In an Atlantic essay called "The Science of Success," David Dobbs writes about two types of children: "orchids" and "dandelions." Dandelion children tend to do pretty well no matter what environment they grow up in. Orchid children, meanwhile, may develop behavior or mood problems in abusive or neglectful homes — but in loving ones, they may thrive even more than dandelions. And according to new research, the difference between dandelions and orchids may be genetic. For instance, kids with a certain variant of a dopamine-processing gene are at greater risk of ADHD and "externalizing behavior" (i.e. "acting out") than other children. But in one study, these kids also improved much more in response to a video-based behavioral intervention than did kids who didn't have the at-risk variant. Similarly, rhesus monkeys with another gene variant (one associated with depression in humans) are worse at processing serotonin than their peers if they are raised as orphans. But when raised by a loving monkey mother, these seemingly at-risk animals process serotonin more efficiently than other monkeys, and are also more socially successful. These and other studies suggest that certain genes confer not risk per se, but a kind of openness to environmental stimuli, positive or negative. Dobbs writes,

At first glance, this idea, which I'll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it's actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It's one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the "bad" gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.

Dobbs spends a lot of time talking about the population-level implications of this new idea. He points out "that a genetic trait tremendously maladaptive in one situation can prove highly adaptive in another" and that "every society needs some individuals who are more aggressive, restless, stubborn, submissive, social, hyperactive, flexible, solitary, anxious, introspective, vigilant-and even more morose, irritable, or outright violent-than the norm." If the orchid hypothesis is true, then perhaps a certain number of people who react extremely strongly to their environment, even if these reactions seem negative to our modern eyes, may be important to the flexibility and survival of our species. But what I found most interesting about Dobbs's piece was its implications for the individual. Dobbs writes of his decision to get tested for a gene variant that increases depression risk but may also confer orchid-like properties. A depression sufferer himself, he turned out to have the variant. Dobbs writes,

[A]s I sat absorbing this information, the chill came to seem less the coldness of fear than a shiver of abrupt and inverted self-knowledge-of suddenly knowing with certainty something I had long suspected, and finding that it meant something other than I thought it would. The orchid hypothesis suggested that this particular allele, the rarest and riskiest of the serotonin-transporter gene's three variants, made me not just more vulnerable but more plastic. And that new way of thinking changed things. I felt no sense that I carried a handicap that would render my efforts futile should I again face deep trouble. In fact, I felt a heightened sense of agency. Anything and everything I did to improve my own environment and experience-every intervention I ran on myself, as it were-would have a magnified effect. In that light, my short/short allele now seems to me less like a trapdoor through which I might fall than like a springboard-slippery and somewhat fragile, perhaps, but a springboard all the same.

In this early age of genetic testing, it's easy to think of genes simplistically — and since most testing is still meant to predict disease, our genotypes sometimes begin to seem like maps full of danger signs. But human beings (and monkeys, too) are extraordinarily complicated, and what seems like a risk may also be a blessing. We still tend to see depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other mood and behavioral abnormalities as defects — if a child is "at risk" for one of these, she needs to be protected as though from a gathering storm. Yet to be at risk may also be to have a unique opportunity.

If the orchid hypothesis is true, then people like Dobbs may possess a plasticity that makes them more vulnerable to sorrow and yet also more capable of change. This would have enormous implications for those suffering from certain mental ailments. Perhaps along with their difficulties, their genes have granted them a tool for solving them — and beyond that, for reaching new heights of personal fulfillment. It would also have an impact on how we raise and teach kids. Some have already speculated that children with ADHD need something different from the one-size-fits-all American educational model. If it's true that some kids are uniquely influenced by environment, then maybe what we need is not to try to make them more like other kids — the current approach — but rather to construct the environment that will best help them thrive. This is likely to be difficult, and expensive, and for these reasons it may not catch on. But we might have much to gain, both as individuals and as a society, by seeing a springboard where we once saw a trapdoor.

The Science Of Success [Atlantic]

According to Miral Fahmy of Reuters, researchers first put their subjects in sad or happy moods by having them watch movies or recall positive or negative memories. Then they conducted several different experiments. They found that people in bad moods were less likely to believe urban myths or rumors, and were also less likely to make decisions based on racial or religious prejudice. They were better at remembering events they'd seen, and better at persuasive writing. Study author Joseph Forgas wrote that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style." He added, "positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages."

So despite the conventional wisdom that thinking positively will help us solve all of our problems, it seems that feeling sad can actually be productive — maybe there's a use for a bad mood after all. Negative feelings appeared to boost subjects' critical thinking skills, the kind of skills that come in handy when something bad happens to you. Being the victim of a crime would be a good example — if it puts you in a bad mood, you may actually remember the incident better, making it more likely that the police can catch the criminal. Perhaps bad moods, rather than being a relic of some less-evolved mental state, are actually adaptive, sharpening our cognitive faculties when we need them most. As Forgas says, "our research suggests that sadness ... promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations."

Of course, the research raises questions. Were the good or bad moods induced by scientists really similar to feelings subjects would experience on their own? And how bad does a bad mood have to be before it stops being a help and starts being a hindrance? Clinical depression might actually reduce cognitive ability, and it seems possible that a certain intensity or duration of negative feelings could impair judgment rather than boosting it. Still, it's intriguing and in a way reassuring to hear that our bad moods may be doing something for us — perhaps instead of fighting against them, we should learn to use them.

