Showing posts with label Bandy Lee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bandy Lee. Show all posts

July 1, 2023

Changing a lie believing brain with psychology, logic, and attempts at rational persuasion may be futile: psychopathology, neuroscience, ingrained cultural metaphors

 

By Hal Brown, MSW, psychotherapist and mental health center director retired after 40 years of clinical practice.

Yesterday I praised Chauncey DeVaga for his Salon column which featured the opinions of two esteemed psychoanalysts, Justin Frank and Lance Dodes, both of whom have warned of the dangers of Trump's psychopathology for years.

If you missed the blog you can read it here: Dr. Justin Frank, author of "Trump on the Couch" gives us understatement of the decade about Trump's behavior.

I am on the email list for NeuroscienceNew.com and by coincidence was sent the article The Language of Lies: How Hate Speech Engages Our Neural Wiring to Foster Division which I found presented another perspective on what I wrote about yesterday.

The article describes the research described In the book "Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories, just released, by Marcel Danesi Ph.D., a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada. He analyzes the speeches of dictators including Mussolini, Stalin, Putin and Hitler, as well as prominent hate groups.

Here's the summary:

Researchers analyze the language of dictators and hate groups, uncovering a common use of dehumanizing metaphors to fuel hatred. Such metaphors ‘switch on’ neural pathways in the brain, bypassing higher cognitive reasoning centers and steering focus towards certain ideas.

These mental patterns can become entrenched over time, making it challenging for individuals to revise their views even in the face of contradicting evidence.

The research underscores the potential dangers posed by such language, including the escalation of violence and political instability.

Danesi's research shows that such dehumanizing metaphors are powerful "because they tap into and ‘switch on’ existing circuits in the brain that link together important and salient images and ideas. In effect, metaphors bypass higher cognitive reasoning centers, directing our thoughts to focus on certain things whilst ignoring others."

He observes that the more these brain circuits are activated the more hardwired they become. Eventually they.becomes almost impossible to turn off. This can be see with those who believe conspiracy theories. The more the therapies are reinforced the more difficult it becomes to lead these people to rethink their basis of their beliefs and realize they are wrong. 

The conclusion is far from optimistic:

What can be done?

Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from the power of lies? According to Danesi, the best thing we can do is to understand the metaphors of the other party, and to examine one’s own metaphors.

However, history and science tells us that it is unlikely to work – research shows that once a lie is accepted as believable, the brain becomes more susceptible to subsequent lying.

Those mental health professionals who are attempting to understand the entrenched and erroneous  belief systems of Trump and his hard-core supporters tend to lean toward those who employ an understanding of the way the mind functions based of Freudian, or psychoanalytic theory (the reason for my photo of Freud's couch above).

I count myself among these mental health practitioners who have been trained in psychoanalytical personality theory and either psychoanalysis for them and psychodynamic psychotherapy for me. 

A highly regarded expert explaining the behavior and beliefs of Trump and his cult  is Bobby Azarian, PhD.  He comes from the world of cognitive neuroscience. Unlike Justin Frank, Lance Dodes, John Gartner, Bandy Lee, and far less prominent mental health professionals like me, who have written about Trump's psychology from a psychodynamic perspective, Azarian writes from what I might call simplistically a brain perspective. Another way to put colloquially it is that he writes about the hard wiring of the brain.

Chauncey DeVega interviewed Bobby Azarian in 2019 here:

Racism on the brain: a neuroscientist explains how the world moved right

"The effects of fear and anger [on the brain]" may make us even more polarized, says neuroscientist Bobby Azarian

His "Psychology Today" articles related to Trump and his followers have titles and subtitles like these: 

There's a glitch on the link to his articles, here, so it is temporarily unavailable. Hopefully this will be repaired before long. You can get an idea of what he writes about from the titles and subtitles of his most recent articles related to Trump and his cult.

