March 13, 2010

OK Go

Posted by Nathen under endorsements, music, music business, National Public Radio, video
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My friend Jeannie posted about the band OK Go a while ago, but I my internet was down at the time (thanks, Qwest) so didn’t watch the video she embedded. It took me until hearing about them on NPR (here’s the story) to look them up again. They have ditched their label (EMI/Capitol) in favor of independent internet distribution–a very cool business model for bands who are well known enough to get away with it. And others, too, who have the ambition, stamina, and talent to get to a high level of recognition on their own. OK Go is clearly set. They write good, catchy tunes, and their videos range from very good to amazing and get viewed many millions of times each, on Youtube. They tend to use a single, long shot to catch an elaborate, surprising sequence. I’ll put in three below. Two are for the same song. The first is the EMI version, and the second, with the Rube Goldberg machine, is their independent version, financed by State Farm. It took 60 takes to get, and they only counted a take if they got past the dominoes and ball-bearings-on-the-tabletop sequences, which they called “very flakey.” It sounds like they recorded different versions of the song (“This Too Shall Pass”) for the videos, too.

Oh, right. The NPR story was partly about how EMI is not letting anyone embed their version of the video… Well, you can still use this attempt to embed as a link to the video on Youtube:

Rube Goldberg version:

The Treadmill video, also financed by EMI, so you’ll have to use the link:

 

March 10, 2010

I Am a Nerd’s Nerd

Posted by Nathen under charting my life, Christians, food, Michael Pollan, projects, Seth Rydmark
[7] Comments 

I’m keeping track of what species I’m eating this week, for a blog post. Michael Pollan says in In Defense of Food that it’s probably a good idea to eat a large variety of species. So I thought I’d keep track and see.

Tonight I ate dinner as I often do with my friend Seth Rydmark. He lives in a Christian dormitory that offers free dinners to guests of dormees. It’s a nice bunch of kids. (And beautiful singers–ever notice that Christians can mostly sing? They know the harmonies for “Happy Birthday”–stuff like that.) Seth and I get geeky about psychology (and sometimes theology) and are usually by far the last to leave the table, deep in some obscure conversation. Tonight, the salad was made of one of those baby-green mixes and I was trying to identify the species. I asked Seth if he knew the name of that pale, frizzy stuff. He said no and asked the girl next to him, and explained my project. She said, “Why would anyone want to do that?”

Seth said, “Well, you know, whatever there is in life, there’s a nerd for that. And Nathen is a nerd’s nerd.”

I’ve been working my whole life to deserve a compliment like that!

And by the way, does anyone out there know the name of that pale, frizzy salad green?

 

March 10, 2010

Will Someone Write Me a Transparent-Government Program?

Posted by Nathen under government, ideas, Long Now Foundation, politics, Sunlight Foundation, transparency
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I listened to the new seminar from The Long Now Foundation today, by Beth Noveck. (You should listen to the Long Now Seminars, too, by the way. They are a series of great lectures by really smart people applying long-term thinking to their area of expertise. Find them here.) She is Obama’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government. Her lecture is called “Transparent Government.” It’s not nearly the best of the series, but I was interested in what she was saying about what some private companies are doing with the data that is now available about the operations of the government. She talked about Sunlight Foundation‘s coverage of the health care summit, how as each politician spoke, you could see who donated how much to their campaigns. I imagined video of the speakers, with subtitles laying out the relevant campaign contributions floating in front of their faces. I checked it out and it wasn’t like that. It was more like a chat that happened at the same time as the summit. Pretty cool, but probably too much work to catch on with the public.

But why can’t we have what I imagined? It seems like it could be automated. The data is available. We have face-recognition programs and voice-recognition programs. I wonder how it would change things if there was a cheap app that effortlessly outed any politician in real time like that, if a senator speaking about health care reform could be seen as a mouthpiece for insurance companies, based on the actual amount of money they’ve received. It would make politics more entertaining to watch, at the least. And probably creepier, too, but I am willing to make that trade-off.

