Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Paul Hsieh, co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM), thinks medical practitioners shouldn’t rush to diagnose climate denial as a psychological disorder.
Should Therapists Treat Climate Change Denial As A Psychological Disorder?
Paul Hsieh
Feb 26, 2019, 07:55amHow far should therapists and psychiatrists go in taking sides on controversial political issues such as climate change?
Reporter Olivia Goldhill recently described a talk by psychoanalyst Donna Orange, an adjunct professor at New York University, urging that therapists address “not just the demons of a patient’s subconscious, but the horrors of climate change.”
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Dr. Orange believes that therapists “can draw attention to the threats posed by climate change, and then challenge the mental defenses that prevent people from responding to climate change.”
I fully support the right of any medical or mental health practitioner to speak out on issues of importance to them and to advocate associated political action. I respect everyone’s right to free speech — whether or not I agree with the specific views being advocated.
However, I’m leery of medical and mental health practitioners introducing their personal politics into the treatment room. And I’m especially uneasy with the prospect that certain unpopular political views (for example, skepticism about climate change) might be labeled with psychoanalytic diagnoses such as “dissociation” or “regression.”
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Wikipedia has an excellent (and heart-breaking) list of the many historical abuses of psychiatry in countries such as China and the former Soviet Union to stifle political dissent by labeling unpopular views as “mental illness.”
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It is refreshing to be reminded that there are people out there who believe liberty is important, that in a free society people have a right to hold and express their own views, regardless of how strongly others disagree with those views.
It’s a bit disconcerting that an organisation, studying, or claiming to be expert in, the Human mind and how it works, fail to see their own reflection in this obvious psychological disorder of their own. Why do they feel they have an authority in a field of ”Science” outside of their own area of expertise? Especially one that is so complex and multi disciplinary as Climate Science, when even those heavily involved within it, have difficulty agreeing on its terms and conditions.
Yeah, and here I was, wondering how far we as a society should go in treating the psychosocial delusion of CAGW Belief. Would, for example, a series of electro-shock treatments be sufficient, or would years of intensive therapy be necessary? Perhaps both. Clearly, children who’ve known nothing else but a wrong-headed, disasterous Belief system which punishes people for simply wanting to lead a comfortable life, and in the case of poor countries, any sort of decent lifestyle will have severe anger issues once they realize they’ve been lied to.
In another vein, just how far, as a society, should we go in punishing the perpetrators of this disasterous Belif system? Tar and feathering was the usual method in bygone years, but perhaps that would be going a bit far.
Tar and feathering is very mild compairing what they want to do to us. They want us in prison or in gaschamber. They are very very evil people.
“Tar and feathering was the usual method in bygone years, but perhaps that would be going a bit far”
Not nearly far enough, Bruce.
No one has reviewed the professional bona fides of Donna Orange.
She has a PsyD. This is a “doctorate in psychology.” A “psy-dee” is different from a PhD in Clinical Psychology. And, is different from a M.D. Psychiatrist.
Of these three “terminal” level degrees, only one provides training in how to be a scientist: the ins and outs of hypothesis testing, research design, measurement, statistical analysis. As well as subject content: human psychology, normal and abnormal. That is the PhD. PhD trains a researcher/practitioner.
A “psy-dee” is a doctoral level degree that is an alternative to the PhD. PsyD trains practitioners, not researcher/practitioners. A PsyD gets trained enough in research stuff to be fairly OK at basic understanding of research principles used in the supposed development of evidence-based mental health care. Generally, a PsyD is not very strong at giving a critique of a peer-reviewed psychology article, such as one testing effectiveness of some intervention, or validating some new measure, or validating the existence of some new concept.
By time a PsyD completes their “dissertation study,” and gets enough clinical hours to get their state license, and so be set for professional practice forever, they have largely forgotten all of the sciency stuff they had to learn along the way.
This is often the case for PhD psychologists who complete the degree and go into clinical practice. But at least a PhD psychologist received a full training as a scientist / researcher.
So, Donna Orange by training does not know how to use research / science principles to empirically investigate whether “deniers” might have a mental problem.
As a PsyD, she most likely did not learn “psychoanalysis.” she has done advanced, specific training in psychoanalysis, and has a respectable certificate in this. This is the normal way to become trained in ‘psychoanalysis.’ But in her essay, she is loosely using psychoanalytic constructs such as “regression” and “dissociation.” The characteristics that would show that either of these two , of the many, defense mechanisms, were being employed by a person are far from being demonstrated.
