We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
It's a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while - the phenomenon of perpetual psychological adolescence in us decadent and pampered Americans - so I will look forward to seeing what she has to say about it.
I hope she will mention that the post-war worship of youth, which culminated in the late 60s and 70s, provided social permission, if not incentive, for adults to continue behaving like kids. Even college, once the domain of the serious, has become an extension of high-school. Given the human temptation for regression, and the joys of youth when compared with the rigors, duties, sacrifices, and responsibilities of adulthood, it's no wonder that people welcome the socio-cultural invitation. Every psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in America, and probably in Europe, is well-aware of this. And so are our politicians, who feed into it - and feed on it: Take care of me, Mommy and Daddy Government.
Photo: These mill workers in Georgia around the turn of the century were probably more mature than some of the 40 year-olds I see these days. Yes, I am in favor of children working. All of mine did. I did, too - and it was not "fun." However, I had time to work on my tennis too.
Psychoanalytic theorists have been struggling with trauma theory since Freud first abandoned it when he realized that fantasy can have as large an impact on a person as can real things. He more or less discovered the realm of what we shrinks call "psychic reality."
My take on it all is that dramatic events of all sorts affect people, but that the impact depends on their pre-existing character structure. One person's horror can be another person's excitement.
I have never been able to understand most of that "self-psychology" stuff he talks about, but I do know that everybody is born defective in some ways, and that emotionally-traumatic events or circumstances, generally unavoidable if you live long enough, change people in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they are opportunities for growth and maturation, sometimes they are simply destructive. Often, the destruction leaves a permanent scar, if not an open wound.
We all want to thrive and flourish in life, as best we can. Why not? Life is short. A quote from the Amazon review:
"Positivity is literally the feel-good book of the year, providing a scientifically sound prescription for joy, health, and creativity. Read one to two chapters daily as needed or until grumpiness subsides." —Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology, Harvard University, and author of Stumbling on Happiness
I have grown fond of Psychiatrist-blogger 1 Boring Old Man. I generally agree with him on things, and I respect his efforts to be more up to date on the latest things than I am. From one of his Awakening Thoughts:
My real complaint about modern psychiatry, besides the corrupting influence of industries of various flavors, is that it lacks the tension and curiosity about things unknown that drives medicine forward. For all the talk of neuroscience, what I mostly see in our literature is "product testing" and the application of any new technology of science that comes along to conditions without creative ideas and hypotheses driving the endeavor. I don’t know why people have Schizophrenia, and I want to know about that. There are thousands of similar questions, and not all of them have to do with neuroscience. I’m sure that people get depressed, have bad anxiety, or behave destructively because of things in their minds, or biographies, or lives – not in their brains. That seems self-evident to me. And I’m tired of having those of us who are interested in that causality discounted as kooks based on complaints about the early theories of Freud or the arrogance of our predecessors.
My profession is currently schizophrenic (in the non-clinical sense).
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason:
Jason graduated from Dartmouth almost five years ago. Now 26, he works in finance in Boston and shares a Back Bay apartment with five other guys with whom he went to school. He runs and works out, stays fit, and dates lots of different women all in their early twenties. At night, he hangs out at the Dartmouth bars of Boston. Hey, college was supposed to be the best years of your life, right? he explains, with only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. So where is it written that it has to end when you graduate? College is forever, man. That's what the admissions guys say that these will be your friends forever. Well, forever is now.
In 2005, Aron teamed up with some neurologists and with Helen Fisher, the biologicalanthropologist who devised the questionnaire used to match people on Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, to conduct a series of experiments. The first experiment placed happily-inlove people in an fMRI scanner to take photos of their brains. They found neural activation in areas of the brain linked with reward, excitement, and euphoria. Aron says this is likely indicative of early-stage love. Over time, the activation in this reward area can diminish. The car runs out of gas.