 

March 4, 2010

Headlines From Psychology, Part 5

Posted by Nathen under advice, behavior reinforcement, children, conformity, decisions, ethics, family, headlines, identity, intelligence, lists, obedience, parenting, psychology, punishment, reading, Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, video
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Here’s part 5 of the stuff I learned in my undergrad in psychology that I thought should have been headlines. If you missed them, here are part 1, part 2, part 3, & part 4. As always, if you are interested or skeptical, leave me a comment and I’ll give you my sources.

If You Punish Your Kids, Use the Mildest Effective Punishment: Do the mildest thing you can that stops the behavior you don’t want. The reason is that a punishment that is harsher than necessary takes the child’s initiative for stopping the behavior out of the picture. If you say “Hey, don’t do that,” and the child responds, they come to think that they didn’t really want to do that thing anyway, since such a mild rebuke got them to stop. Psychologists call these principles “insufficient punishment” and “self-persuasion.” These are research findings, not just speculation. If you sit on and beat your child to get them to stop doing something (as suggested by Mike & Debi Pearl), they will believe something more like “That activity was so great that I’ve only stopped because of that horrible punishment.” In other words, the form of the punishment affects the identity of the child–do they behave well because they think of themselves as well-behaved, or do they behave well only because they fear punishment?

You May Want Your Kids To Be Less Blindly Obedient Than Most People: One of the most famous psychological experiments of all time found that most people risked killing someone they barely knew, given an institutional setting and an authority telling them to do it. The Nazis were mostly not evil, just obedient, like most of us.

Humans Can Be Conformist to the Point of Doubting Their Own Senses:

Each Ethical Decision You Make Affects Your Future Ethical Decisions and Your Identity: If you, say, decide to cheat on a test, you will be more likely to cheat on tests in the future, think of yourself as someone who cheats on tests, and form permissive attitudes about cheating. The opposite is true if you decide not to cheat on a test.

Complement Your Kids For the How Hard They Work, Not How Smart They Are: Getting attention for being smart tends to make kids want to appear smart, which makes them choose easier challenges and lighter competition; it’s the success that matters. Getting attention for hard work does the opposite. This means that these kids will end up smarter than the kids who got attention for being smart.

Teach Your Kids to Think About Intelligence as a Fluid Property: That is, teach them that they can become more intelligent by trying. The more they believe it, the more it will be true for them.

If Your Kids Read, Don’t Reward Them For Reading: They will be more likely to stop, if you do, because they will start to think of reading as something they do to be rewarded, not because they like it. If they don’t read, reward them for reading. This goes for other activities, too.

 

March 1, 2010

Mo’ and Chad

Posted by Nathen under Chad, community, humor, Jeannie Lee, marriage, video
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Two of my good friends, Mo’ and Chad, have never met, even though I’ve known Chad for 33 years and Mo’ for 9. It’s geographical–Mo’ is part of my Oregon community and Chad is in southern California. It’s too bad because they’re both really funny and it would be great to get to watch them riff. Mo’, for example, early on, decided that Chad was my imaginary friend and made a lot of good fun of me: “Oh, riiight, Nathen– “Chad” climbed Mt. Whitney with you…” etc.

When Chad married another good friend of mine, Jeannie, a few years ago, Mo’ and his partner Vangie made this video for them. I’m not sure how funny it will be if you don’t know Mo’ or Chad, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably know one or both of them, and I think it’s just plain funny:

 

February 26, 2010

Murray Bowen on Funerals

Posted by Nathen under community, death, family, funerals, Murray Bowen, rituals
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“I think the best function of funerals is served if it brings relatives and friends into the best possible functional contact with the harsh fact of death and with each other in this time of high emotionality. I believe that funerals were probably more effective when people died at home with the family present, and when the family and friends made the coffin and did the burial themselves. Society no longer permits this, but there are ways to bring about a reasonable level of contact with the dead body and the survivors.”

