciousness, lock those memories away for years, and then recover them through therapy is one with far shakier empirical grounding, and a deeply problematic history. The therapeutic vogue for memory recovery in the early 1990s fueled a nationwide moral panic over ritual sex abuse, satanic cults, and other supposedly repressed traumas. Today, for most of us, the fad seems like a strange, self-contained, and very much closed chapter in recent cultural history.

But for Tom Mitchell, who denies his daughter’s accusations, the controversy is very much alive. He believes his family has suffered from the fact that the mental health establishment has never really purged itself of a thoroughly discredited idea—and arguably lacks the basic mechanisms necessary to self-correct.

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But the tide really began to turn when former patients started to doubt their own recovered memories. In dozens of lawsuits, patients described coercive therapeutic techniques including hypnosis, guided visualization, and dream analysis, and the pressure of group therapy, often used on them when they were at their most vulnerable. Some former patients related terrifying experiences of being confined in mental health wards stocked with people who believed they had dozens of personalities. Therapists, some of the lawsuits claimed, both encouraged these beliefs and accused patients who expressed doubt of succumbing to programming they received from a cult. Some settlements from the lawsuits reached into the millions.

By the end of the 1990s, many of the trauma clinics that had specialized in recovered memory therapy had shut down. The daytime talk shows about satanic abuse and multiple personalities became less frequent, and the courts became wary of testimony based on recovered memories. Richard McNally, the director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and author of the book Remembering Trauma, put it bluntly in a friend-of-court brief: “The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry.”

The Most Dangerous Idea in Mental Health - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

New Age Gurus: Dispensers of Nonsense | Psychology Today

This morning I had the misfortune of catching a two-minute clip of Gary Zukav chatting with Oprah Winfrey. I had never heard of Mr. Zukav until today. I was struck by the astonishing vacuous comments that he was spouting delivered in a guru-like tone of haughty profundity. Of course, there are many other such spiritual “gurus” perhaps none more famous than Deepak Chopra (see my earlier Psychology Today article on the daunting task of choosing between competing spiritual movements). To any person steeped in an ethos of reason, science, and logic, these New Age proclamations are nonsensical gibberish. And yet to millions of people, these men are holders of universal truths that lie below the “vulgar” realm of mere material reality. You see, Chopra, Zukav, and their ilk have access to deeper spiritual truths that plebeian schmucks such as myself can never understand (as was “explained” to me by a Twitter follower).

In a sense, New Age gurus are akin to postmodernists within academia (see my earlier Psychology Today on the faux-intellectualism of postmodernism). They dispense meaningless drivel that masquerades as profound truths whilst in reality it is a mere exercise in obscurantism. Watch how I can easily become a New Age guru. Given my scientific work in evolutionary psychology and my Middle Eastern background, I am an evolutionary quantum hakim (EQH) and as such I channel cosmic energy using the EQH frequency. Because of my ability to tap into this ancient vibrational field, I have received the following three universal truths,,,

New Age Gurus: Dispensers of Nonsense | Psychology Today

Supernatural 'Jinn' Seen as Cause of Mental Illness Among Muslims

Back in early June. I posted about this paper which described the symptomatology of schizophrenia and delusional disorders, talking a little bit about what a “demonic” experience might be like.

It now seems we have another attempt coming from researchers in the Netherlands although this paper seems more focused:

Across societies, beliefs in the supernatural as well as other aspects of culture may influence how mental disorders manifest, the study said. Previous research has found that people with schizophrenia may experience different delusions depending on their cultures. For example, fears about technology and surveillance play a large part in the delusions of people with schizophrenia in the United States. Meanwhile, in Japan, which has an honor-oriented culture, patients' delusions more commonly involve fears about public humiliation.

It may be common for psychiatric patients who are Muslim to attribute their hallucinations or other symptoms to "jinn," the invisible, devilish creatures in Islamic mythology, researchers in the Netherlands have found.

