“George W Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language — especially negatively charged emotional language — as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others.” — Renana Brooks, a clinical psychologist who researches the use of language for power and persuasion, writing in The Nation [via AlterNet]

“Senior figures in the intelligence community and across Whitehall briefed the former international development secretary Clare Short that Tony Blair had made a secret agreement last summer with George Bush to invade Iraq in February or March, she claimed yesterday.

In damning evidence to the foreign affairs select committee, Ms Short refused to identify the three figures, but she cited their authority for making her claim that Mr Blair had actively deceived the cabinet and the country in persuading them of the need to go to war.” Guardian/UK This, to hearken back to Michael Kinsley’s comments about the search for the Weapons of Mass Distraction, is a more profound reason the question of whether we were lied to on that score is irrelevant. The real deceit was much more pervasive — the entire administration charade about deciding whether to go to war was a waltz around a foregone conclusion.

“A funny thing happened on the way to World War III. It looks increasingly unlikely that any justice will soon leave, analysts say.

Some court watchers have long suggested it was a near certainty that Chief Justice William Rehnquist and perhaps Justice Sandra Day O’Connor would announce their retirements by late June. But other legal scholars have been just as sure that the justices are staying put. That view has gained momentum among court watchers in recent weeks.” Christian Science Monitor

“Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history?

A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock’s impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity.

It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and attributed his subsequent victory to divine help from a Christian God.

Constantine went on to consolidate his grip on power and ordered that persecution of Christians cease and their religion receive official status.” BBC News

“Brain imaging confirms that some individuals really are more sensitive to pain than others, report researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in this week’s on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

‘We have all met people who seem very sensitive to pain as well as those who appear to tolerate pain very well,’ said Robert C. Coghill, Ph.D., lead investigator. ‘Until now, there was no objective evidence that could confirm that these individual differences in pain sensitivity are, in fact, real.'” EurekAlert!

Christian Perring, a philosopher, reviews Advancing DSM: Dilemmas in Psychiatric Diagnosis. Edited by Katherine A. Phillips, Michael B. First, and Harold Alan Pincus.:

Those interested in the philosophy of psychiatry will find much food for thought in the chapter by Wakefield and First, “Clarifying the Distinction Between Disorder and Nondisorder.” They explain that it is important to distinguish between mental disorders and other conditions including normal intense emotional reactions, social deviance, personal unhappiness, lack of fit between an individual and a specific social role or relationship or environment, and socially disapproved or negatively evaluated behavior in general.

This is especially motivated by concerns within the psychiatric profession and the general public that mental disorders are being overdiagnosed, and ordinary human problems are being medicalized. They call this the false-positives problem, and they spell out the wide range of clinical, research and social concerns that it raises. They examine the strengths and weaknesses of the current DSM-IV-TR definition, which have been discussed at length elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, the authors are inclined to adopt Wakefield’s well-known “harmful dysfunction” account of mental disorder. It is disappointing that they scarcely mention the existence of a considerable body of literature that finds serious flaws in this account, although they do address some general sorts of concerns that have been raised. They suggest however, that the false-positives problem stems not so much from the defects of the current definition but rather a failure to abide by that definition in the DSM criteria sets. They examine a number of different cases to illustrate their claim here. For example, DSM-IV-TR would count someone who had just lost their job and had experienced 2 weeks of depressed mood, diminished pleasure in usual activities, insomnia, fatigue, and a diminished ability to concentrate on work tasks as having major depression. Wakefield and first argue that such symptoms are a normal reaction to such a loss, and do not give reason to believe that there is a psychological dysfunction. They argue that the criteria for adjustment disorder, substance abuse, acute stress disorder, conduct disorder and separation anxiety are also overinclusive, counting as mental disorders conditions that do not involve internal dysfunctions of individuals.

Wakefield and First also point out that the attempt to reduce false positives through requiring that symptoms be “clinically significant” is unhelpful because it is circular — the whole point of a definition of mental disorder is to explain the meaning of what should count as clinical significance, and so it cannot simply appeal to such a notion in its definition. They suggest that definitions of mental disorder should attempt to focus on the essence of the dysfunction that is the cause of the mental disorder.

Furthermore, they emphasize that there is a dysfunction when a person’s symptoms do not match the context. As they explain, “A dysfunction exists when a person’s internal mechanisms are not able to function in the range of environments to which they were designed to respond. Thus, one can construct a test for dysfunction by specifying an environment in which the function is designed to manifest itself; if the function is not manifested in that environment, there is likely a dysfunction” (p. 51).

Wakefield and First’s call to bring the DSM criteria for mental disorders in line with the DSM definition of mental disorder is certainly to be welcomed. It is likely that their emphasis on clarifying the distinction between normal reactions and internal dysfunctions could lead to improved formulations of psychiatric criteria in many cases. However, their reliance on a concept of dysfunctional mechanisms within a person, often supported by reference to functions of internal mechanisms as set out by evolutionary psychology, is problematic. As many critics have pointed out, evolutionary psychology is in no position to give us a clear picture of what counts as normal function, and it is debatable whether it ever will be. Furthermore, even if we did could use evolutionary psychology for this purpose, there are reasons whether it is appropriate to use the standards of evolutionary fitness for survival in conditions that existed long before the creation of any human civilizations of the last our thousand years for our standards of normality in the twenty-first century. (This point applies as much to standards of physical health as is does to mental health.)

Many will worry that the desire for DSM to clothe itself in the garb of scientific respectability will result in smuggling in a host of ideological and normative assumptions under the guise of scientific objectivity. A strong case can be made that rather than basing criteria for mental disorder on dubious science or pseudoscience, we be better served by encouraging an open public discussion of the normative bases of our psychiatric categories and with the aim of reaching broad agreement.

Happy Birthday, Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s father had the largest library in the county, and when Bierce dropped out of high school—he was not one for groups—he spent much time there. It is hard to disagree with a recent biographer who sees the library as having saved Bierce from being the serial killer type, or having turned him into the prose version of it.

The cap to Bierce’s legendary life is the drama of his mysterious death: at age seventy-one, he perhaps died while attempting to get close to Pancho Villa’s army in Mexico, perhaps as a suicide in the Grand Canyon. Either theory might convey the impression that the cynicism by which Bierce won fame also killed him.

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