Murray Bowen, in Walsh & McGoldrick’s Living Beyond Loss: Death in the Family

 

February 23, 2010

Weigh In On the DSM-V

Posted by Nathen under DSM-III, DSM-IV-TR, DSM-V, Gender Identity Disorder, homosexuality, mental illness, power, prefrontal lobotomy, psychopathology
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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is revised every decade or so, and a revision is under way right now. Up until recently, there has been criticism that the proceedings were taking place in secret. This is not unusual, as I understand it, but it is significant for many people. Mental-health clinicians, for example, have to use the diagnostic categories in the DSM to label their clients, and if the categories and descriptions listed don’t coincide with their experiences or beliefs, this can be quite difficult. It is significant for mental-health clients, too, for complementary and even more personal reasons. What will happen to your diagnosis? In? Out? Changed? These decisions have a big impact on social issues, like stigma, and economic issues, like what insurance companies will pay for.

The DSM committee is proposing, for example, to subsume the diagnosis of Asperger’s Disorder into Autism Disorder. This seems to make a lot of sense, unless you or your child is benefiting from the existence of Asperger’s because of insurance company rules, state regulations, or other regulatory factors.

The content of the DSM is important to people for political reasons, too. For example, the third revision of the DSM eliminated homosexuality as a mental disorder. That was in 1973, for the DSM-III. (We’ve since had the DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, and DSM-IV-TR. They are currently working on the DSM-V.) It may be hard to believe that being gay was an official Mental Disorder, but it was. People were even lobotomized for it: Here, let me “help” you with that unnatural sexual attraction by forcing an icepick in over one of your eyes, through your skull, to twist it in your brain. The removal of homosexuality from the DSM was very controversial in its day, but no one credible is fighting for it to go back in.

That is to say, the DSM can reflect the changing mores of society, which in turn influences the way society sees mental health and illness. This process can effect the quality of a lot of our lives. And now the DSM committee has revealed the changes they are contemplating and is asking for feedback. This is from their website:

“Your input, whether you are a clinician, a researcher, an administrator, or a person/family member affected by a mental disorder, is important to us.  We thank you for taking part in this historic process and look forward to receiving your feedback.”

You almost certainly fall into one of those categories. Take part in this opportunity! Of course, our input being “important” to them does not mean they will pay attention to it, but it can’t hurt to try. The worst that can happen is that you will be better informed about your mental-health system. Here are the categories that they are considering changes in. Click on them to read the proposed changes. To submit feedback, you have to register with them, but it only takes a minute:

Structural, Cross-Cutting, and General Classification Issues for DSM-5
Disorders Usually First Diagnosed in Infancy, Childhood, or Adolescence
Delirium, Dementia, Amnestic, and Other Cognitive Disorders
Mental Disorders Due to a General Medical Condition Not Elsewhere Classified
Substance-Related Disorders
Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders
Mood Disorders
Anxiety Disorders
Somatoform Disorders
Factitious Disorders
Dissociative Disorders
Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders
Eating Disorders
Sleep Disorders
Impulse-Control Disorders Not Elsewhere Classified
Adjustment Disorders
Personality Disorders
Other Conditions that May Be the Focus of Clinical Attention
 

February 19, 2010

Headlines From Psychology, Part 4

Posted by Nathen under antidepressants, depression, headlines, healthcare, mental illness, pharmaceutical companies, psychology, psychopathology, psychotropic medication, science, side effects, SSRIs, statistics
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Psychology hit the actual headlines last week, with Sharon Begley’s “The Depressing News About Antidepressants” in Newsweek. The story is that, if you look at all the evidence, not just the “successful” trials, SSRIs like Prozac and Paxil do not work better than a placebo for mild and moderate depression. Begley also tells the story as if she’s sorry to break the news and spoil the placebo effect. Here’s my version of the headlines from this story:

Pharmaceutical Companies Have Known For At Least Ten Years That SSRIs Work No Better Than Placebos: At least, anyone there who understood statistics and paid any attention to their research.

The Idea That SSRIs Are Better Than Placebos Was Propagated By Publishing Only the “Successful” Trials: This, obviously, was quite unethical.

The FDA Almost Certainly Knew That SSRIs Were No Better Than Placebos, Too: They had all of the research. Perhaps they did not read it.

People Who Read Psych Journals Knew SSRIs Were No Better Than Placebos Two Years Ago: The news caused a stir in my undergrad psych lab in 2008.

