Before the court ruling, the administration repeatedly stated that the detainees were not subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions; now they are, but mealymouthed administration spokesmen feel the most important point to make about this announcement is that it is not a change of policy. Let us hope there is a fight brewing in Congress about an imperious administration now needing to crawl hat in hand to them to rubberstamp its abuses of power.

Given that the Army has said it has discharged the accused ringleader of the massacre for having a “personality disorder”, the reporter wonders why this evidence of a serious mental disorder was not recognized sooner and the soldier quickly discharged before he could do any damage.

Psychopaths, the reporter explains (using a term which has been an imprecise synonym for antisocial personality disorder), feel no tension over the moral implications of their actions. He concludes that the atrocities in Iraq are few and that “just a few soldiers cause big trouble.” First of all, where did this writer get the notion that a ‘normal’ war crime is done in the heat of vengeance? This is a convenient explanation but is mostly in the service of his thesis that a few cold calculating sociopaths can turn a good war bad. Moreover, what one calls a war crime or atrocity is at issue here. Arguably, the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq is one enormous atrocity which has massacred and maimed tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

The author fails to draw on a distinction we make in clinical psychiatry between personality ‘traits’ and ‘disorders’. ‘Personality disorders’ are unlike the major mental illnesses the reporter hopes would be screened out of the military because of the stress intolerance and distress that they cause their sufferers. A personality disorder is merely an accentuation of a personality style, or set of traits (a person’s typical coping strategies, defense mechanisms and interactional style), which rigidly dominates the person’s personality and is relied upon inflexibly to a dysfunctional extent. In some cases this causes suffering to the affected individual (think, for example, of a person with disabling compulsiveness or shyness). In other cases, the personality disorder is — one might say — a successful adaptation insofar as it prevents the individual from feeling distress, instead inflicting it on those around him or her. This is true of many of the more notorious personality disorders we face in clinical psychiatry — borderline, narcissistic, paranoid and, as discussed in this article, antisocial states. A personality disorder is lifelong, enduring and maladaptive in most or all of the settings in which a person finds themselves in life. But even if a person does not have a pervasive personality disorder, their predominant personality traits can be a poor interactive fit with the particular social circumstances s/he finds h’self embedded, such as the Army or a war, at a given moment.

Where the article goes wrong, in attributing a small number of problems to a small number of ‘sick’ individuals, is in ignoring that an illegal and immoral war based on reckless and calculated violation of the rights of others without compunction, for personal gain with no appreciaton of the moral consequences, is a perfect interactive fit for antisocial traits. Even if the recruiters and the basic trainers were good at screening out those with a preexisting fullblown antisocial personality disorder (which would typically have declared itself, unless the recruiters are desperate for anyone, in that the person would likely have had a history of getting themselves into trouble in civilian life), the current conditions will precisely select for, encourage and engender an antisocial style of thinking and behaving. Much as the article I linked to the other day suggested that the conditions of the war make the Army a haven for right wing racialist extremism, the Iraq war is a breeding ground for antisocial behavior and ‘cold and deliberate war crimes’. I argued when the revelations about Abu Ghraib broke that both the perpetrators’ understanding of their mission (aiding in desperate intelligence-gathering at all costs) and the permissiveness of the entire culture of the US military intervention shaped the torture. The scapegoating of the (admittedly depraved) perpetrators was a convenient smokescreen obscuring their superiors’ responsibility, right up to the Pentagon and the White House. The same is true, even moreso, of the current crop of coldblooded massacres and murders. A war that is generally considered just (to the extent that any war can be said to be), where the decision to go to war and support the war effort is a national consensus, is a framework within which the psychological stability of combatants is more preserved, behavior in accordance with the accepted ethical standards of warfare is facilitated, and civilian massacres and detainee torture are much less — or not at all — a way of doing business.

The other point I quibble with is the author’s assertion that there is a relatively low frequency of psychiatric breakdowns in Iraq. This has little to do with the psychological health of the recruits or the impeccabe supportiveness, nurturance and protectiveness of the command structure. Rather, it is a matter of the Army’s callous indifference to the psychological distress suffered both on the battlefield and in returning combat veterans. In Iraq, psychological disterss is ignored or stigmatized and affected individuals bullied back onto patrol, as I have described here in earlier posts. And most psychiatric professionals, especially those who work with combat trauma, project an unprecedented proportion of Iraq veterans will need treatment for post-traumatic conditions. Perhaps the only soldiers immune are precisely those who have been selected for the effective use of antisocial traits, those who are unable to feel any compunctions for the immoral horror they inflict by their invading and occupying presence.

The taunt that made Zidane snap: intense speculation, fantasizing, projecting and, yes, attempts at lipreading off the video clips are consuming many. Suffice it to say, from this U.S. vantage point, that compared to whatever went down on that football field, we here are by comparison woefully inadequate at hurling insults!

