Friday, March 22, 2013
Mike Nova: The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s l...
Mike Nova: The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s l...: American Academy Of Pediatrics: Gay Marriage Is Good For Kids via Queerty by Lester Brathwaite on 3/22/13 The American Academy o...
Mike Nova: The suspected shooter, a male Marine, apparently s...
Mike Nova: The suspected shooter, a male Marine, apparently s...: Marine kills two at Quantico base via Yahoo! News - Latest News & Headlines on 3/22/13 The suspected shooter, a male Marine...
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Letter: Invitation to a Dialogue: Psychiatric Diagnoses
Letter: Invitation to a Dialogue: Psychiatric Diagnoses: A psychiatrist addresses critics who say diagnoses are often stigmatizing and subjective. Readers are invited to reply.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Political Personology - Links
Political Personology - Links
3.13-14.13
Personology - GS
Personality psychology - W
Political Personology - GS
political personality - GS
Political psychology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to Personality and politics: The study of personality in political psychology focuses on the effects of leadership personality on ...
C.I.A. Profiling Delves Into the Minds of Global Leaders - NYTimes.com
Mar 28, 2011 – ... prepared by analysts at the C.I.A. and the Department of Defense. ... act virtually without constraint,” said Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who ...
jerrold post - GS
jerrold post cia - GS
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Notes
static, dynamic, field (politics) specific
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Articles
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Teasing Out Policy Insight From a Character Profile
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: March 28, 2011
Andrew Medichini/Associated Press
LIBYA Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi considers himself an outsider.
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The endgame in Libya is likely to turn in large part on the instincts of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and any insight into those instincts would be enormously valuable to policy makers. Journalists have formed their impressions from anecdotes, or from his actions in the past; others have seized on his recent tirades about Al Qaeda and President Obama.
But at least one group has tried to construct a profile based on scientific methods, and its conclusions are the ones most likely to affect American policy. For decades, analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense have compiled psychological assessments of hostile leaders like Colonel Qaddafi, Kim Jong-il of North Korea and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as well as allies, potential successors and other prominent officials. (Many foreign governments do the same, of course.)
Diplomats, military strategists and even presidents have drawn on those profiles to inform their decisions — in some cases to their benefit, in other cases at a cost.
The political profile “is perhaps most important in cases where you have a leader who dominates the society, who can act virtually without constraint,” said Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who directs the political psychology program at George Washington University and founded the C.I.A. branch that does behavioral analysis. “And that has been the case here, with Qaddafi and Libya.”
The official dossiers are classified. But the methods are well known. Civilian psychologists have developed many of the techniques, drawing mostly on public information about a given leader: speeches, writings, biographical facts, observable behavior. The resulting forecasts suggest that “at-a-distance profiling,” as it is known, is still more an art than a science. So in a crisis like the one in Libya, it is crucial to know the assessments’ potential value and real limitations.
“Expert profilers are better at predicting behavior than a blindfolded chimpanzee, all right, but the difference is not as large as you’d hope it would be,” said Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton University, 2006), who has done profiling of his own. “There’s no secret sauce, and my impression is that often the process can be rushed,” as a leader suddenly becomes a person of intense interest.
The method with the longest track record is modeled on clinical case studies, the psychobiographies that therapists create when making a diagnosis, citing influences going back to the sandbox. The first one on record, commissioned in the early 1940s by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the C.I.A., was of Adolf Hitler; in it, the Harvard personality specialist Henry A. Murray speculated freely and luridly about Hitler’s “infinite self-abasement,” “homosexual panic” and Oedipal tendencies.
Analysts still use this clinical-case approach but now ground it far more firmly in biographical facts than on Freudian speculation or personal opinion. In a profile of Colonel Qaddafi for Foreign Policy magazine, Dr. Post concludes that the dictator, while usually rational, is prone to delusional thinking when under pressure — “and right now, he is under the most stress he has been under since taking over the leadership of Libya.”
At his core, Colonel Qaddafi sees himself as the ultimate outsider, the Muslim warrior fighting impossible odds, Dr. Post argues, and he “is indeed prepared to go down in flames.”
