VOODOO PSYCHIATRY -- THE AMERICAN DISEASE -- ANOTHER VIEW!

VOODOO PSYCHIATRY – THE AMERICAN DISEASE – ANOTHER VIEW!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 28, 2011

REFERENCE:

Many have written confirming Dr. Angell’s view, but this is a moving exception.  I share it with you with that in mind.

*     *     *

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

I read your piece carefully.  Although I can agree to some extent with this narrative, I do have a different viewpoint on psychiatric medications. 

My mother was severely schizophrenic until I was 12.  She was finally Baker Acted (or taken into care).

My life was so bad that I have very few memories of my childhood until I was 13.  What I remember was rage - knives being waved at me, pots thrown through windows, furniture thrown around the room, and more. 

These memories have only started surfacing since I undertook therapy in 2007.  Before that time my life, as a child was totally nonexistent - my brother has confirmed my memories so they are accurate.  He was six years older than I was, and able to get on his bike and ride away, leaving me home alone. 

I take several psychiatric medications to treat severe anxiety and depression that have been with me all of my life. I am happy now, despite my illness.  I can laugh about the disease, but not about mental conditions. 

They are all too real and the drugs really do work. It took my psychiatrist (who also does therapy and is not just a "pill" doctor like most psychiatrists today) many long months to balance me out with the combination that works for me and keeps me on an even keel. 

That I functioned at all during those years prior to 2007 is a testament to my willpower to succeed at whatever I undertook.  There was not a day that on the way home after I left work until that time (and all throughout my life) that I did not want to kill myself. I no longer feel that way. 

I enjoy my life. I enjoy it more than ever I thought I could.  The birds, the ocean, the butterflies, friends, and music - everything about life is good now.  I appreciate every second.  I just wanted to share this viewpoint to balance out the thought that psychiatric drugs are quackery (no, you did not say that), but I felt it might have been implied.

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you for your candor and this moving account.  It is testimony to what a caring, patient and dedicated psychiatrist can do for one scarred by life during his most vulnerable innocence. 

You are correct.  I have had no intentions of suggesting that psychiatrists are quacks.  They are trained and licensed physicians after a long and demanding preparatory career. 

The problem is not with individual psychiatrists many of whom might compare with your experience, but with the collaborative system between the American Psychiatric Association and the pharmaceutical industry, which is well documented in this piece. 

Moreover, I do register concern when the DSM, the psychiatric manual of treatment, more resembles a cookbook than a weighted scientific instrument for diagnosis and treatment.

You have had an outstanding and productive professional life, and clearly psychiatry has played an important role in that success.  My hope is that many others share your experience, as we are all fragile, all vulnerable to conditions that you have described, but not all with the courage or the good fortune that you have shared here.  Thank you.  May the beauty of nature continue to bless you with its warmth.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

INVEIGHING AS I GO -- NUMBER FOUR

 INVEIGHING AS I GO – NUMBER FOUR

VOODOO PSYCHIATRY – THE AMERICAN DISEASE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 28, 2011

REFERENCE:

Should you examine my books, articles and missives, you would see I have been suspect of psychiatry.  It is prominent in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).  We have come to treat our neuroses like favorite relatives. 

My writing emanates from experience and observation.  I was a spirited boy, often in trouble for the inclination.  An episode IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) illustrates how the good Sisters of St. Francis at St. Patrick Catholic School handled it without drugs, or psychiatric intervention, but with understanding care. 

Later, as an adult and professional in the complex organization, it was suggested that I see a psychiatrist after presenting a paper at a conference on what a sham employee involvement was (Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View, 1984).  A few years later, I wrote a prophetic book that hasn’t lost its relevance (WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS 1990).  One reviewer saw it as “angry,” while another thought I should seek psychiatric help.  We are uncomfortable with naysayers.

A trained observer, I have watched voodoo management sink organizations into quicksand with the temerity to point this out.  Now I see voodoo psychiatry copying management's playbook.  Look anywhere as you see the Ritalin Generation of children confined to the lethargic prison of pharmaceuticals.  I have seen my own relatives bounce off the walls triggered by a confection of drugs prescribed by psychiatrists partnering with pharmaceutical companies.  The "Prozac Promise" of the good life has instead produced a generation of walking zombies.    

I should mention that I am an industrial psychologist, not an MD, or a psychiatrist.  I have read widely on mental illness and share views similar to those of anti-psychiatrist Thomas S. Szasz.  Szasz sees mental illness largely as a myth, but he is outside the mainstream of psychiatry, and not taken seriously.  That is changing. 

What follows are highlights of a two-part essay published by Dr. Marcia Angell that appeared in THE NEW YORK REVIEW (June 23 and July 14, 2011).  Dr. Angell is Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine

When I quote her from this piece, her words will appear in italics.

*     *     *

IATROGENIC “COOKBOOK” MEDICINE, OR WHEN THE TREATMENT IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE

Dr. Marcia Angell ends this two-part article with this:

Above all, we should remember the time-honored medical dictum: first, do no harm (primum non nocere). 

It is too late.  Psychiatry has done enormous harm.  The practice of psychiatry is iatrogenic, the cure is worse than the disease. 

The insanity of the times is that anyone who steps outside of what is considered the norm are labeled, if not with a disease with some idiosyncratic designation. 

Thanks to the literary ingenuity of psychiatry, we have a whole new vocabulary for mental illness.  Like self-fulfilling prophecy, it has taken on the dimensions of an epidemic. 

The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007.  For children, the rise is even more startling – a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades.  Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children.

Years ago, a random sample of New Yorkers was taken and the majority were found to suffer from schizophrenia, yet they managed to keep the city going.  More recently, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) conducted a statistical relevant random survey of adults between 2001 and 2003 and found 46 percent met criteria for being mentally ill. 