The processes that keep people together take place elsewhere in the brain. It’s a trait we share with only a few other animals, like the prairie vole.
and
We think of heartbreak as metaphoric, but the body actually does respond to emotional trauma, releasing a flood of stress chemicals like adrenaline that, in some cases, can overwhelm even an otherwise healthy person and cause his or her heart to spasm. Broken heart syndrome, as it’s colloquially known, has been tracked at the nation’s leading heart clinics since 2005, but because its symptoms look so similar to those of a heart attack, it is often misdiagnosed, says Ilan Wittstein, an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins Heart Institute and the lead author of a New England Journal of Medicine article first describing the syndrome.
The movement to gradually destigmatize all social deviancies continues apace. For better or worse, we've come a long way from The Scarlet Letter.
I myself am a clinger. I cling to my antique cultural traditions, morals, codes, and religion as my life's foundations, and I lack the wisdom to opine about whether the destigmatizing of adultery, abortion, pornography, promiscuity, divorce (can anybody remember when divorce was socially shameful?), homosexuality, gay marriage, gay child-rearing, LGBTQ and whatever, prostitution, fetishes, many crimes, drug abuse, overtly antisocial behaviors (see all of the defenses of the UK's rioters), single motherhood, etc. is for the best or not. It certainly does represent a socio-cultural shift which some consider decadent. The notion of destigmatizing crime, for sure, seems like a big problem to me but there are significant subcultures even in the US who do.
The social acceptance of many of these behaviors seems to me to be part of the "therapeutic culture" which I, as an MD and practicing psychotherapist, find to be close to insane in its assumption that all would be perfect humans if not for inner conflict or external traumata. Sen. Daniel Moynihan, who I had the pleasure of talking to several times, defined many such things as "definining deviancy down."
Already, Moslem polygamy is sort-of overlooked in Western nations, and I see no fairness in not overlooking it in traditionalist Mormon families - or in anybody else who wants to do it. That's my Libertarian side speaking rather than my more personal, moralistic and Christian side.
Currently, the American Psychiatric Association has, under consideration, a proposal to de-pathologize Pedophilia. Why anybody in the general public cares very much about the opinion of this APA committee is beyond me, but many do. I doubt that they will have the political cojones to actually do that but, to get a little multicultural here, we have to bear in mind that pedophilia has been and continues to be culturally accepted in many cultures and subcultures - most famously, historically, amongst European royalty, the Greeks and Romans, the Moslems, and Africans, and currently amongst some Asian cultures and many Moslem ones. Prepubescent girls are for rent everywhere in south Asia. As a commonly-defined crime, pedophilia is found everywhere in the world.
Bonobo monkeys do it all, so it must be OK. Human fantasy and psychic reality may not be too different from Bonobo behavior.
In my opinion, pedophilia is not so much of a disease in itself as it is a crime - in our culture. It is a very good idea not to commit crimes even though supposedly everybody does, wittingly or unwittingly. In my field of Psychoanalysis, we still define culturally-deviant sexual behaviors as polymorphous-perverse or plain perverse, but even we - the supposed truth-tellers about the human heart - are subject to taboo PC pressures. It is interesting to see how taboos change, but never go away: now it seems that PC defines the taboos.
I remember a gay patient, years ago, who reported to me with some alarm that he had been dancing with a lady at a wedding and found himself feeling aroused and attracted to her. I joked with him that now he was revealing himself, in modern cultural terms, to have a real perversion.
Some people become concerned with who and what they are, and some people just forge onward and never think twice about it.
To keep it simple, I'll tell you how to "find yourself." Engage the world in all the ways you can: socially, spiritually, economically, morally, avocationally in sports, volunteer activities, clubs, going places and doing things, and in hobbies.
By doing those things, the world will tell you what and who you are. Engaging reality is the best teacher. My experience teaches me that people avoid some engagments with the world because they do not want to learn what reality has to teach them about who and what they are.
Generally speaking, Prof. Reality teaches humility as its first lesson, and goes on from there.