Bogus conspiracy theories will undoubtedly play a major role in the upcoming presidential election. The question is whether anything can be done about it.

Is the nation's collective narcissism the reason for Trump's popularity and political invincibility? A study suggests a causal link between the phenomena.

This brain quirk makes gaslighting particularly easy.

Research suggests that the president is more intuitive than analytical.

Was Donald Trump sent by God to save America? Some believe so, and that should have us worried.

President Trump’s divisive rhetoric can warp a person’s mind into believing that domestic terrorism is justifiable.

Baffled by Donald Trump's political invincibility? Here are 14 reasons why people continue to support the president despite behavior that would have sunk any other politician.

Trump Is Gaslighting America Again — Here’s How to Fight It Gaslighting refers to a type of psychological manipulation used to get people to question their direct experience of reality. It's also one of the president's favorite techniques.

The president's backers share some consistent and troubling characteristics.

My point is sharing the Neuroscience News article and referencing Bobby Azarian's insights is to emphasize how complex addressing the underlying problem of how, if not insurmountable a task it is, how massive an endeavor it is to alter these deeply held beliefs.

Addendum: There's yet a third aspect to understanding Trump and those in power like him, and the hold they have on their supporters. George Lahoff, retired Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and now Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society has written frequently about this subject and Trump in particular. He was writing about his take on "Understanding Trump" (read essay here) as early as 2016.  His focus in on the often incredible power cultural metaphors have on people. 

It is vitally important to grasp how psychodynamics, the wiring of the brain, and ingrained cultural metaphors among certain groups not only influence but shape belief systems and resulting behaviors. These phenomena are interrelated but also must be understood in their own right to gain a complete grasp of why people think and act the way they do for the betterment of society and their own selfish needs to the detriment of society as a whole.

 


June 18, 2023

Why is anybody surprised that the worse Trump's legal troubles get the more his cult loves him, gives him money, and contemplate violence?

 



By Hal Brown

Anyone who follows experts like neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, whose latest article in Raw Story is  "A neuroscientist explains why Trump extremists will grow violent as Election 2024 approaches"or read articles like  "The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists" (Scientific American 2021) knows the scientific reasons why Trump has such an iron grip on members of his cult.

Azarian explains:

Terror management theory is particularly relevant to current political events because it provides a scientific explanation for tribalism. The theory suggests that in the face of threat or fear, we bolster our worldviews, and become more ideological. We also become more tribal, which will strengthen our support for like-minded others, while at the same time making us more prone to aggression toward those who are not like us, and who do not share our worldview.

 They also know, as Azarian explains, how dangerous some of them may be:

This suggests that an atmosphere of existential fear would simultaneously promote aggression while strengthening support for Trump, who regularly projects a “strongman” image and suggests violence as a remedy to political matters. 

This is a very scary combination of psychological effects. For this reason we must be aware of this problem, which will become increasingly salient as the 2024 presidential election begins to heat up.
Azarian concludes with a plea for empathy, using our knowledge, and optimism as follows:

So, we must be empathetic during these times, but we must also be vigilant. If we stay on the current trajectory of increasing polarization, we can almost be certain that a whole new level of unrest is headed our way. Now the question is whether we have the ability to use this knowledge to avert the coming train wreck. But I’m an optimist, and I think if we can predict something ahead of time, we can figure out how to prevent it. That is precisely why science has been such a powerful force for human civilization, and it’s time we start applying that knowledge to solving the existential threat that is the culture war in America.

What puzzles me is why so many rational people are surprised, shocked even, that the more is revealed about how Trump defied the law and put national security at risk and now may face the sword of Lady Justice for what he did, the more members of his cult support him. For example:


At a subliminal level have all of these people bought into the illusion of Telfon Don, of Superman Trump, of Rambo Trump, on bulletproof Trump riding a tank into battle?

