Learn about Edward Bernays, nephew of the very Sigmund Freud, and pioneer of a scientific technique for manipulating public opinion called - “engineering of consent“.  Sounds like something me and my family have already encountered from some doctors. And not exactly with our best intentions at heart either. More for their expediency and convenience, but that’s another blog entry.

He was a doctor too, of spin, promoting using propaganda to control and shape our opinions in politics, business, science, ?? art ??, and education. My oh my, education, what a surprise – NOT !! Called the ‘Father of public relations’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Bernays helped the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) and other special interest groups to convince the American public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health. This was achieved by using the American Dental Association in a highly successful media campaign.

Beyond his contributions to these famous and powerful clients, Bernays revolutionized public relations by combining traditional press agentry with the techniques of psychology and sociology to create what one writer has called “the science of ballyhoo.”

Don’t you just love these Machiavellian types. This quote from Wikipedia and Edward Bernays ‘Propaganda’ -

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. … In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Turns out Nazi Germany was also interested in his ideas on propaganda. Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed. Bernays was Jewish  -  

In his autobiography, titled Biography of an Idea, Bernays recalls a dinner at his home in 1933 where

Karl von Weigand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. … Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.

http://www.answers.com/topic/diagnostic-and-statistical-manual-of-mental-disorders 

The DSM has seen criticisms through the years. A Columbia University team headed by Robert Spitzer, an editor of the DSM, acknowledges a concern about the DSM in their annual report of 2001, “Problems with the current DSM-IV categorical (present vs. absent) approach to the classification of personality disorders have long been recognized by clinicians and researchers.” Among the problems, they list “arbitrary distinction between normal personality, personality traits and personality disorder” and point out the fact that the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder is 301.9, Personality Disorder not Otherwise Specified. ^[5]

There have also been questions of potential bias of DSM authors who define psychiatric disorders. According to The Washington Post, an analysis published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics^[6] pointed out that “every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses.”^[7] However, an important limitation of this study was that the analysis did not reveal the extent of their relationships with industry or whether those ties preceded or followed their work on the manual.

In the United States, health insurance typically will not pay for psychological or psychiatric services unless a DSM-IV mental disease diagnosis accompanies the insurance claim. The website of the DSM-V Prelude Project^[8] covers shortcomings of the DSM-IV that may be subject for improvements for the DSM-V.

http://dsm5.org/ 

Welcome to the DSM-V Prelude Project. Although the DSM-V revision process will not formally begin until 2006 or 2007 (see timeline), the American Psychiatric Association has created this web site in order to keep the public and professionals informed about the plans for DSM-V as well as the ongoing effort to enrich the research base in advance of starting formal work on DSM-V. In addition, this web site provides an opportunity for you to alert us to problems in the DSM-IV that you may have encountered and to provide your suggestions for DSM-V.

Oh  boy, do I ever have suggestions?

Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks
Religion is a light in the fog
I’m not aware of too many things
I know what I know, if you know what I meanWhat I am is what I am
Are you what you are or what?- Edie Brickell and New Bohemians

Have you heard of the book, and now the DVD, of Mozart and the Whale.

Here are some video clips and trailer …


watch video clips

watch trailer

what i am is one of the indie songs on the video. Absolutely love it! Just bought it on iTunes, couldn’t resist.

I seem to have some things in common with Isabelle. Although the math thing I have is more like Donald’s … I love numbers too. But I don’t think you have to be aspie to love numbers. A lot of accountants do as well, and they can’t all be aspie. Nor can all the mathematicians, although with them you’re clearly dealing with people who are at the very least eccentric. And yes, guilty as charged. I am eccentric. But does that make me and other people who love mathematics aspie? I once met this statistics student packing groceries and probably bored to death with the monotony, was saying that he liked numbers more than people, and I agreed with him. Me too. People are scary shit. As Donald says in the movie ‘Numbers, you can count on.’

And the animal thing, OK, so I notice that I’m much more attuned to animals than people, always have been. I’m a lot like Isabelle in that respect too. So is my daughter. Is that an exclusively aspie thing? Plenty of people even boast that they love animals more than people. People who love animals and have a rapport with them might become veterinarians or work in a zoo, or in animal rights. Do they all have aspergers? 

And the endless monologues. Maybe not the best thing to do when you’re driving a cab, but when you’re giving a lecture – heck, it’s even expected. Am I the only one who doesn’t get it? Maybe he could just learn to write his monologues, get it down on paper, or blog, or word. That’s what the rest of us do, aspie or otherwise, if we have a lot to say and people don’t always have the patience to listen to us or it’s not always the best time, we write.

And taking things too literally. Well, I got a surprise for these people. Anyone who’s terrified takes things too literally and out of context. Wish those boneheads who call themselves experts would do some studies on trauma and PTSD. There were some periods in my life when I was taking things very literally. There was this one time after I’d been raped and was going through PTSD. For a while, I had such a hard time making any sense of news headlines.  

And blurt out and shock. HAH! I’m thinking I’ll make it work for me too. Some people just have big mouths. It’s their personality. I’ve known many people with big mouths. They were usually outspoken Europeans or Jews. Were they all aspie?