Yes, you do have one of those psychobabble things.
Your inner child is selfish, self-centered, greedy, jealous, envious, angry, spiteful, grudge-bearing, hyper-sensitive; feels deprived, entitled, fearful, passive-aggressive, and often destructive. It's a nasty thing and results in misery (for others) in life.
My general advice is to avoid being "in touch with" one's inner child as much as possible. Reaching down and finding one's inner adult is a much better plan.
The last fad diagnosis was ADHD: every little boy who didn't act like a good little girl had it. Now, it is Bipolar Disorder for all kids with unruly emotions. In Newsweek, Mommy, Am I Really Bipolar?
A quote from the article:
I believe... that there is no scientific evidence to support the belief that bipolar disorder surfaces in childhood. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case: the evidence against the existence of pediatric bipolar disorder is so strong that it’s difficult to imagine how it has gained the endorsement of anyone in the scientific community. And the effect of this trendy thinking can have devastating consequences. Such children are regularly prescribed medications that are not effective in kids and have unwelcome side effects.
Diagnostic faddishness is rampant in Psychiatry, and an embarassment to the field. Why does it occur? It occurs because our descriptive diagnostic categories are so elastic, and so fundamentally unvalidated, that there is room for much mischief. Not to mention that the drug companies always welcome new opportunities to sell their wares.
We humans flatter ourselves when we claim to "think" things through, because often our starting point is our conclusion. We rationalize our conclusions and biases, and are attracted to information which confirms them. However, that does not mean that our thoughts are always misguided or wrong.
Anyone who does not know why they hold a particular viewpoint cannot judge fairly whether it should be kept or abandoned. There’s no point in arguing with them.
That's the point. It is in fact a Psychoanalytic point. Two good rules of thumb for introspectives are these: "Don't believe everything you think," and the old AA aphorism, "Feelings aren't facts."
Mark Edmundsen has written a piece at The Chronicle about one of my favorite bugabooos in Health Now: A Provocation. Here's a quote:
Francis Fukuyama glances at this matter in a passage from The End of History and the Last Man. "In America today, we feel entitled to criticize another person's smoking habits, but not his or her religious beliefs or moral behavior. For Americans, the health of their bodies—what they eat and drink, the exercise they get, the shape they are in—has become a far greater obsession than the moral questions that tormented their forebears."
I entirely believe in the value of remaining fit, strong, trim, sexy, and attractive but it is the fetishizing of health and the common delusions about food that annoy me the most. In the end, we are not in control of our fates. And I hate brown rice, don't know why anybody would eat it willingly. The Chinese won't eat it.
PTSD is one of those fad diagnoses which won many adherents in the past ten years, even gaining admission to the DSM.
As I have written before, very few of the descriptive Psychiatric diagnoses have validity - all most of them (with a handful of notable exceptions) have is varying degrees of reliability. In my field, a diagnosis does not mean a disease in the usual medical sense (which is why we call them "disorders").
What is termed PTSD is presumed to be a collection of complaints which some (but not most) people experience following significant emotional trauma. There is no doubt that people are distressed by, and, I think, permanently altered by significant emotional trauma. It doesn't have to be bad experiences in combat, because many things in life can constitute emotional trauma (depending on the person's psychological make-up). The reason PTSD is so often studied in combat vets is because that's where the research money is. (In the past, such symptoms were classed as ""nervous in the service," "combat fatigue," "shell shock," "traumatic neurosis," and the like.)
He is talking about the subject of what we term "symptom choice." Of course, we do not generally mean that people set out to select a symptom, but we do mean that, except for those with serious brain disorders, the mind has only a set number of outlets for inner turmoil. Some of them are dysfunctional and some are not.
Many factors: cultural, personality-based, familial, genetic, etc. feed into the symptom "choice" of neurotics. I would say that eating disorders (which I view as a sort of obsessive-compulsive symptom) partake of all of the above. However, toying with an eating disorder because of fashion does not create a serious or persistent eating disorder. It's not like heroin.
