Speaker 1: Today. It's great to have Colin Deyong on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor de Youung is a professor in the psychology department
Speaker 1: at the University of Minnesota and the director of the Personality,
Speaker 1: Individual Differences, and Behavioral Genetics Program. He researches the structure
Speaker 1: and sources of psychological traits using neuroscience methods to investigate
Speaker 1: their biological substrates. He developed a general theory of personality
Speaker 1: cybernetic Big five theory, which identifies psychological functions associated with
Speaker 1: major personality traits, as well as their connection to other
Speaker 1: elements of personality and various life outcomes, including mental illness. Colin,
Speaker 1: it's so good to chat with you again on the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast. That's great to see you. Scott. You are
Speaker 1: you may take the cake as top No, you do
Speaker 1: take the cake as top five of my closest friends
Speaker 1: and collaborators who have appeared on the podcast right on.
Speaker 1: So there you go. It's an honor. Well, it's a
Speaker 1: real honor for me. I uh, it's it's been a nice,
Speaker 1: nice journey of getting you know you and all the
Speaker 1: topics that we debate and discuss, and it's really you've
Speaker 1: really enriched my life just want you to know that
Speaker 1: it's been a while now, right, What is it like,
Speaker 1: overdeteen years almost that we found each other? Decade and
Speaker 1: a half almost. It's it's amazing, And I feel like,
Speaker 1: while we've both grown, there's still this like little child
Speaker 1: that comes out when we get together, like the playful
Speaker 1: you know that that that part of us I think
Speaker 1: still there. I hope so, I hope so too. But
Speaker 1: let's let's say I was just gonna say, we'll see
Speaker 1: how silly the podcast gets. Well, yeah, now we don't
Speaker 1: need to put pressure on ourselves to be silly, but
Speaker 1: we should talk about all kinds of serious things. Yes,
Speaker 1: well your new theory, well, your new theory of psychopathology
Speaker 1: is pretty serious, I think so yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to make too many jokes about that theory.
Speaker 1: So what is mental illness? Like? First of all, shouldn't we,
Speaker 1: as a field of psychologists and psychiatrists actually have a definition? Yeah?
Speaker 1: That's a funny thing, isn't it. You'd think that we
Speaker 1: would know how to define the thing we're studying. But well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you've done research and intelligence, like how hard
Speaker 1: it is for people to agree on a definition of intelligence?
Speaker 1: For example. But yeah, mental illness. I think that one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that there isn't as much focus as
Speaker 1: there might be on defining mental illness per se is
Speaker 1: that people usually think of it as a collection of
Speaker 1: more specific illnesses, specific disorders, and so they tend to
Speaker 1: look for definitions of schizophrenia, or definitions of orderline personality disorder,
Speaker 1: or definitions of PTSD. Right, so the focus is often
Speaker 1: at the level of an individual disorder rather than stepping
Speaker 1: back and looking at the big picture and saying, well,
Speaker 1: what is mental illness in general? Yeah, and also just
Speaker 1: when it comes to like psychological theories of mental illness
Speaker 1: impacting the psychiatry the psychiatry field. When I was looking
Speaker 1: into the literature and reading your paper, it surprised me
Speaker 1: just the dearth of the extent to which psychiatry has
Speaker 1: adopted any of these psychological theories. Yeah. Well, there's a
Speaker 1: lot that we could say about that, just in terms
Speaker 1: of like the history of psychiatry and clinical psychology. I mean,
Speaker 1: there have been times in the past where people have
Speaker 1: thought more actively about what mental illness is in a
Speaker 1: general way, Like you can go back to the anti
Speaker 1: psychiatry movement from the fifties and sixties, you know, people
Speaker 1: like Thomas sasen Ardi Lang, And you know, that's like
Speaker 1: the one polar extreme of thinking about definitions of mental illness,
Speaker 1: which is that they are just purely social constructions, right,
Speaker 1: that there is no thing in nature that's a mental disorder.
Speaker 1: It's all about the way in which society wants people
Speaker 1: to be certain ways, doesn't want them to be other ways,
Speaker 1: and then defines people who aren't the way that they
Speaker 1: want them to be as mentally ill. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that, you know, going to both extremes is problematic,
Speaker 1: Like I don't think that's the right way to think
Speaker 1: about mental illness either, but you know that at some
Speaker 1: point that was a big topic of conversation, Like it's
Speaker 1: mental illness something that's not just socially constructed. We can
Speaker 1: think about it kind of systematically. As one pole is
Speaker 1: just that it's purely socially constructed. The other pole is
Speaker 1: that it is purely naturalistic, right, like that there is
Speaker 1: something scientifically identifiable that is mental illness and it has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with societal norms or societal traditions or
Speaker 1: beliefs or anything like that. And then in the middle
Speaker 1: you have what are probably the more popular positions today
Speaker 1: when people do think about this, which are described as
Speaker 1: hybrid positions, where the idea is that there is something
Speaker 1: really going on, you know, there is some kind of
Speaker 1: dysfunction that we can point to from a naturalistic perspective,
Speaker 1: but then that there's also some degree of societal judgment about,
Speaker 1: you know, like who is severely ill enough to get diagnosed.
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example that's an analogy to something
Speaker 1: that's really trivial in I mean, it's not exactly true.
Speaker 1: It's a serious problem for people, but just in physical medicine,
Speaker 1: which would be blood pressure. Right, So you know, we
Speaker 1: all know that having high blood pressure is a risk
Speaker 1: for various cardiovascular problems. But where we say the line
Speaker 1: is where you have hypertension, right where you get a
Speaker 1: diagnosis from your doctor. That is a somewhat arbitrary line. Right.
Speaker 1: Blood pressure is a continuum. You can have low blood pressure,
Speaker 1: you can have high blood pressure. It's on a spectrum,
Speaker 1: and the medical establishment has picked a certain point at
Speaker 1: which they say like, if you're above that, now you
Speaker 1: have hypertension. If you're below that, you don't, right, So
Speaker 1: you know it's not and they acknowledge that there is
Speaker 1: a certain degree of trying to pick a reasonable threshold
Speaker 1: that is, you know, good for people's health. Nobody thinks
Speaker 1: that having a blood pressure of you know, one point
Speaker 1: fifty nine is qualitatively different from having a blood pressure
Speaker 1: of one sixty one. So you can see that there's
Speaker 1: this element like there's a real thing going on there.
Speaker 1: There's differences in blood pressure associated with differences in risk.
