Book Review: The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal

 

As someone who has been a critic of many of the excesses and science fiction currently present in clinical psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, I have often been frustrated by how little attention has been paid in these professions to the problems that I bring up. Yeah, I know, awwww, poor me, people won’t listen to me. But aside from my narcissistic injury, a lot of patients are receiving substandard care due to the alignment of the forces described in the masthead of my blog.

This excellent and entertaining book by Singal tackles similar issues that have recently been plaguing experimental and social psychology. For those who don’t know, the field of academic psychology is actually two separate fields: clinical psychology, which deals with psychotherapy and other treatments for people with psychological problems, and experimental psychology, which studies both normal and abnormal psychology from an academic perspective. Interestingly, these two branches of the academic discipline are often very critical of each other, and members often refuse to communicate with one another.

Singal’s focus is on what he clearly shows is an explosion of overly-simplified ideas about how to change widespread social behavior, which have been widely taken up by politicians, corporations and the media and praised in TED talks, but which are often backed by very weak and inconsistent evidence that was obtained by highly suspect means and invalid experimental designs. 

Unfortunately, quick fixes have a strong appeal to human beings who are often averse to complicated formulations that look at the wide variety of different influences on human beings that results in their overall behavioral tendencies.

He tackles such widely-believed ideas as the importance of self esteem, fear of so-called “super-predators,” and the belief that societal forces like sexism and racism can be defeated by victims who act as if they were powerful, have grit, or think positively. He looks at notions of “implicit bias” that corporations have been using to train their employees to make themselves feel better about decreasing racism and sexism in their midst—without actually doing anything about the explicit biases which are really at the heart of the problem. Let’s focus on repairing individuals without any reference to the collective forces with which they are faced! Gee, sounds a lot like my criticism of the current treatment of patients with personality disorders.

He brings up, often in very humorous ways,  frequently ignored issues that are widespread in psychological research such as self-report bias, third variables that aren’t even considered, the fundamental attribution error (familiar to my readers), the file drawer effect (studies which come out negative are not reported so that the number of positive studies is misleading), the questionable use of p values, overgeneralizing by ignoring the context in which a research project was done, range restriction in statistics, the “jangle” fallacy (calling the same phenomenon by different names),  social desirability considerations in subject self-report, hypothesizing after results are known to explain away seemingly contradictory results (“HARKing”), the lack of replication in findings, and “bullet point” bias (oversimplification of complex situations).

Wow! Highly recommended.

Creativity and Self-Actualization

One of the themes of this blog concerns the forces that interfere with the ability of people to self-actualize, or express themselves and their opinions, and act on their own personal desires, even when their kin or social group may not always be supportive. Self-actualized people do not always follow in groupthink patterns during which they will go along to get along, agreeing with the family or ethnic groups ideas and philosophies while remaining willfully blind to any information that contradicts the group mythology.

 

Although she did not put it in those terms exactly, the question of whether the ability to do this is an important contribution to creativity in the arts and sciences was addressed by Nancy C. Andreasen, a well known psychiatry professor at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and the former editor in chief of The American Journal of Psychiatry, in an article entitled Secrets of the Creative Brain in the July/August 2014 issue of the Atlantic magazine. 

 

She describes a study she has been doing with a lot of creative people, many of whom are celebrities. In the article, she first discusses the often purported relationship between genius and madness, and found that there is indeed some truth to the idea that there is some. The incidence of mental illnesses in her subjects and their family members is indeed higher than expected. Although some of it may involve heredity, as evidenced by the incidence of schizophrenia, most of the psychiatric disorders found in her sample were those that primarily involve interpersonal dysfunction: certain mood and anxiety disorders and alcoholism.

 

Why might that be? Her answer speaks to my speculation about the role of self-actualization in creative people:  

 

“One possible contributory factor is a personality style shared by many of my creative subjects. These subjects are adventuresome and exploratory. They take risks. Particularly in science, the best work tends to occur in new frontiers. (As a popular saying among scientists goes: “When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.”) They have to confront doubt and rejection. And yet they have to persist in spite of that, because they believe strongly in the value of what they do. This can lead to psychic pain, which may manifest itself as depression or anxiety, or lead people to attempt to reduce their discomfort by turning to pain relievers such as alcohol.”

To be innovative in one’s field involves the ability to persist in letting one’s mind work in the face of scorn and rejection from one’s peers. Even though it does hurt, innovators didn’t let rejection of publications or grant application stop them from continuing. They also had the wherewithal to be proven wrong at times and yet not be discouraged from continuing to search widely for better answers to technical questions.

 

Creative genius also involved the willingness to teach oneself about a wide variety of subjects rather than be spoon fed by teachers only in one’s chosen field of endeavor. Andreasen noted that many of her subjects were what she referred to as autodidacts – basically self-taught. Many had gotten in trouble with their school teachers for pointing out times when the teacher said something that was not true. She also found that many of her subjects were “polymaths” – people who read widely not only in their chosen area of expertise but in many subjects, both in the sciences and the humanities.

This sounds like self-actualization to me.