A chapter in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) is titled “The United States of Anxiety.”  Psychobabble, at the time, was leavened with Beavis and Butt-Head cartoons and jokes.  Freeze frame that time and you might think you were in a time warp.

Common speech has become so laced with psychiatric terms that people sound like therapists: “Oh, he has an anxiety disorder for sure,” or "I understand he’s suffering from PTSD from taking so many finals at once,” or “Well, you know her son is ADHD, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the daughter is, too,” “Have you noticed how she drifted into depression after the miscarriage?  She is clearly bipolar if you ask me,” or “I don’t like to work with him.  He has a mood disorder for sure,” or “I know she can’t help herself.  She shops until she drops, clearly suffers an impulse-control disorder,” or "I hate to say it but her boy seems autistic.” 

Seemingly, everyone is happy to discuss the regiment of drugs they are taking.  Medications are conversation pieces if not for themselves surely for their mates and children.

It has happened with the emotional shift from Freud’s talking therapy to the new science of the brain holding the answers to mental health.  Psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies have discovered a bonanza with people's mind-body chemistry while operating mainly in the dark. 

It is fascinating to contemplate the brain with its billions of nerve cells arrayed in complex networks and communicating apparatuses holding the boilerplate to human behavior.  It takes us off the hook, and puts voodoo psychiatry and acquisitive pharmacology in charge.  Unfortunately, this does not compute with reality:

Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.  However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function abnormally.

Angel asks:

If psychoactive drugs are useless, or worse than useless, why are they so widely prescribed by psychiatrists and regarded by the public and the profession as something akin to wonder drugs? 

She takes that up in the second part of her essay.

*     *     *

AMERICAN PSYCHIATRY FROM “BRAINLESSNESS” TO “MINDLESSNESS”

This was the conclusion of Dr. Leon Eisenberg of Harvard Medical School after studying the effects of stimulants on attention deficit disorder in children. 

When Freudian psychology faded with the view that mental illness had its roots in unconscious conflicts, usually originating in children, a vital touchstone to human experience was lost.  Angell writes:

Psychiatrists began to refer to themselves as psychopharmacologists, and they had less and less interest in exploring the life stories of their patients.  Their main concern was to eliminate or reduce symptoms by treating sufferers with drugs that would alter brain function. 

Eisenberg became an outspoken critic of what he saw as the indiscriminate use of psychoactive drugs, driven largely by the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry.

Psychiatry, once free of the talking cure mystique, gravitated to cookbook medicine.  Angell writes:

To do that, each diagnosis was defined by a list of symptoms with numerical thresholds.  For example, having at least five of nine particular symptoms got you a full-fledged diagnosis of a major depressive episode within the broad category of “mood disorders.”  But there was another goal – to justify the use of psychoactive drugs.

This medical cookbook is known as the DIAGNOSTIC AND STATISTICAL MANUAL OF MENTAL DISORDERS (DSM).  It is dedicated to “reliability,” but as Angell says:

If nearly all physicians agree that freckles were a sign of cancer, the diagnosis would be “reliable,” but not valid.

George Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School wrote that the DSM-III represented “a bold series of choices based on guess, taste, prejudice, and hope.”

The pharmaceutical industry is like all other American industries, more interested in what is legal as opposed to ethical, and what will sell and how best to find that market.  Angell writes:

 As psychiatry became a drug-intensive specialty, the pharmaceutical industry was quick to see the advantages of forming an alliance with the psychiatric profession.

Drug companies began to lavish attention and largesse on psychiatrists, both individually and collectively, directly and indirectly.  They showered gifts and free samples on practicing psychiatrists, hired them as consultants, and speakers, bought them meals, helped pay for them to attend conferences, and supplied them with “educational” materials.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t stop there.  Eli Lilly gave $551,000 to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, $465,000 to the National Mental Health Association, $130,000 to CHADD (an ADHD patient advocacy group), and $69,250 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  These totals are only for three months.

Eli Lilly is not alone in this deceptive marketing strategy.  Yes, it heightens awareness of psychiatric disorders, but is even a more effective and less intrusive way to promote the use of psychoactive drugs.

The problem with cookbook medicine, besides being dangerous, is that it is self-perpetuating.  Dr. Daniel Carlat writes:

Patients often view psychiatrists as wizards of nerurotransmitters who can choose just the right medication for whatever chemical imbalance is at play.  This exaggerated conception of our capabilities has been encouraged by drug companies, by psychiatrists ourselves, and by our patients’ understandable hopes for cures.

The cookbook medicine of matching symptoms to drugs, he writes, provides “the illusion that we understand our patients when all we are doing is assigning them labels."  He then goes on to say: "A typical patient might be taking Celexa for depression, Ativan for anxiety, Ambien for insomnia, Provigil for fatigue (a side effect of Celexa) and Viagra for impotence (another side effect of Celexa)."

He (Carlat) doesn’t believe there is much basis for choosing among them.  “To a remarkable degree, our choice of medications is subjective, even random.  Perhaps your psychiatrist is in a Lexapro mood this morning, because he was just visited by an attractive Lexapro drug rep.”  And he sums up: "Such is modern psychopharmacology."

Most incredible still, when a patient does respond well to medication, Dr. Irving Kirsch suggests what they are really responding to could be an activated placebo effect.

*     *     *

THE PLIGHT OF THOSE MOST VULNERABLE

THE CHILDREN

I suppose you could say the reason I’ve been up all night creating this missive from Dr. Angell’s essay is that the most vulnerable to this cookbook medicine are children and the poor. 

