On average, one active duty soldier is committing suicide each day

DSM5 in Distress

The DSM's impact on mental health practice and research

by Allen Frances, M.D.

The Epidemic of Suicide in the Military 

 

Ten suggested interventions
 

Published on September 19, 2012 by Allen J. Frances, M.D. in DSM5 in Distress 
 

With understandable urgency, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has made suicide one of his top priorities, instructing commanders at all levels to feel acutely accountable for it. The numbers are startling. On average, one active duty soldier is committing suicide each day, twice the number of combat deaths and twice the civilian rate. Suicides have jumped dramatically since 2005 and increased by 18 percent in just the last year. The DOD and VA are groping for explanations and plans of action—clearly, just commanding the commanders to prevent suicide can't possibly do very much. And sadly, psychiatry has no ready or certain answers, no sure way to predict or prevent suicide. Research in this area has huge methodological problems and is unlikely to bear any low-hanging fruit. So we may have to rely on obvious, common sense suggestions...

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My Comments:

This is unconscionable! How do we care for people who defend us? Thank you again, Dr. Frances.

 

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Fighting the Wrong War On Drugs 

Taming the pharmaceutical companies, undercutting the cartels

 

Published on August 28, 2012 by Allen J. Frances, M.D. in DSM5 in Distress 

 

Since Richard Nixon was President, we have been fighting a drug war we can't possibly win. Meanwhile, we have barely begun to fight a different drug war we couldn't possibly lose.
The losing battle is against illegal drugs. Interdiction has been as big a bust as Prohibition of alcohol in the 1930s. Occasionally arresting a drug kingpin or confiscating a few million of dollars worth of contraband heroin or cocaine makes for a nice headline, but doesn't stop the flow.
The beneficiaries of our war on drugs have been the cartels and the narco-terrorists; the casualties are the failing states they can buy or bully. The Mexican government is fighting what amounts to an undeclared civil war against cartels armed to the teeth and flowing with money -- both from north of the border. We have unwittingly created a terrific business model for the drug dealers and a disaster for the states where they deal.



The three jailed members of Pussy Riot are getting death threats in prison

Pussy Riot Facing Death Threats In Prison - 411mania.com

via prisons - Google News on 9/20/12

Pussy Riot Facing Death Threats In Prison 411mania.com The Daily Beast reports that the three jailed members of Pussy Riot are getting death threats in prison and want to move to Moscow instead of a remote area hundreds of miles away. They were sentenced to two years in August for charges of hooliganism. and more »

Professor Thomas Szasz, iconic champion for liberty, pioneer in the fight against coercive psychiatry and co-founder of Citizens Commission on Human Rights, has passed away at the age of 92

In Memoriam: Dr. Thomas Szasz, Iconic Champion for Liberty & Co-Founder of CCHR

 

Sep 202012

Dr. Thomas Szasz
1920—2012

 

 

 

Professor Thomas Szasz, iconic champion for liberty, pioneer in the fight against coercive psychiatry and co-founder of Citizens Commission on Human Rights, has passed away at the age of 92. Considered by many scholars and academics to be psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, Dr. Szasz authored hundreds of articles and more than 35 books on the subject, the first being The Myth of Mental Illness, a book which rocked the very foundations of psychiatry when published more than 50 years ago. Szasz was Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Fellow of the International Academy of Forensic Psychology, whose life long list of educational accomplishments, credentials, honors, biographical listings and awards speak for themselves.
To the world, he was the foremost critic on psychiatry and its abusive practices, a brilliant debater and orator. To those who had the privilege of working alongside him, he was witty, charming, charismatic and fearless. But above all else, he was a defender of personal liberty. As Professor Richard E. Vatz of Towson University stated, “Thomas S. Szasz has steadfastly defended the values of humanism and personal autonomy against all who would constrain human freedom with shackles formed out of conceptual confusion, error, and willful deception.”

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Shades Of Mental Illness - By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast

via prison psychiatry - Google Blog Search by Andrew Sullivan on 9/19/12

Jacob Sullum celebrates the life of Thomas Szasz, "the great libertarian critic of coercive psychiatry, the 'therapeutic state,' and the war on drugs," who passed away recently: Szasz, a Reason ... [T]he anti-treatment movement Szasz intellectually inspired facilitated the release of tens of thousands of seriously ill mental patients who, when they relapsed, had nowhere to go and no one to help them, and often ended up in prison or living life on the streets. Many mental ...

 

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Dr. Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field, Dies at 92

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: September 11, 2012

Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist whose 1961 book “The Myth of Mental Illness” questioned the legitimacy of his field and provided the intellectual grounding for generations of critics, patient advocates and antipsychiatry activists, making enemies of many fellow doctors, died Saturday at his home in Manlius, N.Y. He was 92.
      

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Susan Kahn

Dr. Thomas Szasz in 2001.

He died after a fall, his daughter Dr. Margot Szasz Peters said.

Dr. Szasz (pronounced sahz) published his critique at a particularly vulnerable moment for psychiatry. With Freudian theorizing just beginning to fall out of favor, the field was trying to become more medically oriented and empirically based. Fresh from Freudian training himself, Dr. Szasz saw psychiatry’s medical foundation as shaky at best, and his book hammered away, placing the discipline “in the company of alchemy and astrology.”

The book became a sensation in mental health circles, as well as a bible for those who felt misused by the mental health system.

Dr. Szasz argued against coercive treatments, like involuntary confinement, and the use of psychiatric diagnoses in the courts, calling both practices unscientific and unethical. He was soon placed in the company of other prominent critics of psychiatry, including the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman and the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Edward Shorter, the author of “A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac” (1997), called Dr. Szasz “the biggest of the antipsychiatry intellectuals.”

