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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Your ideas on Psychology are outdated.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/

Also: http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/news/psychopaths-brains-...

"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

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.

"Your comment supports a sentiment that is vastly outdated and no longer supported by the current state of psychiatric research."

[Citation needed]

I am no psychiatrist, but from what I've read, the current consensus indicates that psychiatric orders can be detected using reasonable criteria. The widespread use of the DSM demonstrates this idea. The DSM is occasionally updated, and each revision reflects the changing ideas about psychiatry.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/dsm-revisions-may-sharp...

40 years ago psychiatry was very different than it is today.

"40 years ago psychiatry was very different than it is today."

[Citation needed]

> 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.)

It's easy to examine the situation by flipping it around.

Suppose the research centered on people who care too much. And the implicit assumption is that people who care too much cause problems, because they make suboptimal decisions for the group. Should we begin to stigmatize these people? Was Mother Theresa psychologically defective? Is your overly caring boss causing problems in the workplace because he won't fire the underperformer nobody likes? What should be done about this endemic problem of overly caring bosses? How can we begin to classify and nullify these people?

In both cases the behavior is nightmarish. Here in stark relief for one kind of bias.

I don't want to derail the topic, but Mother Teresa isn't exactly the best kind of example for your argument.

Yes she is.

You've clearly never read The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory And Practice, by Christopher Hitchens.

Mother Teresa was pure evil.

You should read up on how she intentionally tortured dying people by denying them basic pain killers. How she stipulated the use of dull needles. How she claimed pain was desirable because it was the kiss of Jesus. How she refused to properly treat people that were dying in agony, while her charity hoarded massive sums of money. The stories abound, Hitchens was kind enough to document it heavily, both in book and video documentary format.

I know about all of that. That's exactly why I don't think she's a good example of someone who had excessive empathy for others, because she didn't seem to have much empathy at all.

>Hitchens was kind enough to document it heavily //

You appear to think Hitchens didn't have a huge axe to grind ...? If you had to pick someone who would be least likely to make an unbiased report of Mother Theresa's actions then he's be pretty close to top of the list.

>How she stipulated the use of dull needles. //

This seems least likely to be possibly contextually twisted; do you have a reference to a corroborating report on such things from a, shall we say, less motivated party?

As the claim is she stipulated it I expect the reasoning is in her letters or the accounts of her workers?

Dr Robin Fox wrote, in the Lancet, about her home in Calcutta. The Lancet and the BMJ covered her re-use of needles. The risk of infection is obvious, especially since there wasn't any differentiation between people with or without a terminal illness.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_of_Charity#Controv...)

>The risk of infection is obvious, especially since there wasn't any differentiation between people with or without a terminal illness. //

What was the result. Were more people killed or were more people saved from the particular illness/disease the injections were treating?

Was there facilities to readily test for preexisting conditions. Were people already known to be diagnosed with [blood] communicative conditions allowed to pass those on?

Whilst the risk of infection may be obvious the action to serve the greater good doesn't appear to be obvious in the depth we have treated this situation so far.

Do you have a link for the Lancet article please?

(http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(...)

Report from someone who used to work with her:

(http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html)

> Were more people killed or were more people saved from the particular illness/disease the injections were treating?

Many people died long slow painful deaths. The pain was deliberate, a function of her distorted thinking.

>Many people died long slow painful deaths. //

How many? Also do you know the answer to the question you cut and pasted ... presumably you've read both those links so you know if there's a quantitative treatment?

All I could find about Haiti wrt the Sisters of Mercy was that the SoM went there in 1991 (according to graphic here, http://www.mercyworld.org/mercy_network/network-map.cfm). Whilst Susan Shields left the order in 1989 after 9 years "living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco" and apparently then published her story of the situation in Haiti that so shocked her another 9 years later in 1998 (http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/index_18.html, http://www.texnews.com/1998/religion/morph0117.html).

I don't have access to the text in the Lancet (which turns out to be a letter to the editor, and so not reviewed) - do you have a link to an open access version?

I realise we're way OT, but I'm keen to investigate this.

If you think you can make a valid counterpoint via ad hominem instead of with facts you are mistaken.

Questioning someone's potential bias is not an "ad hominem" attack.

If requesting corroboration offends you then you need to ask yourself why.

I've searched the BMJ archive (http://www.bmj.com/archive) and can't find any reference to this particular claim; only a few retrospectives and passing references.