Speaker 1: And then there is also a bit of social construction,
Speaker 1: which is to say, well, what's the level we're going
Speaker 1: to pick where we're going to give people a diagnosis,
Speaker 1: we're going to start giving them drugs, we're going to
Speaker 1: start treating them, you know, we're going to intervene. And
Speaker 1: all those same kinds of questions come up in in
Speaker 1: issues surrounding mental illness. Yeah, as well as uh, issues
Speaker 1: of gifted education like one thirty IQ you're you're gifted
Speaker 1: five ideas, Sorry, you're you're actually ungifted because there's only
Speaker 1: only two categories we have. Yeah. Yeah, so look, uh,
Speaker 1: when we apply this to mentalness, we can see just
Speaker 1: how messy all this stuff gets. And uh, and what
Speaker 1: I like about your theory, I like, I really do
Speaker 1: like a number of things about your theories, not just
Speaker 1: because I'm friends with you. I'm glad. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: wondering if you could tell people about uh the theory,
Speaker 1: how your theory, how you define mentalness because you have
Speaker 1: a very specific definition that brings in cybernetic theory, and
Speaker 1: then will unpack what cybernek theory is. Yeah, okay, And
Speaker 1: I think probably as I start to get into it,
Speaker 1: would probably would be helpful to say a little bit
Speaker 1: about how our theory fits in with these general types
Speaker 1: of theory that I've just been described, and also maybe
Speaker 1: to say a little bit about what's been happening in
Speaker 1: the world of science around psychopathology and mental illness in
Speaker 1: the last you know, like twenty years or so. I
Speaker 1: think the most important thing to understand is that it's
Speaker 1: pretty widely acknowledged at this point that the traditional diagnostic
Speaker 1: system that comes out of like the Diagnostic and Statistical
Speaker 1: Manual from the American Psychiatric Association, that's the DSM, that
Speaker 1: that system is not scientifically accurate. The probably the biggest
Speaker 1: problem with it is that it treats mental illness as
Speaker 1: if it was a categorically distinct phenomenon. So some people
Speaker 1: have schizophrenia and some people don't. Some people have borderline
Speaker 1: personality disorder, and some people don't, And so it's treated
Speaker 1: as if there's this kind of clear dividing line, whereas
Speaker 1: if you look at the actual data more closely, what
Speaker 1: you see is something a lot more like blood pressure.
Speaker 1: People have various kinds of symptoms that cause them problems.
Speaker 1: They have various kinds of unusual characteristics that can cause
Speaker 1: problems for them, can cause dysfunction, can cause impairment, can
Speaker 1: cause suffering, and there is no perfectly clear dividing line
Speaker 1: to say when those get severe enough that they actually
Speaker 1: count as a mental disorder or not, because it's on
Speaker 1: a smooth spectrum. Right, The pattern of these qualities that
Speaker 1: people have that we identify as symptoms of mental illness
Speaker 1: are actually just kind of distributed in the whole population,
Speaker 1: and there's no clean separation of people who have the
Speaker 1: disease from people who don't. Right. It's not like a flu.
Speaker 1: It's not like covid, where you either have the virus
Speaker 1: and it's infecting you or you don't. Right, It's much
Speaker 1: more like blood pressure, where you have a certain level
Speaker 1: of it and it gets to a certain level it
Speaker 1: starts to cause you other problems in your life, and
Speaker 1: so we decide, like we need to intervene in some way.
Speaker 1: But there's this persistent fiction in psychiatry, especially that these
Speaker 1: are somehow categorically distinct entities. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that's been happening in research on mental illness is that
Speaker 1: people are trying to look at it more in terms
Speaker 1: of a spectrum or a lot of different spectrum, right,
Speaker 1: because it's not just one spectrum. You know, we already
Speaker 1: see that in some areas of studying mental illness, like
Speaker 1: we talk about the autism spectrum, and people increasingly now
Speaker 1: talk about the schizophrenia spectrum. But really every common mental
Speaker 1: disorder is on a spectrum, right, And so that's one
Speaker 1: problem with the current system, is this use of categories
Speaker 1: instead of dimensions. Now, the other serious problem is that
Speaker 1: the way the categories are organized are not accurate in
Speaker 1: terms of describing how people's symptoms tend to go together.
Speaker 1: And so what that means is that you end up
Speaker 1: with situations like within depression, people can have extremely different
Speaker 1: sets of symptoms and still get the same diagnostic label.
Speaker 1: For example, like you can have weight loss or you
Speaker 1: can have weight gain, and that could be a symptom
Speaker 1: of depression. You can have insomnia or hypersomnia where you
Speaker 1: sleep all the time, and both of those things can
Speaker 1: be a symptom of depression. So it's also increasingly recognized
Speaker 1: that the current diagnostic categories don't do a very good
Speaker 1: job of actually identifying groups of people who have a
Speaker 1: similar problem that would help us to figure out how
Speaker 1: to treat them and how to help them, because that's
Speaker 1: ultimately the whole purpose of diagnostic systems is to try
Speaker 1: to help people to figure out what is wrong with
Speaker 1: them as accurately as we can so that we can
Speaker 1: figure out as best we can how to help them.
Speaker 1: And the current system isn't really doing that. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that I'm a part of is this
Speaker 1: movement to try to create a new diagnostic system that
Speaker 1: would be based on dimensions instead of on categories. So
Speaker 1: I'm part of this group that's called the Consortium for
Speaker 1: the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, and that last part gets
Speaker 1: abbreviated as high TOP. So what high TOP is trying
Speaker 1: to do is basically use actual empirical data about patterns
Speaker 1: of symptoms that appear in people and which ones appear
Speaker 1: together to describe the range of different symptoms of mental
Speaker 1: disorders that there are, and to group them together in
Speaker 1: ways that are actually based on real empirical data as
Speaker 1: opposed to just tradition and sort of medical intuition expert
Speaker 1: opinion from doctors over one hundred years. So then you
Speaker 1: also have in the world of scientific research on mental health,
Speaker 1: the NIMH, which is the National Institute on Mental Health,
Speaker 1: and they do a lot of the funding of research
Speaker 1: for you know, trying to figure out the causes of
Speaker 1: mental disorder. And about ten years ago or so, they
Speaker 1: also came to the conclusion that they needed to reject
Speaker 1: the categorical system that appears in DSM, and what they
Speaker 1: decided to do instead was to focus on specific what
Speaker 1: they call biobehavioral systems, right, so trying to understand the
Speaker 1: underlying brain processes and the patterns of behavior and cognition
Speaker 1: and emotion that go along with those, and to understand
Speaker 1: them again as a dimension just like blood pressure, where
Speaker 1: you know, you might have a problem with your reward
Speaker 1: system or what they call your positive valence system, and
Speaker 1: if that's hyperactive, it could be associated with mania, for example. Right,
Speaker 1: So instead of saying, well, here's this thing bipolar disorder, right,
Speaker 1: and it's got to have all these features. Instead, what
Speaker 1: they say is, no, let's focus in on specific dimensions
Speaker 1: of symptoms like mania. What are the system what are
Speaker 1: the psychological processes and brain systems that underlie it. Let's
Speaker 1: see if we can make progress on understanding mental illness
Speaker 1: that way. So you've got people from the clinical side
Speaker 1: working on this high top project to classify and describe
Speaker 1: mental illness in a dimensional way. You've got people on
Speaker 1: the scientific and biological side trying to describe it in
Speaker 1: this dimensional way. And so our theory is basically trying
Speaker 1: to come in and say, it's great that we have
Speaker 1: all this progress toward these dimensional approaches that are more
Speaker 1: in keeping with what we actually know scientifically about mental illness.