Thinking Negatively Can Boost Your Memory [Reuters]

The article focuses on several longitudinal studies by psychologist Jerome Kagan and his colleagues. Kagan has found that some babies (about 20% of his simple) are "high-reactive," meaning they kick, writhe, or fuss in response to new stimuli. These babies are more likely to grow into anxious, inhibited, or shy children, and as teens and young adults exhibit differences in brain structure and function. The differences include hypersensitivity in the amygdala, a part of the brain responsible for dealing with danger and new situations. Kagan's research suggests that some people are wired from birth to be more anxious than others.

Henig mentions one subject, known as Baby 19, who in a 1989 experiment "was distressed by novelty - new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells - and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying." In a 2004 interview, when she was 15, Baby 19 enumerated in her worries thus:

When I don't quite know what to do and it's really frustrating and I feel really uncomfortable, especially if other people around me know what they're doing. I'm always thinking, Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone's way? ... I worry about things like getting projects done... I think, Will I get it done? How am I going to do it? ... If I'm going to be in a big crowd, it makes me nervous about what I'm going to do and say and what other people are going to do and say. How I'm going to deal with the world when I'm grown. Or if I'm going to sort of do anything that really means anything.

Not all of Kagan's "high-reactive" subjects were this visibly agitated. By adolescence, most of the kids who had feared new things were "getting good grades, going to parties, making friends." But, Henig writes,

There exists a kind of sub-rosa anxiety, a secret stash of worries that continue to plague a subset of high-reactive people no matter how well they function outwardly. They cannot quite outrun their own natures: consciously or unconsciously, they remain the same uneasy people they were when they were little.

At this point, she seems like she's writing from inside my brain. I'm not sure if I was a "high-reactive" baby, though the way my parents shudder when they talk about my infancy makes me think something was off. I wasn't a conventionally shy child either, but I was terrified of things like death, ghosts, lizards in the bedroom (don't ask), and being disliked. By thirteen, I was convinced I had a mysterious illness that was making my hair fall out (I didn't), and my separation anxiety was so severe that I once spent an entire visit to a friend's house pacing, waiting for my parents to come pick me up. But by high school, I kind of had a handle on things. Therapy helped my separation anxiety, and though I still pretty much thought I was dying all the time, I was able to go out, make friends, and have fun. Which is basically where I am today.

As I've said before, people who've just met me tend to describe me as calm. I don't freak out about work, and being with friends usually makes me forget my anxieties, so I rarely seem outwardly upset. But like Baby 19, I have a laundry list of worries coursing through my head on any given day: Do I have swine flu? Could I be pregnant (this one actually started long before I was sexually active — if I had an immaculate conception, I would not only have to raise a child but also convert to Christianity)? Is this cut on my finger going to give me gangrene? Did I offend someone? Did I say something weird? Am I weird?

If the foregoing list is any indication, the answer to the last question is yes. But if Kagan's research is accurate, there are many more people who are "forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe." This shoe metaphor is especially apt, given that I tend to become especially anxious after something good happens to me, as though I deserve something bad to even it out. But as I've become aware of this tendency, I find it has less power over me, and I'm able to laugh at myself a little as I start to come down with promotion-related meningitis.

Henig discusses different parenting approaches to dealing with high reactive children, but says, "the best outcome, however it happens, is to rear a child who learns to wrestle his demons on his own." She quotes a 13-year-old subject of Kagan's, who wrote,

Inner struggles pulled at me for years until I was able to just let go and calm myself. For example, when I first heard about the anthrax in Washington, I began to have an upset stomach. I realized it was simply because of my anxiety that I was feeling sick. As soon as I realized that, the stomachache went away. Because I now understand my predisposition toward anxiety, I can talk myself out of simple fears.

Henig writes that, "there are many adults, anxious or not, who can't control their own interior monologues as well as this boy can" — and I'm not quite there yet. I'm still capable of losing sleep over the aforementioned gangrenous finger, and I tend to practice a kind of worry exceptionalism — my past worries may have been irrational, I tell myself, but this one is real. I remain a supporter of SSRI treatment, because it's the only thing that ever really shut up my constant interior hypochondrialogue — but a cautious one, because the side effects eventually made me quit. Nowadays what helps the most is absorbing work (which Henig mentions), being social, and, oddly, reading and writing about anxiety.

Some have complained that contemporary psychological research, especially insofar as it focuses on brain scan and controlled experiment, is cold and unhelpful to the individual sufferer. But for me, there's something immensely calming in finding out about the possible defects in my brain. It provides me with a narrative — I'm feeling this way because I was a high-reactive infant and I now have an oversensitive amygdala. This narrative is obviously imperfect — Henig mentions, for instance, that we're not sure about the connection between amygdala activity and the subjective experience of anxiety — but I like that it locates the source of my anxiety in my brain and not in my parents (who, for the record, always tried everything to help me feel better), or, most frightening of all, in the world. I'm aware that we live in anxiety-producing times (Henig duly mentions the recession), but for me, all times are anxiety-producing, and I like to be reminded that my anxiety really comes not from the outside world, but from inside me. It means I have the power to do something about it — even if I'm not sure what that something is.