And this is suposed to be news??! How far away from the psychedelic era we have ended up, I felt as I read this report of the study, partially federally funded and published in the journal Psychopharmacology. Touted by some as a landmark, it is said to be the first study to ‘rigorously’ study the subjective experiences of hallucinogen users. Charles Schuster, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, commented: “We’ve lost 40 years of (potential) research experience with this whole class of compounds,” he said. Now, with modern-day scientific methods, “I think it’s time to pick up this research field.” Despite the fact that hallucinogens have been used since time immemorial in spiritual ceremonies in all but the most uptight societies, the new work is said to demonstrate drug effects in a new way. Given that users report intense mystical experiences, proponents of the study say they may have a window into the religious experience, for example by doing fMRIs of people under the influence of psilocybin or other hallucinogens. Ah, the ludicrous tragedy of feeling it is somehow more valid to study the ‘subjective’ ‘objectively’! Again, the article talks as if this establishes that hallucinogens might be useful for the treatment of drug addicts or depression in the terminally terminally ill. Of course, these two categories are picked because they are areas in which there is already clinical hallucinogen research and established evidence of effectiveness.

This is from John Faughnan, whose weblog I just found by accident and who seems to resonate with many of my interests. The Fermi paradox is one of his preoccupations, it seems.

For readers of FmH — unless you read the comments under the post to which this link points on my weblog Follow Me Here, you would probably not know that FmH is syndicated at medlogs.com.

For readers via Medlogs — I am posting this largely for you. Recently, an anonymous Medlogs reader, in the midst of a mutually rather acrimonious exchange with me in the comments section of FmH, let me know on FmH that s/he has complained to the sysop of Medlogs about my posts syndicated there. She/he claimed that the problem was the volume of posts with non-medical content originating from FmH; I think the issue is really that s/he does not like my political position. Her/his original derogatory comment on FmH did not even mention any supposed concern about medlogs.com:

Only when s/he became defensive after pressed about her/his demeanor did the commenter mention that s/he felt I was hogging the bandwidth at Medlogs:

You can read the rest of the exchange by scrolling down from here. (Not me at my best…)

(Ironically, this complaint about the volume of my posts and the offensiveness of my politics was in response to an item I had put up on FmH considering the decreasing volume of my posts at this point in my weblogging career. In particular, I am posting less political material, as I explain in the post in terms of “Bush fatigue.”)

But back to the issue at hand. My impression is that medlogs.com is not a weblog for medical posts but rather a weblog syndicating medical webloggers’ posts; as you can see, an important distinction. To my way of thinking, it is a dull medical professional who is interested in nothing but medical content, and most medical professionals I know are interested in a broader range of their colleagues’ thoughts. That’s my notion of the medical community crystallized by medlogs.com. FmH represents a cross-section of the thoughts and interests of a psychiatrist (albeit a leftwing antiwar anti-Bush one); seemed to have a place on Medlogs.

I would imagine that if I was offbase in that respect I would have long since heard from Jacob Reider or other Medlogs readers. The page to add a site to Medlogs says, “We will get to feed requests ASAP.” I take that to mean that Reider reviews sites applying for admission to medlogs.com to see if they are appropriate; for just this reason, it would be a great gamble not to do so. In that case, my content was deemed to be in the acceptable ballpark. In any case, I wrote to Reider about this difference of opinion and asked him to clarify. I told him that, although he might be reluctant to kick me off in response to concerns about my content because the action might have the appearance of political censorship, I offered that I would voluntarily withdraw FmH from Medlogs syndication if he thought it would be the right thing to do . I have yet to hear back from Reider.

I am posting this now because I think it would be responsible of me to solicit other Medlogs’ readers opinions about whether I am sullying their reading experience and whether I should leave Medlogs. Do you share the concerns of the scurrilous, anonymous complainant? Do you find my posts on Medlogs out of place or is the content I add acceptable in light of what you understand Medlog’s raison d’etre to be? I know there is some selection bias in phrasing a question in this manner; I ask sympathetic readers to consider replying as readily as others might do it in antipathy. You can let me know by going to the copy of this post on FmH and entering a comment. Please identify yourself as a Medlogs reader (and don’t share the complainant’s cowardice by remaining anonymous, please). Thank you for your input, and I would be happy to leave Medlogs if the preponderance of opinion supports that. I would be happy to see Anon. eat crow if the preponderance of the evidence supported that outcome… (but I will not hold my breath).

The only problem is that Ms. Sutherland acts as if she has discovered these verities. Karen Pryor’s brilliant but neglected (because it had the appearance of being a dog training manual) Don’t Shoot the Dog went over the same revolutionary ground, applying reinforcement-based teaching and training to human relational problems, two decades ago.

The growing unpopularity of the war creates an incentive for quota-burdened recruiters to appeal to the basest sentiments in the American mentality, the xenophobia and reptilian tribalism that turn into torture and massacre. But it is misleading although convenient to focus as this report does on recruiting shortfalls as the cause; they only highlight the deeper issue. As this report makes clear, it was folly for the Pentagon to believe that it could eliminate extremism with regulations or policy when the mission of this war as shaped at the highest levels of administration policy is itself xenophobic, manipulative, dishonest and jingoistic.