Angell writes:

What should be of greatest concern for Americans is the astonishing rise in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in children, sometimes as young as two years old. 

These children are often treated with drugs that were never approved by the FDA for use in this age group and have serious side effects. 

The apparent prevalence of “juvenile bipolar disorder” jumped forty-fold between 1993 and 2004, and that of “autism” increased from one in five hundred children to one in ninety over the same decade.  Ten percent of ten-year-old boys now take daily stimulants for ADHD – “attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder” – 500,000 children take antipsychotic drugs.

There seem to be fashions in childhood psychiatric diagnoses, with one disorder giving way to the next.  At first, ADHD manifested by hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity usually in school-age children, was the fastest growing diagnosis.  But in the 1990s, two highly influential psychiatrists at the Massachusetts General Hospital proposed that many children with ADHD really had bipolar disorder that could sometimes be diagnosed as early as infancy.

They proposed that the manic episodes characteristic of bipolar disorder in adults might be manifested in children as irritability. That gave rise to the flood of diagnoses of juvenile bipolar disorder.  Thus these psychiatrists created a new monster.

*     *     *

THE POOR

Whether such children are labeled as having a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs depends a lot on who they are and the pressures their parents face.  As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive.  It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually assures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid.

Rutgers University study found that children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. 

In December 2006, a four-year-old child named Rebecca Riley died in a small town near Boston from a combination of Clonidine and Depakote, which she had been prescribed along with Seroquel, to treat ADHD and “bipolar disorder" – diagnoses she received when she was two years old. 

Clonidine was approved by the FDA for treating high blood pressure. 

Depakote was approved for treating epilepsy and acute mania in bipolar disorder.

Seroquel was approved for treating schizophrenia and acute mania. 

None of the three was approved to treat ADHD or for long-term use in bipolar disorder, and none was approved for children Rebecca’s age.  Rebecca’s two older siblings had been given the same diagnoses and were each taking three psychoactive drugs . . . The family’s total income from SSI was about $30,000 per year. 

Dr. Angell concludes this most sobering piece with this: At the very least, we need to stop thinking of psychoactive drugs as the best, and often the only, treatment for mental illness, or emotional distress.  Amen! 

*     *     *

RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD -- NUMBER TWO

RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD – NUMBER TWO

THE WISDOM OF DEAD AUTHORS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 24, 2011

It is usual in a series of exploratory missives to start with definitions of terms.  Many far more astute than I am have speculated on the nature of being human, including acting responsibly.  Therefore, I plan to allow them to define my premise as I go forward. 

Let us assume early man was aware he differed with other animals sensing his inferiority physically, but superiority mentally.  Let us assume further that he however felt a spiritual identity and connection with these animals and nature for his survival.  Given this, it seems strange he would look on them as the enemy:  

Every living thing shall be meat for you.  The fear of you and dread of you shall b e upon every beast of the earth.  Into your hands they are delivered.  Have dominion over the earth and subdue it (Genesis, The Bible).

It would seem that we have allowed our minds to override our instinctual wisdom that recognizes we are a part of what we would dominate and subdue, a stratagem for conflict if not disaster.  The conflict takes root in fear and security, as our brains war with our bodies.  The brain desires food and pleasure, comfort and possessions beyond what the body needs.  Want takes precedence over need.  The brain gives the body directions it will not follow, while the body gives the brain impulses it does not understand.  This is the double bind that gets so many people of otherwise solid character problems in personal integrity, security, contentment, anxiety and social inclusion.

SAMUEL WARNER AND GREGORY BATESON

It prompted Samuel Warner to write SELF REALIZATION AND SELF DEFEAT (1966) profiling the war we fight constantly between the adult and child in all our natures.  Gregory Bateson followed this with STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND (1972):

A double bind is a situation in which we, as individuals, feel we are receiving contradictory messages from a highly significant person, usually an authority figure, which result in our inconsistent and sometimes disruptive behavior.

This intra war (between brain and body) and inter war (between authority giver and receiver) represent part of the contradiction of our Western origins.

Science in the modern era is attempting to erase this double bind with research into neurobiology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and research into the Genome and DNA.  The ape of the animal kingdom is genetically nearly identical to man except for man’s prehensile grip and facile mind.

Indeed, we find animals communicate verbally and nonverbally.  They think.  They sense danger and act intuitively and instinctively. A lioness kills a zebra, and is staking out her kill, only to be surrounded by a pack of hungry hyenas four levels deep.  She assesses the situation and retreats to consider her options before launching a counterattack or moving on.  Her action is predicated on surviving to preserve her pride.  Much of what we know about ourselves has been discovered in studying such behavior.

KONRAD LORENZ

Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz (1903 – 1989) studied the animal kingdom all his life, assessing the culture of living systems from amoebae to humans.  In ON AGGRESSION (1963), he traced the physiological mechanism that directs behavior and thought processes, their evolution, function, and malfunction. 

The emphasis of his inquiry was on the development of modern man and his alarming propensity for self-destruction, and destruction of his own kind, as well as his environment.  No system in the animal kingdom with only an instinctive compass in its design operates so irresponsibly.

In CIVILIZED MAN’S EIGHT DEADLY SINS (1973), Lorenz took his observations of all species and applied them to how man adapts to his environment from market economics to the threat of ecological catastrophe. 

The predator-prey phenomenon in ecological systems other than human is a self-sustaining mechanism. It is interdependent between predator-prey and thrives when not obstructed.  On the other hand, humanity is not bound by this mechanism. 

Lorenz saw competition in the human group, typically of Western societies, destroying any chance of competition-cooperation balance.  He writes:

Under the pressure of this competitive fury, we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual.  This is cold and diabolic brutality.