From members of the general public who zealously support him no matter what he's done or how outlandish his behavior is to members of Congress and Republicans running for president it seems as if they fall into one of two groups. The first is the group who believe he is the superhuman being he portrays himself. The more imperiled he becomes for many the more enthusiastic their support of him becomes.  The second group is composed of the politicians who are scared shitless of him and the voting block he controls. In private they may wish he'd just disappear (see Would Republicans support Trump in 2024 if he's convicted of crimes? They're split, NBC News).

Group two is afraid of group one. They are hitching their political wagons to horses that have been grazing in locoweed.









March 16, 2023

Lindsay Graham isn't a psychologist but his assessment of Trump is right on

 Lindsay Graham isn't a psychologist but his assessment of Trump is right on

By Hal Brown, MSW

Background by DonkeyHotey

This story is making the news today:

HUFFPOST article above

On the face of it this isn't surprising. The fact that Lindsay Graham,  testifying during a special grand jury investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn his defeat in Georgia, said that “if somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots, that Trump would’ve believed it," isn't really my point. Politically, Graham doesn't run for the Senate until his current term expires in 2027 so apparently he doesn't believe saying this about Trump will hurt his election chances.

Trump has turned curious critics into armchair psychologists. Until he came along the average American not familiar with psychological concepts who reads articles by and interviews with mental health professionals became familiar with several syndromes. They may have looked up malignant narcissism, dark triad, and Dunning-Kruger effect on Wikipedia when they decided that the best way to defeat one's enemy was to fully understand him. 


Do a Google image search for Trump in strait jacket and this is what comes up (click images to enlarge):

Trump was such a candidate for mockery because of his unhingedness, but the seriousness of his mental state tended to be overlooked or minimized by those who should have known better. 

When the book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" was published the editor, Yale University forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee, went to Washington, met with a dozen members of Congress, and made sure every Democrat in Congress had a copy. (See Yale psychiatrist briefed members of Congress on Trump’s mental fitness , CNN (Jan. 5, 2018)

The first mental health professional to publish an article explaining why Trump's malignant narcissism made him dangerous was the founder of Duty To Warn and who made the documentary #UNFIT clinical psychologist John Gartner in Donald Trump's malignant narcissism is toxic, USA Today, (May 4, 2017).

It wasn't merely mental health professionals who warned about Trump's dangerous psychopathy. George Conway is a prominent example: Donald Trump's Pathological Narcissism and Sociopathy Leave Him Unable to Function as a Proper President, Says George Conway, Newsweek, (10/3/19)


In 2022 it was revealed that John Kelly read "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" and came to believe he was "pathological liar whose inflated ego" was the sign of a "deeply insecure person,” according to upcoming book "The Divider." (LINK).
The first article about Trump being a narcissist by a mental health professional,  Northwestern University psychologist Dan P. McAdams, as far as I can tell, was in The Atlantic in June, 2016 I won't put a link because if you click you will use a free read unless you have a subscription. You can read a summary of the article for free here.


I wrote many articles about Trump's psychopatholgy first published on Capitol Hill Blue and then posted on Daily Kos. In Sept. 2022 I used this image of a Google search page for  Trump mentally ill in a Daily Kos posting:
Click above to enlarge


Bottom line: Trump has amply demonstrated that in addition to sharing the authoritarian and white supremacist beliefs of Ron DeSantos he is manifestly psychologically unstable. There is no way someone like him should be within 100 miles of the nuclear football.

.

Please scroll down to the comments link and let readers know what you think. Sharing on social media, also through the links below, is appreciated.

December 12, 2022

The normalizing of delusional sociopathic grandiose narcissism

 The normalizing of delusional sociopathic grandiose narcissism
By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >


Select comments may be shared here. 

I was a practicing psychotherapist for 40 years before retiring, the first 20 of those I work as the director of a small mental health center. I have posted numerous articles online about the dangerous psychopathology of Donald Trump. 

There are myriad examples of people in the news who demonstrate by their behavior, their actions and words, that they, to put it bluntly, have one or all of their hinges so loose that if they were the door on the jam it would be hanging and about to fall.