Understanding the Anxious Mind [NY Times Magazine]

Subtitled A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, Appignanesi's book aims to trace the relationship between women's "madness, badness, and sadness" and their treatment by (usually male) professionals from the late 18th century to the present day. The book does a good job of describing the connection early physicians saw between physical and mental ailments — the "moving womb" theory of hysteria, the fits of numbness and paralysis supposedly brought on by a frightening sight or memory. The "mind doctors" of the 18th and 19th centuries were of course wrong about the specifics of these connections (breast milk, for instance, does not travel into the brain and cause insanity), but it's interesting to note that they understood what we sometimes forget — that the mind and body can influence each other, for good and ill.

Unfortunately, this awareness often led to sexism. Appignanesi notes that doctors in the second half of the 19th century believed that problems with the female reproductive system caused "nervous afflictions," and that,

Throughout this period, doctors and scientists seemed determined to raise the existing division of labor in the middle class to a universal given, and to transform women's place in the domestic sphere into a biological inevitability from which deviation of any kind would bring breakdown, not only of the mind but of the species. Women were understood as being fashioned by evolution for the home and maternity, nervously fragile, intellectually inferior. Moving away from that lesser birthright, allowing energies to be drained by intellectual or imaginative exertion would lead to nervous collapse or to that capacious list of symptoms which most often went under the catch-all diagnosis of neurasthenia or its near-neighbour hysteria.

Prejudicial theory was often matched by brutal practice. Pelvic surgery and force-feeding were common treatments, and Appignanesi tells the story of one woman fed so violently in an asylum that all her teeth were broken. Especially gruesome was early 20th-century hospital superintendent Henry Cotton, who believed psychosis was caused by "chronic pus infections" and who "treated" sufferers not only with tooth removal but with surgery on the stomach, tonsils, uterus, and colon.

There's an interesting book to be written about how fads in mental treatment have harmed and helped women's bodies and minds over the past two centuries. Mad, Bad & Sad is not that book. Appignanesi offers overlong and sometimes jumbled case histories in lieu of any real tracking of trends. Instead of a full picture of how culture has shaped women's diagnosis and treatment, we get scattershot portraits of such ailments as hysteria, neurasthenia, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder without a coherent explanation of what brought each of these conditions to the fore. It's clear that aspects of mental illness are culturally determined — there's a reason why the diagnosis and even the symptoms of hysteria were prevalent in one century, BPD in another, but Appignanesi doesn't really examine what that reason is.

She does say that "therapies [...] can create their own best patients," and she seemed nearly as skeptical of modern SSRIs and cognitive-behavioral therapy as she does of tooth removal and pelvic surgery. Despite her graphic descriptions of blood-vomiting hysterics, she sometimes seems to think that mental illness is largely illusory, something imposed by doctors on women going through normal life phases like adolescence and childbirth. The only therapies she seems to support are journaling, psychoanalysis (with some reservations), and just growing out of your problems.

Appignanesi makes good points at the beginning of her book about the inherent sexism of early psychiatric theories. She might have used these insights to examine how modern-day therapists might transcend gender stereotypes and treatment fads to give their patients the best possible care. Instead, she seems to consider almost all mental health treatments to be forms of insidious social programming. Of course, psychotherapy does tend to reinforce social norms even as it helps patients deal with their very real pain. Whether the two necessarily go hand in hand is an interesting question. It's too bad Appignanesi doesn't make a serious effort to answer it.

Mad, Bad, And Sad: A History Of Women And The Mind Doctors [Amazon]

Roan says people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) "make a mess of their relationships — and no wonder, given the hallmark symptoms: mood instability, fear of abandonment, impulsive behavior, anger and suicidal or self-injurious acts. People with the disorder may misperceive the actions — even the facial expressions — of others." Borderline patients frequently also struggle with other mental illnesses or substance abuse. Psychologist Marsha Linehan, an expert on the disorder, describes it thus: "You can't regulate your emotions despite your best efforts."

Roan writes, "the composite of an angry, unstable, clingy, substance abuser is not a pretty one, and people with the disorder suffer greatly because they drive away even the people who love them most." They may also suffer stigma from the very people who are supposed to help them. One writer says some therapists use a diagnosis of BPD "to express hatred of patients," and psychiatrist Richard G. Hersh tells Roan, "borderline personality disorder is considered a pejorative term." A test for BPD, the Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines, describes the disorder as being characterized by "sexual deviance," "manipulativeness," "demandingness," and "entitlement." Therapists who are looking for these qualities in their patients may well develop a negative attitude toward them — especially if patients prove difficult to treat.

Dr. Josepha A. Cheong of the American Psychiatric Association says media portrayals of borderline personality disorder — like Glenn Close's bunny-boiler in Fatal Attraction — are often inaccurate. She says a better example is Jenny from Forrest Gump, "a somewhat sympathetic but self-destructive, dysfunctional woman who wanted a normal life but couldn't achieve it." But maybe an even better example would have been a man.

Although Roan says men and women suffer borderline personality disorder in equal numbers, many still consider it to be a woman's disease. This may be in part due to media influence — the main character in Girl, Interrupted is also diagnosed with BPD — or because men are more likely to be diagnosed with other problems. Whatever the cause, the image of the "clingy" patient who can't regulate emotions tends to be the image of a woman.

But clinicians may now be focusing less on stereotypes, and more on what patients can do. BPD was front-and-center at this year's meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, and today's therapies offer hope, not judgment. Roan mentions Linehan's dialectical behavior therapy, which encourages therapists "to balance acceptance and change." In addition to teaching strategies for forming healthier relationships, therapists also "highlight for clients when their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors were 'perfectly normal,' helping clients discover that they had sound judgment and that they were capable of learning how and when to trust themselves." Dialectical behavior encourages doctors to see borderline patients as people in pain who also have the capability to lead normal lives. This image may not be as sensational as a bunny-boiler, but it's a lot more helpful.