The findings demonstrate one way in which culture may influence how people perceive their psychotic symptoms, and could help Western psychiatrists better understand patients who have an Islamic background.

Moreover, in today's connected world, patients may fuse the symbols from their own backgrounds with those of other cultures to explain their symptoms, study leader Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Groningen, told Live Science.

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To get a better idea of how commonly Muslim psychiatric patients consider jinn in the course of their diseases, the researchers looked into the scientific literature. They found 105 articles about jinn and their relationship with mental disorders, including 47 case reports. About 66 percent of those reports included a medical diagnosis. Nearly half of the cases involved a person with schizophrenia or a related disorder, while the rest of the patients had mood disorders, epilepsy or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"The available literature suggests that the attribution of psychiatric symptoms to jinn is common in some Muslim populations," the researchers wrote in their review, published July 30 in the journal Transcultural Psychiatry.

"Since Western health professionals tend to be unfamiliar with this attribution style, diagnosis may prove quite challenging — especially when the patient-physician encounter is already impeded by language problems and cultural differences or biases," the researchers said.

Moreover, findings from several case reports suggested that the attribution of psychiatric symptoms to jinn also affects the treatment and course of patients' mental disorders, the researchers said.

Supernatural 'Jinn' Seen as Cause of Mental Illness Among Muslims

See also:  Real-Life Werewolves: Psychiatry Re-Examines Rare Delusion

Psychologist Accused Of Sexually Assaulting Patients With 'Touching Therapy'

A Pennsylvania psychologist was arrested on charges of sexual assault for treating patients with a special brand of "touching therapy" he practiced, the state attorney general said on Wednesday.

Dr. Richard Lenhart, 53, of State College, Pennsylvania, sexually assaulted two female patients at his private practice under the guise of treatment and then billed insurers as if he had provided legitimate services, prosecutors said.

"The charges state Lenhart prescribed 'touching therapy' for the women, which included touching and holding the patients. The therapy allegedly included stroking, sexual contact and rubbing of genitals," according to a news release from state Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

Psychologist Accused Of Sexually Assaulting Patients With 'Touching Therapy'

ADDENDUM::Journal Under Fire For Linking Schizophrenia to Demonic Possession

Curtis Hart, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Religion and Health and lecturer in public health at Weill Cornell Medical College, told Real Clear Science that he stands behind Irmak’s paper and has no plans to retract it. “The article was published in hopes that it would provoke discussion,” he said. “The journal does not agree that demons are a real entity.”

Hart might see the paper’s inclusion as an interesting way to ignite debate, but his peers in the medical community question if it’s a useful one. Dr. Joshua Kantrowitz, director of Columbia University’s Lieber Schizophrenia Research Clinic, dismisses Irmack’s argument as “pretty unfortunate.”

“With respect, this is a way to attract eyes to their journal and not necessarily a legitimate scientific debate,” he says. “People with schizophrenia are prescribed antipsychotics, and they work for most. As the article correctly cites, they don’t work for everybody, but I think it’s a pretty big leap to jump to the explanation offered. There didn’t seem to be much actual evidence or science behind what the author was saying.”

Journal Under Fire For Linking Schizophrenia to Demonic Possession

ADDENDUM::RealClearScience - Published Paper Blames Schizophrenia on Demons

THE EDITOR OF the Journal of Religion and Health is Dr. Curtis Hart, a lecturer in public health at Weill Cornell Medical College. RealClearScience reached out to him for comment.

"The article was published in hopes that it would provoke discussion," he said. "The Journal does not agree that demons are a real entity."

There are currently no plans to retract the paper, but two rebuttals are already slated for a future issue, Curtis added. The journal's publisher, Springer, recently made headlines by withdrawing 16 gibberish papers spotted by an independent computer scientist. The nonsense papers were created with a computer program, SciGen.

RCS gave Irmak a chance to defend his paper.

"There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of demons," he admitted. "This is like the argument of creation or evolution. It is a matter of belief and I think the existence of demons cannot be proved by scientific methods."

