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. […]