Do not use if you have ever had an allergic reaction to this product or any of its ingredients.
Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Please leave as clean on leaving as you would like to find on entering.
Caution: Dates on calendar are closer than they appear.
Please note locations of emergency exits upon arrival.
No animals were harmed in the production of this page.
May be used as flotation device in case of emergency.
Anything you say can and will be used against you.
Satisfaction guaranteed; return for full refund.
Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Objects on screen are closer than they appear.
If condition persists, consult your physician.
Detach and include upper portion with payment.
Nutritional need is not established in humans.
Do not use if safety seal is torn or missing.
Product is sold by weight and not by volume.
In emergency, break glass, pull down handle.
Caution! The edge is closer than you think.
Contents may have settled during shipment.
Do not fold, staple, spindle or mutilate.
Prices subject to change without notice.
Freshest if used before date specified.
Valid only at participating locations.
If swallowed, do not induce vomiting.
You have the right to remain silent.
Do not remove under penalty of law.
Offer void where prohibited by law.
This page intentionally left blank.
Do not exceed recommended dosage.
No user-serviceable parts inside.
No shirt, no shoes, no service.
You need not be present to win.
Keep out of reach of children.
Part of a daily balanced diet.
Apply only to affected areas.
Other restrictions may apply.
Do not think of an elephant.
You must be present to win.
Honk if you can read this.
No purchase is necessary.
Don’t try this at home.
Consume in moderation.
For external use only.
Your mileage may vary.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Use only as directed.
Ignore this notice.
Slippery when wet.
Unplug after use.
Same-day service.

Thanks to Dennis Fox, who links to it to assuage his defensiveness at irregular posting, for pointing to this piece by a marketing professor.

Since the Nov.15, 1999 origin of Follow Me Here (2423 days ago), I have posted 14,438 posts (including this one). The argument that prolific isn’t necessarily good certainly applies to FmH. But, as you have no doubt noticed, the frequency of posts has indeed fallen off here recently. Posting less frequently here is done without much anguish at all; I am way past the article’s touted pressure to post daily to establish one’s seriousness (FmH speaks for itself).

I agree, traffic is not generated by daily posting and it is irrelevant to FmH’s ‘success’, such as it is. Whether a significant decrement in post frequency would affect the loyalty of those who frequent FmH remains to be seen, even if you continue to surf over here and check for new posts in a ‘Web 1.0’ way rather than subscribe to my RSS feed á la Web 2.0. I get several hundred hits a day; I have only several dozen RSS subscribers. Certainly, if the posts slow down too much, beyond a certain point loyal readers would find it unproductive to keep surfing over here, but I hope I am still far from that level.

Frequent posting may drive poor content quality and negatively affect the credibility of the ‘blogosphere’, the author says, but I have never posted to meet a quota; I post if I have something to say or if I have something to which I think you would be interested in being pointed. While much weblogging has evolved into either diary, confessional, or pretentious punditry, I have always said that I come from the original late ’90’s weblogging tradition (Rebecca Blood ) in which what you post is — literally — a log of your interesting surfing. If I surf the net, which is an integral part of my self-informing, I hit a few keys and log what grabs me, albeit finding my own voice in the process.

So, then, if there has not been any sudden liberation from the compulsion to post daily, why am I posting less?

• First of all, I am in a busier phase in my career and my community involvements than I was when I started this.
• Secondly, I am sleeping better these days; by comparison, go back and look at the timestamps of my posts during more prolific periods here. It has become far more important to be far less sleep-deprived, and I love my family too much to choose this over them if I cannot have my cake and eat it.
• Third, I have an incredible degree of Bush fatigue; it is not that I cannot get outraged anymore, but there is only a finite roster of ways in which a government can lie, cheat, steal, kill, destroy, and oppress. Bush and his minions have long since done them all; I have long since taken note of them here; nothing surprises me, and my outrage is constant and numbing.
• And I have only a limited tolerance for my own frustration and despondency that a more effective movement of opposition has not arisen in response to his outrages. And I have no confidence that weblogs like FmH are change agents. (I don’t know what would be effective activism these days, I guess, but I can no longer rationalize as I did for so long that FmH was an integral form of activist activity)
• It also seems that the polarization of the blogosphere, like that of the country, has been proceeding apace. I don’t think I have readers with whom I don’t agree on the large issues and I don’t believe dialogue across the culture war in modern America is productive. So my conversation with my readers is or should be more nuanced and subtle; the opportunity for that inherently arises less often than for bolder pronouncements, or maybe it is just my taking the opportunity less often.
• And, yes, the ‘landfill’ of useless blowhard weblogs proliferates, but so too are there more of those who do have something thoughtful to say, or something interesting to link to. They’ve gotten there first and said it better, whatever ‘it’ is.
• Also, I think, the non-blog web is more homogeneous and, well, less interesting, than it was when the original webloggers emerged in the late ’90’s. There may be less cataloguing of interesting sites going on today because there may be less interesting sites, or at least I am finding them less. The quirky early web users have moved on. The web is so much less a place to be quirky and original for the novelty of it. Certainly, in numbers, there are diverse numbers of independent sites around, but many of them are rubbish. So the links to the New York Times, Wired, Salon and the like take over…
• And finally, I do want to be responsive to what I imagine my readers want. Over the years, I have noticed which posts generate comments and discussion. That is a rough indicator, since each individual post doesn’t have a click-through or a hit counter, of what grabs you. And it is not the simple linking posts, but the ones in which I make a comment — insightful, pseudo-insightful, absurd, outrageous, provocative, hackneyed, trite or limited. I am not saying I will be able to do more of that, but it certainly means I will do less of the other.