For the record, there is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence in support of evolution, which is not at all a matter of belief.

Irmak also insisted that readers of his paper watch the Academy Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind, which chronicles the life of genius mathematician John Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia.

"I think the creatures who disturb John Nash are demons," he said.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/06/published_scientific_paper_blames_schizophrenia_on_demons.html

RealClearScience - Published Paper Blames Schizophrenia on Demons

New paper says maybe mental condition really IS demons | Doubtful News

Kudos to Sharon Hill over at Doubtful News for this gem,,,

Long ago, before modern medical understanding, people thought that various conditions such as mental illness and brain disorders like seizures were caused by demons. Those days have long past. Maybe not in the religious-minded. Note that this article comes from High Council of Science, Gulhane Military Medical Academy, Ankara, Turkey. Turkey is a hotbed of Muslim fundamentalism.

The Journal is peer-reviewed including reports on “contemporary modes of religious and spiritual thought with particular emphasis on their relevance to current medical and psychological research.” Articles deal with mental and physical health in relation to religion and spirituality of all kinds. Therefore, that might explain why such a piece is published – that even contemporary (backwards) religions are returning to pre-scientific explanations.

I can’t fathom how such a paper would contain anything but speculation. The medical data nor any other scientific evidence anywhere in no way supports the reality of supernatural entities as a cause of human harm. Belief, however, causes havoc.

I was half tempted to pay the $40 to purchase this paper until reading K Friesen's comment,

,,,it is definitely not peer reviewed. For that matter, there is scarcely anything in the paper – no methods, numbers, statistics, nothing even about “spiritual treatment”. The five pages of this paper (three if you don’t include the abstract and references) basically describe the symptomatology of schizophrenia and delusional disorders, talk a little bit about what a “demonic” experience might be like. To be a bit balanced, this article is under a subheading of “Psychological Exploration”

Sorry forty bucks for five pages of dreck is not worth the price no matter how "enlightening" it may be.

A few thoughts to ponder,,,

A point that HIll makes, "[w]hen people believe this is religious cause, it will encourage exorcisms. Exorcisms are downright deadly." To which Improbable Research, cited by Hill, ends with this question, "The new theory raises an enigmatic question : if medication helps patients, is it acting on the patients themselves, or on the demons which possess them?

It is my question of which came first, religious belief or mental illness? In my humble opinion, the belief that one is demonically possessed is often a symptom of schizophrenia. "My feelings and movements are controlled by others in a certain way” and “They put thoughts in my head that are not mine.” Compare also to what some say in regards to aliens and demonology, Bill Alnor for example in a 2009 lecture [from my other blog].

A second point, if one looks at the references cited by the paper talked about by HIll some of the references are to sources specifically about the Near Eastern or Islamic belief jinn.

Whether Christian or Islamic, belief in demonic possession will lead to catastrophic results as I have many times highlighted.

New paper says maybe mental condition really IS demons | Doubtful News

Phineas Gage neuroscience case: True story of famous frontal lobe patient is better than textbook accounts.

The first story that appeared about Gage contained a mistake. The day after his accident, a local newspaper misstated the diameter of the rod. A small error, but an omen of much worse to come.

Psychologist and historian Malcolm Macmillan, currently at the University of Melbourne, has been chronicling mistakes about Gage for 40 years. He has had a peripatetic career: Among other topics, he has studied disabled children, Scientology, hypnosis, and fascism. In the 1970s, he got interested in Gage and decided to track down original material about the case. He turned up alarmingly little, and realized just how rickety the evidence was for most of the science about Gage.

Macmillan has been sifting fact from fiction ever since, and he eventually published a scholarly book about Gage’s story and its afterlife, An Odd Kind of Fame. Although slowed by a faulty hip replacement—he has trouble reaching books on the bottom shelves at libraries now—Macmillan continues to fight for Gage’s reputation, and he has gotten so involved with his subject that he now refers to him, familiarly, as Phineas. Above all, Macmillan stresses the mismatch between what we actually know about Gage and the popular understanding of him: “Despite there being no more than a couple hundred words attesting to how he changed, he came to dominate thinking about the function of the frontal lobes.”