Characterizations of this type have been invaluable in the past. In preparation for the Camp David peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, the C.I.A. provided President Jimmy Carter with profiles of both nations’ leaders, Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sadat. In his memoir “Keeping Faith,” Mr. Carter credited the profiles with giving him crucial insights that helped close a peace deal.
The brief on the Egyptian president, “Sadat’s Nobel Prize Complex,” noted that Sadat “sees himself as a grand strategist and will make tactical concessions if he is persuaded his overall goals will be achieved,” and added, “His self-confidence has permitted him to make bold initiatives, often overriding his advisers’ objections.”
Yet the assessments can also be misleading, even embarrassing. Profiles of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq that circulated in the early 1990s suggested that he was ultimately a pragmatist who would give in under pressure. And in 1993, the C.I.A. reportedly provided lawmakers with a brief alleging that the Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide had a history of mental illness, including manic depression.
Mr. Aristide furiously denied it, and the report was soon discredited. In a 1994 review of the episode in Foreign Policy, Thomas Omestad wrote that the profile was “light on facts and heavy on speculation; it came closer to character assassination than character analysis.”
Intelligence specialists have learned to hedge their bets over the years, supplementing case histories with “content analysis” techniques, which look for patterns in a leader’s comments or writings. For instance, a software program developed by a researcher at Syracuse University, Margaret Hermann, evaluates the relative frequency of certain categories of words (like “I,” “me,” “mine”) in interviews, speeches and other souces and links the scores to leadership traits.
A technique used by David G. Winter, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, draws on similar sources to judge leaders’ motives, in particular their need for power, achievement and affiliation. The sentence “We can certainly wipe them out” reflects a high power orientation; the comment “After dinner, we sat around chatting and laughing together” rings of affiliation.
“Combine high power and high affiliation, the person is likely to reach out, whereas power and low affiliation tend to predict aggression,” said Dr. Winter, who has profiled Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton, among many others. “That’s the idea, though of course you can’t predict anything with certainty.”
At least one group of political profilers has incorporated that flaw itself — uncertainty — into its forecasts. Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who has worked with Dr. Tetlock, sifts through a leader’s words to rate a quality called integrative complexity. This is a measure of how certain people are, how confident in their judgments, whether they have considered any opposing points of view.
In a series of studies, the researchers have compared communications leading up to the outbreaks of World War I and the Korean War with those that led to a peaceful resolution, like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. And the higher the level of acknowledged uncertainty, the less likely the leader is to pursue war, Dr. Suedfeld said.
He has not yet analyzed Colonel Qaddafi’s comments, but it doesn’t take an expert to observe that the Libyan leader sounds very certain, if not always coherent.
What is missing amid all this number crunching and modeling is any sense of which methods are most useful when. In an exhaustive review of intelligence analysis published this month, a prominent panel of social scientists strongly agreed: psychological profiling and other methods intelligence analysts use to predict behavior are sorely in need of rigorous testing.
And new ideas. In an unusual move, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which commissioned the report, has sponsored a kind of competition (http://goodjudgment.info), inviting people to test their own forecasting techniques, to improve intelligence analysis.
Given the challenge of predicting what leaders like Colonel Qaddafi might do, think of it as a plea for help.
But at least one group has tried to construct a profile based on scientific methods, and its conclusions are the ones most likely to affect American policy. For decades, analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense have compiled psychological assessments of hostile leaders like Colonel Qaddafi, Kim Jong-il of North Korea and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as well as allies, potential successors and other prominent officials. (Many foreign governments do the same, of course.)
Diplomats, military strategists and even presidents have drawn on those profiles to inform their decisions — in some cases to their benefit, in other cases at a cost.
The political profile “is perhaps most important in cases where you have a leader who dominates the society, who can act virtually without constraint,” said Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who directs the political psychology program at George Washington University and founded the C.I.A. branch that does behavioral analysis. “And that has been the case here, with Qaddafi and Libya.”
The official dossiers are classified. But the methods are well known. Civilian psychologists have developed many of the techniques, drawing mostly on public information about a given leader: speeches, writings, biographical facts, observable behavior. The resulting forecasts suggest that “at-a-distance profiling,” as it is known, is still more an art than a science. So in a crisis like the one in Libya, it is crucial to know the assessments’ potential value and real limitations.