We Do Not Know What Causes Depression: The idea that depression has to do with the neurotransmitter serotonin was based largely on the (incomplete) evidence that SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) cured depression. In fact, we have pretty limited knowledge of what goes on inside a living brain. In fact, we have no ethical way to measure how much serotonin or any other neurotransmitter is where inside anyone’s living brain, so when a doctor tells you something like, “You are depressed because you have overactive serotonin re-uptake mechanisms,” they are passing on speculation, not science.

If You Recovered From Mild to Moderate Depression While On An SSRI, It Was Probably Your Own Hope That Lifted You Out: The thing about placebos is that they work pretty well. If you benefited from the placebo effect, it was your own strength, your own hope, that made the difference. You overcame that challenge. I think that’s pretty cool.

While SSRIs Do Not Treat Depression Better Than Placebos, They Do Have Side Effects: Here’s a list from wikipedia: Decreased or absent libido, Impotence or reduced vaginal lubrication, Difficulty initiating or maintaining an erection or becoming aroused, Persistent genital arousal disorder despite absence of desire, Muted, delayed or absent orgasm (anorgasmia), Reduced or no experience of pleasure during orgasm (ejaculatory anhedonia), Premature ejaculation, Weakened penile, vaginal or clitoral sensitivity, Genital anesthesia, Loss or decreased response to sexual stimuli, Reduced semen volume, Priapism (persistent erectile state of the penis or clitoris)anhedonia, apathy, nausea/vomiting, drowsiness or somnolence, headache, bruxism (involuntarily clenching or grinding the teeth), extremely vivid and strange dreams, dizziness, fatigue, mydriasis (pupil dilation), urinary retention, changes in appetite, changes in sleep, weight loss/gain (measured by a change in bodyweight of 7 pounds), may result in a double risk of bone fractures and injuries, changes in sexual behaviour,increased feelings of depression and anxiety (which may sometimes provoke panic attacks), tremors (and other symptoms of Parkinsonism in vulnerable elderly patients), autonomic dysfunction including orthostatic hypotension, increased or reduced sweating, akathisia, liver or renal impairment, suicidal ideation (thoughts of suicide), photosensitivity (increased risk of sunburn), Paresthesia, Mania, hypomania, sexual dysfunction such as anorgasmia, erectile dysfunction, and diminished libido, a severe and even debilitating withdrawal syndrome, a slight increase in the risk of self-harm, suicidal ideation, and suicidality in children, neonatal complications such as neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) and persistent pulmonary hypertension, and platelet dysfunction.

Until Your Medicated Kids Are Old, We Will Not Know What All of the Side Effects of Treatment by SSRIs Are: This is true for any new drug, and it’s worth considering. If your child is on Prozac or other new drug, they are essentially part of a massive experimental trial.

Pharmaceutical Companies Pay for Psychiatric Educations: Why would it surprise anyone that treatment equals drugs in this case?

Most Antidepressant Prescriptions Written by Health Care Providers With No Significant Psychiatric Training: GPs, OBGYNs, pediatricians, etc account for 80% of SSRI prescriptions.

 

February 17, 2010

The No-Secrets Policy

Posted by Nathen under CFT cohort, countertransference, Couples and Family Therapy, graduate school, infidelity, marriage, marriage and family therapy, no-secrets policy, relationships, secrets, statistics
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Yesterday, I participated in my master’s program’s OSCEs–Objective Structured Clinical Exercises–for the students in the year ahead of me, who are about to graduate. My cohort played clients in specific, challenging scenarios for the second-year-cohort therapists. The activity was adapted from a medical school test of clinical ability.

My scenario was the most challenging of the day. The therapists came in expecting to be doing a goal setting exercise with a couple but found that only one of us (me) had showed up. I was to immediately disclose an affair and request that the therapist not tell my wife about it. I had ended the affair, felt very guilty about it, and was certain that revealing it would destroy our relationship. I was to try and get the therapist to help me with the “things that pushed me to do this.”