Comments?

Lo! How the mighty have fallen, one might say. This essay considers Freud’s legacy as he turns 150, describing the state of British psychoanalysis. The authors, one of whom is a British psychiatrist, remind us of the fury and “seriousness with which disputes over psychoanalysis were being conducted in the 1980s” (typified by the controversy over Jeffrey Masson so ably described by New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm back then), and how far toward the edifice passing with a whimper, instead of a bang, we have come in the two decades since.

The British government and, I might add from my perspective, U.S. managed care companies, are gangbusters over cognitive therapy instead these days, insofar as they have any truck with ‘the talking cure’ at all anymore. The article describes cognitive therapy and how it is different from psychoanalytically-based therapy. The article seems to contrast the two first and foremost on the basis of technique — focusing on Freudian analysis’ reliance on free association and the transference. “…The process is classically driven by (these) two mechanisms, and these are essentially all there is to the technique…” I think there are more extensive, and more accessible, ways of capturing what is unique about psychoanalytic therapy. For example, that it is insight-based, that exploration of one’s past is considered important to that insight, that the therapist is attentive to what is avoided and not said by the patient as well as what is being discussed, that there is an emphasis on how the patient functions interpersonally, and that the internal life of wishes, fantasies and dreams is considered important. All of these are largely absent from cognitive therapy.

I also think the essayists are misleading about transference. They describe it as “what takes place between you and the analyst as you become embroiled in an intimate relationship that is unlike any other you might have outside the consulting room”. It is not different; it is simultaneously the same and different! The beauty of analysis of the transference is that the patient will create a relationship with the therapist that cannot escape replicating the rigid and problematic patterns with which they interact with everyone else in their social spheres. All that is different is that the therapist is a trained observer with respect to this process, so that s/he can understand it, comment upon it, and facilitate the patients’ reshaping it, all while staying somewhat above the fray and preventing the relationship from being disrupted. It would not work if it were “unlike any other” relationship the patient has!

Quite rightly, the authors point out that one has to consider not only technique but the theory on which it is based. The true lynchpin of psychoanalysis, the understanding of the human being that it informs, and the therapeutic impact of the insight patients develop through psychoanalytically-based therapy, has been the notion of the unconscious` — that some of the forces which shape how we think, feel and behave are not obvious to us, remain undiscovered and out of our control, and that that is the basis of our distress. The notion of the unconscious has little empirical backing and is different from the subconscious processes that cognitive science posit and the neurophysiological underpinnings of mental function that biological psychiatry and neuroscience suggest.

In contrast to the baroque complexities of psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy is built on the idea that distress is an outcome of dysfunctional and correctable thoughts that patients have aboout themselves. The article has a good description of what a patient can expect to find in a cognitive therapy. The empirical evidence for cognitive therapy’s efficacy is reviewed.

Much is made of the notion that, in psychoanalytic treatment, instead of “tell[ing] you what it is that you’ve got,… [or] explain[ing] how you will get over it,… you embark on a personal exploration during which you find that you don’t only suffer from the symptoms you thought you did, but also a range of other conflicts underlying them.” Arguably, from this perspective, patients do not get ‘better’ in psychoanalysis. Much is made of Freud’s famous (perhaps his most famous) statement that “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” Certainly, shouldn’t the result-driven governments or insurance companies funding mental health treatment abhor such an empirically unproven, costly and unproductive practice!

In a word, the problem lies in the lack of precision, refinement or specificity about what getting better means. Quite simply, cognitive therapy was developed to deal with depression and anxiety. Along with medications, it is an effective and cost-effective treatment for limited subtypes of the human misery we are dealing with in the mental health field, the bread-and-butter disorders of the field. You may not need to understand yourself better to improve from these and similar conditions and, indeed, understanding yourself better may not help.

But that is a far cry from dismissing psychoanalysis for the “near-uselessness of its insights,” as Janet Malcolm is quoted as saying. Whether empirically proven or not, psychoanalysis works because its practitioners are skillful at spinning a web of belief and enlisting their patients into adhering to a coherent and believable story about why they feel and act the way they do. This exists in an entirely different sphere than that in which you can measure the ‘truth’, or the empirical validity, of what one comes to understand. It is more akin to faith than scientific knowledge; treatment is more akin to going to church to reaffirm and extend one’s belief than going to the doctor’s office. Argue as you might about the damage that faith may bring; there are spheres in which it is important, and in which nothing else works. Paradoxically, perhaps, this is the case for some of our least sick patients, the so-called “walking wounded”; and also some of our sickest, the so-called personality-disordered or character-disordered patients. In contrast to someone undergoing a depressed episode, these are people who have chronic and pervasive maladaptive ways of being in the world and interacting with others throughout the bulk of their adult lives. In these cases, getting ‘better’ may mean not so much repairing anything as it does entering into a new, more comforting and perhaps more empowering storyline about oneself and one’s relationships. Doesn’t it make sense that there might be a distinction between conditions in which relief comes from changing what we cannot bear and others in which it is a matter of bearing what we cannot change? And that different techniques might facilitate those two kinds of solution? As the authors conclude:

Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. CBT, medication-based treatment, etc., have largely supplanted open-ended exploratory and revelatory therapy not because they are better or more suitable for all but because they suit a society which has gone overboard with quick fixes, with linear and concrete understanding instead of nuanced analysis, with the romance of the evidence-based, and ultimately with cost-consciousness. This is a society that has excised most of the meaning out of people’s lives already. At least, in my profession, I can draw the line somewhere, and continue to attempt to help patients find meaning in their suffering and value in their lives.

This Prospect Magazine article is by Fred Pearce, an acquaintance of mine in years past from Cambridge who I have always found to be one of the more thoughtful and smart writers on complicated technological issues and their environmental and social impact, but from whom I have not heard much in a few years. As it turns out, he has a forthcoming book, The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change. Here he considers whether the dream of fusion power is worth pursuing.

This is a consideration of the other famous literary characters whose authors killed them off (among them Little Nell, Emma Bovary, and Sherlock Holmes, the clamor about whose death was so great that Conan Doyle was compelled to bring him back, as you know) and whether we should really want it any other way:

(New York Times )

“…[A] bear cub sits in a vintage red Buick convertible in a Lake Tahoe neighborhood, in Stateline, Nev., in this Sunday, July 2, 2006 file photo. The bear drew a crowd of spectators as it munched on barbecue-chicken-and-jalapeno pizza in the back seat of the 1964 Buick Skylark. It also apparently washed it down with a swig of a Jack Daniel’s mixer, an Absolut vodka and tonic, and a beer taken from a cooler, the vehicle’s owner said.” (Yahoo! News)

Ken Lay’s death prompts confusion on Wikipedia (Reuters)

And: A Google News search on ‘ “Ken Lay” and “suicide” ‘.

And:

“Oh, for crying out loud.The whole point of America is that you can burn the flag.”

The frugal traveller visits Tirana for the New York Times: “I had arrived in Albania hoping to discover an untrammeled paradise hidden in the Balkans. What I found instead was a deeply weird place…” I was at a dinner on the United Nations Day Against Torture last week (the anniversary of the day, 6/26/1987, that the U.N. Convention Against Torture went into effect) held by Boston Medical Center’s Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights to honor political refugees who had gained asylum in the United States. By far the most uncomfortable and isolated people in this room full of political refugees from oppressed nations all over the world were an Albanian family, I felt.

I have already writtten here about this technology as if it is a thing to come. But the ACLU suspects that the technology is already being used in interrogations abroad and has filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to find out. Hasn’t the ACLU learned yet that the Bush administration, to protect us from the world terrorist conspiracy out there, also has to protect us from freedom of information?

Ask MetaFilter thread from someone who loves french fries but is uncomfortable dipping them in ketchup any more because it is such a heavily processed food, thus offends his current eating philosophy. How’s that for congruity? In any case, he asks what he should use instead, and there are some interesting responses. The suggestions are pretty well divided between exotic, mostly Asian, sauces, which I suspect are often as industrial as American ketchup; and some surprising simple alternatives.

That’s how much the US Air Force will spend on a three-year research project on the value of weblogs to war-fighting and intelligence efforts. The study is entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.” (DefenseLink via Think Progress) One of the chief investigators is quoted as saying, “It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns.” My guess is that FmH readers are always sorting out what’s important from what’s irrelevant here through your sophisticated pattern analysis tools. Do you think the researchers want any subcontractors?

Supreme Court Blocks Guantanamo Tribunals: “The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put Guantanamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law.” (New York Times ) Justice Stevens’ majority opinion warned Bush that “the executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction..,” as if expecting him to try to weasel out of it, Human rights advocates were jubilant. Part, but not all, of the basis for the ruling was that the administration had not consulted Congress in establishing the tribunals. Bush vowed to “find a way forward” and there are indications of bipartisan interest in crafting legislation authorizing tribunals that would withstand judicial scrutiny. The ruling fell short of requiring the full range of protections for detainees that defendants have in the civilian judicial system, but it made it clear that necessary protections are missing from the administration’s rules for the military commissions. “The flaws the court cited were the failure to guarantee the defendant the right to attend the trial and the prosecution’s ability under the rules to introduce hearsay evidence, unsworn testimony, and evidence obtained through coercion.” The ruling also reaffirmed the US obligation to abide by the Geneva Conventions in our treatment of WoT® detainees, in coontradiction to Bush’s assertion that the rules do not apply. Repudiating as it does Bush’s broad use of the congressional “authorization to use force” resolution in the days after the Sept. 11th attacks, the ruling also has broader implications for the administration’s other illegal activities in its WoT®-Without-End., including the NSA’s secret wiretapping program.