Speaker 1: But still not enough people are thinking about this more
Speaker 1: general question of what mental illness is. Because once you've
Speaker 1: got a dimensional system, you still have to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: what's the threshold where do you decide when somebody is
Speaker 1: mentally ill? And what does that mean? And so what
Speaker 1: I'll do is I will I'll read you our definition
Speaker 1: of mental illness and then I'll unpack it. So what
Speaker 1: we say is that psychopathology is persistent failure to move
Speaker 1: toward one's goals due to failure to generate effective new goals,
Speaker 1: interpretations or strategies when existing ones prove unsuccessful. Okay, so
Speaker 1: there's a lot to unpack there, obviously now, and so
Speaker 1: you know, the way to understand this is in the
Speaker 1: in the context of this idea of cybernetics, which people
Speaker 1: now you hear that word. You think like cyberspace, cybersecurity,
Speaker 1: You think artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence. Absolutely, you tend to
Speaker 1: think about things that are done with computers. But cybernetics
Speaker 1: is actually a discipline that is broader than just artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: that also includes natural intelligence, and it includes the way
Speaker 1: in which organisms function as well as the way in
Speaker 1: which computers function. And it dates back to a scientist
Speaker 1: named Norbert Wiener in the late nineteen forties who had
Speaker 1: this idea. He had this insight, which is that is
Speaker 1: operating in the context of the first artificial control systems, like,
Speaker 1: for example, in World War Two, you might design anti
Speaker 1: aircraft gun that is able to actually track a plane
Speaker 1: as it's coming in automatically to aim right in order
Speaker 1: to track the trajectory of the plane and to shoot
Speaker 1: at it accurately, and then you can get things like
Speaker 1: missile guidance systems. Pretty soon you're going to get things
Speaker 1: like chess computers. So in the middle of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century you've got all of these artificial control systems being
Speaker 1: developed in different ways, like the first computers, various things
Speaker 1: for weaponry, et cetera. And what we are recognizes is
Speaker 1: basically that there have to be principles that are common
Speaker 1: to any kind of system that is able to pursue
Speaker 1: a goal based on feedback from what's happening and from
Speaker 1: what it's tracking in the environment. Right, So like a
Speaker 1: missile guidance system has to take feedback in order to
Speaker 1: correct the course of the missile. A chess computer has
Speaker 1: to register what's happening in the game that it's playing
Speaker 1: in order to try to win the game. And any
Speaker 1: organism has to pursue sources of nutrition and reproduction in
Speaker 1: order to be able to survive and reproduce, right, in
Speaker 1: order to have fitness from an evolutionary perspective, So what
Speaker 1: cybernetics is basically is that it is the study of
Speaker 1: the principles that govern goal directed systems that self regulate
Speaker 1: via feedback, so that are able basically to process input
Speaker 1: about the state of the world, to compare it to
Speaker 1: some particular value or goal that is represented within the
Speaker 1: system itself, and then to act in various ways to
Speaker 1: enact a set of operators you know, behaviors or cognitive
Speaker 1: operations or whatever they are, to try to move toward
Speaker 1: their goals. And in psychology we often think of goals
Speaker 1: as things like where you have a very concrete idea
Speaker 1: the future that you're committed to working toward. But in cybernetics,
Speaker 1: a goal is something more abstract. Basically, it is any
Speaker 1: representation within the system of a state that the system
Speaker 1: then works to bring about in the world. So plants
Speaker 1: are cybernetic systems. They carry out processes, you know, to
Speaker 1: acquire nutrients and moisture and to grow in various ways.
Speaker 1: And so that's the basic insight, right, is that there
Speaker 1: have to be a set of principles that are responsible
Speaker 1: for governing any kind of cybernetic system, whether it's you know,
Speaker 1: a robot trying to accomplish something or a human trying
Speaker 1: to accomplish something, or a plant or a chest compute
Speaker 1: or whatever it is. And so there you know, that
Speaker 1: turned into a whole very successful field, and it was
Speaker 1: more widely applied in you know, in engineering, and all
Speaker 1: of our computer technology basically or much of it is
Speaker 1: influenced by that field. But to an important extent, it
Speaker 1: was also influential in psychology. And so so when I
Speaker 1: was on your podcast once before, we talked a lot
Speaker 1: about my theory of personality in general, which is a
Speaker 1: cybernetic theory. It's called cybernetic Big five theory, and it's
Speaker 1: about the way in which personality traits. These kinds of
Speaker 1: broad personality traits like the Big Five that we study
Speaker 1: represent variation in these general cybernetic mechanisms that allow us
Speaker 1: to pursue our goals and our needs effectively. Like we
Speaker 1: have to be able to be motivated by goals things
Speaker 1: that are going to reward us. We have to be
Speaker 1: able to carry out actions that move us toward them
Speaker 1: and to avoid distractions from those from those actions, and
Speaker 1: we have to be able to compare where we are
Speaker 1: with where we want to be or how we think
Speaker 1: things ought to be. And so we have a set
Speaker 1: of mechanisms in the brain that enables us to do
Speaker 1: all those things. Now, the connection between the personality theory
Speaker 1: and the theory of psychopathology is basically that those same
Speaker 1: mechanisms that allow us to pursue our goals can break
Speaker 1: down in various ways, and most common forms of mental
Speaker 1: illness we can trace back to specific ways in which
Speaker 1: those human functions that allow us to pursue our goals
Speaker 1: and our needs effectively tend to break down. And sometimes
Speaker 1: they break down because they are relatively extreme. Like somebody
Speaker 1: has what we could describe as a relatively unusual or
Speaker 1: extreme level of some personality trait and it causes problems
Speaker 1: for them in their lives, and that might lead to dysfunction.
Speaker 1: But I think the important thing about the way in
Speaker 1: which we're defining psychopathology is that it hinges on this
Speaker 1: idea of cybernetic dysfunction. So what we're saying is basically,
Speaker 1: no matter how unusual you are, no matter how weird
Speaker 1: your personality profile is, you do not have a mental disorder.
Speaker 1: Unless means that yeah, well, I mean we could talk
Speaker 1: about your weirdness too if we want to. I was like,
Speaker 1: you better out brou we can do that later. That's
Speaker 1: that's for the psychoanalysis part of the of the podcast.
Speaker 1: I don't want you psycho analysy. Yeah, all right, I
Speaker 1: won't not on err anyway anyway. So, but the basic
Speaker 1: idea is that you don't have a mental disorder, you
Speaker 1: don't have psychopathology on our definition, until whatever your unusual
Speaker 1: qualities are cause you to be unable to meet your
Speaker 1: needs or to be able to pursue your goals in
Speaker 1: life effectively. And so in some ways that is already
Speaker 1: present in implicitly, at least in the DSM, because a
Speaker 1: lot of the diagnoses in the DSM emphasize that you're
Speaker 1: not supposed to give the person a diagnosis unless they
Speaker 1: meet the criteria for what it's called impairment or distress.
Speaker 1: So what does that mean. Well, one of the things
Speaker 1: that it means is that you could have all the symptoms,
Speaker 1: for example, or you know, you can have a set
Speaker 1: of symptoms that would qualify you for schizophrenia, let's say,
Speaker 1: And at some fine I'll talk a bit about how
Speaker 1: from the perspective of our theory, schizophrenia as a categorical
Speaker 1: entity doesn't really exist. And it's not just from the
Speaker 1: perspective of our theory either. As I was saying earlier,
Speaker 1: it's this new emerging perspective in clinical psychology as a
Speaker 1: whole that recognizes that the data say that these categories,
Speaker 1: the categories don't really exist as categories, and the symptoms
Speaker 1: aren't really organized in the way that the DSM says
Speaker 1: they are. But just as shorthand for now, let's say
Speaker 1: you have all the symptoms or a set of symptoms
Speaker 1: that would qualify you for schizophrenia, but you're not impaired,
Speaker 1: like your life is going along just fine, and you know,
Speaker 1: you may have challenges once in a while, but you
Speaker 1: are able to overcome them and deal with them, and
Speaker 1: so in that case, and you're not particularly distressed either.
