Psychology

When Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing as its candidate last time around, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish Secretary, rejoiced at avoiding "three months of psychodrama – who’s up, who’s down, who’s getting on with who…" But as Gareth Roberts remarked in The Spectator’s Coffee House, "I’m not quite sure what the difference is between psychodrama and good old-fashioned plain original-flavor drama." Indeed, Mr. Alexander’s characterization of psychodrama sounds like the essential lineaments of pure politics: "Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out," as King Lear puts it. King Lear itself might be a classic psychodrama, if madness is the defining feature.

In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.” “We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology. Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.

Unless you happen to live under a rock, this week you became aware of Dr. Robert Malone. He’s a virologist and immunologist who has become a lightning rod of controversy — and for good reason. Alongside laying claim to the invention of mRNA vaccines, Dr. Malone has spoken about a hysteria that has swept the United States, something he refers to as mass formation psychosis. Although I agree with many points Dr. Malone has made, and I believe that many of the pieces written about him have been needlessly vicious, the idea of mass formation psychosis is plain wrong. Let me explain why. Psychosis, an abnormal condition of the mind, renders a person unable to differentiate between the real and the imaginary.

If you’re the sort of person who buys and reads books about human behavior, then it is likely you have recently encountered an exciting, counterintuitive new psychological idea that seems as if it could help solve a pressing societal problem like educational inequality, race relations, or misogyny. Maybe you came across it in a TED Talk. Or, if not there, in an op-ed or blog post or book. It is, after all, a golden age for popular behavioral science.

Nothing duller for those of us not in therapy than listening to people who are in therapy talking about it, something they seem to like to do incessantly, at every opportunity. For this reason, my heart sank during the Oprah interview — which I’d been looking forward to tremendously — when early into his appearance, Prince Harry made an unsmiling reference to the ‘many years’ he had spent ‘doing the work — and doing my own learning’. Here we go, I thought. Sure enough, not long later he was telling the ludicrously softball interviewer of his family, his father, particularly: ‘they only know what they know. I’ve tried to educate them, through the process that I’ve been educated.’ Difficult to imagine how much the Windsors must have enjoyed that.

The 'Goldwater rule' is the informal name of the American Psychiatric Association’s guideline that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give ‘a professional opinion about public figures whom they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements.’ It’s named after 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who sued a magazine and won after it published a story claiming over a thousand mental health experts said he was unfit for office. ‘Fuck that,’ reflected psychologist and Yale professor Bandy X. Lee when she looked at the Goldwater rule in 2017.