He offers this paradox:

All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical, and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering tend instead to favor humanity’s destruction.

In BEHIND THE MIRROR (1973), Lorenz wondered philosophically about our psychology.  You will meet others who have pondered the same question.  Do we see and engage the world as it is, or do we perceive it as an illusion of how we think it should be? 

It is the intention of these missives to illustrate the contradictions and speculations, not only of those that seriously ponder this question, but how we as individuals weather constant change doing more right than wrong things to ensure our survival.

We are aware of time.  What is unfortunate is that although we have instincts of animals, the intuitive capacity to sense danger, and the cognitive capacity to make choices that would enhance our survival, we often disregard the signals.  We fly in the face of good sense and do just the opposite of what we know is right and good for us, destroying our health, wealth and relationships often in reckless abandon. Fortunately, it is never too late.  As long as we have the will, the way awaits us.

*     *     *

RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD -- NUMBER ONE

RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD – NUMBER ONE:

FOUR LITTLE PIGS AND CHARLIE ROSE WITH THE WOLF AT THE DOOR THE WORLD AT LARGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 23, 2011

As I walked today, meaning no disrespect to New York Times reporters around the table with Charlie Rose (PBS) as moderator, I thought of  “The Three Little Pigs” (plus one in this case) with the wolf at the door as the world at large.

Bruno Bettelheim’s THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT (1977) read many years ago came to mind.  The psychoanalyst saw the fairy tale in terms of Sigmund Freud’s “the pleasure principle” (CHILD) versus “the reality principle” (ADULT).

The “three little pigs” dramatize the idea we must not be lazy or take things for granted because if we do we shall perish.  Intelligent planning and foresight combined with hard work will make us victorious no matter how ferocious our enemy (wolf at the door).

The houses the pigs build are symbolic of man’s progress in history, from a lean-to shack to a wooden house to a house of solid brick. The fairy tale suggests a transformation from the pleasure retained to the demands of reality.  The wolf is tricked and falls down the chimney into boiling water, and ends up as cooked meat for the wisest pig.  The demise of Osama bin Laden comes to mind.  In our retreat from adulthood, the reality principle is often demonstrated counterintuitively.

*     *     *

Moderator Rose gave a litany of the challenges facing the United States and the President such as 9.1 percent unemployment, $14 trillion national debt, the current gridlock in Congress, and a myriad of other problems on the eve the president was to speak on troop draw down in Afghanistan, a war suggesting a lean-to shack.

These four New York Times reporters, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, David Leonhardt and Roger Cohen have the pusillanimous power of the word when it comes to leadership. 

Their role as pundits is to lead the discussion of a bifurcated audience of skewed political, social, economic and cultural preferences.  They use the power of media to subliminally bombard our unconscious 24/7 until we sound like them, and unfortunately, so do our leaders.

They write columns on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, syndicate these to other newspapers, write books, and grace television with reports as they come back from globetrotting expeditions.

Profiled as the crème de la crème, I confess to growing weary of reading and seeing them as they practice Freud’s “morality principle” (PARENT) criticizing and critiquing those in power with sound bytes of enchantment, but little else. 

Chances are these four men are programmed products of our most prestigious universities, citadels of learning that we constantly congratulate ourselves as being the best in the world.  If true, then they have been well schooled in the ecclesiastical authority of the salience of timeliness.   What do they do?

They observe, report and distill the significance of the leadership of those in power when, at best, their leadership and management skills might be confined to a research assistant or two.  It would be ludicrous to consider them otherwise if they were not taken so seriously.

I find them entertaining but unsettling.  They would have us see them as the wise pig when they are not in the frame at all.  They have the luxury of gain without pain, ticking off options on their fingers when they can skirt the ADULT (reality principle) with opines as the CHILD (pleasure principle) with immunity. 

These four journalists have power, have no doubt about that, but it is not the power of action in the caldron of the daily hell of decision making, but from the luxury box far above the fray where they can reflectively meet column deadlines or book contracts.  Scribes have climbed onto the shoulders of giants to whisper into their ears so subtly that these giants believe it is their own voice they hear. 

They remind us we are stuck in the past, stuck in the present, stuck in our culture, stuck in trauma, or stuck in short term strategies at the expense of long term necessities.  It all sounds rational, realistic and insightful, but despite their efforts (could it be because of them?) we are frozen, paralyzed, marooned, trapped, isolated, enchanted and enslaved to white noise.  Forgive me, but this bubbled up from my subconscious as I walked today.  Perhaps tomorrow I will champion them all as Oracles of Delphi.

*     *    *.

 

RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD -- INTRODUCTION

 RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD – INTRODUCTION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 22, 2011

The announcement of this topic has brought some interesting responses.  It is apparent I am not alone in thinking about this topic.  At some point in this exchange, a montage of these responses will be presented.

Adulthood, it would seem, is something we avoid as long as possible.  Most of human history has not had the luxury of such avoidance. 

Slave labor exists in India and China, two emerging great powers of the twenty-first century.  A minority segment of the population is exploited by the majority because it can.  This was largely true in the Americas after Columbus from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.  Tell people there they could escape adulthood, or the reality of day-to-day survival, and they would think you mad. 

In periods of boom, there is a tectonic shift to adolescence and self-indulgence, that is, until society is put against the wall, collapses in disarray, forcing it to fight for survival through correction.  It happened in the heydays of the Roman Empire, the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, the rise and then fall of the British Empire, and now the United States is in this configuration. 

The American Civil War was followed by insouciant affluence with an explosive retreat from adulthood in the Gay Nineties.  This led to the Great Depression of the 1880's.  A cavalier disregard for lessons learned after this collapse resulted in World War One.  The “Roaring Twenties” and wild speculation was eclipsed with the Great Depression of the 1930's.  And so it continues into the twenty-first century.