“Expert profilers are better at predicting behavior than a blindfolded chimpanzee, all right, but the difference is not as large as you’d hope it would be,” said Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton University, 2006), who has done profiling of his own. “There’s no secret sauce, and my impression is that often the process can be rushed,” as a leader suddenly becomes a person of intense interest.
The method with the longest track record is modeled on clinical case studies, the psychobiographies that therapists create when making a diagnosis, citing influences going back to the sandbox. The first one on record, commissioned in the early 1940s by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the C.I.A., was of Adolf Hitler; in it, the Harvard personality specialist Henry A. Murray speculated freely and luridly about Hitler’s “infinite self-abasement,” “homosexual panic” and Oedipal tendencies.
Analysts still use this clinical-case approach but now ground it far more firmly in biographical facts than on Freudian speculation or personal opinion. In a profile of Colonel Qaddafi for Foreign Policy magazine, Dr. Post concludes that the dictator, while usually rational, is prone to delusional thinking when under pressure — “and right now, he is under the most stress he has been under since taking over the leadership of Libya.”
At his core, Colonel Qaddafi sees himself as the ultimate outsider, the Muslim warrior fighting impossible odds, Dr. Post argues, and he “is indeed prepared to go down in flames.”
Characterizations of this type have been invaluable in the past. In preparation for the Camp David peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, the C.I.A. provided President Jimmy Carter with profiles of both nations’ leaders, Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sadat. In his memoir “Keeping Faith,” Mr. Carter credited the profiles with giving him crucial insights that helped close a peace deal.
The brief on the Egyptian president, “Sadat’s Nobel Prize Complex,” noted that Sadat “sees himself as a grand strategist and will make tactical concessions if he is persuaded his overall goals will be achieved,” and added, “His self-confidence has permitted him to make bold initiatives, often overriding his advisers’ objections.”
Yet the assessments can also be misleading, even embarrassing. Profiles of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq that circulated in the early 1990s suggested that he was ultimately a pragmatist who would give in under pressure. And in 1993, the C.I.A. reportedly provided lawmakers with a brief alleging that the Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide had a history of mental illness, including manic depression.
Mr. Aristide furiously denied it, and the report was soon discredited. In a 1994 review of the episode in Foreign Policy, Thomas Omestad wrote that the profile was “light on facts and heavy on speculation; it came closer to character assassination than character analysis.”
Intelligence specialists have learned to hedge their bets over the years, supplementing case histories with “content analysis” techniques, which look for patterns in a leader’s comments or writings. For instance, a software program developed by a researcher at Syracuse University, Margaret Hermann, evaluates the relative frequency of certain categories of words (like “I,” “me,” “mine”) in interviews, speeches and other souces and links the scores to leadership traits.
A technique used by David G. Winter, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, draws on similar sources to judge leaders’ motives, in particular their need for power, achievement and affiliation. The sentence “We can certainly wipe them out” reflects a high power orientation; the comment “After dinner, we sat around chatting and laughing together” rings of affiliation.
“Combine high power and high affiliation, the person is likely to reach out, whereas power and low affiliation tend to predict aggression,” said Dr. Winter, who has profiled Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton, among many others. “That’s the idea, though of course you can’t predict anything with certainty.”
At least one group of political profilers has incorporated that flaw itself — uncertainty — into its forecasts. Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who has worked with Dr. Tetlock, sifts through a leader’s words to rate a quality called integrative complexity. This is a measure of how certain people are, how confident in their judgments, whether they have considered any opposing points of view.
In a series of studies, the researchers have compared communications leading up to the outbreaks of World War I and the Korean War with those that led to a peaceful resolution, like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. And the higher the level of acknowledged uncertainty, the less likely the leader is to pursue war, Dr. Suedfeld said.
He has not yet analyzed Colonel Qaddafi’s comments, but it doesn’t take an expert to observe that the Libyan leader sounds very certain, if not always coherent.