Borderline Personality Disorder Grows As Healthcare Concern [LA Times]
Reducing Severe Episodes Of BPD [LA Times]
What Is Borderline Personality Disorder? [LA Times]

According to Tom Kelly of the Daily Mail (and rarely have a book and a newspaper been so well-matched), Why Women Have Sex presents research conducted by psychology professors Cindy Meston and David Buss at the University of Texas. Meston and Buss apparently asked 1,000 women their "reasons for sleeping with a man." Says Kelly, "Romance and passion [...] comes rather low down the list." It's not clear from coverage of the research exactly how far "down the list" it is — or whether Meston and Buss interviewed any gay women. But they did find over 200 reasons "for succumbing to the advances of the opposite sex." These include:

— "to make my sexual skills better"
— to relieve a headache
— to get pregnant from a guy
— "I slept with a couple of guys because I felt sorry for them"
— "because it's the closest thing to God"
— "I hoped he would put the rubbish out"
— "to relieve the boredom — because it's easier than fighting. To give me something to do."

This last one actually seems like two different reasons, unless one of your hobbies is fighting. And really, having sex to liven up a dull Tuesday night — or to forestall an unnecessary argument — don't seem like such terrible things. However, it is a little upsetting that the women in the study claimed to fuck for basically every other reason than actually wanting to.

Or is it? First of all, it's not totally clear from the Daily Mail (or corresponding articles in The Sun and News.com.au) how often women were actually boning for rubbish-taking-out-type reasons. Kelly opens the Daily Mail article with the line, "For every woman expecting the earth to move, it would seem there are two with more practical motives," suggesting that "romance and passion" motivate one third of women (or all women, one-third of the time?). But he doesn't give any explicit numbers on this. If women were asked all the reasons they had ever had sex, I'm not surprised that some weird or mercenary ones came up.

But of course, the way the Mail and other papers have chosen to cover the story plays right into the stereotype that women don't actually like sex, and only ever fuck out of ulterior motives. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,26041735-36398,00.html">Commenters on News.com.au chime in with equally simplistic analysis. Perth Boy says, "Women having sex for something in return.....where I come from we call them 'prostitutes'." Ouch! But surely plenty of men have had sex for reasons other than "romance and passion" too (if we're playing stereotypes, what about the one that says dudes like to screw lots of women to brag to their friends about it?). More upsettingly, Jimara says, "Did it ever occur to you women that us guys actually USE you for our own purposes also? We'll do and say anything for a good time." So men are lying to get women in bed, and women are agreeing because they want the garbage taken out. Where do I resign from the human race?

The idea that women never actually want sex is much older than Meston and Buss, and it often provokes responses like Jimara's — and, more upsettingly, the rhetoric of pickup-artists who think their job is to convince women to do something they don't actually want to do. This can become a vicious cycle of ever more reductive and damaging gender roles. But of course, lots of women do like sex. As commenter Emma says, "What a load of crap. I'm sick of so called research studies telling me how I think. I have sex because I like it!" I have to wonder if it's still hard for women to admit this to researchers, if it's somehow more acceptable to say "I hoped he would put the rubbish out" than "I was horny" (a phrase I, for my part, find it almost impossible to utter). And I wonder if the more newspapers tell women "how they think," the more embarrassed they'll be to admit how they really feel.

Why Women Have Sex: To Relieve Boredom, Win Favours ... Or To Stop A Headache [Daily Mail]
Why Women Have Sex [The Sun]
Secret's Out: Why Women Really Have Sex [News.com.au]

In his appearance (the teaser for which appears above), Pantoliano mentions that he takes antidepressants, and argues for the less controversial causes of mental health parity and frank discussion of mental illness. He's founded a nonprofit organization "based on accepting, encouraging people to admit to their disease — to seek treatment and become even greater members of society." But some members of the Mad Pride movement prefer to forgo treatment — at least, the conventional psychiatric variety.

ABC's Ia Robinson and Astrid Rodrigues talked to musician Madigan Shive, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder but now prefers not to label her condition. Though she has delusions and "extreme state[s] of consciousness," Shive doesn't take medication or go to psychotherapy. Instead, she relies on her own "mad map" of triggers and coping strategies, and a network of friends who will take her to a hotel room, instead of a hospital, when her symptoms become severe. She says, "Please don't change this thing in me that creates this music and keeps me alive. ... I need my madness."

Shive says she knows people who take psychiatric medication "and use it smashingly well and I support all that." Similarly, David Oaks, leader of Mad Pride group MindFreedom International, says his organization isn't against drugs, but only against forced drugging of people who would rather manage their illness in other ways. One of MindFreedom International's FAQ pages says, "one of the main human rights violations in the mental health system today, is the way the psychiatric drug approach dominates, squeezing out alternatives and spreading dis-information."

Writer and psychiatry lecturer Charles Barber might agree, though he comes at the problem from a different direction. In a Salon article, Barber advances the recently popular argument that the rise in antidepressant use in America can be blamed on pharmaceutical marketing. Of TV ads for antidepressants, he says,

Often it is hard to tell exactly what condition the drugs are treating. The taglines of the drugs are often vague - for drugs for depression, the slogans might speak broadly but inspirationally about change and hope and getting back to one's true self. (Now that I think of it, these meta-messages are not unlike those of the Obama campaign.) The drugs thus appear to be defined less as mediators of specific medical conditions than as ways to enhance one's lifestyle and quality of life. And this is good for business: It turns out that the market base of people who are interested in enhancing their lifestyle is far greater than of those who suffer from major depression and other serious and debilitating mental illnesses.