Speaker 1: In that case, you're not supposed to give a diagnosis. Now,
Speaker 1: your fist intuition when you might when you hear that
Speaker 1: might be to say, how would that even be possible? Right,
Speaker 1: Schizophrenia that's supposed to be such a severe disorder. That's
Speaker 1: you know, there's that's psychosis. Right, It's characterized fundamentally by
Speaker 1: you have delusions or hallucinations or both, and plus a
Speaker 1: bunch of other qualities that you might have there that
Speaker 1: are likely to be impairing. So how could that not
Speaker 1: be impairing? Well, there's a great study that we talk
Speaker 1: about in the paper that I sent you in which
Speaker 1: a group of psychics was compared to a group of
Speaker 1: diagnos clairvoyance. They were people who had auditory, regular, auditory hallucinations.
Speaker 1: That was what qualified them to be in the study,
Speaker 1: and they believed that those auditory hallucinations were them communicating
Speaker 1: with other realms, you know, whether that's with spirits of
Speaker 1: the dead or other spiritual realms or whatever. So from
Speaker 1: the standpoint of you know, medical diagnosis, if you take
Speaker 1: somebody who come who presents with those symptoms, they that
Speaker 1: would classify as as psychosis because they have hallucinations, they
Speaker 1: have auditory hallucinations, and they have delusions. Yes, but the
Speaker 1: reason that you would not get a diagnosis of you know,
Speaker 1: schizophrenia for example, or some other psychotic disorder with those
Speaker 1: for those people is that you know, they're not impaired.
Speaker 1: Some of them are maybe working professionally as psychics or clairvoyance,
Speaker 1: or you know, they could be you know, maybe that's
Speaker 1: just like a side hobby of theirs. But whatever, it
Speaker 1: suggests that they are able to pursue their lives effectively.
Speaker 1: They can make a living, they have normal social relations,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe some of their friends believe that they
Speaker 1: really do have these powers. Maybe they are maybe they
Speaker 1: are humoring them, who knows whatever, But there is this
Speaker 1: crucial distinction that even the current system recognizes between whether
Speaker 1: you have some whether you have dysfunction or not. Hey, Colin,
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you could tell me how your
Speaker 1: theory differs from the class of theories that rely on
Speaker 1: statistical deviance, you know, the extent to which you have
Speaker 1: a certain characteristic function that is way abnormal statistically. How
Speaker 1: does your theory differ from all those class of theories.
Speaker 1: So the the issue when we get to this general
Speaker 1: question of like what is mental illness? One of the
Speaker 1: ways that people have dealt with that is basically just
Speaker 1: to say that if you are far enough from the norm,
Speaker 1: then you have a problem. You're abnormal. So there's you know,
Speaker 1: one of the one of the scientific journals that I've
Speaker 1: published papers in is called the Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
Speaker 1: and it's actually about to change its name to something
Speaker 1: else that doesn't use the word abnormal, because the idea
Speaker 1: being that that word has become stigmatized. But it's important,
Speaker 1: I think, to think about what that word actually means
Speaker 1: because it means away from the norm, right, ab means
Speaker 1: away from and so it's basically saying that people have
Speaker 1: mental health problems, who are weird, who are unusual, who
Speaker 1: are different from the norm. And that is a pretty
Speaker 1: common way of approaching thinking about mental illness, even if
Speaker 1: it's not the official definition, it is often implicitly the
Speaker 1: way that we approach people. Even the categories in the
Speaker 1: DSM are often that way, right, because they'll say, so,
Speaker 1: if you have some if you're having some kind of
Speaker 1: distress and you have five out of nine symptoms, for example,
Speaker 1: then you have this particular mental disorder. So they're basically
Speaker 1: counting the number of symptoms you have. And once you
Speaker 1: get extreme enough, you know, once you get far away
Speaker 1: from the norm, because what's normal is for people to
Speaker 1: only have, you know, like zero symptoms or maybe one
Speaker 1: symptom of something, but they're not going to have like
Speaker 1: four or five or six or seven. And so the
Speaker 1: idea is that as you get up to have enough symptoms,
Speaker 1: then you're far enough away from the norm that we're
Speaker 1: going to say, okay, now you have a disorder. And
Speaker 1: so our theory explicitly rejects that. And I was talking
Speaker 1: a little bit about this earlier because of the idea
Speaker 1: that just being unusual shouldn't be enough to say that
Speaker 1: you have a mental disorder or a mental illness, and
Speaker 1: it's often does so. The DSM often does require these
Speaker 1: additional components, like the presence of impairment or dysfunction. But
Speaker 1: it's funny because in the book itself it says basically
Speaker 1: like that's just a that's just there because we don't
Speaker 1: have perfect diagnostic powers yet, you know, like once we
Speaker 1: know exactly what's going on the brain that's making this
Speaker 1: person weird in this way, then we'll be able to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: this person has a mental disorder without even asking whether
Speaker 1: they show empairment or distress. And to me, that's exactly backwards.
Speaker 1: I think we should focus less on statistical deviance, whether
Speaker 1: you're unusual or not, whether you're extreme on some dimension,
Speaker 1: and focus more on whether you are impaired in your
Speaker 1: ability to pursue your goals in life, and by goals
Speaker 1: from a cybernetic perspective, as I was saying, we use
Speaker 1: that broadly to include things like your basic needs and
Speaker 1: just whatever it is that people are trying to get
Speaker 1: in life, even if they don't necessarily know it themselves, right,
Speaker 1: Goals can be conscious or they can be unconscious. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what confuses me, and how you distinguish between competing goals,
Speaker 1: like if there's no priority there, because you know, one
Speaker 1: could act a certain way that is getting them towards
Speaker 1: let's say they're meeting goals but being catastrophic to there
Speaker 1: are any other goals they have in their life, right,
Speaker 1: And that's yeah, absolutely, that's super important. And you know,
Speaker 1: so people have often asked us about that in relation
Speaker 1: to theory, like, well, what if somebody is an alcoholic
Speaker 1: and they're doing a really good job of you know,
Speaker 1: their goal staying drunk all the time? Right? Well, right,
Speaker 1: So the point is that from our perspective, it's not
Speaker 1: enough just to consider one goal. You have to consider
Speaker 1: you have to try to consider all of the person's
Speaker 1: goals and how they prioritize them and how they're doing
Speaker 1: with that. And that would include you know, basic needs
Speaker 1: that most people have, like a certain degree of connectedness
Speaker 1: to others and you know, a sense of autonomy or whatever.
