Friday, April 09, 2004

Two on Digging Into the Mind

Here are a couple of interesting pieces delving into psychology.  First, at the New Statesman, we have a Peter Watson written piece titled “Why psychiatry has failed." The piece was written in July 2002.  An excerpt.

"One hundred years ago, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud unveiled the unconscious, and “the psychological century” was born. It has turned out to be a huge disappointment. The gene and the quantum were conceived at the same time as Freud conceived the unconscious; yet, although they have led to sophisticated technologies, psychology and psychiatry, by most standards, are failures. More people than ever are on anti-depressants; drug abuse is rampant; psychotherapies don’t work; our jails are fuller than ever."

Next, we have a piece published at The Edge, which is a conversation with Martin Seligman.  The piece is titled “EUDAEMONIA, THE GOOD LIFE A Talk with Martin Seligman." An excerpt.

"Clinical psychology, social psychology has, in our lifetimes, been able to relieve an enormous amount of suffering, notes Martin Seligman. “Can psychologists can make people lastingly happier?,” he asks.

“We are able to look at the causal skein of mental illness and unravel it, either by longitudinal studies — the same people over time — or experimental studies, which would get rid of third variables...We’re able to create treatments — drugs, psychotherapy — and do random assignment placebo control studies to find out which ones really worked and which ones were inert.” But, he notes that one result of this success is that 90% of the science in psychology is now based on the disease model, and this has resulted in three costs:

“The first one was moral, that we became victimologists and pathologizers. Our view of human nature was that mental illness fell on you like a ton of bricks, and we forgot about notions like choice, responsibility, preference, will, character, and the like. The second cost was that by working only on mental illness we forgot about making the lives of relatively untroubled people happier, more productive, and more fulfilling. And we completely forgot about genius, which became a dirty word. The third cost was that because we were trying to undo pathology we didn’t develop interventions to make people happier; we developed interventions to make people less miserable."

Both pieces make for interesting reads. 

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 07:00 AM
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