When I was in training, a wise old Doc told me to tell the old folks to eat all the salt they like, but to take their blood pressure medicines if they have hypertension.
Still, if you have congestive heart failure, it might help your management to limit salt intake.
There are countless myths about diet and health. The truth is that most of it is driven by wishful thinking, the wish that we might control our fates as easily as by deciding what to have for supper.
The only dietary-related thing (besides basic sustenance) that probably helps health to some extent is to get your Vitamin D from plenty of natural sunlight (instead of from pills or diet) over much of your body, while avoiding sunburn and avoiding obsessive use of sunblock.
Thirty years ago, the training and practice of medicine was deeply rooted in "inherited" values as much as craft. Physicians were in a noble discipline recast into paladins protecting society, even a bit of its soul, against an implacable adversary. Training was both arduous and flawed (inflated egos and autocratic mice that roared) but with a central purpose. When done well, doctors successfully confronted their most difficult internal challenges, fear of the power of illness and the willfulness to make important decisions when the consequence was uncertain. This "old" medical culture was best expressed by a single term: "My patient." It was as far from provider and client as you could possibly get. "My patient" conveyed both bond and responsibility.
We are about to burn the bridges to this tradition from both ends.
Read it all, because this is what is coming to your town soon with Obamacare. Some of you have already seen it. Mass-market medicine, by the rule-book, "delivered" by anonymous "providers" to the masses. I plan to stick with the old ways for as long as I can.
We humans have a remarkable talent for rationalizing our feelings and behaviors. The world is full of hot guys and hot babes, and all sorts of other tempting things. One cannot have them all.
First, begin with the idea that love is dangerous and some people are more vulnerable than others. We’ve called love a virus before, and sadly, your emotional immune system is impaired.
While preserving my usual skepticsm about what "studies say...", it does make sense that humans would need a good dose of full- body sunlight daily.
Recent studies say 40 mins/day (without sun block), or 20 minutes per side or until done to taste.
With unblocked sunlight over enough of your body, your skin produces the right sorts of Vit D that you need for full health, vigor, and maybe even cancer prevention. Roofers get enough but, in my experience, roofers often tend to destroy themselves with crystal meth and/or alcohol. It's a roofer thing.
The alternative is to do the research yourself and try to figure out what kind and what amounts of Vit D a person ought to take as pills. As I have posted here in the past, Vit D is the only vitamin I take on the advice of all of my doc friends. However, I also take my shirt off whenever I can.
(Men, middle-aged and above, also probably need a baby aspirin and Vitamin L - Lipitor, but don't take medical advice off the internet. Including mine.)
A patient told me that she had seen something useful on Oprah a while back. Some therapist-type had suggested that, when something about somebody bugs the heck out of you, write a letter to them telling them about it.
But do not mail it. Cross out their name, address it to yourself, and read it as if directed to yourself.
The psychology of how and why we tend to be so annoyed by things in ourselves that we wish to disown, and thus react against in others, is too messy for here. It's enough to say that we all have many tricks that we use, usually unwittingly, to feel OK about ourselves instead of sinking into painful self-reproach. It does not always apply, but applies often enough to be a good rule of thumb.
Give it a try. It is not much fun, but could be educational.
It's a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while - the phenomenon of perpetual psychological adolescence in us decadent and pampered Americans - so I will look forward to seeing what she has to say about it.
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason:
We all have them, and have had them.
Yes, you do have one of those psychobabble things.
Mark Edmundsen has written a piece at The Chronicle about one of my favorite bugabooos in 
When I was in training, a wise old Doc told me to tell the old folks to eat all the salt they like, but to take their blood pressure medicines if they have hypertension.
By Dr. Joel Levine: 
While preserving my usual skepticsm about what "studies say...", it does make sense that humans would need a good dose of full- body sunlight daily. 