Dan Hartung (lake effect), whom I’ve considered one of my weblogging friends but whose views and mine have diverged dramatically since Sept. 11th (I think), understands cognitive therapy for depression quite well (“the key feature of cognitive therapy is the idea that you have an inner voice that’s thinking negative thoughts, and you need to “talk back” at yourself to combat them. Call it a rationalist’s version of the daily affirmation”) but then has an insight that there’s an analogy between the automatic negative thoughts of the depressive and “much of the anti-war journalism the anti-idiotarian warbloggers have been shredding with varied amounts of glee or exasperation.” He describes cognitive distortions like all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, the mental filter, and disqualifying the positive, as characteristic of his ‘opponents’, and in the process indulges in all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, selective filtering and disqualifying the positive about antiwar discourse.

But my major bone to pick with him about this simile between depressive cognition and antiwar thought is that he assumes, as do many, that because depressive thinking causes such distress, it’s necessarily wrong. In fact, there are serious arguments that depression may be an adaptive response to loss, setback or grief. Depressive thinking may actually be a more realistic appraisal than we can usually afford and hope to go on, and the organism’s shutdown in response to it may be a resource-conserving one in the service of survival. . In the modern world, with its rather superficial emphasis on productivity and function, we can have no truck with this response, so we jump to treat the depression. And, of course, we hasten to treat it if the pessimistic distortion is vastly out of proportion to the reality of the situation. But it isn’t necessarily out of proportion! It’s like the old line about bugs and insects — while all depressive thought is pessimistic, not all pessimism is pathological. These nuances should factor into anyone’s analogizing , it would seem to me.

Dan, I haven’t heard anything from you, as I was accustomed to hearing, since you and I began shooting our mouths off in divergent directions after Sept. 11th. I’m pretty sure my expressed sentiments place me among the cognitively distorted in your mind. That’s okay. But, particularly as both an opponent of the war effort and an experienced therapist, I think you’re wrong about whether “we” think “you” are the “sick ones,” as you suggest in your last line. In ministering to the depressed, you rarely get anywhere by a frontal assault on the contradictions in the depressive thinking, especially if you label the person or the thining as “sick.” Cognitive therapy works only for a subset, the most intellectualized subset, of the depressed, and at great cost of keeping one divided from oneself and some of one’s mental content. As the saying goes, you can never succeed arguing about politics or religion (and this is both to each of us, it would appear…). We only get somewhere when we recognize “sickness” as a different, not a priori better or worse, way of thinking about a situation, and engage in an open-minded exploration of whether it works or not. Anything less is just namecalling…

True color of the cosmos revealed, pale green CNN

Michael Byers: US doesn’t have the right to decide who is or isn’t a PoW

Would you want your life to be in the hands of US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld? Hundreds of captured Taliban and al-Qaida fighters don’t have a choice. Chained, manacled, hooded, even sedated, their beards shorn off against their will, they are being flown around the world to Guantanamo Bay, a century-old military outpost seized during the Spanish-American war and subsequently leased from Cuba by the US. There, they are being kept in tiny chain-link outdoor cages, without mosquito repellent, where (their captors assure us) they are likely to be rained upon.

Since Guantanamo Bay is technically foreign territory, the detainees have no rights under the US constitution and cannot appeal to US federal courts. Any rights they might have under international law have been firmly denied. According to Rumsfeld, the detainees “will be handled not as prisoners of war, because they are not, but as unlawful combatants”. Guardian UK

Military Looks to Cut Patrols in US: ‘The military has flown more than 13,000 fighter-jet patrols over American cities since Sept. 11 at a cost exceeding $324 million. Now it wants to cut back.

The round-the-clock patrols designed to deter terrorists may be straining planes and personnel, the Pentagon said Monday.

Four months after the airliner attacks, any decision on ending or changing the patrols may come down to a calculation of how safe Americans would feel with the change, some officials say.’ Guardian UK

Crackpot index: ‘A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.’