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Bigelow’s assessment meshed well with the medical consensus at the time, which held that the frontal lobes didn’t do much—in part because people could suffer grave injuries to them and walk away. Scientists now know that parts of the frontal lobes contribute to nearly every activity inside the brain. The forefront of the lobes, called the prefrontal area, plays an especially important role in impulse control and planning.

But even today scientists have only a vague idea of how the prefrontal lobes exercise that control. And victims of prefrontal injuries can still pass most neurological exams with flying colors. Pretty much anything you can measure in the lab—memory, language, motor skills, reasoning, intelligence—seems intact in these people. It’s only outside the lab that problems emerge. In particular, personalities might change, and people with prefrontal damage often betray a lack of ambition, foresight, empathy, and other ineffable traits. These aren’t the kind of deficits a stranger would notice in a short conversation. But family and friends are acutely aware that something is off.

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In particular, Macmillan suggests that Gage’s highly regimented life in Chile aided his recovery. People with frontal-lobe damage often have trouble completing tasks, especially open-ended tasks, because they get distracted easily and have trouble planning. But in Chile Gage never had to plan his day: Prepping the coach involved the same steps every morning, and once he hit the road, he simply had to keep driving forward until it was time to turn around. This routine would have introduced structure into his life and kept him focused.



Phineas Gage neuroscience case: True story of famous frontal lobe patient is better than textbook accounts.

Ugly Game of Telephone: The Way I Hear It, Our Enemies Are to Blame - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

“The findings strongly suggest that third parties to a conflict should be skeptical when listening to conflict narratives, and to question their authenticity."
__
We’ve all seen it happen: A simple dispute grows into a major controversy. As news spreads, antagonistic attitudes harden, and soon an argument among a handful of individuals is viewed as a symbolic struggle between “us” and “them.”

What’s behind this destructive dynamic? New research suggests at least part of the answer lies in the way we tell, and retell, stories.

It finds that the more often a tale gets repeated, the more skewed it becomes, with each new version distorting the facts a bit more.

As a result, one of the parties involved—the one the storyteller and listener inherently identify with—is increasingly portrayed in a more favorable light. Within just a few tellings, an ambiguous event is transformed into a clear-cut case of “our side” being wronged.

That’s the conclusion of a research team led by psychologists Tiane Lee and Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland-College Park. In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the researchers describe an experiment that demonstrates one unfortunate way stories get distorted as word is passed from person to person.

Ugly Game of Telephone: The Way I Hear It, Our Enemies Are to Blame - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates | Alternet

Alcoholics Anonymous is a part of our nation’s fabric. In the seventy-six years since AA was created, 12-step programs have expanded to include over three hundred different organizations, focusing on such diverse issues as smoking, shoplifting, social phobia, debt, recovery from incest, even vulgarity. All told, more than five million people recite the Serenity Prayer at meetings across the United States every year.

Twelve-step programs hold a privileged place in our culture as well. The legions of “anonymous” members who comprise these groups are helped in their proselytizing mission by hit TV shows such as "Intervention," which preaches the gospel of recovery. “Going to rehab” is likewise a common refrain in music and fi lm, where it is almost always uncritically presented as the one true hope for beating addiction. AA and rehab have even been codified into our legal system: court-mandated attendance, which began in the late 1980s, is today a staple of drug-crime policy. Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.

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Any substantive conversation about treatment in this country must reckon with the toll levied when a culture encourages one approach to the exclusion of all others, especially when that culture limits the treatment options for suffering people, ignores advances in understanding addiction, and excludes and even shames the great majority of people who fail in the sanctioned approach.

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In other words, the program doesn’t fail; you fail.