Speaker 1: And so you know, the person who's who's being successful
Speaker 1: at staying drunk, right, who's an alcoholic, they are probably
Speaker 1: undermining some of their other goals, like being able to
Speaker 1: earn a living effectively, or maintaining good relationships with other people,
Speaker 1: or even just maintaining their own health, for example. So
Speaker 1: what's really important is that you look at the whole
Speaker 1: collection of what people are pursuing, what they value in
Speaker 1: their lives, and you look to see whether they are
Speaker 1: actually able to pursue those things effectively. Great. Great. Something
Speaker 1: that's interesting about your theory is that you distinguish between
Speaker 1: mental disorder and psychopathology. Isn't that right? And I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is right. This kind of relates to the kind
Speaker 1: of new way you're thinking about the brain's role. Is
Speaker 1: there's not like a particular brain pattern you can find
Speaker 1: in the brain and say that person's mentally ill just
Speaker 1: because their brain shows it. So can you elaborate it? Sure? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and we think about that issue with with
Speaker 1: brain disease. Like one of the things we've said is
Speaker 1: that mental illness is not brain disease. And you know
Speaker 1: that that doesn't mean we're dualists, right, We're not saying
Speaker 1: that there's some like you know, the mind is separate
Speaker 1: from the brain. Obviously, the brain is you know, producing
Speaker 1: the mind. The brain is doing the things that the
Speaker 1: mind is But what we mean is that merely having
Speaker 1: some particular unusual pattern of brain function does not in
Speaker 1: and of itself mean that you're mentally ill. It's just
Speaker 1: like having particular symptoms like we were talking about. You know,
Speaker 1: you could be a clairvoyant and hear voices and you know,
Speaker 1: believe you're communicating with spirits, and that doesn't make you
Speaker 1: mentally ill if your life is nonetheless going well on
Speaker 1: functional functioning normally in other regards, right, And so the
Speaker 1: important thing is that whatever your brain is doing, it
Speaker 1: has to be causing you to not be able to
Speaker 1: pursue your goals effectively in life before we want to
Speaker 1: call it psychopathology in terms of this distinction that you
Speaker 1: were you brought up between psychopathology and a mental disorder.
Speaker 1: Like so far in our conversation, I haven't been very
Speaker 1: careful about distinguishing between those two things, and you know,
Speaker 1: many people in the field just use those interchangeably. But
Speaker 1: we think it's important to that there could be a
Speaker 1: distinction between something that is relatively naturalistic that we could,
Speaker 1: you know, from a scientific perspective, say, okay, this person
Speaker 1: is not only having trouble pursuing their goals, but then
Speaker 1: they're also unable to adapt and to come up with
Speaker 1: new ways to live or new ways to interpret their
Speaker 1: situation that would enable them to come up with new
Speaker 1: strategies for pursuing their goals, or even to just develop
Speaker 1: new goals that would be better than the old goals. Right. So,
Speaker 1: one of the things about a cybernetic system is that
Speaker 1: it's not we can't really say it's dysfunctioning just because
Speaker 1: it's temporarily off course, because the whole point of cybernetic
Speaker 1: systems is that they can correct their course. Right. They
Speaker 1: use feedback basically to when they're veering off course to
Speaker 1: get back on course. So they adapt. And so we
Speaker 1: all know that you're not going to say that somebody
Speaker 1: has a mental illness just because they have a bad
Speaker 1: day or even a bad week, right, or things go
Speaker 1: really wrong for them, or you know, some project that's
Speaker 1: really important to them gets undermined in some way and
Speaker 1: they might be depressed for a little while. That's totally
Speaker 1: normal and totally healthy. Even when we start to be
Speaker 1: concerned about people and mental illness is when something like
Speaker 1: that happens and they can't figure out new goals or
Speaker 1: a new strategy to pursue their old goals or a
Speaker 1: new way of thinking about the world that would allow
Speaker 1: them to bounce back and get on course right and
Speaker 1: to start pursuing their needs and goals again effectively. So
Speaker 1: that's why there's that other part of our definition, which
Speaker 1: is that it's not just about your ability to it's
Speaker 1: not just whether you are having trouble pursuing your goals.
Speaker 1: It's also then you are not able to develop new
Speaker 1: strategies or new goals or whatever that would allow you
Speaker 1: to get back on course. And we think that that's
Speaker 1: fundamentally something that is objectively true or not. Like a
Speaker 1: person has a set of goals. People aren't necessarily totally
Speaker 1: conscious of all aspects of their goals or their needs,
Speaker 1: but they're in there, right, They're represented in the brain.
Speaker 1: And whether they are actually able to pursue those effectively
Speaker 1: or not, or to bounce back and get back on
Speaker 1: course when things go when things get challenging, that is
Speaker 1: that's like a matter of fact, right it's objectively true
Speaker 1: or not, whether that's whether that's possible. But then there's
Speaker 1: another level, which is that we have to figure out
Speaker 1: how severior does that have to get before we intervene. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's where we use the term mental disorder because
Speaker 1: that's sort of the term that's typically used in psychiatry,
Speaker 1: like for a diagnosis, then you officially have a mental disorder.
Speaker 1: So we kind of we recognize that there's still going
Speaker 1: to be some kind of discussion that's going to go on, negotiations,
Speaker 1: right between different players in medicine and in politics or whatever.
Speaker 1: That sets the threshold for when somebody is said to
Speaker 1: have a problem that severe enough that then we're going
Speaker 1: to spend resources intervene. It's just like blood pressure, right,
Speaker 1: we know that the higher your blood pressure is, the
Speaker 1: more risk you have, but we pick a level at
Speaker 1: which we're going to intervene. And so basically we say
Speaker 1: psychopathology is just this fact that you're not able to
Speaker 1: pursue your goals effectively, whereas mental disorder is, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever decisions get made about when we're going to give
Speaker 1: somebody a diagnosis. Good. I really like this distinction quite
Speaker 1: a bit. You know, in a lot of ways. Your
Speaker 1: whole theory is it's very like neurodiversity friendly. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, like that world would embrace it,
Speaker 1: you know, because there's lots of different forms of neurodiverses,
Speaker 1: you know that I'm very interested in, like autisms, but
Speaker 1: a lot of different kinds of spectrums. And the whole
Speaker 1: movement is moving towards this idea that like not to
Speaker 1: pathologize it just because it exists, right, I think that's
Speaker 1: very much in line with with your theory. I think
Speaker 1: in further unpacking your theory, and I want to I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do a bit by bit here one to
Speaker 1: There's another piece I want to pull out, and that's
Speaker 1: the difference between character characters what do you call it
Speaker 1: characteristic adaptations in personality traits? Okay? Can you define both
Speaker 1: and the difference to Yeah, And this is like a
Speaker 1: throwback to our last podcast that we did together, how Wet,
Speaker 1: where we were talking about the personality theory, because that's
Speaker 1: kind of the center of that theory too. So the
Speaker 1: idea is basically that I think I said earlier even
Speaker 1: in this conversation that traits we think represent variation in
Speaker 1: these basic mechanisms that everyone has, like everybody has the
Speaker 1: capacity to experience being motivated by something, at least to
Speaker 1: some extent. Everybody has the capacity to experience fear, at
Speaker 1: least to some extent. All that, you can find people
Speaker 1: who are relatively fearless. Right, everybody is averse to certain things.
Speaker 1: So there are these universal properties and there's variation in them,
Speaker 1: and that's what personality traits are fundamentally. So the way
Speaker 1: that I think about this is the test is would
Speaker 1: this make sense to describe differences between people in any
Speaker 1: culture at any time in human history? Like if you
Speaker 1: go back to prehistoric times, I'm sure you know you
Speaker 1: have hunter gatherers sitting around the fire, and some of
Speaker 1: them would want to argue with each other and some
Speaker 1: of them would not. Right, Argumentativeness is probably something that's
Speaker 1: been different between people and useful for characterizing people for
Speaker 1: all of human history. And so anything that you can
Speaker 1: use in any human context like that is a personality trait.