Responsible adulthood is the court of last resort.  People kick and complain, riot and rebel, and blame everyone but themselves for economic and social collapse.  Portugal, Ireland, and Greece stagger like drunken sailors to gain some purchase, failing to realize Europe has been living in the surreal world of economic fantasy.  

Meanwhile, the United States has been playing with funny money during these early days of the twenty-first century, resulting in the real estate collapse and Wall Street fraud and bankruptcy.  This has required a $trillion government bailout of these institutions and the automotive industry.  The adult is nowhere in sight. 

The family has collapsed with sixty percent of newborn children likely to be born out of wedlock; with twenty percent born to parents not siblings of the couple, of between 14 and 20 million unemployed or underemployed workers because of a lack of adult leadership in government and industry, of children inventing social distractions such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter to fill the vacuum left by a retreat from social engagement.  There is a mania to be somebody, some type of celebrity, rather than to do something worthwhile.  Major religions sabotage each other rather than see a common design. 

The adult has no choice but to surface as we are moving dangerously close to the abyss.

Suicide, homicide and genocide have resulted in hundreds of millions perishing in the last century.  We are forced to realize that cooperation and competition are polar coordinates.  Will we get it? 

SOJOURN OF A SCRIBBLER

Adulthood is the consistent theme in my books.

CONFIDENT SELLING (1970) is about self-acceptance, coming to terms with oneself before worrying about persuading someone else to find you of value.  Once you cross that bridge, confidence is the product of the journey.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) is a systematic unraveling of how workers have given up control of work for pay and benefits, not realizing self-hate and alienation would come to fill this vacuum.  As a consequence, workers have gone from the culture of comfort and management dependent (PARENT) to the culture of complacency mired in arrested development and terminal adolescence (CHILD) at the price of the culture of contribution and interdependence (ADULT).  Virtually all the book’s warnings have reached fruition.

CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992) is a touchstone to the development of partnerships at the personal, professional and social level rather than adversarial ones.  It doesn’t deny the adversarial or the necessity of conflict in the conduct of life, but provides a formula for managing such encounters.  It claims managed conflict, not harmony, is the glue that holds an organization on task.

THE WORKERS, ALONE (1995) is directed at professionals trained to lead, but who would prefer to collect their salaries and bonuses, and leave the driving to someone else.  It shows the retreat from negative freedom, which is actual freedom, to positive freedom where conditions and stipulations prove freedom a myth.  BIG BROTHER was the theme of 1984 (1948) by George Orwell, a work of fiction that has come to past as a reality. 

THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) was a commentary on how our lives have become so other-directed that inner-direction has essentially vanished.  The last person we trust is ourselves.  We seek the opinion of others rather than trust our experience.  The book echoes the sentiment, "To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself." 

SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) is directed at CEO’s and senior management demonstrating how juvenile and masochistic the best trained people are likely to be, costing the corporation $billions.  Such behavior is difficult to detect because it is largely invisible.  These silent killers were the greatest challenge of management in the last century, and now in the twenty-first century.

CORPORATE SIN (2000) places the blame for this retreat from responsible and accountable corporate behavior to leaderless leadership and dissonant workers.  Leaders worry only about creating good numbers during their watch, while workers constantly sabotage their own efforts to be productive.  A blueprint for correction is offered.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) is a personal memoir in novel form to show those born during the Great Depression growing up during rationing and self-sacrifice during World War Two developed adult characteristics by default.  They then did everything to see that their children were not to suffer such deprivation, resulting in sixty years of baby boomer adolescence.

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) illustrates our chronic inclination to repeat in perpetuity to the same problematic behaviors.  From the 1970s on, the theme has never changed: unpopular wars, political upheavals, corrupt politicians unmasked, electorate deceived (Watergate), drug wars fighting a losing battle with drug addiction, automotive industry in sharp decline, morality on holiday, new hatreds hatching, energy prices beholden to the whim of OPEC, paranoid presidents hunkering down, becoming a law unto themselves, Congress staying the same, missing the changes, unwilling to face them, leaving the future up for grabs.   The book attempts to breakthrough our cool façade, canned rhetoric, mania of insiders, always looking to science to find the magic bullet to cure all its ills.

These books were written as a reflection of a declining adult constituency, books that may resurface in a hundred years to show how we lost our moral compass and thus our way.

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RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD

RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 18, 2011

This is to alert my readers that I have stumbled on what I think makes sense of the last forty years or since 1970.  We have made a systematic but unconscious retreat from adulthood with all the fads and fantasies, all the new binges, and yes, the wild success of such things as the Internet and FaceBook.  These appear to be manifestations of this retreat.  Small wonder that children largely created them.

The plight of Congressman Anthony Weir is not the exception to this thesis, but the rule.  No, I don't think he should have resigned because what he did at least a few million others are doing on a regular basis, as the mind of the adult is warped to the juvenile, and cannot seem to escape it.  

Why?  Because that is the morality of the times.  This doesn't make it right (or wrong) but simply a reflection of that mind.

In 1970, when my oldest child told me one day, “Dad, I don’t want to ever be an adult.”  He proved his words, and has been a very successful man never having to become one.  He is not the exception but the rule.

These essays will be short – less than five hundred words – as people don’t read today.  Less than one-tenth of one-percent purchase books on a regular basis.  Only about 100,000 citizens out of 300 million spend as much as $1,000 a year in reading materials.  

Books are not only windows to the soul, but manifestations of the soul itself, as we think in words.

Stay tuned.