“Together,” he added, “they tried their hardest to keep people away from psychiatric treatment on the grounds that if patients did not have actual brain disease, their only real difficulties were ‘problems in living.’ ”

This attack had some merit in the 1950s, Dr. Shorter said, but not later on, when the field began developing more scientific approaches.

To those skeptical of modern psychiatry, however, Dr. Szasz was a foundational figure.

“We did not agree on everything, like his view that there is no such thing as mental illness,” said Vera Hassner Sharav, president and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a patient advocacy group, and a longtime critic of the field. “But his message that people get designated as ill, labeled and then shafted out of society and preyed on by an industry dominated by drugs — that’s where he was very valuable.”

After making his name, Dr. Szasz only turned up the heat. From his base in the psychiatry department of SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, he wrote hundreds of articles and more than 30 books, including “Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man” (1970) and “Psychiatric Slavery: When Confinement and Coercion Masquerade as Cure” (1977).

In 1969, in a move that damaged his credibility even among allies, he joined with the Church of Scientology to found the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which portrays the field as abusive and regularly pickets psychiatric meetings.

Dr. Szasz was not a Scientologist himself, and he later distanced himself from the church, but he shared the religion’s critical view of psychiatry. His provocations were not without cost. In the 1960s, New York mental health officials, outraged at his attacks on the state system, blocked Dr. Szasz from teaching at a state hospital where residents trained, according to two former colleagues. Dr. Szasz bristled but had little recourse, and his teaching was curtailed.

Dr. Szasz opposed the American Psychiatric Association’s broadening of its diagnoses in its new manual.

“For the record, I will say that I admired him, even though I think he was dead wrong about the nature of schizophrenia,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., which supports stronger laws to ensure treatment of people with severe mental disorders. “But he made a major contribution to the issue of the misuse of psychiatry. His message is important today.”

Thomas Stephen Szasz was born in Budapest on April 15, 1920, the second child of Julius Szasz, a lawyer, and the former Lily Wellisch. The family moved to Cincinnati in 1938, where the boy became a star student. He earned a degree in physics from the University of Cincinnati and graduated from the university’s medical school in 1944.

After an internship and residency, he enrolled at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, earning his diploma in 1950. He worked at the Chicago institute and served in the United States Naval Reserve before joining the faculty of SUNY Upstate.

He wife, Rosine, died in 1971. Beside his daughter Dr. Peters, he is survived by another daughter, Suzy Szasz Palmer; a brother, George; and a grandson.

Dr. Szasz was widely sought after as a speaker and presented with dozens of national and international awards. Until the end of his life he continued to discuss psychotherapy, the practice he was trained to perform and of which he became so skeptical.

“The goal is to assume more responsibility and therefore gain more liberty and more control over one’s own life,” he said of talk therapy in an interview in 2000 with the Web site Psychotherapy.net. “The issues or questions for the patient become to what extent is he willing to recognize his evasions of responsibility, often expressed as ‘symptoms.’ ”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 12, 2012, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: Dr. Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field, Dies at 92.

 

Behavioral Styles

Behavioral Styles - working draft outline

Norm | Psychopathology

Dimensions:

Cognitive

Ideational - Perceptual

Affective

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal

Social

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Predatory behavioral styles

as precursors of criminal and paracriminal behaviors

• Self-violence and Self-aggression

• Violence and aggression against individuals - manifestation of disturbance in interpersonal relations

• Violence and aggression against groups - manifestation of disturbance in social relations

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Scholarly articles for predatory behavior in humans

The predatory behavior of wild chimpanzees - Teleki - Cited by 291 Anti-predatory behavior of lapwings: field evidence of … - Walters - Cited by 45 Aggressive behavior of dogs kept as companion … - Borchelt - Cited by 120

Search Results

Predation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PredationCached - Similar

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Jump to Mobbing behavior‎: For example, nesting gull colonies are widely seen to attack intruders, including humans. Costs of mobbing behavior include ...

Functional classification - Ecological role - Adaptations and behavior

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Criteria for assessment:
Severity, Frequency, Degree of functional impairment

Aspects:
Subjective self-report, interviews, etc;
Objective: assessments by others

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[PPT]

The Behavioral Genetics of Predatory Criminal Behavior

faculty.uml.edu/jbyrne/44.521/Violent_Offenders_Ch3_PPT.ppt

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File Format: Microsoft Powerpoint - Quick View
Predatory offending, about the fundamentals of human genetics, about the methods used by behavioral genetics, and about how this information is used to ...

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The Biological Basis of Human Behavior

public.wsu.edu/~taflinge/biology.htmlCached

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The three main elements biology contributes to human behavior are: 1) ... like foxes, the one that is particularly good as a predator, through cunning or speed or ...

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Self-management of anger, rage, violence and aggression as a part and as a dimension of behavioral styles


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Other References and Links

Behavioral Styles - Google Search

DISC assessment - From Wikipedia

 

 

 

Mothering (parenting) styles

Mothering (parenting) styles - working draft outline

Secure mothering (parenting)

Insecure mothering (parenting)

Psychotherapy and psychoeducation for mothers (parents) to be and in variations of mothering (parenting) styles

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Opinion

Why Fathers Really Matter

Paul Blow

By JUDITH SHULEVITZ

Published: September 8, 2012 134 Comments 

MOTHERHOOD begins as a tempestuously physical experience but quickly becomes a political one. Once a woman’s pregnancy goes public, the storm moves outside. Don’t pile on the pounds! Your child will be obese. Don’t eat too little, or your baby will be born too small. For heaven’s sake, don’t drink alcohol. Oh, please: you can sip some wine now and again. And no matter how many contradictory things the experts say, don’t panic. Stress hormones wreak havoc on a baby’s budding nervous system.