Bernards Voices

Ryan Szuch found this article for us:

Bridgewater teen recognized for work bringing mental-health issues to forefront.

Caitlin Carey is committed to discussing her mental-health issues and providing a resource for others to fight their stigma.

Carey, 17, of Bridgewater is the creator of http://stepoutofthesilence.org, a forum for teenagers with any kind of mental-heath issues. Her efforts are one reason why Caitlyn will be honored Dec. 8 as the Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the Somerset County Business Partnership Awards ceremony.

Psychopathy is not my favorite subject.  But I find myself reading a cross section of articles on mental health, and letting the ideas pollinate across the various subjects.  In this article I do sense distance between the author John Seabrook and the researchers, Dr. Kiehl and his mentor Dr. Hare.  For example when Seabrook was interviewing Dr. Hare, he commented, “Hare was friendly but wary of me.”  I share that sense of distance with the author.  I know the subject is important, but I’m not sure I want to get too close to it.

I’ve excerpted some quotes below just to give a bit of the background on Hare and Kiehl.

At thirty-eight, Kiehl is one of the world’s leading younger investigators in psychopathy, the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population.

In order to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths among the Western volunteers, Kiehl and his students use the revised version of the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R, a twenty-item diagnostic instrument created by Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist, based on his long experience in working with psychopaths in prisons. Kiehl was taught to use the checklist by Hare himself, under whom he earned his doctorate, at the University of British Columbia.

Today, Kiehl and Hare have a complementary but complicated relationship. Kiehl claims Hare as a mentor, and sees his own work as validating Hare’s checklist, by advancing a neurological mechanism for psychopathy. Hare is less gung ho about using fMRI as a diagnostic tool. “Some claim, in a sense, this is the new phrenology,” Hare said, referring to the discredited nineteenth-century practice of reading the bumps on people’s heads, “only this time the bumps are on the inside.” (Hare himself is a “strong proponent” of brain-imaging technology, but he noted that scans in isolation will always be insufficient.) Hare sees himself as a generalist, and Kiehl as “more of a data-driven guy.” Hare added that, while Kiehl’s brashness sometimes puts people off, “that’s why Kent gets things done.

And it was this paragraph below, that made me want to excerpt the article for this blog.  It illustrates much of the misinformation out there which we have to deal with regarding mental health awareness.  And this misinformation or distortion (I’m searching for the right word … casualness?) is coming straight from the mouth of Dr. Kiehl, a PHD, doing fundamental research, an expert in the field.  1. The DSM definitions are subjective, cover a broad, continuous range of symptoms, and are mutable.  You cannot take a blood test and get a definitive diagnosis.  When Dr. Kiehl says “so much” it almost implies too much.  2. He mentions the famous drug companies that fund research, and profit from treatment.  Quotes like this make the general public suspicious of what is happening.  When you read commentary in the MSM you always run into this.  3.  The categorization of the disorder is influenced on whether it treatable or not.  (I have added the blue for emphasis.)

If a biological basis for psychopathy could be established and pharmacological treatments developed, the idea that many people have at least a little of the psychopath in them could well become accepted. As Kiehl points out, “It used to be the case that it was very hard to meet clinical criteria for depression in the fifties and sixties. However, the definition of depression has been broadened so much with DSM-IV that nearly every person will meet the criteria at some point in their lives. One reason for this is that drug companies have lobbied to change the criteria—because they have a treatment, a drug, that can help people even with moderate levels of depression. It’s a completely different issue whether this is appropriate.” He added that “even moderate levels of psychopathy may someday be considered a disorder—especially if we can treat it.”

Your brooding teen: Just moody or mentally ill?
First signs of mental illness often occur during a time of typical teen turmoil

Half of all serious adult psychiatric illnesses start before the age of 14, experts say. But mental illness can mask itself as typical teen turmoil.

Continue article.

About Half of College-Aged Had Psychiatric Disorders (Update1)

By Elizabeth Lopatto

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — Almost half of college-aged adults had a psychiatric disorder over a one-year span, based on research criteria that ranged from bipolar disease to substance abuse including smoking. Few sought treatment, the study found.

Continue article.

Fewer than 25 percent of college-age suffers get treatment, study finds

CHICAGO – Almost one in five young American adults has a personality disorder that interferes with everyday life, and even more abuse alcohol or drugs, researchers reported Monday in the most extensive study of its kind.

Read full article at MSNBC