The journal Archives of General Psychiatry will “look into” whether an author who recommended antidepressants for preschoolers failed to disclose her financial ties to Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Shire, companies which make such drugs, according to Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons.
Shockingly, people in the west are less likely to recover than those in poorer countries. Kindness and empathy are missing from the system. Drugs dominate but they don’t work well: it’s time to prescribe them only on a suck-it-and-see basis.
According to a Psychology Today hit piece written by psychologist John Gartner, people prone to thinking that powerful men might actually get together and plan to maintain and advance their power are borderline psychotics who are a danger to society. In reality, hundreds of years of history has taught us that psychologists routinely aid authoritarian regimes in enforcing tyrannical and inhumane policies while helping them crush political opposition by defining suspicion of authorities as a mental illness.
My book, The C.I.A. Doctors, is based on 15,000 pages of documents I received from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act and dozens of papers published in medical journals.
The New York Times’ Benedict Carey reported this week that the Army “plans to require that all 1.1 million of its soldiers take intensive training in emotional resiliency.”
“Resiliency” is not something learned in a “crash course.” It’s a backdrop for what we used to call “character,” something parents and religious organizations instilled over years. You can have all the “resiliency” classes and role-playing and “conflict resolution” strategies you like, but if it is not in keeping with the underlying personality of the individual, it won’t work in the end.