Barber doesn't really address the problems with the health insurance industry that cause many people to take medication when more expensive therapy — or a combination of meds and therapy — might be more effective. Instead, he's more interested in branding those who take antidepressants as greedy consumers intent on "enhancing their lifestyle." And is he implying that the Obama campaign, too, was trying to sell us something we don't need?

It's become popular to argue that lots of people are on antidepressants for frivolous reasons, for what Barber calls "the blues, or financial, career or relationship problems, all of those things that we used to regard as life problems, and not medical or diagnosable ones." Most people who make this argument blame the pharmaceutical industry, but some, like Barber, seem to reserve a bit of blame for patients as well. It's undeniable that more people are taking antidepressants than ever before, and it's certainly possible that some could benefit more from other treatments. But who are these vaunted pill-poppers who don't "really need" their Prozac? Whose problems are too minor for drugs, better suited instead to finger-wagging and a course in biting the bullet? Would Barber be willing to point the finger at someone who's lost a job, a marriage, a child, and say, this form of relief should not be available to you?

A more compassionate approach would be to examine psychiatric drugs from a patient's point of view. Are they being pushed on patients who don't want them? Do antidepressants lessen patients' self-reported feelings of sorrow over what Barber calls "life problems"? Are there other treatments or practices that might help them more? In many cases, the answer to this last question is yes, and when that's the case, insurance should cover these more effective practices. But we're not going to get the answers to any of these questions if we infantilize patients, assuming they're all reaching for something they saw on TV as an easy way out of their troubles.

There are plenty of problems with the Mad Pride movement — for one thing, untreated mental illness can make people hurt themselves or others. Robinson and Rodrigues mention John Hinckley and Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho as people whose violence may have stemmed from insanity. Oaks says, "The vast majority of people with psychiatric diagnoses [...] — we're law-abiding, we're peaceful," and this is no doubt true, but he doesn't offer a solution for people who are so violent or suicidal that they can't make decisions about their own treatment. At least, though, Oaks and his fellow Mad Pride activists argue for more autonomy for those who are suffering. In arguing against the pressures of pharmaceutical companies, Barber is actually exercising his own kind of pressure.

At the end of his piece, Barber changes direction, acknowledging, "I can claim confidently that there is, right now, a high-water mark of worry and suffering on numerous fronts - economic, of course, but also social, with our ever-increasing isolation and Internet-driven loss of human connection and the ongoing trauma of wars and crises that just don't seem to end." In some ways, he recognizes, this is a difficult time to be alive. Perhaps it's not so shocking that many people turn to medication for relief — and that others find more relief in refusing such medication. And while both approaches have drawbacks, perhaps we should be a little slower to judge them.

'Mad Pride' Activists Say They're Unique, Not Sick [ABC]
Are We Really So Miserable? [Salon]
MindFreedom International [Official Site]
Teaser - Joey Pants on ABC Primetime - Tuesday, Aug. 25 at 10pm [YouTube]

A study by Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick asked participants to say "I am a lovable person" to themselves sixteen times in four minutes. People with low self-esteem actually felt worse about themselves after the four minutes were up. Time's John Cloud offers several explanations for this failure of a commonly recommended mood-lifting technique. For one thing, he writes, "when people hear something they don't believe, they are not only often skeptical but adhere even more strongly to their original position." So if you think you're terrible, but tell yourself you're lovable, you may end up feeling even more terrible as a kind of rebellion.

A variant on this explanation is the finding that, "when people get feedback that they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better." Most people, even if they have normal self-esteem, have probably walked away from excessive praise feeling weirded out, or wondering if the praiser really knows them very well. And blanket affirmations like "I am lovable" may be the self-talk version of excessive praise.

What Cloud doesn't address is how vague — and kind of depressing — the statement "I am lovable" is. Being lovable doesn't mean you're actually loved, or kind or interesting or smart or happy. Most people, in fact, are lovable at least to someone, and the word doesn't say anything about a person's actual being. Telling yourself that it is possible that someone could love you actually seems like setting the bar pretty low.

Compliments from other people tend to carry more weight the more specific they are. It's easy to brush off "you're great," less easy to ignore "what's great about you is how you approach new situations with such confidence." And while it's always harder to believe your own compliments than other people's, it might help to start with compliments that don't suck. We'd like to see a study where people were asked to come up with something specific that they authentically liked about themselves, and then repeat that bunch of times. They might end up feeling more than just "lovable."

Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking [Time]

According to the Times, psychological research shows that blushing actually improve people's opinions of the blusher. When subjects were shown photos of people who had done something bad, they judged the sinners less harshly if they were blushing. And when frat brothers made fun of pledges, they ended up getting along better with the ones who blushed. Psychologist Dacher Keltner says a blush means, "I care; I know I violated the social contract." This caring may soften others' judgment of a social misstep, and even make them like the blusher better. So blush away, all my easily-embarrassed compatriots — bashfulness is the new confidence! [New York Times]

Writer Wray Herbert applies to McAllister four cognitive mechanisms that are not necessarily related to the horror of finding out a loved one has committed murder. Perhaps she is suffering from "the endowment effect," which in studies showed that people who already owned tickets to a basketball game overvalued them when asked to sell. Or maybe she's experiencing "loss aversion," as she is "facing a huge loss-the end of her dreams, symbolized by her canceled summer wedding plans." We've all wondered why McAllister stuck by Philip Markoff for so long, but it's impossible to understand what she's going through from a few random findings about the human brain. But, we can guess that a man would be just as traumatized, and have just as much difficulty knowing when to call it quits, were the situation reversed.