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INVEIGHING AS I GO -- NUMBER FOUR -- THE FRAILTY OF LEADERSHIP!

 INVEIGHING AS I GO  -- NUMBER FOUR -- THE FAILTY OF LEADERSHIP!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 16, 2011

Twenty years ago in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1991), I wrote that leadership requires the capacity to see (vision) and the ability to serve.  I added that service is either self-aggrandizing or beholden to the traditional power structure.  I did not envision the power of megalomania on leadership although I experienced it quite directly in my work.

This power is brought home in THE STORM OF WAR: A NEW HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR (2011) by English historian Andrew Roberts.  What I did indicate in WORK was the frailty of organizational resistance or challenge to that leadership because of the dominant personality of the leader. 

My first taste of the power of leadership was when I was a white hat sailor (enlisted man) in the United States Navy on the flagship of the Six Fleet operating in the Mediterranean.  Admiral “Cat” Brown was like God to us, and whatever he ordained we followed to the nth degree.  I saw that repeated when I was with Nalco Chemical Company, and again with Honeywell, Inc. and Honeywell Europe Ltd. 

Leadership, in my experience, creates little Turks, and everyone follows their “leadership” no matter how asinine it is, and with nary a protest, that is, with the exception of a few.  

Roberts has a wider perspective than mine on leadership in his new book, but he implicitly and explicitly develops a case for why the West won the war and Germany lost.

The essence of his case is the maniacal hatred of Adolph Hitler of the Jews.  Roberts argues the war ended very largely because of the Jewish scientists that created the atomic bomb.  The under secretary of Winston Churchill once said, “We won the war because our German scientists were better than Germany’s scientists.”

The great brain drain of Germany was largely because of Hitler’s insane desire to exterminate the Jews.  He invaded Russia failing to learn from Napoleon’s Great Russian defeat because half the European Jewish population existed in Russia, and he was bent on destroying that population.

To give you a sense of this from a scientific point of view, between 1921 and 1932, the year before Hitler came to power in Germany, Germany won 25 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry and the United States won five.  From 1950 to 2000, or after WWII, and the reign of Hitler, which ended in 1945, the United States won 67 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, many of Jewish ancestry, while Germany won only 16.  This indicates the size of the brain drain caused by Hitler’s obsession with the Jewish Question.

Moreover in 1936 Germany had 39 million workers in war production and only 29 million by the end of the war.  At the same time, Hitler was eliminating six million Jews, known to be the hardest working, intelligent and best-educated segment of the German population.  Adding irony to this, the German officer who awarded Hitler the German Cross in WWI was a Jew.

Nearly seventy years later, when books such as this come out, we say, “How could this happen?  How could such an insane megalomaniac come to power, and reduce a great people to his will?”

If your answer is, “It could never happen here?” I suggest you read Sinclair Lewis’s book IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE (1935), which was written before the Second World War. 

I read the book as a boy after the war, and it sent shudders through me, so much so that I’ve never forgotten the book or its impact on me.  Perhaps that is why I have been suspect of rhetorical leadership from a personal, professional or citizen perspective. 

Germany needed a scapegoat to explain why it had lost the First World War, and Hitler gave them the Jews. 

Look at us today.  We have a plethora of scapegoats created by media, distancing us from the reality of our own experience, and the frailty of our resolve. 

The last person we want to blame for our predicament is our individual self. We prefer to blame the banks, Wall Street, Washington, the President, Congress, industry, the church, failing to realize we are implicitly or explicitly responsible by the choices we make.  We create our leaders.  They do not create us.

Politicians get elected by appealing to our frailty, not our strengths, to what we can get, not what we might need to give up.  They know how to manufacture and exploit our fear and ignorance of minorities.  They drift from our concrete world of experience into the abstract world that they see threatening us.  For the second half of the twentieth century it was the Soviet Union, now it is China and India or even possibly Brazil.  It is always something lying in the shadow of our mind.    

Fear is the operational word when leadership approaches the abyss.  I’ve read many books on how the Roman Catholic Church and the German people were implicitly or explicitly involved in allowing the Jews to be exterminated.  I’ve read only one book that puts President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in that mix.  Yet, logic tells me that rational arguments took precedence in the United States as well as in Rome and Germany over morality during that terrible time. 

The subtitle to the Lewis book is, “What will happen when America has a dictator?” 

That is always a danger in leadership.  It is so simple to have a philosopher king, as Plato suggested, making all our decisions so that we never have to blame ourselves for our failed lives. 

New York Times columnist, David Brooks, a man I often agree with, wrote a recent column protesting that he had to spend the next sixteen months following and writing about the presidential campaign for 2012. 

Brooks pointed out how pathetic the participants, how pusillanimous the issues, and how boring the expected discourse. 

Well, Mr. Brooks, given the alternative, I thank God that men and women in America still have the courage to suffer the abuse of pundits, the catcalls from audiences across the nation, and still have the courage and energy to put their hats in the ring, and attempt to run our republic as best they can. 

Leadership that takes hold is leadership that the majority subscribes to implicitly or explicitly because everyone is a leader or no one is.

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TOM & JERRY CARTOONS, MINDLESS RESPITE OR CAMEO TO ADVERSARIAL RELATIONS?

TOM & JERRY CARTOONS, MINDLESS RESPITE OR CAMEO TO ADVERSARIAL RELATIONS?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 11, 2011

BACKGROUND

When I was a boy, I would visit my uncle Leonard in Detroit of a summer from the age of nine through my freshman year in high school, or until organized baseball dominated by summer routine.  My uncle, holder of Ph.D.’s in psychology and economics, was Chairman of the Department of Finance & Commerce at the University of Detroit.   

