Political advocacy and psychotherapy don’t mix

Two senses of “psychotherapy is political” are often conflated.  The first is the notion, popular lately, that psychotherapy either allows or demands political advocacy in the therapy room itself.  The other is recognition that political factors influence the nature and practice of psychotherapy.  It is a conceptual error to confuse the two, and a […]

Does psychiatry add to political discourse?

Quick, grab a weapon!

Millions of alarmed Americans, and people the world over, grabbed the nearest bludgeon to fend off the Trump presidency. They reached for anything handy: street marches, sympathetic pundits, counter-tweets, progressive infotainment, social media. Unfortunately, most of these reactions only fed a vicious cycle of attack and counter-attack.

For the relatively […]

Antisocial masking disorder

Features of Antisocial Masking Disorder include:

Violation of the physical or emotional rights of othersIrritability and aggressionLack of remorseConsistent irresponsibilityRecklessness

(Adapted from DSM 5 Antisocial Personality Disorder)

Whew, that was fun.  Those guys are crazy.  

But let’s be fair and make some distinctions.  At one extreme are those who deny reality.  A few […]

We are one

E pluribus unum strikes the pluribus lately as a threat, not a promise — more like assimilation by the Borg than a patriotic ideal. Instead of striving for the common good, we’ve split into factions, each defined largely by its enemy. Feminism fights patriarchy, Black Lives Matter fights police brutality, the 99% fight the 1%. […]

Lumping and splitting

As a young psychotherapy researcher I learned that some of my colleagues were “lumpers” and others were “splitters.” The former look at research data and see commonalities. Instead of different kinds of psychotherapy, say, they see a spectrum of styles with a shared core. Lumpers search for universal truths, missing links, ways of combining categories. […]