Speaker 1: But then we have these ways that we specifically adapt
Speaker 1: to our own life circumstances and to the specific culture
Speaker 1: that we're a part of, and those are what we
Speaker 1: call characteristic adaptations, right, So they require learning, they're characteristic
Speaker 1: of us because they're persistent over time. Right, Like I'm
Speaker 1: a professor, that is part of my persistent identity and
Speaker 1: my behavior. It shaps what I do. It's a role
Speaker 1: that I have, right, just like you know, being a
Speaker 1: lawyer would also be a different characteristic adaptation. It's the
Speaker 1: way that somebody has adapted to make do in their
Speaker 1: particular situation. And so characteristic adaptations are the parts of
Speaker 1: personality that aren't really universal, but that represent variation between
Speaker 1: people that have to do with what we've learned in
Speaker 1: the circumstances that we're in. You know, what do you
Speaker 1: think about this density distribution model, like the fleecin sort
Speaker 1: of way of thinking about person That's exactly the way
Speaker 1: that I would think about personality that when we think
Speaker 1: about what a trade is. It is a tendency to
Speaker 1: be in a particular type of states. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you're always that way all the time, right,
Speaker 1: Like you know, an extrovert isn't talking one hundred percent
Speaker 1: of the time, even though extroverts are more you know,
Speaker 1: talkative in general. Somebody who has an anxious temperament isn't
Speaker 1: experiencing anxiety every moment of their lives. But when we
Speaker 1: say somebody has the trait, we're saying that they're more
Speaker 1: likely to experience those things more often, more intensely, and
Speaker 1: more situations, And so the density distribution, you know, that's
Speaker 1: just saying that there is an average and that's where
Speaker 1: the person spends more of their time. But there's still
Speaker 1: a whole distribution, right, Like, so even the extroverts actor
Speaker 1: introverted some of the time, but on average, they're acting
Speaker 1: more extroverted, more outgoing, more talkative than somebody who is
Speaker 1: relatively introverted. Right. So, yeah, so it leaves room for
Speaker 1: variation within the person for their behavior, but points to
Speaker 1: the fact that people have these kinds of stable average
Speaker 1: tendencies over time. Right. So I'm glad that we talked
Speaker 1: about that, and hopefully I didn't lose our audience. You
Speaker 1: can cut it if you need to. No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: This is technical stuff. This is real time people stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, characteristic most people aren't probably aren't familiar with
Speaker 1: the term characteristic adaptations. They're maybe more familiar personality. So
Speaker 1: but this is central to your argument, Like, we really
Speaker 1: have to make sure that that people understand this. You know,
Speaker 1: you're saying that people can use characteristic adaptations to help
Speaker 1: them manage or even thrive with the kind of brain imprint,
Speaker 1: imprint imprint that the DSM could even currently classify as
Speaker 1: a mental illness. Right, so you know what, you know
Speaker 1: what another good term for characteristic adaptations is that I've
Speaker 1: been using a lot lately habits. Well, that's much better.
Speaker 1: It's a lot short, right, Yeah, And I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: say I didn't invent the term characteristic adaptations. That's not
Speaker 1: my fault. No, that's fair enough. That's fair enough. I'm
Speaker 1: not blaming you. I like it because it actually has
Speaker 1: a good description of what it is. It's like, we
Speaker 1: adapt to our situation in certain ways, and then those
Speaker 1: adaptations become habitual, right, and so we have habits of acting,
Speaker 1: we have habits of thinking, and those habits those ways
Speaker 1: that we you know, habitually act and think and habit
Speaker 1: things that we habitually strive for. Right, Our goals are
Speaker 1: habits in a certain sense too, once they're concrete enough,
Speaker 1: you know, those are these characteristic adaptations. And yeah, people
Speaker 1: can have very unusual profiles, and they can have experiences
Speaker 1: that would be classifiable as psychiatric symptoms, like those clairvoyants,
Speaker 1: for example, hearing voices. It turns out that hearing voices
Speaker 1: is a lot more common than you might expect, and
Speaker 1: and it's actually a lot of voice right now. Yes,
Speaker 1: come on, that's that joke Adedy made because you literally said,
Speaker 1: you know, people hearing voices is more common than you think,
Speaker 1: sometimes in their writing their ears, as if somebody's just
Speaker 1: speaking in their ears. Yeah, I realized I took out
Speaker 1: my headphones at some point, so hopefully this sounds not
Speaker 1: but you sound good to me anyway. Yeah. So, like,
Speaker 1: let's just imagine that you are somebody who heard voices. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, why do you do that? That's because
Speaker 1: your brain is designed to simulate the social world, right,
Speaker 1: It's designed to understand other people. Part of what you
Speaker 1: do is by imagining other people talking. So if you're
Speaker 1: the kind of person who spontaneously hears voices, that's just
Speaker 1: your brain running its simulation programs. And you know, we've
Speaker 1: been talking a lot lately in other contexts about consciousness
Speaker 1: and free will and things, and you know a lot
Speaker 1: is going on in your brain that you don't have
Speaker 1: voluntary control over, right, And so let's say you are
Speaker 1: somebody who spontaneously hears voices that you can't control very well,
Speaker 1: how do you deal with that? Right? Well, you can
Speaker 1: get really panicked because we associate that with schizophrenia and
Speaker 1: we stigmatize it. Or you could have a number of
Speaker 1: different possible ways of adapting to that. You could just accept, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I've got an active imagination that sometimes you know, talks
Speaker 1: to me, and I'm going to I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: I'm going to turn that into something that helps me
Speaker 1: write novels, for example, because it's like I have dialogues
Speaker 1: with characters in my head. Or maybe the way that
Speaker 1: you adapt is that you come to believe that you
Speaker 1: are communicating with other spiritual realms, right, and you launch
Speaker 1: a business as a psychic, and maybe that allows you
Speaker 1: to make a living and to get along with people.
Speaker 1: Those are all different patterns of characteristic adapt patients, right,
Speaker 1: They're all different habits of thinking and acting and pursuing
Speaker 1: goals in the world, and they can be effective to
Speaker 1: allow people to meet their various needs and to coordinate
Speaker 1: all their various goals together adequately to get by and
Speaker 1: even to thrive in the world. Right. And so to us,
Speaker 1: merely being unusual is not enough to indicate that you
Speaker 1: have a problem, because there's so many different ways that
Speaker 1: people can adapt with so many different habits that people
Speaker 1: can develop that can potentially allow them to you know,
Speaker 1: manage their own unusual qualities right, and to even have
Speaker 1: them be to even have them be benefits or gifts
Speaker 1: right that allows them to function well. So don't take
Speaker 1: this the wrong way, Colin. But what you your theory
Speaker 1: is revolutionary. I think it's revolutionary, but it really shouldn't be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, because because what you're saying to me is
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, duh, but but it's so weird that
Speaker 1: something where I would respond yet duh, is the complete
Speaker 1: opposite from the structure that has existed for for almost
Speaker 1: one hundred years. You know. Uh, well, I don't know
Speaker 1: when when the first DSM came out. Well, right, Well,
Speaker 1: the d s M chains dratically in nineteen eighty, right,
Speaker 1: So there was DSM one and DSM two, which were
Speaker 1: basically Freudian psychoanalysis manuals that had lengthy descriptions about what
Speaker 1: different kinds of mental problems looked like and how they
Speaker 1: work that were all based on like, you know, Freudian
Speaker 1: interpreting Freudian mechanisms in the brain. And then in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty what you had was a group of psychiatrists who
Speaker 1: got together and said, we can do this better, We
Speaker 1: can do this in a more scientific way, and they
Speaker 1: created these, you know, sets of checklists for what are
Speaker 1: the symptoms going to be for each diagnosis that did
Speaker 1: not require drawing any inferences about what was going on
Speaker 1: in people's unconscious minds. So, you know, they were trying
Speaker 1: to make a more systematic process and a better system
Speaker 1: for diagnosis. And you know, and I think in many
Speaker 1: ways that they did. But the fact remained, nonetheless that
Speaker 1: the sets of criteria that came up within the categories
Speaker 1: and the lists of symptoms were really just based on
Speaker 1: you know, the experience of peoples in the medical profession,
Speaker 1: psychiatrists experience, so you could think of it as like
Speaker 1: the accumulated wisdom of psychiatry. It still wasn't very scientific
Speaker 1: by our standards today. And so the you know, the
Speaker 1: new movement to move towards these dimensional systems is because
Speaker 1: now we have enough actual data that we can see
Speaker 1: how different symptoms are likely to present together and to
Speaker 1: develop over time and all these things. Yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: love it. And I don't know if you've noted, if
Speaker 1: you've noticed the similarity to my theory of personal intelligence.