During that impressionable period, I was intrigued with his interests, quality of his mind, and diversity of friends.  They varied from the philosophical to the esoteric, from writers to industrialists, from the military to people on Wall Street. 

A widower, he invited me to join him at the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit where he had a consulting business.  I would listen to him dictating to his secretary, and study his quiet concentration. It made an impression on me.

His son, slightly older, shared common athletic interests with me and we became best friends. 

The three of us of a Saturday would go to dinner and view a film at the Detroit Yacht Chub on Belle Isle near downtown Detroit.  Films that seemed to give my uncle the most satisfaction were animated cartoons, especially Disney Productions.  I watched him in the darkness of the theatre, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, wondering how such a man could find joy in such mindlessness.

Years later when I was heavy into my own career, I discovered similar satisfaction in the high jinx of comedic cartoons.

Only today after taking in the Charlie Rose Show on PBS with all its gravitas, I flipped channels to the Tom & Jerry cartoons, then went on my daily peripatetic walk.

NATURE OF ADVERSARIAL RELATIONS

Is it absurd to discover an important lesson learned in this foolishness?  I asked myself that question, as the nature of the adversarial relationship was clearly demonstrated in this cartoon.

Tom and Jerry are adversaries, a tomcat and a tiny mouse, essential to each other in high jinx.  In this episode another tomcat and pussycat were added to the mix. 

This tomcat was competing with Tom for the affection of the pretty pussycat.  This left Jerry effectively outside the intrigue. 

No matter what Jerry did to get Tom’s attention – first a hotfoot with a match, then a full box of matches – he failed.  Tom was in quest of the pussycat and to neutralize his new adversary, the tomcat.  Ultimately, as the drama ends, Tom tired of the chase, his passion spent, he returned to his familiar adversary, Jerry, with élan. 

This was a cartoon.  As I walked, I asked myself what was so compelling about the introduction of a third and fourth party into the plot?  Of course, it took the protagonists out of their game.  It derailed the expected adversarial relationship, changed the dynamics, and left the partner out in the cold. 

The vitality of the relationship depends on the collision of adversaries.  Tom & Jerry are not Shakespeare but use the same mechanism to promote their drama. 

They inflict havoc on each other to the point of annihilation only to rise again whole to engage again in the same nonsense.  We have wars, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, tsunamis, and epidemics that test our mettle to survive, and yet we rise again and again from them to go on forward if not whole with full resolve.

Once faced with an adversary, be it a natural disaster or some human foible, we rise to meet the challenge with resolve we didn't know we had, but materializes in a crisis situation.

We complicate matters by this inclination.  We are better at reacting to rather than anticipating the adversarial.  Two million people die a year because of AIDS, as many as 7,000 a day, a disease that may originate in lower animals but spreads to humans through unprotected sexual contact or shared needles of illicit drugs.  When we are the adversaries, adversarial relations are as likely to be denied as embraced. 

We are not by nature confrontational, or adversarial.  We may not like to think so but the relationship of:

(1)   Children to each other is adversarial;

(2)   Parents to each other is adversarial;

(3)   Parents to children is adversarial;

(4)   Families to each other and to the community is adversarial;

(5)  Inclination to learn is adversarial;

(6)  One part of the nation is adversarial to another;

(7)  The president is adversarial to Congress;

(8)  Congressmen and Congresswomen are adversarial to each other;

(9)  One company is adversarial to another;

(10)  One organized religion is adversarial to another faith;

(11)  The laity is adversarial to the priest and the church.

We will do anything to avoid conflict.  Therefore, we are not very good at managing it.  The adversarial is normal.  We need to capture the energy of conflicting forces in order to build consensus.  Conflict is actually the glue that holds us together as a single force, not harmony.     

Consider this:

(1) Children do not become independent contractors and adults until they rebel against their cultural programming and purchase identity.  We suffer today from a lack of adults running things because adversarial relations have been tabled.

(2) A husband and a wife cannot become partners or a team until they deal with and accept their natural differences as individuals.

(3) Parents cannot rely on the proper development of their children by demanding obedience without demonstrating trust.  Trust is an outcome of listening to the conflicting voices that dominate the mind of the child.

(4) Families cannot have a sense of community until they get their own house in order.  That demands first recognizing and dealing with adversarial relationships in the home.

(5) Education is bridging the gap between listening and telling, knowing and learning.  A knower is not a learner.  Education creates knowers, not learners, tellers, not listeners.  Small wonder students hate school and teachers that measure performance on arbitrary tests and not the unique gifts of the student.  School has become a war zone, not because of the adversarial, but because of its absence.

(6) We have several countries in one.  The Midwest has little patience with the pomp of the East Coast and the West Coast.  The South has nostalgia for antebellum days.  The North has little empathy for the South, where jazz, cuisine and literature thrive, while the industrial North lives in the nostalgia of its halcyon past.  Meanwhile, the Northwest is oblivious to all this as it lives in artificial dream of ubiquitous technology.  Balderdash?  Perhaps, but it needs to surface adversarially to be dispatched.

(7) The president and Congress fail to understand that the adversarial relationship is the ticket to their collaborative success, and so continue to avoid confrontation and conflict other than rhetorically, as the country sinks deeper into red ink.

(8) Congress cannot get to real issues until it first encounters the real in the adversary.

(9) It the adversarial relationship within and between companies that spurs them on to excellence, not the absence of the adversarial.

(10) Organized religion avoids the adversarial as if it were mortal sin, creating parallel universes of innocuous interventions that never crystallize into anything meaningful.  Organized religion has forgotten it is all about love, and for love to thrive the adversarial of hate must be embraced not denied or denigrated.

