The LA Times brings us two great essays showing a healthy skepticism about modern ideas in psychology. The first, by Steve Salerno, who wrote "SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless" is a polemic against the self-help movement and the idea that self-esteem is the basis of good mental health.

The larger point is that society has embraced such concepts as self-esteem and confidence despite scant evidence that they facilitate positive outcomes. The work of psychologists Roy Baumeister and Martin Seligman suggests that often, high self-worth is actually a marker for negative behavior, as found in sociopaths and drug kingpins. Even in its less extreme manifestations, confidence may easily be expressed in the kind of braggadocio - "I'm fine just the way I am, thank you" - that stunts growth, yielding chronic failure.
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As top management consultant Jay Kurtz argues: "The most dangerous person in corporate America is the highly enthusiastic incompetent. He's running faster in the wrong direction, doing horribly counterproductive things with winning enthusiasm."

Sounds like a president we all know. It continues:

You cannot have a life plan predicated on the belief that everything is equally achievable to you - especially if that same message has been sold indiscriminately to all comers. In the grand scheme of things, knowing one's limitations may be even more important than knowing one's talents.

Ah, self help books. Little more than the pointless blather of charlatans selling snake oil.

The second is an attack on modern psychiatry by UCLA professor Dr. Irwin Savodnik (no he's not a Scientologist).


Pathology has replaced morality. Treatment has supplanted punishment. Imprisonment is now hospitalization. From the moral self-castigation we find in the writings of John Adams, we have been drawn to Woody Allen-style neuroses. Were the psychiatric association to scrutinize itself more deeply and reconsider its expansionist diagnostic programs, it would, hopefully, make a positive contribution to our culture by not turning the good and bad into the healthy and the sick.

The last thing the United States needs is more self-indulgent, pseudo-insightful, overly self-conscious babble about people who can't help themselves. Better, as Voltaire would put it, to cultivate our gardens and be accountable for who and what we are.

I love it, both reflect a desire of modern intellectuals to increase the foundation of the field of psychiatry with a more scientific data. By far, psychiatry lags behind all other medical fields in terms of basing treatment on the randomized double-blind clinical trial. My only disappointment with the essay is his attack on the DSM-IV as if the problem is an increased number of descriptions of mental illness. I tend to think that's a good starting point, a description of the problems afflicting people, the problem is that modern psychology seems to stop there. Once your categorized they're done with you rather than trying to figure out the pathology of the disease, or real effective methods of behavioral modification. Great reading from the LA Times though.