Standing By The Craigslist Killer [Newsweek]

Earlier: After Visiting Markoff In Jail McAllister Says Wedding Is Off

We've written about this before, but Raina Kelly's piece in Newsweek this weekend sealed it: we are in a narcissism epidemic article epidemic. Spurred partly by several new books on the subject, and partly by whatever cultural forces conspire to name the human-failing-of-the-month, journalists all over the country are obsessed with narcissism. Despite the fact that scientists disagree about whether narcissism is on the rise, the disorder is the new ADD, or, as Sadie says, the new sex addiction. It's the latest way for writers to wrap all the ills of our society into a neat little package, give it a psychological name, and then diagnose everybody with it.

Most narcissism-epidemic articles have a few features in common. They identify the causes — usually permissive parents, grade inflation, and participation trophies. Because apparently we'd like to go back to the days when all 100 kids in the fifth grade had to try out for choir, and then only three didn't get in, and those three kids not only had to sit out while everyone else sang "Dona Nobis Pacem," but also got little "does not participate" marks on their report cards . . . what? No, that never happened to me. Anyway, the next step is to talk about the symptoms of narcissism. These are quite wide-ranging, from simply being confident (student Sharise Tucker tells Newsweek, "at the end of the day I love me and I don't think that's wrong") to "failed marriages, abusive working environments and billion-dollar Ponzi schemes." Apparently it's a slippery slope — one day you just feel kinda good about yourself, the next you're Bernie Madoff. Usually, these articles end up with a prescription for curing narcissism — usually by reminding the narcissist that he or she is actually not special.

We're willing to believe that for some people (the APA estimates 1% of the population), narcissism is a real problem. What we're not willing to swallow is the idea that our culture is caught up in some sort of narcissism maelstrom, with excessive self-regard causing all the ills of our society, from self-absorbed teens to the economic crisis.

First of all, a little self-absorption is pretty much a hallmark of adolescence. It's certainly possible to spoil your kid, but do we really want to return to a time (if such a time even existed) when kids felt they weren't special, that they couldn't do whatever they set their minds to, that they wouldn't succeed in life? Narcissism-epidemic articles tend to argue that people don't work hard if they think they're great, but actually believing that you can accomplish a task may increase your commitment to it. And while excessive self-regard has its problems, low self-worth can lead to bullying, bad relationships, and even abuse. The Newsweek article focuses on kids who think highly of themselves, but there are plenty of kids who are belittled at home or in school, who grow up full of fear and self-doubt, and whose lives are hobbled by lack of confidence. You might not always be able to tell by talking to them — an inferiority complex can look a lot like narcissism — but plenty of kids might benefit from a little more self-love.

All that aside, to blame social problems on psychological problems is to let society off the hook. If we say the economy crashed because people were greedy or grandiose, then we don't have to improve regulations, create a better safety net, or reform lending practices. We just have to stop feeling so freaking special. Blanket-diagnosing people with a psychological illness not only trivializes the difficulties of people who actually have it — it shifts the burden of reform from the community onto the individual. We'd probably be better people if we practiced "humility, [...] mindfulness and putting others first," but these qualities on their own aren't going to get families back into their houses or provide unemployed people with health insurance. For that, we need a new public policy — and if anyone can come up with one that solves our devastating problems, that person would be pretty special.

Generation Me [Newsweek]
Is Narcissism On the Upswing In The Young? Studies Disagree [USA Today]

Earlier: Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Everyone's Doing It
Hard-hitting Times Piece Tackles Narcissism, Shopaholics, This Thing Called "Hotornot"
Allure's "New Narcissist" Not New, Maybe Not A Narcissist

For the study, published today in Applied Cognitive Psychology 40 volunteers were asked to listen to a boring two and a half minute phone message that gave the names of several people and places, reports EurekAlert. Half of the participants were asked to shade in shapes without paying attention to neatness while they were listening, and the other half were not. After the test, they were asked to write down the names and places that were mentioned in the message.

The doodlers recalled on average 7.5 names of people and places, while non-doodlers only recalled 5.8 items. Lead researcher Dr. Jackie Andrade, University of Plymouth in England explaines in The Guardian :

If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream ... Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.

Andrade told Newsweek that she was inspired to do the study because she was interested in daydreaming. She said:

When you have something really boring to do in a laboratory, you aren't just doing that task-you are thinking about shopping, picking the kids up from school, what you're going to have for tea. We don't usually take those things into account. Daydreaming takes up a lot of mental energy and can be distracting. I had the idea that maybe some small, simple task would catch just enough energy to keep you focused on the [main] task at hand, and though it wouldn't make the task you're doing less boring, it could help you focus.

