7 ms·

I see a danger here. It isn't with this child and his problems, but with the continued progress of the media and other political groups in co-opting psychologic

• gwern 14y ago
  > The terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are already bywords for "doesn't share my politics or worldview". You can see this clearly in the article and the comments. The article mentions "financiers and business people", and the first comment covers explicitly naming the opposing political party. In fact, how many articles from the last few years manage to bring up the subject without casually slipping in a reference to businessmen? I am guessing not many. They've slipped in because that's where the research is pointing, after decades of anecdotes. One of the main instruments for diagnosing psychopathy is the HARE checklist, as in Robert D. Hare; guess what Hare's latest book is called? _Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work_. Yeah. (I could finish by accusing you of baselessly accusing your opponents of twisting psychology to fit one's worldview, but I don't think most people would appreciate the irony.)
  • javert 14y ago
    that's where the research is pointing Are you defending the claim that businessmen and Republicans are psychopaths? I'm sorry, but that's generally untrue, and no amount of valid research will ever prove it.
    • DanBC 14y ago
      About one in one hundred people are probably psychopath in the general population. When you look at some sub-populations you find higher representations of psychopaths, or of tendencies associated with pyschopathy. One clear example given in the article is in the prison population. Other examples include high-level businessmen and politicians. Obviously saying "there's an over-representation of psychopaths among politicians" is not the same as a simplistic "all politicians are psychopaths". Better quality research is needed, and pop-psychology books are pretty frustrating.
      • sskates 14y ago
        Is there any evidence that high-level businessmen and politicians are more likely to be psychopaths than the general population?
        • njs12345 14y ago
          For business at least, there seems to be: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20422644 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20422644
    • perspectiveless 14y ago
      If a group advocates more self-reliance and less organised help for the less fortunate then it's not unreasonable to accuse them of having less empathy.
      • javert 14y ago
        I completely disagree. You can't enjoy life on the dole. The nanny state is a form of cruelty. I truly believe these things. I could go on at length, but what's the point. Fiscal conservativism != less empathy.
• stfu 14y ago
  Interesting way of highlighting the subjectivity inherent in any social sciences, and the dangers that come with claiming to know the "truth". As long as culture changes, people change and ultimately what is defined as normal and "ill" is going to change. No matter what wonderful data one is able to generate, it is most likely trying to project something from the past to the future. And no matter how scientific it may look, in the end calculating the future of society tuned out to be mostly numbers based fortune telling. The evolution of society is an exciting thing, but as soon as someone make the claim to carry the "only truth", I get very, very skeptical.
• sliverstorm 14y ago
  The terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are already bywords for "doesn't share my politics or worldview". You sure about that? I mostly hear them used as: psychopath: dysfunctional thought processes, turns violent sociopath: hates people, turns violent
  • celer 14y ago
    Dysfunctional thought processes = religion Turns violent = expansionist, militaristic. Hates people = Anti-American, War on Religion, War on Marriage, War on America, _____(s) hate(-s) America. I am sad to say that I see them getting used to describe opposing worldviews or political preferences all too often. Edit: Did people think that I believed them? I don't think that they are accurate in the slightest. I noted useages that I have seen before.
  • harshreality 14y ago
    Not even psychologists and psychiatrists agree on what sociopath/psychopath/ASPD (anti-social personality disorder) means. http://helpingpsychology.com/sociopath-vs-psychopath-whats-the-difference http://helpingpsychology.com/sociopath-vs-psychopath-whats-t... That article proposes that while most people consider the terms interchangeable, some people consider sociopaths to be psychopaths with additional personality disorders; from the description that additional disorder could be in the schizoid spectrum or something else like bipolar disorder that would cause them to be under-socialized. Exhibit 2. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/us-brains-psychopaths-idUSBRE8460ZQ20120507 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/us-brains-psychopa... Those English psychiatrists are trying to redefine ASPD to mean hot-headed with poor impulse control, which is the opposite of my understanding of what it is: lacking empathy or deep emotions. Those shrinks want that to be called "psychopathy", and distinguish it from their redefined ASPD, even though psychopathy/sociopathy/ASPD currently, according to many psych professionals, refer to the same general thing. I can see how some hot-headed criminals might seem to fit the clinical definition of ASPD, but I don't see how any reputable shrink would diagnose poor impulse control as ASPD. Borderline personality disorder, for instance, could be a better fit for many "hot heads".
• Dn_Ab 14y ago
  It is not clear that what you have to say has anything to do with the article. This article is about a child who is clearly intelligent, manipulative and possessive of unhealthy behaviors outside the norm. Instead it appears that you prefer to broadly tar the field of Psychology by arguing that facts can be distorted with careful presentation of statistics. >It has a long history of shifting its positions, and a long history of debunked and discredited bodies of theory This is not a bad thing on its own. It just means the search space is large and complex with many potholes and convergence will take a while yet. > Don't you think that, with a few weeks of study, I could apply any subset of mental disorders from the DSM-IV to any person I wished? No I don't think so. Not in any substantial way that couldn't just as accurately be replicated by a markov chain with the specificity of a fortune cookie. You can't just trivialize an entire branch of study like that. Certainly there is a lot of room for improvement and terms like disorder, psychopath, multiple personality, schizophrenic are abused and misused but there are behavioural patterns and characteristics by which people can be clustered. The mistake most people make is to think these clusters are static and disjoint. Your ideas on Psychology are outdated. What Freud believed is nonsense and without experimental feedback he could do little better. Things are better these days, there is cross-talk between areas like Machine Learning, Psychology and neurobiology. Here is a better example of what the future of Psychology will be like: http://videolectures.net/icml09_niv_tnorl/ http://videolectures.net/icml09_niv_tnorl/ Also: http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/news/psychopaths-brains-show-differences-in-structure-and-function/32979 http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/news/psychopaths-brains-...
