Hildegarde

I don’t usually sign in on Mondays, but there were a couple of things overnight, and I’ve got just a few minutes.

1)Lymaree’s problem can be solved if we stop thinking in modern ideas of “sexual orientation” as a singular sort of thing. 

To the extent that any sexual orientation is hardwired, any such orientation that produced no children would fade out if practiced exclusively.

But there’s no reason to believe that most people at most times ever practiced one and only one form of sexuality exclusively–homosexuality in classic Greece, for instance, was almost never practiced exclusively.  You had one sort of sexual relationship with your partner in battle, and another with your wife.

What’s more, to assume that the gold standard for what is sexually “normal” is to whether or not it can at least theoretically produce natural children is to go back to a very old standard of normality indeed, and completely undercuts most arguments for full civil rights for gay people.

I don’t understand why one has to class any form of sexuality as a “disorder.”   Things don’t have to be psychologically diseased to be bad for us.  What is natural is not necessarily good.  Arsenic is natural.  It will still kill you.

The attraction of older men to young girls and young girls to older men is perfectly natural, but there are good reasons why so many societies have worked overtime to discourage and control it–and better reasons for us to do so, living in a world where women are expected to take their places beside men in the professions.

2) I do know that there have been attempts made to reign in the depredations of “expert testimony,” but they don’t go nearly far enough.

My problem is not that some particular clinical psychologist has an abysmal track record at predicting recidivism rates, it’s that all of clinical psychology does.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which psychological “experts” are embedded into our legal system.  Their pronouncements are the basis for policy not only in criminal courts and on parole boards, but in social services of all kinds. 

And their track record is abysmal on a lot more than recidivism rates.

The book I recommended–Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology–has a long article on the anatomical dolls debacle.

For those of you who don’t know it:  for a long time, one of the methods used to “prove” that child sexual abuse had occurred was to give the child an anatomically correct doll and see what she did with it.  If she pulled at the genitals or otherwise inspected them–well, there it was.  She must have been sexually molested.  No normal child would do that.

This “evidence” was then brought in to court to prove that molestation had occurred, even when the child herself denied it.

In fact, the denial was another “proof” of molestation–the expert advice was that children never lie when they say they have been abused, but will often lie when they have been because they’re ashamed to tell anybody. 

It was a perfect example of circular reasoning–if the child said abuse happened, it happened, because we must believe the children.  If the child said abuse didn’t happen, it happened, because saying it didn’t happen was really a cry for help and a way of saying it did. 

The anatomically correct doll test was done over and over again and never failed to confirm abuse–and it send dozens of people to jail, ruined hundreds of lives, tore families apart.

The problem was this:  nobody had ever checked to see what a normal, unabused child would do with such dolls.

When people started checking, it turned out that all children of a certain age grabbed at the genitals.  And unless you wanted to claim that all children everywhere had been sexually abused, then pulling at the genitals proved nothing but that the child was a child.

What I want is to delegitimize clinical psychologists as experts in all settings, not just in court testimony.  We should not be making public policy on the basis of “research” that is not only not science, but is often barely voodoo.  We should not be allowing teachers to classify children on that basis, or social workers to classify families, or courts to demand a stint in rehab to addicts.

When the profession gets its act together we can revisit the field to see if it should be installed in government operations, but until then–no.

3) For what it’s worth, in the short run, the medications we give to children diagnosed with ADD and ADHD always work.

They increase concentration and the ability to focus in everybody. 

That’s why parents in upscale neighborhoods often go out of their way to get their children diagnosed–and why a thriving black market in Ritalin exists in every upper middle class suburb in America. 

In my experience, though, what parents are actually looking for is a way out of what has become a terrifying maw of competitiveness.

It’s not 1950 any more.  The difference between graduating from college and not graduating from college is enormous.  Consider the fact that during the last three years, unemployment among college graduates has stayed fairly level at between 4.5% and 6%, but unemployment among people with only a high school diploma has been over 12%.

Granted, the plumbers and the electricians are doing fine, but most people with only a high school diploma won’t be plumbers and electricians.

A middle class parent faced with the fact that one of her offspring is…what shall we call it?–not academically talented can find herself in a real state of crisis. 

Not to be able to get into a “good” university means a dismal prospect for employment for the rest of your life–and the dismalness is worse the higher the parents’ own educational attainment and career success.

In some places on the Connecticut Gold Coast, getting into “only” Bucknell or Vanderbilt is failure.   It’s the Ivies, the Seven Sisters or the Little Three, or you might as well write off your entire life.

Yes, I know.  It’s silly.  But the worry about kids who can’t compete in academics being unable to compete in the job market is not, and parents do what they have to do to get their children what is necessary to succeed in life.

Connecticut was the most highly medicated state not just because the schools pushed it–although they did–but because the parents did, convinced that doing so would give their children an advantage in the race towards college admissions.

4) But here’s the thing:  as nuts as this sort of thing makes me, I’d consider it absolutely none of my business if it weren’t for the fact that it was never a matter of individual choice.

The entire mindset has become entrenched and established as “science” in schools and elsewhere, and that means that anybody who dissents from the orthodoxy is likely to be hit with reprisals, and the reprisals have teeth.

Parents who refused to allow their children to be medicated for ADD and ADHD were, in Connecticut, often threatened with being reported to CPS for “neglect,” since “obviously” they weren’t getting their children the “medical help” they needed.

Others found principles and guidance counselors who refused to provide recommendations for private school and college admissions.

All the families found their children’s records littered with the “conclusions” of “experts,” thereby affecting everything the kid did as long as he stayed in school.

And, like I said, we have absolutely no material evidence that ADD and ADHD actually exist.

5) Clinical psychology as it is now practiced consists mostly of an attempt to create and impose social  norms from above, and to police behavior based on a standard of “normal” that’s actually a standard of perfection.

And now I have to go off and have a sensible dayl.