Imagine if similar claims were made in defense of an ineffective antibiotic. Imagine dismissing millions of people who did not respond to a new form of chemotherapy as “constitutionally incapable” of properly receiving the drug. Of course, no researchers would make such claims in scientific circles—if they did, they would risk losing their standing. In professional medicine, if a treatment doesn’t work, it’s the treatment that must be scrutinized, not the patient. Not so for Alcoholics Anonymous.



AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates | Alternet

Movie Review: Frankie & Alice | World of Psychology

It’s been 57 years since The Three Faces of Eve premiered in move theaters. One of the first cinematic portrayals of serious mental illness, the movie starred Joanne Woodward. She would end up winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance portraying three different personalities in one individual in the film.

Enter Halle Berry and her performance in Frankie and Alice. Although first released to very limited audience in 2010, it garnered Berry a Golden Globe nomination in 2011 for her lead role in the film. In it, she portrays Frankie, a go-go dancer in the 1970s who experiences blackouts she can’t explain.

Finally released more generally this past week, it’s an interesting and engaging addition to the film category of movies portraying multiple personalities.

This film is inspired by the true story of an African American go-go dancer named Frankie, who just happens to also have multiple personalities — what we now call dissociative identity disorder (DID). She has three personalities: Frankie, a strong, intelligent go-go dancer trying to make her way in the world. Genius, a seven-year-old little girl who has a genius IQ. And Alice, a Southern racist woman — who also just happens to be white too.

Movie Review: Frankie & Alice | World of Psychology

Not just the father of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud was also a pioneering neuroscientist | The Raw Story

Penis envy. Repression. Libido. Ego. Few have left a legacy as enduring and pervasive as Sigmund Freud. Despite being dismissed long ago as pseudoscientific, Freudian concepts such as these not only permeate many aspects of popular culture, but also had an overarching influence on, and played an important role in the development of, modern psychology, leading TIME Magazine to name him as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.

Before his rise to fame as the founding father of psychoanalysis, however, Freud trained and worked as a neurologist. He carried out pioneering neurobiological research, which was cited by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, and helped to establish neuroscience as a discipline.

The eldest of eight children, Freud was born on 6th May, 1856, in the Moravian town of Příbor, in what is now the Czech Republic. Four years later, Freud’s father Jakob, a wool merchant, moved the family to Austria in search of new business opportunities. Freud subsequently entered the university there, aged just 17, to study medicine and, in the second year of his degree, became preoccupied with scientific research. His early work was a harbinger of things to come – it focused on the sexual organs of the eel. The work was, by all accounts, satisfactory, but Freud was disappointed with his results and, perhaps dismayed by the prospect of dissecting more eels, moved to Ernst Brücke’s laboratory in 1877. There, he switched to studying the biology of nervous tissue, an endeavour that would last for 10 years.

Not just the father of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud was also a pioneering neuroscientist | The Raw Story

Opponents of therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction have no scientific backing | Christian Concern

Wondering if the fact that Exodus International has collapsed would be "proof" enough. When your own former poster boys (Alan Chambers and John Paulk) admit to the therapy being a complete failure it makes one think that you are grasping at straws.

Evidence of harm? Let's see how about Ann Paulk telling a mother struggling to accept her adult gay son to cut ties and detach from him. There's good ole Christian family values for ya .

Anywho, waiting to see what the reaction is from this study will be,,,

Dr. Sutton concludes from his analysis that: “In the absence of clear, reliable and valid scientific evidence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that professional organisations like the American Psychological Association, the UK Association of Christian Counsellors, various state and national government legislatures, and even media such as The Guardian, are working to prevent mental health professionals from offering educational guidance, counselling and therapeutic care for persons with unwanted same-sex attraction and behaviour based on ideological and not scientific or professional grounds.”

Core Issues Trust has challenged the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) to provide sight of peer-reviewed studies which show conclusively that help for people to move away from unwanted same-sex attraction is harmful. The two bodies refuse to licence practitioners who want to offer therapies which can enable people to change their sexual orientation.

