Dr. X's Free Associations

John Edwards

Many people are saying this week that John Edwards is a reprehensible person, but he really wasn't guilty of a crime. What interests me is that they feel the need to qualify the not guilty with an assessment of his character. This leads me back to an old post about John and Elizabeth Edwards:

New York magazine ran an excerpt from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's 'Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.'  Here are a few snippets from a chapter on John and Elizabeth Edwards:

No one in the Edwardses’ political circle felt anything less than complete sympathy for Elizabeth’s plight. And yet the romance between her and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant that they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.

With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.” [...]

She would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team.  She routinely unleashed profanity-laced tirades on conference calls. “Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?” she snarled at the schedulers.[...]

Elizabeth’s illness seemed at first to mellow her in the early months of 2005—but not for long. One day, she was on a conference call with the staffers of One America, the political-action committee that was being turned into a vehicle for John’s 2008 bid. There were 40 or 50 people on the line, mostly kids in their twenties being paid next to nothing (and in some cases literally nothing). Elizabeth had been cranky throughout the call, but at the end she asked if her and her husband’s personal health-care coverage had been arranged. Not yet, she was told. There are complications; let’s discuss it after the call. Elizabeth was having none of that. She flew into a rage. If this isn’t dealt with by tomorrow, everyone’s health care at the PAC will be cut off until it’s fixed, she barked. I don’t care if nobody has health care until John and I do!

Fire

I was planning to write more about diagnosis this week, but I've been doing so much writing for work, that I haven't been interested in writing about psychology.

So here's some local news:

Old Stuff

A long ago family dog. I was playing with colorization of a few old black and whites. The dog was the easy part.

Diagnosis ctd

Excerpts from another post by Cheryl Fuller, on the problems with insurance coverage and DSM diagnoses:

When a therapist sees someone like I described above and agrees to accept payment from health insurance, both therapist and patient are agreeing to the assignment of a psychiatric diagnosis and thus tacitly accepting that these problems in living are in fact symptomatic of mental illness. I opted out of accepting insurance when I realized that in my mind continuing to assign diagnoses to people who were not ill was unethical. It allowed me, as it has those therapists who continue to do so, to charge higher fees, but it was also putting me in the position of colluding with something I didn't believe in.
[...]

Vintage Saloons

Children playing in front of saloon, Gemmel, Minnesota. Photo by Russell Lee, 1937

More saloons below the fold.

Local Shots

Memorial Day, Chicago; an early morning stroll.

Aqua is an 86-story mixed-use residential skyscraper in the Lakeshore East development in downtown Chicago. Designed by a team led by Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects, the building is the tallest in the world to have a woman as lead architect, at 859 ft (262 m).

Three more local photos, below the fold.

Vintage Memorial Day: 1943

Memorial Day Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. Photo by Esther Bubley, OWI.

Boy scout color bearer listening to the Memorial Day ceremony.

Stolen home run of the year

>

During the first round of the NWAACC baseball championships, Lower Columbia College outfielder Derrick Salberg leaps over the fence to make a game-ending catch to rob Everett of a two-run home run and preserve a 4-2 victory. Video courtest of KLTV in Longview, Wash.

And the marriage proposal of the year, below the fold.

Obsession with diagnosis: part I

I've been thinking about a post on clinical diagnosis for the last week, but a recurrent health problem forced me to strictly limit my time reading and looking at the computer screen, but things are good again, so here we go.

Cheryl Fuller wrote a post about the current obsession with diagnosis in the mental health field. I have quite a few thoughts related to this subject, so I'll spread them over several posts of my own. Here's Cheryl:

How different Jung's perspective is from what dominates today -- a fixation on diagnosis. In fact, if one is not assigned, then there is no third party payment. We may have rather hugely increased the number of potential diagnoses, but to think the process is actually precise or scientific is to labor under serious delusion. Following Jung's path takes patient and therapist to meaning of symptoms in the context of that patient's life.

When I first started out, all the psychiatric world was divided into 3 parts: psychosis, neurosis, organic brain syndromes. And yes, borderline was in there too along with personality disorders but not as major categories. I can't see that things are better now for having so many more labels. And does diagnosis, especially when considering the types of issues most frequently brought to us in our offices, make much of a difference in what we do, really? And is it helpful to the patient?