Although journalist Ron Suskind is on the right side — the only side — of the issue, NPR dignifies his opponents by including an interview with him on his new book in a series debating the merits of the use of torture. Debating the merits? I know there are all sorts of situational ethical frameworks, usually discussed in undergraduate philosophy courses, in which hairs can be split about the ends justifying the means in this situation but not that, but there are also some moral absolutes. Indeed, Suskind’s argument, that torture backfires in terms of weighing the costs and benefits accruing to the US from our practices, misses the boat and leaves a door open to the Dershowitzs who simply weigh the costs and benefits differently. We have become the animals we detest.

Previous aroma generators have been limited by the number of canned smells they are able to reproduce, but the new technique does away with pre-prepared smells and synthesizes each odor to order from a set of 96 odiferous ingredients. Of course, the greatest application of this work, if it proves successful, will be in subliminal (or not-so-subliminal) marketing.

Free/Cheap Access to the Invisible Web: Kevin Kelly clues readers in to the fact that you can access numerous online fee-based databases by logging on to your public library’s website with your library card (you do have a library card, right?).

Coverages vary tremendously by region and residency requirements do apply, although in many states you can get a library card for any library system in the state. Even non-residents can get a library card for a fee; Kelly opted for a free San Francisco card in his native state of California, and a New York Public Librarycard for $100. I just logged onto the Brookline (MA) library site and discovered I have free searchable access to the full text of all New York Times and Boston Globe articles, for starters. I have paid, oh I don’t know, $3 or $5 to the Times or the Globe when I have needed to download an article in the past. Alas, my library system doesn’t give me access to JSTOR (of which Kelly writes), an online depository of the full text of most major scholarly and scientific journals you can download in PDF format.

Details leaked from a classified Pantagon briefing by General George Casey, reported in the New York Times, outline a concept of how to cut US troop strength in Iraq approximately in half by December, 2007, with the first brigades withdrawn early this fall. The Republican response in last week’s debates to Democratic calls for a phased withdrawal, which all but the most hardened chicken hawks consider inevitable, was to say we needed to hear from the military. Now we have it, from the top commander in Iraq. But coincidentally enough, the proposed withdrawal is timed precisely to have maximal impact on the Nov. 2006 midterm elections and the 2008 Presidential campaign. Families of US troop casualties from here on out should feel proud that the death or maiming of their loved ones will have served a good cause — not the war effort but the Republican reelection effort and the culture war on the ground at home.

Not that more is necessarily better…

“People should not use mobile phones outdoors during thunderstorms because of the risk of being struck by lightning, doctors said on Friday. They reported the case of a 15-year-old girl who was using her phone in a park when she was hit during a storm. Although she was revived, she suffered persistent health problems and was using a wheelchair a year after the accident.” (Wired News) I am not sure I can take this warning, which is all over the net this week, at face value. It brings to mind all the discussion about not using your cell phone at a gas station because of the risk of sparking, which seems at least remotely plausible. In contrast, the operative principle in the current warning, if it is credible at all, would seem to be “leave your cell phone home.” If a cell phone is going to attract a lightning strike, it would seem to be an issue of whether it is on your person at all rather than whether you were operating it to make a call or not. (Although, on second thought, could there be an effect from its relative height when you have it up to your face during a call rather than stored in your pocket, your waist or wherever?) But I digress; more important, do cell phones inherently attract lightning strikes at all? If there are any readers out there who are telecommunication engineers, earth scientists or physicists, maybe you can comment on whether carrying a device with an antenna makes one inherently more of a target for lightning, or whether the cell phone use of the unfortunate young woman mentioned in the article was “correlation, not causation.”

And: Cell phone signals excite brain: study: “Cell phone emissions excite the part of the brain cortex nearest to the phone, but it is not clear if these effects are harmful, Italian researchers reported on Monday.

Their study, published in the Annals of Neurology, adds to a growing body of research about mobile phones, their possible effects on the brain, and whether there is any link to cancer.” (Yahoo! News)

I knew this would happen (New York Times ) when I heard Bush was going to Hungary for the commemoration. Any global enemy will do for those who define themselves by whom they hate, and the neocons have been looking for the next opportunity since the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War. Forget oil-based conspiracy theories about what fuels the WoT®, it is a reflection of these people’s impoverished psyches, not their impoverished bank accounts.

i.e. Voice Phishing (WebSense)

Tired of seeing him mooch for months, café calls the police and he is charged with theft of services. (Yahoo! News)

Some of the valedictories in the media for Michael Gerson, as he leaves the Bush administration, characterize him as a “speechwriter turned policy advisor” to the president. I haven’t followed his career all that closely but, if that is an accurate description of his trajectory in the Bush administration, it strikes me as particularly apt. Speechwriting and policy-making are very different things in most administrations, Bush, however, is a man whose rationale for a decision never goes beyond merely stating with those beady mock-earnest eyes and folksy drawl that he is sure it is the best choice. Convincing the nation of the wisdom of a policy is supposed to rest entirely on conveying the depth of his conviction. This is the problem with faith-based decision-making; he doesn’t have a clue that policy-making consists of anything more than the slick delivery. So who better to make policy than his chief speechwriter?