Dr. Mike Davidson, Director of Core Issues Trust, says that despite several official requests for scientific evidence that supports the professional bodies’ opposition to therapies for unwanted same-sex attraction, neither has provided any evidence.

[,,,]
“We are seeking a genuine debate around the issue of “harm” in relation to therapeutic support of efforts to change sexual orientation change efforts, whether these are about management, reduction or elimination of unwanted same-sex attractions and behaviours. So if the sceptics who govern the leading UK mental health bodies are truly interested in scientific debate and therapeutic choice as a foundational professional principle, I recommend that they read Dr. Sutton’s careful and comprehensive analysis.”

Opponents of therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction have no scientific backing | Christian Concern

Did your absentee father make you an atheist? - The Washington Post

“The rise of militant, evangelical, fundamentalist atheism in our time adds to the pertinence of this book,” said Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius Press, the Catholic publishing house that has reissued the book.

“Some atheists try to equate atheism with rationality. Vitz’s book shows that atheism, like many belief systems, has significant irrational elements.”

Vitz said he wanted to revise the book not only to include the New Atheists, whose family relationships he scrutinizes (Dawkins was sexually molested by a clergyman, a subject he has discussed before), but also because there was new research about atheists and attachment theory (generally, they didn’t get much of it) and atheists and autism (many autistic people are also atheists, the book claims).

As he did in the first edition, Vitz makes an important point — the book does not try to prove or disprove the existence of God. Rather, its goal is to examine some of the “irrational” underlying reasons some people become atheists.

[,,,]
But atheists are less enthusiastic. “I have a spectacular relationship with my father and consider him to be the most admirable man I’ve ever known,” wrote JT Eberhard, an atheist blogger for Patheos. Many of the comments on his review are unprintable.

Vitz, a Catholic who identified as an atheist in his youth, acknowledges there are exceptions to his theory. He identifies a big one in his book — Sam Harris, a New Atheist who hit the best-seller list with “The End of Faith,” has an apparently healthy relationship with his father, too.

“The best answer I have to explain that is I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t studied them (the exceptions) enough.”

Did your absentee father make you an atheist? - The Washington Post

Pseudoscience and psychopathy

Last month I posted concerning the original article, pondering whether I would want to know. The following article brings to light some interesting points in rebuttal, that I should have considered, but didn't.

• I was curious as to how a single brain scan from an unrelated study could predict psychopathic behavior.
• I was confused on why Dr. Fallon was comparing his brain scan from an Alzheimer’s study to an unrelated study about psychopaths. Did they do the same task in each study?
• A crucial issue with Dr. Fallon’s story is that we can’t even critique such an experimental design because he wasn’t even doing any sort of morality study! So to say that less frontal and temporal activity equals less morality is a gross oversimplification to begin with and there isn’t even any details to support such a claim.
• ,,,comparing a single brain scan from one study to an aggregate of brain scans from an entirely different study isn’t just wrong, it’s unethical.
• This is a classic example of poor scientific journalism and I believe it became so popular due to widespread deficits in scientific literacy. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see that there are huge problems with his story. You simply have view this story objectively have a healthy dose of skepticism without quickly deferring to the authority figure.
• ,,,the news articles covering his story do not provide enough details to support his claims. I find it rather troubling that no one is even addressing this

Pseudoscience and psychopathy

The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath | Surprising Science

Would you want to know?? The article and comments raise some interesting questions: freewill, nature/nurture, genetics, empathy, morality, and research ethics,,,

One afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was looking at brain scans of serial killers. As part of a research project at UC Irvine, he was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world.

“I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains,” he says. “Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk.”

“I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.

Many of us would hide this discovery and never tell a soul, out of fear or embarrassment of being labeled a psychopath. Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon has gone all in towards the opposite direction, telling the world about his finding in a TED Talk, an NPR interview and now a new book published last month, The Psychopath Inside. In it, Fallon seeks to reconcile how he—a happily married family man—could demonstrate the same anatomical patterns that marked the minds of serial killers.

The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath | Surprising Science