Dr. X's Free Associations

Sunday Shot

Fla. Siblings Charged With Stealing Frito-Lay Chips From Factory

GMA:

Two Citra, Fla., siblings were arrested and charged with burglary and grand theft after police caught the pair with a van full of allegedly stolen Frito-Lay brand products.

Police said they spotted Darren Hagerman, 25, and Jessica Huggard, 22, Thursday evening pulling away from industrial area of Ocala, Fla., where many factories are located. The siblings were pulled over when police noticed a 2-year-old jumping around in the backseat of their vehicle, according to the the Marion County Sheriff's Office.

When an officer looked inside the car, he noticed it was packed with hundreds of bags of Frito-Lay brand chips, ABC Orlando affiliate WFTV reported.

If you're of a certain age, you probably thought of this...

DSM

From a ridiculous article in the New York Times:

Just weeks before the long-awaited publication of a new edition of the so-called bible of mental disorders, the federal government’s most prominent psychiatric expert has said the book suffers from a scientific “lack of validity.”

I don't think I've ever heard anyone but a reporter refer to the DSM as the "bible of mental disorders." And yes, the DSM has [reliability and] validity problems, always has and almost everyone knows that. But the expert cited in this article, doesn't inspire hope for improvement.

The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

As if this way of thinking about psychological difficulties isn't part of the problem in psychiatry, and, itself, rife with fatal and obvious validity problems?

While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., is the best tool now available for clinicians treating patients and should not be tossed out, he said, it does not reflect the complexity of many disorders, and its way of categorizing mental illnesses should not guide research.

The best tool now available for clinicians treating patients? That's completely out of contact with reality. It's not a treatment guide and no one I know relies on it as a treatment tool or a treatment guide. As a blunt diagnostic instrument for a pharmacologist picking medications, I suppose it could be a starting place, but drug treatments don't depend on it.

I see two uses a clinician can make of the DSM: it can be used for coding insurance claims and as a paperweight.

Update:

In a post titled "groundhog day," 1boringoldman also commented on the Times piece. He said much more than I did, but I'll just share this:

So Insel woke up in this replaying of the day with a jolt, "his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms." But that’s what Robins and Guze said [1972]. That’s why there was a DSM-III in the first place [1980]. That’s what Kupfer et al said with their Research Agenda for the DSM-V [2002]. But Dr. Insel is saying it with all the freshness and naivety of a high school senior facing a brand new chapter in life like we haven’t heard it all before.

A Death At Wrigley Field

This story was painful to read. A 28-year-old woman and her brother were at Wrigley Field for the Cubs game on Sunday. During the pregame warmup, the woman suddenly collapsed over the seats in front of her. Intensive efforts to revive her failed. It was later learned that she choked on a hot dog, but prior to her collapse, no one noticed any signs of choking or distress of any kind.

You may recall that on Sunday I posted some game-time photos of Wrigley Field taken from the Addison el station. Later, when we were heading home, we happened to arrive at the Addison stop as fans were leaving the game. I overheard two women who'd been at the game talking about the incident, one of them saying that she "hoped the girl getting CPR was okay." They must have been sitting very close to the woman who collapsed. One of them said that she'd never before seen such a frantic situation with an injured person. I didn't ask them about it and hadn't heard or read anything further until coming across the story in the Tribune this morning.

Many people die tragically and unexpectedly every day, but something about this story tugged at my heart beyond what I usually feel when I read a news story about someone's death.

Stewart, Trump and The F-face Von-Clownstick Kerfuffle

Dan Brooks offers a sensible take on the function of comic derision in this case.

Whatever his contributions in business may or may not be, the character Trump plays (his brand?) is a cultural pollutant that can best be contained by ridicule.

How Do You Feel About Monsters?

The rescue of three young women held captive for many years by a Cleveland man brings the word monster to mind.

One risk in using the word is that we dehumanize the accused and, in turn, give ourselves moral license to indulge our own retalliatory inner monsters. We all have these internal monsters and when we turn them loose, we get sloppy about truth and proportionality. Monsters are not, by their nature, moral neatniks. Throughout human history, millions of heads have ended up, either literally or figuratively, on spikes because of dehumanization given twisted moral cover.

Sunday

Sunday Shots

Above: Waveland Avenue, Wrigleyville neighborhood, Chicago. Some rooftop seats can be seen, upper right.

Addison and Sheffield.

Your Drinking Is A Problem When

The Chicago Tribune:

A 58-year-old Brookfield woman charged by Riverside police Friday for driving under the influence said she had been out celebrating the imminent return of her driver’s license from an earlier drunk driving conviction.

The NRA Has Finished The Transition...

From a once respectable organization, to an organization for crackpots, meet the new NRA president.

Did you get all that?

He also calls Obama a "fake president." He doesn't explain what he means by that, but it isn't a stretch to think he's a birther crank, too.

When your leadership says things like this, don't be surprised that some people wonder if a violent attack on America originated with radical Islamists or right wing kooks.