Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?

By Jennifer Kahn
The New York Times
Originally published May 11, 2012

Here is an excerpt:

For the past 10 years, Waschbusch has been studying “callous-unemotional” children — those who exhibit a distinctive lack of affect, remorse or empathy — and who are considered at risk of becoming psychopaths as adults. To evaluate Michael, Waschbusch used a combination of psychological exams and teacher- and family-rating scales, including the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits, the Child Psychopathy Scale and a modified version of the Antisocial Process Screening Device — all tools designed to measure the cold, predatory conduct most closely associated with adult psychopathy. (The terms “sociopath” and “psychopath” are essentially identical.) A research assistant interviewed Michael’s parents and teachers about his behavior at home and in school. When all the exams and reports were tabulated, Michael was almost two standard deviations outside the normal range for callous-unemotional behavior, which placed him on the severe end of the spectrum.

Currently, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children, but a growing number of psychologists believe that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition — one that can be identified in children as young as 5. Crucial to this diagnosis are callous-unemotional traits, which most researchers now believe distinguish “fledgling psychopaths” from children with ordinary conduct disorder, who are also impulsive and hard to control and exhibit hostile or violent behavior.

The entire article is here.

Robert Wright's Interview with Paul Bloom

Originally published November 13, 2013
Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
BloggingHeadsTV

Are mental illnesses real? (Part One)

John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally published November 12, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

It may be a push, but I think it is fair to say that no branch of modern medicine faces the same existential challenges as psychiatry. To give a sense of the problem, a quick browse through Amazon reveals a plethora of books, many published within the past ten years, that either directly challenge the legitimacy of mental illness, call into question the medicalisation of the mind, or dispute the unholy alliance between “pharma” and psychiatry. This is to say nothing of the organisations and religious groups (most famously the scientologists) who critique modern psychiatry and try to dismantle its apparatuses.

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Part of the reason for this is philosophical. The attempt to identify, diagnose and treat mental illness seems to bring the mind within the scope of biomedical science: to “reduce” mental phenomena to scientifically tractable, manipulable and treatable “disorders”. This cuts to the core of one of the central projects in modern philosophy: the reconciliation project. This project tries to determine the appropriate relationship between the world as it seems to be to us (the manifest image) and the world as it seems to be when viewed through the lens of modern science (the scientific image).

As such, the topic of mental illness — what it is and how it should be treated — is one that is particularly ripe for philosophical analysis and debate. The purpose of this series of posts is to look at some aspects of this analysis and debate. Specifically, to look at various attempts to determine what an “illness” or “disease” really is, and at arguments for or against the legitimacy of “mental illness”.

The entire blog post is here.

The Not-So-Hidden Cause Behind the A.D.H.D. Epidemic

By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER
The New York Times
Published: October 15, 2013

Here are two excerpts:

Of the 6.4 million kids who have been given diagnoses of A.D.H.D., a large percentage are unlikely to have any kind of physiological difference that would make them more distractible than the average non-A.D.H.D. kid. It’s also doubtful that biological or environmental changes are making physiological differences more prevalent. Instead, the rapid increase in people with A.D.H.D. probably has more to do with sociological factors — changes in the way we school our children, in the way we interact with doctors and in what we expect from our kids.

Which is not to say that A.D.H.D. is a made-up disorder.

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This lack of rigor leaves room for plenty of diagnoses that are based on something other than biology. Case in point: The beginning of A.D.H.D. as an “epidemic” corresponds with a couple of important policy changes that incentivized diagnosis. The incorporation of A.D.H.D. under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act in 1991 — and a subsequent overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration in 1997 that allowed drug companies to more easily market directly to the public — were hugely influential, according to Adam Rafalovich, a sociologist at Pacific University in Oregon.

The entire article is here.

The New Science of Mind

By ERIC R. KANDEL
The New York Times
Published: September 6, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

These results show us four very important things about the biology of mental disorders. First, the neural circuits disturbed by psychiatric disorders are likely to be very complex.

Second, we can identify specific, measurable markers of a mental disorder, and those biomarkers can predict the outcome of two different treatments: psychotherapy and medication.

Third, psychotherapy is a biological treatment, a brain therapy. It produces lasting, detectable physical changes in our brain, much as learning does.

And fourth, the effects of psychotherapy can be studied empirically. Aaron Beck, who pioneered the use of cognitive behavioral therapy, long insisted that psychotherapy has an empirical basis, that it is a science. Other forms of psychotherapy have been slower to move in this direction, in part because a number of psychotherapists believed that human behavior is too difficult to study in scientific terms.

ANY discussion of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders must include genetics. And, indeed, we are beginning to fit new pieces into the puzzle of how genetic mutations influence brain development.

The entire story is here.

Biological psychiatry’s false paradigm—still no proof mental illness is a biological disease

By René J. Muller
Baltimore Sun
June 18, 2013

Days before the official May 22 publication date of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-5), a number of psychiatrists who were closely associated with the project scrambled to do some preemptory damage control, mostly by lowering the expectations for what was to come.

Michael B. First, professor of psychiatry at Columbia, acknowledged on NPR that there was still no empirical method to confirm or rule out any mental illness. “We were hoping and imagining that research would advance at a pace that laboratory tests would have come out. And here we are 20 years later and we still unfortunately rely primarily on symptoms to make our diagnoses.” Speaking to The New York Times, Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, insisted that this failure had not been for lack of effort.

In the same Times article, David J. Kupfer, chairman of the DSM-5 Task Force, admitted “a failure of our neuroscience and biology to give us the level of diagnostic criteria, a level of sensitivity and specificity that we would be able to introduce into the diagnostic manual.” Drs. Kupfer, Insel and First agree that the new paradigm envisioned for psychiatry — the reason the new edition was undertaken — remains elusive.

The entire article is here.