The study was well timed, as today is National Doodle Day in the U.K., an event created as a fun way to raise money for people affected by epilepsy and neurofibromatosis. Celebrities including Gillian Anderson, Ben Kingsley, and Ricky Gervais, have submitted their doodles to be auctioned on eBay to benefit the charity. There is also a U.S. National Doodle Day on May 7th to raise money for people affected with neurofibromatosis. The sketch above was submitted by then-Senator Barack Obama last year. Here's the work of a few extremely focused celebrity doodlers being auctioned on the charity's website this year:

Candice Bergen:



Ellen DeGeneres:



David Duchovny:

Do Doodle: Research Shows Doodling Can Help Memory Recall [EurekAlert]
Doodling Should Be Encouraged In Boring Meetings, Claims Psychologist [The Guardian]
Doodle Zone [Newsweek]
UK National Doodle Day
USA National Doodle Day

Last month, Dr. William Shiels, the chief of radiology at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, presented evidence of what he says is an increase in the number of self-injurers embedding sharp objects under their skin, showing x-rays of patients who had inserted objects such as paper clips, staples, glass, and even chunks of crayon. This led to media reports on the "new trend" of self-embedding, and now Shiels is lobbying to have "Self-Embedding Disorder" included in the next edition of the the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the bible of psychiatric disorders.

But this has raised several questions: Should self-embedding be classified as its own condition separate from cutting? And is self-injury itself a disorder, or is it always just a symptom of a larger mental problem? Though the media jumped on self-embedding as a new practice, doctors say that embedding is a known method of self-injury. There are accounts of self-injury and embedding in the earliest known medical literature, and yet doctors still say there isn't enough research on self-injury and there have been no studies on embedding. It may have something to do with the fact that self-injury has always been seen as something "silly girls" do. "The early writing on this was of the tone that this was just another lunatic, hysterical female behavior," Joan Jacobs Brumberg, social historian and professor of human development at Cornell University.

Classifying self-embedding or self-injury as a specific disorder is a double edged sword. On the one hand, inclusion in the DSM would make the conditions easier to diagnose and treat. It would also probably lead to more funding for research and make obtaining insurance coverage easier. Even the media hype over the "new" medical disorders can help make people aware that self-injury is a "real" problem, not just something "silly" that girls do.

The danger is that defining self-industry or embedding as one neatly-packaged disorder can oversimplify the issue. People who self-injure usually say they do it as a way to cope with stress, but the specific reasons vary widely. As anyone who has self-injured, or been close to someone who self-injures knows, each person's motivations for doing it are complex and varied. Some say it's about control, others say it lets them feel release, and some are seeking a euphoric feeling, but in all cases boiling someone's mental issues down to a few bullet points and packaging it as the "hot new trend" in medical disorders isn't likely to help.

Why She Cuts: One Woman's Battle With Self Injury [Newsweek]

[Image via Flickr.]

As people spend more and more time at the office, workplace relationships have grown closer and more fraught - in short, more family-like. An increasing number of companies are actively analyzing family dynamics to help manage office interactions. says one shrink,

Work is nothing more than an entirely complex set of relationships. You have partners that are your equals, subordinates, superiors...It’s parents and siblings. All of these dynamics that are exactly the same in the workplace, just the titles are different.”

As is so often the case, things come down to birth order:

Firstborns...tend to be fearful of losing their position and rank, so they may be extremely anxious at a time of layoffs and downsizing. Second-born children tend to be most adventurous and open to change, he said. In fact, [psychologist] Dr. Dattner said that companies he had worked with found that when sending employees overseas, second-born children tended to fare better than older ones. As the older of two daughters, Ms. Frankel said she sometimes feels competitive with Ms. Delio, which reminds her of competing with her sister for their parents’ attention.

Of course, as a composition teacher might say, where's the "so what?" To a degree, all interaction can probably be reduced to familial dynamics - which in turn can likely be explained by some biological imperative. At its worst, can overanalysis of this kind of pre-determining absolve us of adult responsibility? And to a certain degree, isn't what they're describing, at the end of the day, just your "personality?" For the most part, it seems moot: I'm scared of losing my job not because I'm the elder of two, but because we're in a recession; probably any responsible employee craves a boss's approval. What's more interesting is the degree to which an office life can allow someone to break out of his or her assigned roles, building new relationships and dynamics that in a sense give you a chance to do it better. To be crassly pop cultural, Don Draper may be a philanderer in the suburbs, but his commitment to his job is unstinting; where the character of Peggy may be one of a large crowd at home, her experience with dealing with a lot of people allows her to navigate the work "family" and promote herself. To the extent awareness of your proclivities makes you better able to harness them, I suppose this kind of knowledge is useful. But to the extent the formality of an office setting imposes structure and a certain professional courtesy, it seems like that, conversely, can inform home life. Those of us who work from home can just morph into spoiled only children and throw tantrums...with no one to hear.

Family and Office Roles Mix [New York Times]

According to Jane Brody, hypnosis is not a deep trance or a sleeplike daze that you don't remember — but rather, "a deeply relaxed state that renders the mind highly focused and ready to accept suggestions to help you accomplish your goals." In fact, apparently a lot of people who are expecting "you-are-getting-sleepy" drama feel ripped off after what feels almost like a standard therapy session — even if they find they've actually quit smoking or overcome a fear of flying.

In fact, contrary to nonsense like the Obama theory, you can't even practice hypnosis on an unwilling subject; it can't make you do anything you don't want to do - like vote. As one psychologist tells the Times, “The power of hypnosis actually resides in the patient and not in the doctor.” It's really a question of telling your body things it already knows.

