Sanity Squad Clinton

...In Which Grim Defends Bill Clinton:

Consider this 'Sanity Squad' podcast on Clinton's recent remarks. I wouldn't have normally noticed it, but PJM has been advertising it on my sidebar.

The issue with the podcast is identified in the comments to it by commenter "Greg":

"In 1964, a few months before the presidential election, Fact magazine, now defunct, surveyed the membership of the American Psychiatric Association about the personality traits of Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee. The psychiatrists savaged Goldwater, calling him "warped," and a "paranoid schizophrenic" who harbored unconscious hatred of his Jewish father and endured rigid toilet training.

Such forays into applied psychoanalysis have not been immune to criticism. After the Fact survey, the psychiatric association issued the so-called Goldwater Rule, advising members that it is "unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion unless he/she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.""

The Perils of Putting National Leaders on the Couch

I'm sure that they were just offering their "observations and opinions" too. That's why the APA promulgated that rule, right?

Greg is, of course, plainly correct about what they're doing here. His reward is to be referred to as an "idiot," a "self important pipsqueak," and a "gnat." Commenter "Sigmund, Carl and Alfred" asserts that there is an obvious difference between a professional diagnosis and an opinion asserted on the radio, and so the APA rule presumably should not apply.

As to that, it is opinions of just that sort that Fact magazine published, and which generated the rule -- as Greg rightly points out.

Still, grant the point. One would expect psychologists to practice a certain humility even in their professional diagnoses, given that they are so regularly wrong. You would think they would be careful about what they say even after lengthy experience, given the following:

Although schizophrenia has been shown to affect all ethnic groups at the same rate, the scientist found that blacks in the United States were more than four times as likely to be diagnosed with the disorder as whites. Hispanics were more than three times as likely to be diagnosed as whites....

The data confirm the fears of experts who have warned for years that minorities are more likely to be misdiagnosed as having serious psychiatric problems. "Bias is a very real issue," said Francis Lu, a psychiatrist at the University of California at San Francisco. "We don't talk about it -- it's upsetting. We see ourselves as unbiased and rational and scientific." ...

Unlike AIDS or cancer, mental illnesses cannot be diagnosed with a brain scan or a blood test. The impressions of doctors -- drawn from verbal and nonverbal cues -- determine whether a patient is healthy or sick.

"Because we have no lab test, the only way we can test if someone is psychotic is, we use ourselves as the measure," said Michael Smith, a psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies the effects of culture and ethnicity on psychiatry. "If it sounds unusual to us, we call it psychotic."

Er, great. That makes it easy for us to tell the difference between your opinion and a professional diagnosis.

They do have tests, though: personality tests, for example. Do they work? Well, not precisely.

I have occasionally made the assertion in these pages that psychology is not a science at all, but rather a discipline more like fortune-telling. As to the first part of that assertion -- that psychology is not a science -- I'm hardly alone in making it.

As to the second part, I have begun to think I have been unfair to tarot card readers by using them as the analogy. Here's a little piece from "Gagdad Bob," the special guest on the Sanity Squad podcast. He's talking about how raising your spirituality to higher planes of consciousness is exactly like psychology:

Indeed, God should only be spoken of in a manner that “protects” and guards against the distortions and simplifications of the spiritually unqualified, while at the same time posing a challenge to the sincerity and intensity of the true seeker’s aspiration. This is not mystagogy. It is actually no different than in psychotherapy. A seasoned therapist will often know the exact nature of the patient’s problem within a session or two. However, it would serve no purpose whatsoever to prematurely blurt this out to the patient, for truth that is given is truth that cannot be discovered, and that makes all the difference.

Not for nothing did Jesus speak in paradoxables. When asked about this by his inner brotherhood of Cosmic Raccoons, he responded, “For you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.... Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.”

Therefore, Jesus is identifying and highlighting a perennial problem with spiritual knowledge: many who hear hear it do not hear it, and many more who understand it do not comprehend it. It is an organic process, in which the seed must be planted in fertile soil, so as to actually transform the person. Again, it is absolutely no different than psychotherapy. Very early in my training I learned various ways to deflect the inevitable question, “Can’t you just tell me what’s wrong? Just give it to me straight, and I’ll work out the rest myself.”

A particular patient comes to mind who had great difficulty getting beyond the idea that there was some unremembered event from his past, and that if he could only remember what it was, he would be magically transformed. Also, being a narcissistic character, he was convinced that he (being a special person) could bypass the usual drawn out process, and that I would simply disclose the secret to him and send him on his way. But his greed for the truth was a symptom of his very problem. I constantly gave him truth in the form of "nourishing" interpretations, but he greedily swallowed them so quickly (without even chewing!), that he had no time to metabolize them, much less feel gratitude for them.

Your tarot card reader may look down on her client, the way a hustler looks down on an easy mark. At least she doesn't perceive herself to be looking down on her clients the way that God looks down upon an unChosen people.

Humility? There is none. I doubt their 'science' has anything to offer the world, except the pain that comes from basing decisions on untruths and false beliefs. Yet they may be on good grounds in diagnosing Bill Clinton as a narcissist, according to that most traditional formula: 'It Takes One to Know One.'

If any real doctor diagnosed your problem and then refused to tell you what was wrong, you'd be perfectly right to haul them into court over it -- they are, after all, putting your health at risk while taking your money. Not so psychologists, who are like unto God Himself! No, they should determine what it is proper for you to know about your "illness," and, like Obi Wan Kenobi, to tell you the truth only "from a certain point of view." For which you should be grateful! Yes, be grateful for the Master's teachings.

I swear I don't get it. Why does anybody listen to these people? Why haven't we laughed psychology totally off the stage of American life?