Lack of social skills – sounds like a lot of people in my family. In fact, sounds like most of the kids at my daughter’s school, and their parents. School staff as well. Neighbors too. You have to ask yourself why a book like ‘How to win friends and influence people’ by Dale Carnegie is a classic. Is it because the
NTs - http://isnt.autistics.org/ are all so good socially?

There was this autistic woman who was asking for help because the mother of a friend of hers had just died and she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t like it when I told her that it’s a very common problem, even among
NTs . So common in fact that I found several pamphlets on the subject at a hospital, including how to respond to someone in grief, and how to help your child deal with loss. Considering what bullies and jerks some NTs are, I think the emotional dysfunction is more a problem on their side, but that’s just, like everything else on this blog, an opinion.

I believe Mozart and the Whale is more about a bunch of people who’ve been convinced that they have some difference that deserves to be pathologized. Donald was rejected by his family at a very young age. That’s bound to have been traumatic.

But here is the thing that I believe most people miss. That how we see ourselves can be greatly influenced by how others see us, especially when we’re young, helpless and dependent. If most everyone reacts to us badly, if especially our parents rejected us, and psychiatry wants to give us some label to pathologize what they think is the reason for that social rejection, then that’s how we’ll see ourselves. It can become our identity and overpower us. The word for it is internalization, i.e. becoming the label.

If you have it in your head all the time that you’re aspie, then regardless of what happens, you’ll always see yourself or your aspergers as being to blame. The other person may have been a total jerk with you, an asshole, but you’ll blame yourself, you’re at fault because you’re the aspie with the emotional dysfunction and lack of social skills. At least that’s what psychiatry keeps telling you. Why are people so easily misled? 

watch video

http://autismdiva.blogspot.com/2007/02/more-amanda-baggs-on-cnn.html

… generally, what I tell parents is not to believe most of what they read, particularly the stuff that says we have no understanding, and no connection to our families, and no anything, and are empty shells, and stolen fairy children, or whatever. Most of that is not true.

GUPTA: Just nonsense?

BAGGS (through voice synthesizer): Yes. A lot of it is just people reading us wrong and underestimating us.

The person making the post, and many of the people commenting, are ranting about not being party animals. Hate to break the news to these guys, but I don’t think it’s exclusively an aspie problem. Wonder if they even are aspie, considering all the parties they’re being invited to that they don’t want to attend!

Think Asperger’s, along with a host of other psychiatric disorders like ADHD and PDD-NOS, are being overdiagnosed. I don’t believe Asperger’s is a lack of social skills – there are plenty of socially awkward NTs out there, nor is it not enjoying parties – do they seriously believe all NTs enjoy parties? Extroverts may enjoy parties. But then there are the introverts, the shy, the socially phobic, inhibited, or inept, the highly sensitive, the geek or nerd, who try to avoid parties whenever they can. That is, if they even get invited to any parties to begin with.

Reminds me of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland who was convinced he was mad (crazy) because his behavior was the exact opposite of a dog’s. As he said to Alice when she asked him how he knew he was mad -

‘To begin with,’ said the Cat, `a dog’s not mad. You grant that?’

`I suppose so,’ said Alice.

`Well, then,’ the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.’

`I call it purring, not growling,’ said Alice.

`Call it what you like,’ said the Cat.

The problem with the Cheshire cat wasn’t that he didn’t behave like a dog, (regardless of what his psychiatrist might have told him). His problem was that he didn’t realize he was a cat, and it’s alright to behave like a cat when you’re a cat. His problem was that his identity had more to do with not being a dog than with being a cat. In fact, he was so out of touch with being a cat, that he didn’t even know or care what purring was. (Sounds a lot like psychiatry to me!) 

Asperger’s is not a disease, they say on the site and bravo for them! But I don’t believe what they’re describing warrants  any label either, except for perhaps allowing themselves to be misled by those unfortunate souls with psychiatry disorder, psychiatrists - http://isnt.autistics.org/dsn-psy.html

 (DSN-IV – Psychotic Disorders – 669.xx Psychiatry Disorder.

A. Delusional thought patterns, consisting of at least two of the following:

• (1) Patronization    
• (2) Responsibility    
• (3) Thought Decryption    
• (4) Stereotyping - This is the belief that large numbers of very different people may be grouped into pre-defined categories of “illness.” Virtually any unusual or deviant behavior may be classified as an “illness” in this way, and then these illness may then be “treated” (i.e., the person may be made “normal,” or like the presumed mode of the populations). Often, it is assumed that what is good for one person in a certain category will be good for all or most others, and that they may be treated as all the same.    
• (5) Pseudoscientific

Oops – sacred cow! You can click the above link to read more from the brilliant satire by Jared Blackburn. This part is my favourite.

In addition, most (athough not all) psychiatrists have an impairment of receptive communication. Often, they will not listen, or fail to listen closely. They will often misinterpret statements made to them in such a way as to “prove” their preexisting delusions or to label the speaker as “sick.” Further, they are often quite literal minded, frequently taking figurative sayings or metaphors as concrete statements (thus producing a belief that the speaker is delusional and/or hallucinating). Very frequently, psychiatrists will give stereotyped responses based on a category to which the patient is believed to belong, even if though they have nothing to do with what the patient said actually said. It is uncertain whether these communication deficits are specifically related to psychiatry, or to comorbid neurotypical disorder. Clinical experience, however, suggests these communication deficits may be especially common and severe among psychiatrists.

More to come.