Unfortunately, Gerson was considered the chief architect of compassionate conservatism and the ‘conscience’ of the White House to some… so I am afraid we will have to consider him a failure as a policy maker.

Jay Leno: “President Bush’s number one speech writer, a man named Michael Gerson, resigned yesterday after seven years writing speeches for the President. It’s already having an effect on Mr. Bush. Like, after turning in his resignation, Mr. Bush wished him the goodest of luck.”

For my northern hemisphere readers, the longest day and the zenith of the Sun’s power. At Midsummer, the Mother Goddess is heavily pregnant and the God is at the peak of his manhood. This is the second time the Oak King and the Holly King do battle. This time, the Holly King is victorious.

I am not saying anything brilliant in asking what in the world a US regime that abrogates treaties and standards for the humane treatment fo our prisoners of war enemy combatants could expect?

A retired CIA case officer gives some gratuitous and unsolicited advice to General Hayden (Foreign Policy Research Institute)

“Bush’s determination to impose his own reading of new laws amounts to a power grab and subverts the US constitution” (Guardian.UK)

“Bush’s determination to impose his own reading of new laws amounts to a power grab and subverts the US constitution” (Guardian.UK)

How to build it

Luckily the children survived with only minor injuries (excluding their psychological traumatization, of course), while their mother died. Unlike the husband’s heinous endangerment of his children, the charge of ‘promoting a suicide attempt’ seems arbitrary and dubious, to my way of thinking. I wonder how often people are prosecuted on this charge, and how often a conviction is obtained. My suspicion is that that law is being misapplied beyond its original purpose of preventing Kevorkian-like assisted suicides, although I acknowledge that I do not know all the details of this case.

In my work as a clinical psychiatrist, frequently treating people hospitalized after suicide attempts, I often see situations in which (even excluding the egregious instances in which angry bystanders have goaded a person threatening suicide to “go ahead and do it”) a family member or other close associate has failed to prevent or discourage an attempt in someone who in 20/20 hindsight they might have had reason to believe was suicidal. People go out and leave a depressed person alone; they try less hard than they can to get the affected person into mental health treatment; they do too little to prevent access to alcohol or other disinhibiting substances that make suicide more likely, or they fail to prevent access to lethal means used to make an attempt. They fail to do enough to reassure a person fearful of abandonment or vulnerable to criticism or self-reproach. Are they to blame in those instances? By definition, psychiatrist Leston Havens once observed, suicide comes when least expected.

Arguably, no one besides a health professional has a responsibility to prevent another’s suicide, it seems to me, and no one, including a health professional, has an obligation to foresee the unforeseeable. Assessing suicide risks is one of the most challenging aspects of mental health work, requiring sophistication, experience, aplomb… and the ability to bear being wrong. Those of us who full well have an obligation to prevent suicide know that it is not a matter of if, but merely of when, we will fail to do so. Can we expect members of the lay public to unambiguously assess when someone close to them represents a true threat?

And where exactly do we draw the line? Is there a specific moment when the need to walk on eggshells around the vulnerable individual kicks in? Suicide often — although not invariably — occurs in an interpersonal context; should there be a moral obligation to conduct ourselves so no potentially vulnerable person around us is ever emotionally hurt by us? In an ideal world, perhaps, but not in the world I live in.

Update: more details in this New York Times article, including the following:

There was evidence that Sandra Day O’Connor was against this finding but the case was reargued after Alito’s confirmation and the decision reached by a 5-4 vote. I agree with Breyer’s dissenting opinion that, if evidence of an illegal search is still admissible, the knock-and-announce rule becomes entirely moot: “…[T]he court destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution’s knock-and-announce requirement. And the court does so without significant support in precedent.”

It also seems, as critics propose, that this is a serious and wrong-headed overall challenge to the protections of the Fourth Amendment, that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence. In this case, the argument goes, it is unfair to exclude the evidence obtained without knock-and-announce because the evidence would still have been found if the police had waited a few moments longer; and also that the right being protected was a trivial one when weighed against the adverse consequences of the exclusion of incriminating evidence. This ignores the fact that rule of law is not based on how well the end justifies the means in any given instance, but on the overriding importance of a consistent principled stance that transcends the individual case at hand.

How does it feel to have a Court where Anthony Kennedy is the new swing vote between, on one side, Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas and, on the other, Ginsburg-Souter-Breyer-Stevens?

You may not remember her; I do, both because her 1964 murder outside her apartment block had a profound effect on psychology and because, at the time, I was a 12-year old living less than a mile from where it happened. The story has it that her murder was witnessed by 38 neighbors, none of whom called the police, supposedly because each thought another would do so. It is the basis for the well-known psychological principle of the ‘bystander effect’ in which individual responsibility is diffused by experiencing an event as part of a crowd. Now, Mind Hacks describes a revisionist history of what really happened.