Speaker 1: You know, and on gifted, arguing that we need to
Speaker 1: move away from intelligence models that are based solely on
Speaker 1: the decontextualized IQ test and look at the person's personal goals.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, absolutely, I mean, and you know, you
Speaker 1: and I have talked a lot about that, of course,
Speaker 1: because I think we don't necessarily agree on, you know,
Speaker 1: whether intelligence should be or needs to be redefined. But
Speaker 1: that's only because we have, you know, we're just thinking
Speaker 1: about different kind of perspectives. Let's say, like I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about it in terms of the scientific tradition of researching intelligence,
Speaker 1: whereas you're thinking about the way in which the concept
Speaker 1: of intelligence gets used in policy and in popular culture,
Speaker 1: and is you know, constraining on people who could potentially
Speaker 1: be facilitated to well, you know, live their best life,
Speaker 1: as you would probably say, right, And so you know,
Speaker 1: I absolutely see the parallels between what we're saying about
Speaker 1: mental disorder and what you're saying about how we should
Speaker 1: help people to achieve well being. I guess we're probably
Speaker 1: not going to talk about this today, but as you know,
Speaker 1: I've also been developing this the cybernetic theory to be
Speaker 1: a theory of well being too, because we've got, you know,
Speaker 1: moving to try to take in mental health problems on
Speaker 1: one side. But then you know, the mere fact that
Speaker 1: you don't have psychopathology doesn't mean that you have you know,
Speaker 1: the optimal amount of well being, and so you know,
Speaker 1: there again, our theory of well being is all about
Speaker 1: looking at what individual people value and what works for
Speaker 1: them as a set of values and goals in coordination
Speaker 1: with each other. That's what you're doing with Valerie TOI burs, right,
Speaker 1: Valerie Tiberius. Yeah, who's a friend of mine. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so an idea of what yeah going. I just finally
Speaker 1: realized I never gave a shout out to Bob Krueger,
Speaker 1: who's you know, I keep saying we when I'm talking
Speaker 1: about our theory of psychopathology, but I should, obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: recognize Bob, who is really brilliant clinical psychologist and has
Speaker 1: been so involved in this whole movement toward better classification
Speaker 1: systems for psychopathology and understanding it better. This really is
Speaker 1: revolutionary stuff. I mean, I hope the listener understands the
Speaker 1: gravity of what you're proposing, because it would really shake
Speaker 1: things up in the field of psychiatry psycho Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: so there's there's kind of like levels of radical in
Speaker 1: terms of changes that are being proposed. So first of all,
Speaker 1: you've got this hierarchical taxonomy of psychothology high top, right,
Speaker 1: This this new model that people in that CONSORTI room,
Speaker 1: including me, we would like that to replace the DSM. Right.
Speaker 1: So instead of those categories, you get described as having
Speaker 1: levels of you know, a set of different dimensions. They're
Speaker 1: sort of analogous to the Big Five. Actually quite a
Speaker 1: lot of them are quite analogous to the Big Five
Speaker 1: in personality, where you have different levels of different potential,
Speaker 1: you know, symptoms that could be used to characterize people
Speaker 1: who are having problems. But even some of the people
Speaker 1: who are working on that, then they still want to say, like, well,
Speaker 1: when you reach a certain level of symptoms, then we're
Speaker 1: going to give you the diagnosis. Right, And so I
Speaker 1: think what's most radical about the theory that we're working
Speaker 1: on is that it even goes beyond that to say
Speaker 1: that no matter what level of these symptoms you have,
Speaker 1: it doesn't count as a mental disorder unless you have
Speaker 1: cybernetic dysfunction, right, unless you're not able to pursue the
Speaker 1: things that you value and need in life. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, one way to describe I guess just how
Speaker 1: radical this theory is is that in some sense, there
Speaker 1: would only be one diagnosis that would be you have
Speaker 1: you know, you have psychopathology, you're having some kind of
Speaker 1: a you're having a problem in your life, and then
Speaker 1: we can go to try to figure out what's it like, right,
Speaker 1: and we can say, well, you know, you have you
Speaker 1: have these unusual characteristics and those seem to be into help,
Speaker 1: you know, causing you trouble in these ways. And you've
Speaker 1: got these habits that are really kind of counter productive
Speaker 1: and that are undermining you that you know, maybe we
Speaker 1: can figure out where you pick them up, maybe we
Speaker 1: can figure out why, maybe we can figure out how
Speaker 1: to help you change them. So yeah, in some ways,
Speaker 1: but you know what's really interesting thinking about this, Scott,
Speaker 1: my observation is that in some ways this is what
Speaker 1: people in the clinic typically do all ready. Like you know,
Speaker 1: not the people who are writing the DSM or you know,
Speaker 1: funding scientific research, but just clinical psychologists who are interacting
Speaker 1: with people. Somebody comes in, what do you do? You
Speaker 1: try to you say what's wrong? You try to understand
Speaker 1: their problems, You try to understand like the pattern of
Speaker 1: their lives, the specific ways they think about things, the
Speaker 1: specific you know, personality profile that they have that might
Speaker 1: be like helping or hindering them, and then you know,
Speaker 1: you deal with that person as an individual. So in
Speaker 1: some ways, I don't think it's that weird. It's just
Speaker 1: so counter to the way in which everybody is obsessed with,
Speaker 1: you know, identifying labels for people and slotting them into
Speaker 1: the right boxes, because that's how you know what to
Speaker 1: put on the insurance form, and in theory, that's how
Speaker 1: you know what pills to give people. Right, Because that's
Speaker 1: another thing we haven't even touched on yet, is the
Speaker 1: current obsession in psychiatry with treating everything with pills. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a whole different conversation, but I hear you. I
Speaker 1: just I want to ask a follow up question, because
Speaker 1: you've talked a lot about trying to understand UH and
Speaker 1: and move move us away from thresholds of the actual
Speaker 1: characteristics themselves. But I want to talk about the other end.