Besides that weak case that there is some unhealthy use of defense mechanisms to ignore or avoid facing the supposed reality of “climate change,” the most fitting defense mechanism, if all of this were true, would be “psychotic denial.”
If she were presenting a case in a case conference, to her psychoanalytic peers, her nomination of “dissociation” and “regression” would politely be undercut, and someone would note this likeliness of “psychotic denial.”
As it is she is just slinging around words as part of the ongoing multi-prong cultural attack from the Ivory Tower Totalitarians who believe they know better than the rest of us, and are offended that we don’t just shut up and submit to the rule of our totalitarian overlords because “science.”
Finally, she has a PhD in Philosophy. Philosophy, specifically, “epistemology,” undergirds all of science. Or, should. Each aspect of science, research design, hypothesis testing, measurement, probability analysis / estimation, modeling, etc., has an underlying philosophy regarding how numbers gathered from measuring phenomena in the real world, inserted into a data matrix, and analyzed in one way or another, with resulting output, informs us about the real world.
If – big if – her focus in her Philosophy PhD were on “empiricism,” then we might feel like we really had a strong scholar on the case.
Her dissertations (PsyD, PhD in Phil) are not focused on “science.” Her focus seems to be on emotionality, subjectivity, post-modernism, subjective perspectives, and such. So, it seems that she is just the type of post-modern, relativism-focused “scientist” where grounding in the real world does not matter that much.
What might a “psychoanalyst” bring to this discussion? The discussion of how people can believe things in the face of strong contrary evidence? Psychologists, including clinical and social, have a long, strong track record in this area.
After the Holocaust was exposed, the world was shocked, but also puzzled. How could so many go along with such evil? How in their minds did they live their day-to-day lives in knowledge of this horror? Or, how was such evil sold to the population as something good?
This spurred a great movement of profound investigation and great discovery.
We got Stanley Milgram’s exploration of “Obedience to Authority.”
We got Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment.”
We got Solomon Asch’s Conformity” experiments.
we got Festinger’s concept of “Cognitive Dissonance.”
We got Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion.”
And more.
To get up to speed quickly, get an old, inexpensive copy of Aronson’s “The Social Animal.” You will see that psychologists have used “science” to understand and inform how something like Hilter’s Holocaust could happen.
This used to be common fare for undergrads, obtained in your psychology or sociology class. Not any more.
Nowadays, all of that scientificness has been hijacked for political ends. They are hiding their political motives in “science” so that the average guy supposes they are “right.”
They are not following principles of science, and they are not interested in science. It is all about power.
This is like “religion:” when you get caught up in the ritual and recipe, you lose sight of God, and the love, guidance, and expectations he has for you.
Despite the alphabet soup of credentials, this woman could not explain to you how her propaganda is or is not in lines with what any old school professor of epistemology would recognize.
Oh – link to her CV:
https://sites.google.com/site/donnamorange/curriculum-vitae
Nice post, thanks.
Wow . . . I was really, really, really worried over the exact psychological issue that this article discusses. Now I can sleep a bit easier. Thanks!
Hmm – my experience is pretty much the opposite. I remember somewhat vividly when I was about 10-12 years old, being terrified of global cooling and the coming ice age. Once that farce was better understood and resolved, my threshold for any widespread pronouncements about (man-made) disasters increased dramatically. I’d say that was when my skepticism towards all things environmental was born.
Just tell us the number you are looking for to pay for major infrastructure and social spending agendas. Wouldn’t that be a lot easier than wrecking professions and attacking straw men? Let’s coexist.
Have a seat on the couch and let’s talk about it.
This is a very interesting article to me personally. My wife just returned from a visit to her family where she learned that her little sister wants to follow in the footsteps of the likes of John Cook, researching the connections between people’s mental state/politics and their refusal to accept the general consensus on climate change. I have been a skeptic since 2009 (a believer before that) and my wife holds degrees in both biology and geology so she is naturally also a skeptic.
It was laughable and yet somewhat scary to think that her little sister would be researching our “cognitive dissonance” on CAGW. Apparently researching all of the facts to form our own opinion doesn’t count as a valid reason to her.