Creative Commons Flickr

I don't have to tax my brain by coming up with a list of clinically deranged people in public life. Just a look at the stories on various websites will provide many examples. A Salon article by one of my favorite columnists, Amanda Marcotte, this morning offers a list of five:

Of course these five are just losers even though Trump could actually become president again. We still have winners like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Loren Boebert who are still in the House and now that the GOP controls it have even more power.

From Elon Musk whose unhingedness knows no bounds as he just yesterday tweeted "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci, a sentiment supported by said Rep. Greene who is saying that if she was in charge of the January 6th attack on the Capitol the crowd would have been armed (something that could end her in front of a grand jury), to Ye and Herschel Walker (who I wrote about here) 

There are enough people to be analyzed for in a PhD dissertation titled "Abnormal psychology as manifest in people in public life."

In some ways it is more disturbing to know that there are so many ordinary citizens who embrace the Big Lie and the conspiracy lunacy of QAnon. There are uncountable millions people not just in this country but around the world who, if objectively assessed by mental health professionals, would be diagnosed with one or more psychiatric conditions listed in the DSM-5.
There are several hundred diagnostic categories in the DSM  and new ones are periodically added, for example:

  • Binge Eating Disorder.
  • Caffeine Withdrawal.
  • Cannabis Withdrawal.
  • Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder.
  • Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder- DMDD.
  • Hoarding Disorder.
  • Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder – PMDD.
 "According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), about one in five adults lives with a mental disorder (any mental illness in the US, and about one in 18 American adults has a serious mental illness. Some psychiatric conditions may be temporary, occur occasionally, and never return again." Reference includes entire list.

It should be obvious that most people with psychiatric disorders actually suffer, thus the term "suffering from" one or another disorder. There are other people who don't suffer themselves. They make  people in their lives including family, friends, and co-workers, suffer. Just consider the number of books about being married to a narcissist.

Of all of these the two most relevant disorders to consider when looking at the people I am writing about are what is now called antisocial personality disorder but is often referred to by the previous name, sociopathic disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. Some people meet enough of the criteria for having both and would be considered to be malignant narcissists. This diagnosis never made it into then DSM but in my opinion and the opinion of many mental health professionals including, notably, Dr. John D. Gartner, the founder of the Duty to Warn society, Donald Trump has this disorder. Gartner wrote about this in 2017:
If any single person could be described as causing an extreme and dangerous mental pathology as becoming normalized it is Donald Trump.

Gartner is, as far as I know, the only mental health professional critical of Trump to appear on Fox News. In 2017 he was on "Watters World" in an interview which, to put it mildly, did not go well. Here's the video:


Full disclosure: Dr. Gartner and I have had a relationship since the formation of his Duty to Warn society. 

Currently the media, with some notable exceptions like MSNBC which regularly has clinical psychologist Mary Trump on and others experts discussing Donald Trump, reports the behavior of Trump and people like those mentioned above as if it is normal. 

I have followed the media closely since 2017 to see whether any mainstream publications addressed the issue of public figures like Trump, Taylor-Greene, Herschel Walker by interviewing mental health experts. 

Salon stands out for having Chauncey DeVega who often publishes interviews with mental health experts like psychiatrist Lance Dodes like "Trump is a dangerous sociopath — but he's sane enough to stand trial" and Psychiatrist Bandy Lee says White House officials told her Trump was "unraveling".

Of course, Salon with its progressive slant, can't be considered mainstream the way USA Today can. As far as I have been able to tell USA Today is the only widely circulated publication to publish a story about Trump's dangerous psychopathology.

It is about time that the mainstream media, including publications that the far right fringe considers to be fake news like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have regular columnists who are mental health experts who can analyze the behavior of public figures based on their knowledge of personality.

It is about time dangerous psychopathology stops being normalized by the media. It must be called out for what it is.

