The new book is essentially a psychology book (though it shouldn’t feel like it when you read it).  In it, I challenge a lot of ideas presently being taught in psychology programs today, but have to keep myself limited to one central idea.  So I thought I’d share a couple of my contrarian notions that will not be addressed in the book:

  1.  The explosion in diagnoses (mostly self-, but many clinical-) of ADD/ADHD is really a mislabeling of the result of the prevalence, the omnipresence of attention-taking devices.  Even when silent, your phone is tempting you: unlimited music, videos, movies and TV, every picture you’ve taken in the last 10 years, et cetera, ad infinitum.  But then the damn thing rings with phone calls, chirps with texts, voicemails, email, updates, news alerts, weather alerts, all proactively, aggressively, intentionally disturbing you and shattering your concentration.  Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and we remember them being longer, or if we don’t, we find activities like reading a novel in a day to be quite literally impossible and seem totally unrealistic.  It is true: we are having trouble concentrating and focusing, but it ain’t ADHD…it’s the logical result of living full time with and essentially becoming addicted to smart phones.
  2. What many armchair mental health professionals along with many licensed clinicians mistakenly diagnose as narcissism is really more accurately an obsessive sort of perfectionism.
  3. Gender dysphoria is not best dealt with by catering to the delusions of the patient (i.e., scientifically incorrect pronouns, et cetera).  In fact, catering to and participating in the delusions can be as harmful as catering to and participating in the delusions of schizophrenics or psychotics.  I get a lot of push back from some psychologists about this one, but this particular population has a ridiculously high suicide rate (I haven’t checked in a while, but the last time I did it was over 60%) doing things the way they are being done.  If a particular population of patients has a suicide rate that is more than double that of all other delusional disorders, I would do some very critical questioning regarding the efficacy of present treatment protocols and, oh, I don’t know…try something different.

N.P.: “Go Insane” – Lindsey Buckingham

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