In the diagnostic system used for insurance claims, the DSM, checklists of symptoms lend an air of objectivity to diagnostic work. These checklists may include externally observable phenomena, patient and family historical reports and, in some instances, patient reports of conscious, subjective experience, though the latter is deliberately de-emphasized. This sounds like an effort to maximize diagnostic objectivity, so what's not to like?

If Republicans really cared about the truth

Fact Checking and Alternate Realities

By Sheila Kennedy

One of the stereotypes firmly embedded in the nation’s political psyche is that of the “tax and spend” Democrats. The taken-for-granted “reality” of American politics pits these profligate lefties against fiscally prudent conservative Republicans.

As with all stereotypes, this one has roots in reality. When I was young, Democrats were leftwing big spenders. And Republicans were fiscally responsible. (Those Republicans would never have waged a war and cut taxes at the same time, to use just one example.) The problem with stereotypes, however, is that they persist long after the reality that generated them has changed.

Which brings me to the reality-challenged charge by Mitt Romney and his minions that the Obama Administration has spent money like drunken sailors, a charge echoed by partisans on the Internet, Faux News and other outlets that have long since abandoned even the pretense of fact-checking and/or objectivity.

The charge has now been pretty decisively debunked by no other than the Wall Street Journal, hardly a left-wing publication.

The Journal reports that, even taking into account the massive stimulus spending during Obama’s tenure, overall federal spending has been rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s. In fact, according to the article,  ”Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.”  The article includes a nifty graph, and hyperlinks that will lead skeptics to the official sources of the information presented.

Not only has spending barely increased in present dollars, after adjusting for inflation, the Journal reports that spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4% annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam.

Why level a charge so demonstrably untrue? Because people will believe it. It feeds into a persistent stereotype, and the “legacy media” that could formerly be relied upon to provide fact-checking has been displaced by lazy “he said/she said” reporting and partisan spin.

Repeat a big lie often enough, and you’ll be amazed at how widely it will be accepted.

Sheila Kennedy is Professor of Law and Policy in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. She's a member of IUPUI’s Philanthropic Studies faculty, a Faculty Fellow with both the Center for Religion and American Culture in the School of Liberal Arts and the Tobias Center of the Kelley School of Business, and an adjunct professor of political science. In addition, Professor Kennedy was for several years, a regular columnist for the Indianapolis Star.

CPD and the NATO protests

From what I've seen on the news, and based on what reporters present have said, the police showed extraordinary restraint. Most of the protesters conducted themselves well, but a small, very active percentage of protesters were there to instigate violence and chaos. According to many reports, the police endured viscious taunts without reacting (at one point, chanting in their faces: dead police! dead police! dead police!).

Vintage Photos: 1943

Sun bathers on the sand beach at the swimming pool in the Glen Echo Amusement Park. (Esther Bubley, Glen Echo, Maryland).

Sunday p.m. pig out

The condiments are regulation, but the dogs are a violation (charred). You can't expect non-natives to play by all the rules. I know, the beer is criminal, but the blue bottles are cool.

The NATO Protests

The summit itself will be held in Chicago today, now that all the G8 big shots have arrived. The biggest protest event is set for late this morning in Grant Park. So far, events this week haven't lived up to the police and press hype. The semi-lockdown of our building has thus far proven entirely unnecessary.

Psychological undercurrents in political movements

Commenting on anti-gay crusader Paul Cameron's revelation that he was raped as a child, Sullivan observes:

The longer I am in this debate, the more something emerges. Most people don't really care much about gays. The subject doesn't come up; and most adjusted straight men do not feel passionately on the subject one way or the other. And so you notice patterns. You find that most of the really impassioned anti-gay activists are just as motivated by personal passion - whether as an early victim of sex abuse (Paul Cameron), or as the father of a gay son (Charles Socarides), or as a single mother abandoned by her boyfriend (Maggie Gallagher), or someone fighting to restrain their own gay feelings (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig) - as pro-gay activists are. This is a perfectly legitimate motivation for all sorts of political movements, but on the gay question, one should always be alert to the personal psychological undercurrents. (That goes for us gays as well as out opponents, and I am grateful for the odd psychological diagnoses I receive via email.)