What is missing amid all this number crunching and modeling is any sense of which methods are most useful when. In an exhaustive review of intelligence analysis published this month, a prominent panel of social scientists strongly agreed: psychological profiling and other methods intelligence analysts use to predict behavior are sorely in need of rigorous testing.
And new ideas. In an unusual move, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which commissioned the report, has sponsored a kind of competition (http://goodjudgment.info), inviting people to test their own forecasting techniques, to improve intelligence analysis.
Given the challenge of predicting what leaders like Colonel Qaddafi might do, think of it as a plea for help.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 29, 2011, on page D1 of the New York edition.
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Psychology of Intelligence Analysis - GS
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis - CIA Search
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis - Richards J. Heuer, Jr.
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Friday, March 8, 2013
Report details flaws in Army's handling of PTSD
Report details flaws in Army's handling of PTSD: SEATTLE (AP) -- The Army has more than doubled its number of military and civilian behavioral health workers in the past five years, but a litany of shortcomings still plagues the force when it comes to diagnosing and treating soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorder, according to an Army report being released Friday....
Friday, March 1, 2013
Autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia all share common genetic risk factors, according to the results of the largest genetic study of psychiatric disorders to date
Mike Nova's starred items
via Psychiatric News Alert by noreply@blogger.com (Psychiatric News Alert) on 3/1/13
Their study is the largest to date and the first to provide evidence that specific SNPs are significantly associated with a range of psychiatric disorders. In particular, they pointed to the effects of voltage-gated calcium channels on such disorders: "Our results implicate a specific biological pathway—voltage-gated calcium-channel signaling—as a contributor to the pathogenesis of several psychiatric disorders and support the potential of this pathway as a therapeutic target for psychiatric disease."
"These important findings indicate that fundamental alterations in brain development and biology can confer vulnerability to various types of mental disorders....," Jeffrey Lieberman, M.D., president-elect of APA told Psychiatric News." Overall, the study provides an important new clue about the etiology and pathogenesis of mental disorders."
APA President Dilip Jeste, M.D., also commented: "Research of this type would help in the development of future diagnostic systems in psychiatry that are based on validated biomarkers...this important study is one step in that direction."
(Image: Chepko Danich Vitalevich/Shutterstock.com)
For previous news alerts, click here.
via psychiatry research - Google News on 3/1/13
 TIME |
International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric ...
Public Radio International PRI International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric diseases. Home | Stories | Health and Medicine | International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric diseases. Font size: Decrease font Enlarge font ... 5 Disorders Share Genetic Risk Factors, Study FindsNew York Times Share via e-mailBoston Globe Five major psychiatric disorders, including autism and bipolar disorder ...GlobalPost TIME -The Conversation -TopNews New Zealand all 58 news articles » |
via international psychiatry journals - Google News on 2/27/13
Largest study reveals five major psychiatric disorders share common genetic ...
Medical Xpress These findings are particularly relevant in view of the imminent revision of classifications in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)." Writing in a linked Comment ... |
via international psychiatry journals - Google News on 2/28/13
Autism, Depression Genetically Linked
ABC News The results are "new evidence that may inform a move beyond descriptive syndromes in psychiatry and towards classification based on underlying causes," Smoller said in a statement. Read this story on www.medpagetoday.com. The findings are especially ... |
via international psychiatry journals - Google News on 3/1/13
 Times of India |
International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric ...
Public Radio International PRI International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric diseases. Home | Stories | Health and Medicine | International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric diseases. Font size: Decrease font Enlarge font ... 5 Psychiatric disorders share genetic linkTimes of India Study points to "shared biology" between 5 psychiatric disordersCBS News Share via e-mailBoston Globe The Takeaway -UPI.com (blog) all 58 news articles » |
via psychiatry - Google News on 3/1/13
Children with autism had higher levels of toxic metals
Healio Researchers reported that children with autism had higher levels of toxic metals in their blood and urine vs. healthy children. The levels of those toxic metals were associated with the severity of the disorder. “These significant associations may ... and more » |
via international psychiatry - Google News on 2/27/13
5 Psych Disorders Have Common Genetics
MedPage Today The results are "new evidence that may inform a move beyond descriptive syndromes in psychiatry and towards classification based on underlying causes," Smoller said in a statement. The findings are especially important because of revisions to the ... |
via international psychiatry - Google News on 2/27/13
Five Major Psychiatric Disorders Genetically Linked
Medscape "These findings are particularly relevant in view of the imminent revision of classifications in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Diseases," said Dr. Smoller. The investigators add that ... |
via international psychiatry - Google News on 3/1/13
Times of India |
International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric ...