I am not a good actor, so it took all my attention just to get my part across in a semi-believable way. When I watched my cohort-mates play the same part, though, it was heart wrenching. They did such a good job showing remorse, almost crying, showing the fear of losing their husbands, and over “a stupid mistake.” (Well, three stupid mistakes with one person.) I really felt for them–and they were just pretending! I can see how much preparation I will need to do to handle this kind of situation effectively. I am certain to have clients who have affairs. I just looked up the statistics, and the lowest numbers I found are that about 15% of married women and 25% of married men have sexual affairs. That means that at least one out of four couples I see will have had or are heading towards an affair.

Our clinic has a “no secrets” policy for couples counseling. It’s something we bring up on the first day of therapy. If one member of a family has an individual session, what is said in that session is not going to be confidential to the rest of the family. The idea is that for this work, it is the relationship that is our primary client, not the individuals, and that secrets (differentiated from privacy) are toxic to relationships. Also, if the we are brought into one person’s secret and keep it, we can no longer serve the relationship without bias.

I think that the no-secrets policy is a good idea and I have been planning to use it in my work, but now, seeing it in practice, I see that it’s not just a matter of having a policy. I will need to thoroughly wrap my head around how it will apply in different scenarios. I will need to talk it through with a lot of people so I feel comfortable and confident in my thinking. I will also need to remember to remind clients about the no-secrets policy the moment I see that a couples client has come in alone. We introduce the policy during the first session, but that may not be what a client is thinking about when they disclose an affair. They may think that I have trapped or betrayed them if their disclosure is followed by, “Remember that no-secrets policy we talked about during our first session?”

Ideally, in this case, we would work together with the client on a palatable way to reveal their actions to their partner and then work with the couple to heal the rifts. We don’t automatically tell the partner about affairs, either. There are some things that we are required by law and ethics to report, like death threats or the abuse or neglect of a child, but affairs are not one of them. If the cheating partner refuses to allow revealing the secret, I would have to refer the couple, for suitably non-specific reasons, to another therapist who could be unbiased, if in the dark.

I think that I need to rid myself of some countertransference when it comes to affairs. That is, as it stands, I think I might favor cheat-ee over cheating clients, because it’s harder for me to relate to cheating. I walked out of our role plays thinking, “Wow, it’s so much simpler and less painful to avoid an affair than it is to deal with the aftermath!” Can anyone recommend a good book or movie that could help me empathize with someone having an affair–especially someone who feels like they are not in control of their actions, or just not thoughtful, in sexual infidelity?

This is interesting and sometimes painful work I am getting myself into!

 

February 15, 2010

Alexithymia

Posted by Nathen under alexithymia, emotions, mystification, parenting, psychology, somatization
[5] Comments 

Alexithymic describes someone who can’t talk about emotions. They also have trouble knowing when they or others are experiencing an emotion, and trouble distinguishing which emotion it is, if they do notice one. It is not a considered a clinical condition, but it can produce clinical conditions, like somatization, where people develop various body conditions instead of feeling emotions. It becomes a problem when somatizers insist on one medical test or procedure after another for a problem that will never yield to biological intervention. I read one estimate that 20% of money spent on medical services is for these kinds of concerns. (!)

There are social consequences, too, of course. If you can’t recognize that you’re in the grip of an emotion, you can be hard to understand and hard to deal with. It’s also hard for an alexithymic person to relate to others who are having emotions–it’s more difficult to take their perspectives and to have empathy.

It’s not a black-or-white condition, of course. Everyone is somewhere on the spectrum of emotional fluency. It’s not an intractable state, either. You can learn emotional fluency, and most people do, to some extent. It’s part self-awareness, part self-acceptance, and part vocabulary. It’s something you continue learning throughout life, given a supportive environment. Parents can stifle the learning curve in their children by how and when they give them attention. Somatizing children, for example, can come from parents who give them attention for physical pain but not emotional pain. Another problematic parenting technique, called “mystification” by psychologists, works to slow the emotional learning curve; when a child is angry, for example, a parent might say something like, “You’re not angry,” or “You shouldn’t be angry.” That kind of thing goes a long way to confuse people about emotions.

 

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