You can post comments directly by clicking below.


September 27, 2022

Digby posits three reasons Trump stole the documents, I have a fourth

 

A psychological reason Trump might have stolen the top secret documents 

By Hal Brown 

Scroll down for articles that piqued my interest today





In Heather "Digby" Parton's Salon column she speculates on the following:

Why did he steal the documents? Maggie Haberman's book may hold the answer

Let's review: He's a pack rat; he hoped to sell them; he meant to use them for blackmail. Yes, yes and yes

Of course none of the reasons are mutually exclusive, but I propose a fourth possible reason:

There’’s plenty of speculation as to why Trump wanted to bring top secret documents home to Mar a Lago. I have yet to hear one that isn’t nefarious.  These include his wanting to sell them to foreign adversaries or curry favor with them, but I am posing a different reason just as consistent with his personality. If he wanted to use them to benefit himself in the former way it speaks to his being a traitorous sociopath. I suggest another possiblity. It is based on another aspect of his psychology. This is that he may have wanted to use them as trophies, either to enjoy by himself or to show off to select mucky-mucks who he wanted to impress. This speaks to his over-the-top pathological grandiose narcissism.


If he didn’t take them for evil reasons I lean towards his wanting to show them off because I don’t see Trump as the kind of wealthy person who is like the collector of illegally obtained fine art which he keeps in a vault where he enjoys just sitting by himself enjoying the work of the masters only he is able to look at.


Trump most likely knew he wasn’t allowed to take home gifts from foreign leaders to show off to his pals but figured that showing these off was no big deal (see From chess sets to model jets, foreign leaders lavish gifts on Trump White House) compared to flashing a document labeled Top Secret with the locations of our nuclear submarines on it. For example Chinese President Xi Jinping gave Trump a paper panel with five columns of calligraphy, valued at $14,400, that’s a big ho-hum.


Of course I may be totally wrong here, but then again sometimes a simple explanation is the right one. Both reasons are consistent with who we know Trump is.


My possible, emphasis on the word possible, reason is not as newsworthy as those being suggested. It doesn’t paint him as an evil traitor. In fact while it might be embarrassing to him to offer this as a defense should the case end up in court, it might be offered to exculpate him. It would be a kind of “not guilty by reason of pathological narcissism.”


On a personal note, I was friends with Biggie Munn’s daughter Jane when he was the athletic director of Michigan State University. She showed me the trophy room he had in his beautifully furnished basement. The walls of the room were lined with shelves and displays of fancy trophies which he or his teams had won dating back to when he was an All-American at the University of Minnesota through his coaching career, to when he eventually became athletic director at MSU. In one way or another he earned each and every one of them. None of them were stolen.


Articles that piqued my interest today

This article makes it sound like Bandy Lee was isolated among the community of mental health professionals. Of course there was a concerted effort to marginalized her in some quarters, but not enough media attention was given to those who agreed with her, and there were lots of us.
.
As members of the Duty to Warn society like me know, this is not true. There were thousands of therapists saying in various ways the same thing. Some made a diagnosis (John D Gartner , myself, and others, a malignant narcissist, Lance Dodes, MD, a sociopath) and some not, but all saying he was dangerous.
.
I viewed the reluctance to go public with an actual diagnosis was for some therapists as a way to avoid being accused of breaking the Goldwater Rule or subject to the criticism that one couldn't make a diagnosis without a clinical interview. It seems to be common sense that we have much more information about Trump's psychopathology than we would after a typical clinical assessment interview.
.
We also have the observations of a family member the way we might when we interview a family member in some kinds of therapy, and in Trump's case this family member, Mary Trump, is a clinical psychologist.




In the news today: How far will the Supreme Court go to promote trans ingnorance and anti-trans bigotry? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Above:  Protesters of Kentucky Senate Bill SB150, known as the Transgender Health Bill, cheer on speakers during a rally on the lawn of the ...