Public Radio International PRI International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric diseases. Home | Stories | Health and Medicine | International research group finds genetic link among five major psychiatric diseases. Font size: Decrease font Enlarge font ... 5 Psychiatric disorders share genetic linkTimes of India Study points to "shared biology" between 5 psychiatric disordersCBS News Autism, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric disorders share genetic ...Boston.com (blog) Wall Street Journal -UPI.com (blog) -The Takeaway all 57 news articles » |
Mike Nova's starred items
via DSM5 in Distress by Allen J. Frances, M.D. on 3/1/13
A new way that DSM-5 mislabels the medically ill. Stress, risks factors, noncompliance, and unhealthy lifestyles will now be called a mental disorder.read more
via psychiatric diagnosis - Google News on 3/1/13
Anti-Soviet 'Psychiatric' prisoners want diagnoses reversed
Deutsche Welle (press release) The film, “The Dissident," portrayed a 53-year-old Latvian lawyer who was locked up for many years in psychiatric hospitals. This kind of thing, it seems, was not an isolated incident. From the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, a group of Latvians were ... |
via international psychiatry journals - Google News on 2/28/13
Five Major Psychiatric Disorders Share Genetic Link
Medical News Today These findings are particularly relevant in view of the imminent revision of classifications in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)." In a linked editorial comment ... |
via international psychiatry - Google News on 3/1/13
 UConn Advance (blog) |
UConn Researchers Impacting Mental Health Treatment in Prison Population
UConn Advance (blog) Researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center are making significant contributions to the treatment of mental illness in prisoners, with their efforts earning international recognition and continued federal grant funding. With current ... |
via international psychiatry - Google News on 2/28/13
Five Major Psychiatric Disorders Share Genetic Link
Medical News Today These findings are particularly relevant in view of the imminent revision of classifications in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)." In a linked editorial comment ... |
via psychiatric diagnosis - Google News on 3/1/13
Anti-Soviet 'Psychiatric' prisoners want diagnoses reversed
Deutsche Welle (press release) The film, “The Dissident," portrayed a 53-year-old Latvian lawyer who was locked up for many years in psychiatric hospitals. This kind of thing, it seems, was not an isolated incident. From the late 1960s to the mid-80s, a group of Latvians were ... and more » |
via NIMH | Recent Updates by Jules Asher on 3/1/13
Five major mental disorders share some of the same genetic risk factors, the largest genome-wide study of its kind has found.
via Uploads by NIMHgov by NIMHgov on 3/1/13
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National Institutes of Health-funded researchers discovered that people with disorders traditionally thought to be distinct -- autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia -- were more likely to have suspect genetic variation at the same four chromosomal sites. These included risk versions of two genes that regulate the flow of calcium into cells. Bruce Cuthbert, Ph.D., director of NIMH's Division of Adult Translational Research, explains the significance of the study findings for diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses.
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via Healio.com PSYCHIATRY RSS Feed on 2/28/13
Autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia all share common genetic risk factors, according to the results of the largest genetic study of psychiatric disorders to date.“This study indicates that some specific genetic variants confer risk to a range of psychiatric disorders that are treated as clinically distinct,” study researcher Jordan Smoller, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told Psychiatric Annals. “The findings also highlight the role of calcium channel genes, which may provide a treatment target that is relevant to a range of psychiatric disorders.”
Five major psychiatric disorders may share common genetic risk factors - Healio
 Healio |
Five major psychiatric disorders may share common genetic risk factors
Healio Autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia all share common genetic risk factors, according to the results of the largest genetic study of psychiatric disorders to date. and more » |
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