Fun from crank psychology: Except, it is not fun when you must live it.

I have not had much time to contribute to the Mindful Hack blog, because I must shortly help write a book about something else. But bear with me now. First, ...

One columnist writes,

I have a former student who has found the perfect job. She’s working with troubled youths in a faith-based program that allows her to finally put her psychology degree to use – a full eight years after she graduated from college. She likes the job, but she called my office recently to vent about a boy who suffers from Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD).

I have a B.A. and an M.S. in psychology. But I must confess that I needed some explanation of ODD because it wasn’t yet a disorder when I studied psychology back in the 1980s. So I asked my former student simply to describe the behavior of the boy with ODD. The conversation went something like this:

Erica (not real name): He is constantly pitching a fit over nothing – or nearly nothing. He argues with everything I say and there is no such thing as a rule he does not question.

Me: So, in other words, the boy is a jerk.

You get the general idea. Modern (as opposed to traditional) psychology sometimes gives a young fellow a pass just for being a jerk.

Fast backward to traditional psychology: Unenlightened young fellows, in my experience, might not offer such a pass, especially if their sweethearts, mothers, sisters, aunts, old lady teachers, etc., are in any way concerned. Stuff happened to guys who did bad things to them, and those guys had bruises they could not plausibly explain to the emergency room physician, let alone a local cop. But no one really cared.

Was that a good teaching method? Do I know? All I would ever ask is, does your community feel safer than it did two decades ago?

Mental health: Use of psychiatry as torture

The Falun Gong, a Chinese sect, write to tell me of the use of torture of their members under the guise of psychiatry. I don't doubt it in principle; it was done to Christians in the former Soviet Union.

The difficulty is that if a person is given unneeded psychoactive drugs, the effect can look like mental illness, which helps convince the public that the person really is sick.

The obvious test is to see what happens when the drugs are not given. In real mental illness, the patient will probably get worse, but in a persecution case, they will probably slowly get better.

Opinions differ as to whether Falun Gong is a cult. The sect has some cult characteristics but not others. At any rate, it is good to see psychiatrists beginning to confront these abuses.

Sightings: Andrew Newberg explains the psychological benefits of spirituality

In "Faith and the Brain" (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, July 17, 2009), Bob Abernethy interviews Andrew Newberg, author of How God Changes Your Brain on spirituality and emotional health:

DR. NEWBERG: We’ve learned that being religious or spiritual has a very profound effect on who we are, has a very profound effect on our biology and on our brain, and what we’ve found more recently is that not only does it have a profound influence on who we are, but it actually can change our brain and to change ourselves over times.

[ ... ]


SEVERSON: But Newberg has made another discovery, a controversial one, that our belief system, how we view God, can make a huge difference in how it affects our well being. If we believe in a loving God it can have a positive effect, even prolong our lives. But believing in a judgmental, authoritarian God can produce fear, anger, and stress, and that’s not healthy.

[ ... ]

SEVERSON: Newberg believes the number one activity that can exercise your brain and enrich your life is faith.

Dr. NEWBERG: When you have those kind of positive, optimistic beliefs in the world, in God or religion, depending on the person, that that really, over the long haul, seems to be the thing that really provides a benefit for us in terms our mental state and in terms of our physical health and well-being.

SEVERSON: As for his own faith, he describes himself as a searcher who is still searching. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Philadelphia.

Religion and health: Practising believers feel most in control

A study of 1800 Americans by University of Toronto sociology prof Scott Schieman finds that religious beliefs and devotion are linked to a sense of personal control.

That surprised Schieman:

“One might think the most devout religious practitioners would feel a lack of personal control in their lives because they have such faith in divine control,” says Schieman. “Surprisingly, we found the opposite. It’s those who believe in God but don’t dedicate much time to practicing religion who feel the least in control of their lives.”

It's not really hard to understand, though. If people think they should be doing something and are doing it, they will feel that they are in control. However, if they think they should be doing something but are not doing it, they will feel that they are not in control. And they're right, too.

I cannot find the abstract online at the journal, Sociology of Religion, which seems to be moving to a new publisher.

Ah well, in the meantime, another one for the "Religion spoils everything" files ...

See also:

See also:

Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Religious practice prolongs life, unexplained factor cited

Adopting a dog better for your health than pills?

Religion and health: Some teens more, not less, depressed due to religion?

Mental Health: Social problem? Spiritual problem? Both?

In Sin or Insanity?: Salvation through Retaliation in Flannery O'Connor's "The Partridge Festival," Stephen Sparrow (May 2008) discusses O'Connnor's approach to insanity, contrasting it with others:

In the early 1970s, internationally renowned psychiatrist Ronald David Laing dumbfounded many of his professional colleagues by declaring that apart from cases where the human brain had been affected by physiological illness, physical injury, or some deformity existing at birth, all mental illness was nothing other than social phenomena, which, just as in the case of "normal" social behaviours, has been acquired by the individual from his adjacent social environment. Laing was no Freudian so it was little wonder that psychiatrists world wide were dismayed, since the effect of his pronouncement meant that in most cases their methods to cure the mad (as Laing called them) were futile, and that furthermore, the money being poured into trying to identify a gene responsible for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders was money wasted and tantamount to man searching for God through a high powered microscope.

Laing's controversial statement should make us all grateful, since any purported genetic link to mental illness would in the future inevitably be used to screen individuals in an experimental attempt to eliminate what "experts" see as mental illness and what the rest of us might prosaically refer to as bizarre or unusual behaviour--which is often the stuff of every interesting story ever told. The corollary is that any attempt at genetic manipulation to modify human behaviour is an attack on free will and as such is doomed to fail. Having said that, there are some mindsets where free will is a practical impossibility--obsessive states leading to paranoia are an obvious example, but rarely if ever is one born into that condition. Obsessive states usually come about through behaviour that over a period has so gradually changed, that even those closest to the afflicted person barely notice the effect until it is much too late to easily reverse the condition.

From what I can tell, people who are obsessive frequently know that their feelings are unreasonable, but they also don't think they can control them. So they may well hide them out of shame in many cases.

(For example, if I believed that house flies contained little videocams and were spying on me, I would probably say nothing to anyone until I experienced some kind of mental health crisis ... at which point people would be astonished to discover that I had thought so for years. All anyone would notice in the meantime is my systematic approach to exterminating flies - but that can be explained by the pursuit of cleanliness.)

Anyway, Sparrow writes,

Devoutly Catholic, Flannery O'Connor was deeply distrustful of modern psychiatric practice and in her short story "The Comforts of Home", her character Sarah Ham admits that she habitually lied because she was insecure. O'Connor's omniscient narrator then informs us that Sarah "had passed through the hands of several psychiatrists who had put the finishing touches to her education." O'Connor also dismissed as a romantic notion, the "traditional" association of insanity with the Divine (letter to John Hawkes 22/6/61).

O'Connor is one of my favourite novelists. She lived a short (1925-1964), pain-filled life, so her work focuses on the spiritual reality that is all around and within us - but we often do not even see it. That reality embraces mental illness as well.

Here is a survey discussion of her work. In my view, her "The Displaced Person" (on line here) is the best American long short story of the twentieth century.

(Note: "Long short story" is an oxymoron to be sure, but it refers to a short story roughly over ten thousand words - much longer and the story will soon be growing up into a novella! But O'Connor makes a good use of every single word.)