No surprises in this Pew Research Center survey. We should probably stop talking about “countries closely allied” with the US; it is only their governments that support US hegemonism, not thier people.

The N.S.A. is Listening: an animated editorial cartoon from Newsday by Walt Handelsman.

And:

Is NSA eavesdropping legal?

Judge may decide : “The National Security Agency’s domestic spying program faces its first legal challenge in a case that could decide if the White House can order eavesdropping without a court order.” (ZDNet)

Guantanamo suicides ‘acts of war’. That’s the take of the US military commander of the illegal detention center at Guantanamo, commenting on the two Saudi and one Yemeni prisoners supposedly found hanged in their cells the same night. This is so nonsensical it defies any scrutiny. That is, if you even believe they were suicides. It makes for an unbelievable coincidence that there were three on the same night… unless there was a conspiracy, either on the part of the detainees or on their watchers. The only thing that puzzles me is why the US even announced these deaths, since our regime is no better than other tyrannical regimes that create ‘disappeared’ people without a trace. (BBC)

The N.S.A. is Listening: an animated editorial cartoon from Newsday by Walt Handelsman.

And:

Is NSA eavesdropping legal?

Judge may decide : “The National Security Agency’s domestic spying program faces its first legal challenge in a case that could decide if the White House can order eavesdropping without a court order.” (ZDNet)

Forensic Specialists to Examine Al – Zarqawi : an attempt is being made to reconstruct the last moments of his life and the exact manner in which he died, after US spokespeople change their story. Also, an Iraqi man living next to the bombing site told AP that neighbors put an injured man resembling al Zarqawi in an ambulance, but that U.S. soldiers took him out of the ambulance and beat him to death. A Pentagon spokesman said he was “unaware of the claim”. (New York Times )

The Tech That Took Out Zarqawi: “New sensors and weapons, high-tech surveillance drones and better training have resulted in a minor revolution of which the Zarqawi attack is just one result.” (DefenseTech)

This is the study that is getting alot of popular press. I am glad to see the research team acknowledge that the diagnostic category will expand or contract depending on how broad or narrow the inclusion criteria are; you know that all ‘official’ psychiatric diagnosis is done essentially by checklist. Research psychiatrists just want to know if a given subject qualifies ‘in’ or ‘out’. In contrast, we clinicians are interested in whether it is meaningful to understand a person in terms of a given diagnosis in relation to their difficulties in living. One of the consequences of the ascendency of research-driven diagnostic classification is to ignore this contextual issue. For this reason, we should take with more than a grain of salt all the studies that come out loudly trumpeting the fact that this disorder or that is much more prevalent than we had suspected. Moreover, many psychaitric diseases are not a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as much as they are a matter of degree, and ctieria such as how angry a person is surely exist on a continuum. But in current diagnosis, you’ve either got it or you haven’t. That just doesn’t make sense in thinking about people and individual variability.

Which brings me to my next point, regarding the widely varying notions of ‘prevalence’. For example, a broad definiition of intermittent explosive disorder (IED) entails at least three rage attacks during one’s lifetime; the narrow one at least three such attacks during the same year. Just consider how intuitively different those two definitions are!

And that’s just the systematic type of diagnosis. As readers of FmH know, one of my pet peeves is ‘intuitive’ diagnosis. If diagnosis by criteria divorced from life context is meaninglessly overinclusive, consider how many people yet will receive a diagnostic label iwhen it is done because they ‘feel’ like they have a disorder to the examining clinician. Consult a mental health professional because you are upset about an anger outburst you just had toward your family member, perhaps present with an angry ‘feel’, and risk the IED diagnosis. ADHD is perhaps the modern example par excellence of this problem. As readers of FmH know, I consider the ‘epidemic’ of ADHD in our society largely a result of brain-dead, meaningless diagnosis by feel, from the hip, by fad, by bandwagon, by naiveté..

Although it may be welcome for justifying coverage of care from a third party payor, there are profound consequences to receiving a needless diangosis, to start with in terms of needless or harmful medication prescribing. In addition, carrying around a label has weighty influences both on self-concept and on how others both in the healthcare and social services sectors and in the general public conceive of you. (It would be a different polemic to go off on the unfairness of stigmatization of psychiatric patients; suffice it to say that it is real and prevalent). How we understand our society as well is altered by altered notions of the prevalence of disorders such as IED.

And finally, overinclusive diagnosis is horrible for psychiatric research. As I have often written, if the members of a diagnostic category are neurochemically and physiologically diverse (i.e. if they really do not have the same disease process on a biological level), there is no chance that biological research, e.g. medication trials, will reach any meaningful conclusions. The more you look, the more diffuse it gets. And the more diffuse, the more meaningless.

Philosopher of mind Susan Blackmore explains why what goes on in our heads is a continuing puzzle. A quick and dirty summary of current debates about the ‘hard problem’ of the nature of consciousness, the holy grail of cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind. (Independent.UK)

“Understanding consciousness may be easier than we thought” — MIT philosopher Alex Byrne (Boston Review via Mind Hacks)

“Writing your internet business plan, but suffering from writers block? Use this handy tool to break the deadlock and write like a pro!”