"In effect, hypnosis is the epitome of mind-body medicine. It can enable the mind to tell the body how to react, and modify the messages that the body sends to the mind. It has been used to counter the nausea of pregnancy and chemotherapy; dental and test-taking anxiety; pain associated with surgery, root canal treatment and childbirth; fear of flying and public speaking; compulsive hair-pulling; and intractable hiccups, among many other troublesome health problems."

Hiccups? Dental surgery? This is hardly the stuff of Spellbound and Vegas magicians. However, if true, the possibilities for medical use are apparently much greater than people knew — or than doctors are prepared to accept. If anything, it seems like the swinging-watch stigma probably doesn't help hypnotism's case in that regard — and does feed into paranoid fantasies such as Obama-as-illustionist. But even if, hypothetically, Obama was knowingly employing "hypnosis techniques" in, say, his thirty minute network commercial, every single viewer would need to be in a voluntary state of total relaxation and openness in order for the messages to penetrate. Is Obama a highly effective speaker? Sure — and undoubtedly the same qualities that make a voice soothing and reassuring are useful in facilitating the relaxation of hypnosis; good public speaking by definition includes an element of unconscious manipulation. And hey, if at worst hypnosis can help you do something you already want, there are certainly more damning smears!

The Possibilities in Hypnosis, Where the Patient Has the Power [New York Times]

Psychologist and novelist Paul Verhaeghen describes himself as "somewhat mood disordered," and says, "one of the things I do is think about something over and over and over again, and that's when I start writing." However, "if you think about stuff in your life and you start thinking about it again, and again, and again, and you kind of spiral away in this continuous rumination about what's happening to you and to the world — people who do that are at risk for depression." Obsessive rumination and reflection can lead to insightful and surprising works of art; Verhaeghen mentions David Foster Wallace, whose "breathless" sentences "need to be annotated, and the annotations need to be annotated again." However, these same mental habits can get the brain stuck in painful patterns, as David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide on September 12, no doubt knew.

The idea that creativity and mental illness are connected is an old one, and one that has done a lot of damage. Miserable people have created some beautiful things, but the belief that misery is necessary for art, or the price one pays for the gift of artistic genius, may discourage artists from getting treatment. It also reinforces the notion some depressed people have that their worldview is the correct one, and that happy people just aren't paying enough attention. And it encourages people like Eric Wilson, author of Against Happiness, to wish for just a little bit of depression — enough to write good books, but not enough to commit suicide. Like people who misguidedly wish for a little anorexia to trim those extra 20 pounds, boosters of mild artistic depression forget that mental illness isn't like gas for your brain — you don't just get to pump in how much you want.

However, acknowledging that bipolar disorder can be linked to creativity could have an upside. It's popular today to view mental problems as diseases, like diabetes, that afflict people with no connection to their personalities. But mental illness is more complicated than that. It's often difficult to separate one mental illness from another, and to separate the symptoms of mental illness from the traits of character. If we viewed people holistically, we might be better able to help them live happily and healthily, without giving up what makes them unique.

Experts ponder link between creativity, mood disorders [CNN]

Warburton polled 441 university students about their parents' bad behavior, such as ""making a child feel ashamed," being unloving or rejecting, and frequently telling the child they were stupid or would fail." Then he "asked questions designed to uncover destructive thinking patterns in the students, such as being "clingy" out of a fear of being abandoned." He identified twenty-two percent of mothers as "toxic" (a possible reason for the Britney Spears pic that accompanies the story in the Herald), along with fourteen percent of fathers.

One possible explanation for the results, admits Warburton, is that "kids spend more time with their mothers, especially in the crucial early years." But what if people also remember their mothers less fondly than their fathers for other reasons? Because they have higher expectations for female parents to be warm and nurturing? Or perhaps because they've been conditioned to think — a la the "refrigerator mother" theory — that their moms are to blame for their problems? Having subjects self-report on the "toxicity" of their mothers seems especially fraught with error. So, frankly, do the questions designed to uncover "unhelpful patterns of thinking." Who's to decide what's "unhelpful"? The whole study seems like specious mommy-bashing to us, but what do you think? In the long, complicated process of fucking you up, do moms do more than their fair share?

The Sins Of The Mothers [Sydney Morning Herald]

Psychologists from Bradley University of Illinois say that both physical and social stresses in poorer countries are the reason that there is less of a personality difference in those societies. The personality tests of men in these countries suggest that they are more cautious, anxious, and less assertive than men in wealthy societies, and researchers say this may be because their natural biological traits are muted because their growth is stunted by disease and malnutrition. Evidence shows that poorer agricultural societies where a few men hold the power are actually unnatural, because hunter-gatherers were actually more egalitarian. They suggest that modern progressive cultures are actually moving us back to a more ancient state where men and women were considered equal overall, but had predisposed interests in different domains.

But some, like John Tierney in a NY Times blog post, say the gap is more likely just an illusion resulting from the way people in different cultures interpret the personality tests. For example, in a traditional culture like that found in Bangladesh, a man may rate his aggressiveness as average because he's comparing himself only to other men in his society, or a woman may rate her benevolence lower than a woman in a wealthy society because she's acting out or social duty, not personal kindness.

Another study out today suggests that the differences between men and women may be less culturally motivated and have more to do with how men and women are wired biologically. In trying to understand why men and women of equal intelligence tend to excel at different cognitive tasks, Spanish researchers studied brain tissue from the left temporal cortex and found that men had 52% more synapses in that region than women, and they suspect there are other brain regions where women have greater synaptic density than men.

As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen [NY Times]
Gender Differences Seen In Brain Connections [New Scientist]