Maggie's Farm

 Thanks in no small part to Youmans’s Spencerian pump, the scientific method permeated American popular culture and influenced the major American intellectual movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably pragmatism and behaviorism. These movements’ most important figures—including Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and, later, B.F. Skinner—developed their ideas about “the scientific method” partly in the pages of The Popular Science Monthly and its 1915 spinoff, The Scientific Monthly. In the series of articles introducing the philosophy of pragmatism, Peirce granted a monopoly on truth to “the scientific method,” which consisted of restricting one’s conception of a thing to its sensible effects. This method alone, Peirce promised, would carry people past their diverse points of view to converge upon a single, certain answer to any question, “like the operation of destiny.”

The psychology of psychopathy: an inside look at the psychopathic brain

Scott Alexander and The New York Times

How to manage impossible problems. It's a bit of an oldie, but a goodie: F- Feelings.

Many people have found it to be helpful, clarifying. 

It's coming to a DSM near you one of these days: Orthorexia nervosa. You may find many victims of this disorder in the socially-distanced lines at Whole Foods. It's a harmless preoccupation other than the risk of annoying or boring your friends. 

Another one is Binge Eating, aka Binge Eating Disorder.  These are people who will ask for seconds, or eat ravenously until the food is gone. Historically it was just called the sin of gluttony, but now it's a diagnosis. It is interesting to me how various behaviors, maybe once attributed to demons, later to sins, are now DSM diagnoses.

Does a "mind" even exist? It seems to me that it does, but the concept of mind has a history. 

Scott Alexander reviews a 20 year-old book,  The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

It is always an interesting topic. Pathological Liars, Psychopaths & Natural Liars - How can we tell natural liars from pathological liars and psychopaths?

He left out politicians in his "natural liars" list.

If it could somehow be measured, people's capacity for fantasizing about everything and anything would probably be represented by a bell curve, with the most inhibited and rigid on the left tail and the most free-wheeling on the right tail.

Sometimes attempting to turn fantasies into reality is a good idea, sometimes unwise or self-destructive.  Mistaking fantasies for reality is rarely practical. 

Here's an example:  AUTOGENDERPHILIA IS COMMON

Of course women want romance, a great sex life, and cheerful and intelligent companionship. Maybe solid husband material too. Maybe not so easy to find.

Who do women target? At Quillette, All the single ladies 

It's a guided imagery approach, Here.

Study Shows Genetic Source of Anxiety 

It is unsurprising, since we can identify anxious kids quite early. It frequently appears as unusual separation fears. 

A quick summary: Sex differences and personality.

Bear in mind that these are bell curve data. 

Why researchers are starting to change their minds.

Here are the problems, with which I am sure most people in my field would agree. First, most serious psychopaths rarely seek help, and then usually only when they get in trouble. Second, lying and manipulating are second nature to them, so they try to play you. Some are quite adept. Third, they tend to be unreliable with showing up or paying their bills.

There are others, too.

In my experience, when people come to me worrying about whether they have a cold or dark heart, or feeling guilty about some pattern of behavior, it's a good sign that they are far from psychopathic.

I will offer the opinion that there are full-blown psychopaths, very scary people. However, there are people with a range of psychopathic (ie sociopathic) traits which are worth being alert to. On the other end of the spectrum, most people have psychopathic fantasies which they never, or very rarely, act on.

No mortal is pure of heart. It's complicated. It's not a disease. 

Nobel Psychologist (whose Nobel was in Economics) Donald Kahneman explains why in a podcast interview.

Asylums for the "moral treatment" of the mentally ill emerged in the early 1800s. I put moral treatment in quotes not to disparage their efforts but because Moral Treatment was a new medical movement at the time to treat the mentally ill compassionately, protectively, and respectfully. That movement continues today.

-  Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar

-  A Cultural Historian Explores an Old Mental Hospital

The giant old state mental hospitals are mostly abandoned now.  

What is life like for people like Kayla Mueller's parents to know that their daughter was abducted, kept as a sex slave by al-Baghdadi until he tired of her, then tortured including having her nails pulled out, and then beheaded?

I have spent many hours with parents whose children have had tragic experiences, catastrophic lives,  or met tragic ends. Life must go on, but the mental images and the agony that accompanies them can never be erased.

A vale of tears. People like me can sometimes offer no relief, only companionship in suffering.

Everybody knows that most of "homelessness" is about dysfunctional people rather than lack of a roof. Given the complexity of humans, and the complexity of modern society, it's remarkable how few there are.

The great reformer Dorothea Dix recognized the need for "humane asylums" for the mentally ill and incapacitated. By the 1970s, the "miracle drugs" were supposed to treat serious mental illnesses. JFK led a movement towards "deinstutionalization". You all know this.

As things turned out, we found excellent treatments for bipolar ailments but really only symptomatic treatments for the Schizophrenic spectrum of low-functional, marginally-functional, and non-functional people. (Addicts are highly-treatable, but addicts do not always want that and it's a free country.)

So, for the chronically mentally ill (mostly Schizophrenic variants who might be as much as 1% of the population), there is either family support, street life, or asylum of some form. "Asylum" should not be a dirty word. It should be a beautiful word, and asylums can be good places. But nobody is building them or coming up with creative ideas about it.

 How The Loss Of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals Led To A Mental Health Crisis

Seven Reasons Why Most Major Depression is Probably Not a Brain Disorder

Note that they say "most," not all. Bipolar depression sure seems like a brain disorder of sorts, as do depressive symptoms related to peripartum, hypothyroidism, some GI cancers, etc. 

To my mind, it's best to think of "depressive symptoms" rather than of a unitary phenomenon. Many acute depressive events I have seen are, in fact, reactive to events and could be viewed as grief. 

Bell curve chart is from No One Is Born in ‘The Wrong Body’