Also where it is mentioned in other literature, the claim is limited to reuse of hypodermics and there is no mention that she specified that hypodermics must be blunt, eg in order to increase the pain of patients - as adventureful appears to intimate.

Given the choice between not getting an innoculation or getting one from a used needle ... well that's a hard choice isn't it. As I can't find the article there is nothing to tell us what factors are at play, the seriousness of the diseases or the attempted mitigation (if there was any).

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.

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.

Is there any evidence that high-level businessmen and politicians are more likely to be psychopaths than the general population?

For business at least, there seems to be: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20422644

Research I've seen reported seems quite dubious. For instance, a CEO may take decisions that 'harm' hundreds of employees and not appear to feel anything like 'remorse.' That could be because he's a psychopath... but a more likely explanation is that he is confident that his decision was ethical and justified.

A justified decision may be appropriate to be painful. Do you think the person who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima should feel good about it, even if it were universally agreed to be the lesser evil?

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.

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.

You added the word "dole" and thereby changed the content of what you claimed to reply to.

I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't edit my post, if that's what you mean by "added."

I took the reference to Republican advocacy for "more self-reliance" as synonomous with Republican advocacy for less welfare. welfare == dole.

Although in actuality, almost all Republicans are RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), because almost all of them are altruists that advocate expanding the government/nanny state, just at a less rapid rate than Democrats. So "Republican" in this discussion may be a misnomer.

</rant>

Are you sure it's "less organized help" they are advocating for, or is it "not forced help"? I find it to be the latter in almost all cases. People tend not to argue against charity, but rather "forced charity" (which is not something I would consider charity at all).

I think GP is using "organized" to mean the same thing you're using "forced" to mean - given by a governing body from its tax revenue. Funny how we tend to choose the adjective that puts our personal views in the best possible light. :P

It's hard enough to trust any research than can simply be turned around and used as a political weapon. Research that supports a blanket tarring of some group's political enemies is very suspect.

I don't think it does support blanket tarring if interpreted reasonably.

I don't see it as a positive thing when science gets suppressed because it's conclusions are considered politically incorrect or unfortunate -- either by the left or the right.

We should have a heightened watchfulness for political bias from the researchers in these cases, sure, but usually it's not the researchers who are misinterpreting or over-interpreting or drawing heavily political conclusions from their work.

Science does get suppressed when its conclusions are considered politically incorrect or unfortunate. That's exactly why politically convienent and fortunate research is so suspicious--any dissenting research is automatically disqualified, so it has the appearance of truth when really it's just systemically one-sided.

No it doesn't. As far as I know, the opposite thing happens: politically motivated research that doesn't deserve to be called scientific gets published over and over again. I'm specifically thinking about a few "scientific" articles sponsored by oil companies that happen to explain away global climate change, for instance. Or the many papers in which the Cato foundation, earnestly and with the best of intentions no doubt, tries to establish the inferiority of public healthcare. Or the Genesis Foundation defense of creationism.

There's no suppression. Just bullshit addition.

If you take a step back, one man's convenient is another man's inconvenient. And don't think for a minute that science limits itself to pissing off rightwingers. Nature has a way of pissing all over all sorts of ideological preferences. There's nothing about the laws of the universe that force, say, human biology to work in a way that suits a given political agenda. One day it might seem to be on your side, another day not so much.

Ultimately when politically sensitive research is allowed to happen, independently confirmed (or disconfirmed), and slowly digested in a mature fashion on all sides of the political spectrum (no "ha I told you so!" and systematic over-interpretation, no knee-jerk "the only explanation is political bias and the research must stop"), society surely stands to benefit from a more realistic and nuanced worldview in which to decide on policy. Not easy to achieve of course, but it makes me sad when people fail at the first hurdle.

Please can you cite the research that supports a blanket tarring of some group's political enemies?

When people talk about some politicians being psychopaths they are i: careful to limit it to "some", not "all" or "most" and ii: not limiting it to some particular party. It's as possible for someone in $PARTY_X to be psychopathic as someone in $PARTY_Y.

> 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).

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 ...

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

Not even psychologists and psychiatrists agree on what sociopath/psychopath/ASPD (anti-social personality disorder) means.

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-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".

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.

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.

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 :)

btw2: this doesn't mean I believe in Xenu.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.