(11) The laity continues to desert the church because church conformity fails to resonate with its life challenges.  The laity is not looking for answers in the church, but for a sounding board to address its adversarial conflicts. 

The common theme to this is that we are tired of lying to ourselves.

NO ESCAPE OF THE ADVERSARIAL RELATIOSHIP?

The twentieth century was remarkable in its drift towards adversarial avoidance.  World War One was fought largely to deny Germany its hegemony.  Rather than embracing its fault line of fear, the Western Allies punished Germany at Versailles with the unintended consequences of seeding the hegemony of Nazi Germany and WWII.

Afghanistan and Pakistan have become like poor relatives that we felt good about helping, but now we own their burden.  The more we do for them the more they hate us.  If you have ever lent money to a relative, and never gotten it back, but instead have that relative treat you deplorably, then you know something of what our military and diplomatic corps face every day.  There are exceptions.

Not until 1948 did the Jewish people have a homeland, yet over the centuries they have made contributions far exceeding their numbers in literature, scholarship, philosophy, music, mathematics, medicine, painting, education, physics, chemistry, psychology and sociology, finance and commerce.  How is that?  

The Jewish people have always embraced the adversarial within, the conflict that forced them to find that ethical-moral center where creativity resides.   

In contrast, we have ethnic cleansing, a practice throughout history by one people’s attempt out of fear and ignorance to remove another ethnic or religious group by violence, only to be enervated for the effort.  Most recently, the Serbs tried it in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the same shameful results as the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth century. 

In my walk today, I realize adversaries are not the problem, sane relationship with adversaries is. 

The adversarial Civil War made the US a stronger nation and able to ultimately embrace the adversarial Civil Rights Movement.  The Great Depression made Americans more resourceful and capable of hitting on all cylinders during World War Two. 

The United States came out of the Cold War with the Soviet Union as the lone super power, but, alas, no longer with a recognizable adversary  

Long before the Osama bin Laden led al-Qaeda destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, even before the Soviet Union beat the US in space with Sputnik in 1957, the US commenced to chasing ghosts. 

When an adversary vanishes, as did Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after WWII in 1945, the inclination is to fill the vacuum with an invented one.  Many senior citizens my age can remember the high jinx of that period.

We had the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) from 1938 to 1975, looking under every rock for communist sympathizers in writers, directors, filmmakers, novelists, poets, educators and the religious.  Senator Joseph McCarthy was on a witch-hunt for Communists in the army and government.  This came to a head with the histrionic psychodrama of the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954. 

We need an adversary, an adversary that generates an authentic response, not a fear mongering concoction of special interests.  This is because we are a combative society.  When the combat is missing or not real, when it doesn’t generate passion, we become stuck. 

The danger of being stuck is that we retrogress, live in nostalgia, and fail to see the real challenges ahead.  How can you tell?  We become critical of anyone who isn't optimistic for America's future.

QUICK WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE

When I entered the workforce after college in the late 1950’s, I was confident that I was on the same page as my contemporaries, that we were guided by the same ethical-moral compass, that hard work and effectiveness got rewarded, that worth was qualitative and not quantitative, that a college education was not designed to punish others with your knowledge but to use it to enhance their development, that no one was better than anyone else, and that all honest work was noble.

Given this philosophy, I wasn’t much into bosses, not especially good at taking orders, or asking permission before I did something.  Rather than being career oriented and ambitious, I was interested in the effective utilization of my inherent ability.  I was not a competitor, a joiner, a sycophant, a flatterer, or a stooge for the boss’s ideas if I didn’t believe in them. 

I was naturally disciplined and loved to work.  There wasn’t a job that I had from being a student in school to a laborer in a chemical plant to a white hat in the navy to a chemist and chemical sales engineer in industry to an executive to a professor and writer that I didn’t derive immense pleasure.   

This is mention because I came into the system just as everything was being escalated. 

There were essentially six levels of management when I entered to twelve when I left.  Executive compensation was marginally ten times that of workers with hands on experience to five hundred or more times that same workers daily take home pay when I retired. 

Management was hard and lean when I entered the system and tough on you if you didn’t do your job.  You didn’t get a reprimand in those days.  You got fired.  Same in school.  You fouled up and you were expelled, not suspended for four days. 

Chances of getting an “A” were not impossible but difficult.  Having a “B+” average in college was enough to get you into Phi Beta Kappa; today you have to have an “A+,” which should not be construed as the “A” student being a better student.  It was all about escalation. 

If you flunked a course, it went on your permanent record.  You couldn’t take the course over to erase the embarrassment.  If you cheated on an exam, even if you were about to graduate, you were expelled with no redress. 

It was a black and white world where good and evil were clear to everyone, and doers and slackers were as well.  Then the human relations movement came in, followed by the human resources department, and we went from a society of contributors to a society of complainers, where everyone’s delicate psyche needed massaging no matter how much we were rotting on the inside.

We have been on this seventy-year drift preoccupied with the bumps that inevitably surface from time to time such as the 2008 real estate meltdown, the scandal of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the Wall Street corruption, the automotive industry failures, the stimulus package and the corporate bailouts of GM and Chrysler.

The common theme here is retreat from conflict and confrontation, from the natural adversarial relationship that enables a people to move in the direction of its strengths by facing its weaknesses, not apologizing for its failures but learning from them.

We are a bankrupt nation in spirit as well as coin because we have bought into the bleeding hearts that confuse equal opportunity with meritocracy.  We are not all equal in ability nor can we all rise to the same heights.  Excellence has many faces, and we can all put our best face on it. 

Failure has been given a bad name, and failure is something I know much about because for every time I have succeeded I have failed four times.  I am not a successful writer, but yet I write because like all those other jobs I have had, I derive immense pleasure from the practice.

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