  • 6ren 14y ago
    "Being sane in insane places", the 1973 Rosenhan experiment, concluded "we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
    • fruchtose 14y ago
      Your argument is highly misleading, First, Rosenhan was commenting on the state of psychiatry at the time rather than making a universal statement. Second, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)--today regarded as the Bible of psychiatry--was not written yet, meaning that psychiatry was at a state where repeatable metrics had not been defined and ratified for everyday use by medical professionals. In fact, Rosenhan's experiment was one of the catalysts that led to the creation of the DSM. Your comment supports a sentiment that is vastly outdated and no longer supported by the current state of psychiatric research.
• njs12345 14y ago
  > Why do we continue to teach Freud and Jung in college English departments? Freud and Jung are taught to English students because their work, while thoroughly debunked, has indeed influenced a lot of authors. Also, at least in the case of Freud, he was a fairly prolific literary critic in his own right, with his contributions in this field being quite separate from his psychoanalytic efforts (if perhaps influenced by them at times).
  • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Can you point me to some reading on the debunking of Freud's tripartite model of the mind (id, ego, superego). I find it a useful description, it often seems apposite in describing my internal mental machinations and conflicts of thought and desire so hearing that it is apparently clearly debunked is interesting ... Do you mean they've been shown not to be scientific? That just sounds like psychology as a whole to me ...
• pessimizer 14y ago
  I agree, and take it further. Psychopathy is a label looking for a definition. It's defined as the opposite of any of the qualities that we associate with the root "human". They're normal people except that they can't be humane, they can't show any humanity, they completely lack compassion and normal human emotion. They don't share our motivations, their motives are alien and disruptive. They are "other". How do we diagnose them? Each of us decides what is morally repugnant to us, then when other people don't find it repugnant, we label it as sick and speculate whether it's genetically irredeemable. Did they have a mutation in their morality gene? Or are they just the descendants of Cain? It's 100% culturally bound. Some people think that profit is morally repugnant - does that mean we live in a world of psychopaths? If they were the majority it would. It's an ugly, dehumanizing term, and reveals a lot of psychology as a moral system rather than a scientific one - being its equivalent of evil. Labeling a 9-year old a psychopath is part of the same cultural process that causes children to be tortured and killed as witches in Nigeria. btw: support http://steppingstonesnigeria.org http://steppingstonesnigeria.org :) btw2: this doesn't mean I believe in Xenu.
  • loopdoend 14y ago
    If the majority believed profit to be morally repugnant and the person in question didn't understand why due to a lack of empathy, then yes, perhaps they would be a psychopath. I think most anarchists would agree that it is not that the majority of the population is emotionless and uncaring, they just haven't been educated about the alternatives in an open-minded, truthful fashion.
    • pessimizer 14y ago
      You're making psychopath mean what you want it to mean. I've rarely heard anybody say that psychopaths don't understand emotions in other people. That would be autism. Also, anarchists aren't the people against profit - many libertarians are anarchists.
      • loopdoend 14y ago
        What I wrote was that psychopaths don't experience empathy, I never said anything about not understanding emotions in others. Also, you clearly don't know what anarchism is, libertarians (in the American sense) are not anarchists, they are capitalists. The two are mutually exclusive.
• wiggins37 14y ago
  I think that a lot of it stems from an ignorance in the general population of what mental disease is. Practising psychiatrists don't use the words psychopath or sociopath when describing people, at least not in my experience (a relatively new internal medicine doctor), and I'm going to disagree that psychiatry is "highly subjective", although there is definite a large component of subjectivity, since it mostly deals with things that are difficult to objectively measure (although there are examples such as the PHQ-9 score for depression). I agree with you that psychiatry has a history of being soft, but modern psychiatrists are medical doctors and there are very few living one's that I know who use aspects of Freud or Jungian theories in the way they treat psychiatric diseases. Nowadays, just like the bulk of medicine, the focus on is on evidence based therapeutics. Unfortunately, how the brain works is still much of a black box and for many of the medications we use we have no idea how they work. We have some inkling of what they do in general, but on a directly mechanistic level it's still at a point where we try things based on what we think might work, and then if it's shown to work in a large population better (or maybe as well as, with less side effects) then we keep it. I do think that you could apply some subsets of various aspects of the DSM to anybody, but if you read it, these diagnosis have time courses, and based on the current way they are diagnosed (which is soon to change when DSM V comes out), you have to have symptoms present for a specific amount of time before you can be labelled. Anyways, the feeling I get from your post is a concern about psychiatric diagnosis being applied too liberally. In my experience I see so many people with the really big psychiatric issues, such as people who have just had a luckily unsuccessful suicide attempt or are actively hallucinating from schizophrenia. The psychiatrists I work with are overwhelmed (especially in child psychiatry) with these kinds of patients and aren't out to change abnormal behaviors into pathologies. But, I see your point about people dropping psychiatric diagnosis on things they don't agree with which is wrong. I'm just defending the field of psychiatry, which I don't think has any interest in redefining what is normal/abnormal.
• rbanffy 14y ago
  > Would you trust a court-ordered psychologist to make an accurate appraisal of your psyche? That's not what happens. They are asked very specific questions about the person being evaluated. > When Tom Cruise begins to sound more sane than the psychology he criticizes, you know something is wrong. Luckily, that hasn't happened yet.