Speaker 1: How do you find the cutoff for cybernetic dysfunction? You know,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know you you haven't. We haven't focused
Speaker 1: on that question as much as right, So that gets
Speaker 1: us back again to this distinction that you run up
Speaker 1: between psychopathology and mental disorder. And so what we think
Speaker 1: is that actually, again it's an objective question or not
Speaker 1: whether somebody has cybernetic dysfunction, because remember that requires two things.
Speaker 1: First that you are you know, you're you're blocked from
Speaker 1: moving towards you know, some of your important goals. And
Speaker 1: then the second thing is that you're unable to engage
Speaker 1: in the process that allows you to explore new possibilities,
Speaker 1: right like slopping in new goals, or finding new strategies
Speaker 1: to pursue the old goals, or just thinking about the
Speaker 1: world in a different way that it would allow you
Speaker 1: to get past whatever you're stuck in. And as soon
Speaker 1: as you've got that being blocked and then also not
Speaker 1: being able to engage in effectively in the process of
Speaker 1: developing new strategies and new goals, then you've got psychopathology.
Speaker 1: So I think that that's I think it's reasonable to
Speaker 1: think about that as something that you do have or
Speaker 1: you don't. But of course you could have a very
Speaker 1: you could have a pretty mild version of that right
Speaker 1: where you know, somebody might just I don't know, be
Speaker 1: really depressed and stuck in a way for a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks, and maybe if you went into the doctor
Speaker 1: at that point said I'm super depressed, things going badly,
Speaker 1: I don't know what to do. You know, let's say
Speaker 1: it's lasted for a month rather than two weeks. Like
Speaker 1: eventually you're going to get to the threshold where even
Speaker 1: the DSM would say, Okay, now we're diagnosing you with
Speaker 1: the depression. But remember for them too, it's pretty arbitrary
Speaker 1: exactly how long that has to be. And so what
Speaker 1: we're saying basically is that whether or not you have
Speaker 1: psychopathology is something that we should be able to say
Speaker 1: pretty clearly. But that doesn't mean we want to give
Speaker 1: you a diagnosis, right, because the diagnosis has to do
Speaker 1: with whether you need treatment or not, or whether we're
Speaker 1: just going to, you know, see whether you can you know,
Speaker 1: whether you can get by on your own, or maybe
Speaker 1: we give you just a little bit of advice or
Speaker 1: counseling or whatever. I mean, it's like it's rare that
Speaker 1: somebody goes in to see like a counselor or a
Speaker 1: therapist and they get nothing. Right, they're not going to
Speaker 1: say they're going to say, well, you know, talk to
Speaker 1: me and I'll see how I can help you. But
Speaker 1: you know, maybe just that little bit of help might
Speaker 1: be enough. And so figuring out how much cybernetic dysfunction
Speaker 1: somebody has to have before we're going to give them
Speaker 1: a diagnosis, that's a tricky question, right, And that's not
Speaker 1: really the business that we're in, because that's something that
Speaker 1: has to be worked out with the medical establishment, and
Speaker 1: you know, even sadly with things like insurance and all
Speaker 1: these things. They're all these players that come in to
Speaker 1: defining exactly when somebody needs treatment. And I don't think
Speaker 1: that ultimately that can be a purely objective question because
Speaker 1: there's always judgments about when when you should help. There's
Speaker 1: a basic issue with medicine. It's not it's not just
Speaker 1: a science, because there's this there's imperative. There's the imperative
Speaker 1: to treat well. Also, I mean, if you have the money,
Speaker 1: you can get service from someone. It's not like psychologists
Speaker 1: are turning people with They're like, you're not messed up
Speaker 1: enough to see me, you know, right, we're talking about psychoanalysis.
Speaker 1: You can go pay to land the couch will take
Speaker 1: you for five years. Yeah, yeah, so's we don't get
Speaker 1: that precise. It's just like the PA, the patient has
Speaker 1: to reach a point in their life where they're motivated
Speaker 1: to change in some way or yeah, I mean, one
Speaker 1: interesting question is what do you do with people who
Speaker 1: have a problem but aren't motivated to change and they're
Speaker 1: destroying society and or become like a president? Right? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: so there's an interesting thing about narcissism and antisocial personality disorder,
Speaker 1: which is that those people who have those problems often
Speaker 1: don't think they have a problem, I know. And so
Speaker 1: you know, one question we always get with our theory
Speaker 1: is like, well, how do you say when those people
Speaker 1: have a problem, because what if they are pursuing their
Speaker 1: goals effectively? And what we usually say is that, well,
Speaker 1: most of the time they're not, even if they think
Speaker 1: they are. Right, Like, if you are constantly stressed out
Speaker 1: and constantly in a rage because people aren't giving you
Speaker 1: the admiration that you feel you deserve, then you are
Speaker 1: not actually successfully pursuing your goals. Right, So you know,
Speaker 1: you can still you can potentially diagnose people who don't
Speaker 1: want to be diagnosed, even using our theory. That's you
Speaker 1: say you say to a narcissist. You have some serious
Speaker 1: cybernetic dysfunction going on there. Yeah, well and they'll say,
Speaker 1: you know, screw you, right, I'm the greatest. I'm the
Speaker 1: greatest of cybernetic dysfunction. Well right, well they probab wouldn't
Speaker 1: say that, but right, But that's you know again, when
Speaker 1: we say that, it's an objective question, like they have
Speaker 1: a set of goals, and whether or not they're actually
Speaker 1: effectively pursuing them is an objective question. Whether or not
Speaker 1: they recognize it, whether or not, you know, they're diluted
Speaker 1: about how their lives are going or not. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really interesting point. Another interesting one
Speaker 1: is what do you do with the what what people
Speaker 1: have called a successful psychopath, you know, like the person
Speaker 1: who is not in jail, but making people, making people miserable,
Speaker 1: making people suffer to get what they want. You know,
Speaker 1: is that person, you know, they're very callous, they have
Speaker 1: no consideration of other people's, other people's feelings or other
Speaker 1: people's needs, happy to hurt people to get what they want.
Speaker 1: Is that person mentally ill or not? And there are
Speaker 1: take on it is basically that if the way that
Speaker 1: they treat other people is interfering with some of their
Speaker 1: goals or needs again, regardless of whether they recognize it
Speaker 1: or not. Then we can say that, yes, they do
Speaker 1: have psychopathology, they do have cybernetic dysfunction, but in the
Speaker 1: very rare case where they are actually meeting all of
Speaker 1: their own values and needs while causing other people to suffer,
Speaker 1: they're not mentally ill. But that's a question for you know,
Speaker 1: for the law, probably, like we need to use other
Speaker 1: societal mechanisms, and we often do that of course, right,
Speaker 1: because we often say, well, you're not mentally ill, but
Speaker 1: I'm sending you to jail because you did things that
Speaker 1: are causing other people to suffer. So totally, Yeah, diagnosing
Speaker 1: mental illness is not the only way to deal with
Speaker 1: people who cause suffering. Yeah, and their own personal goals
Speaker 1: might be being met at the expense of society, and
Speaker 1: I think your theory needs to take that to account
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, well, I'm you know, And the way
Speaker 1: that it does that is to say that some things
Speaker 1: are a matter for for for the law, right, for
Speaker 1: legal enforcement or societal enforcement in some other way, and
Speaker 1: not for the mental health profession. Yeah, you know, which
Speaker 1: is not unless their risk. You can still report, there's
Speaker 1: still certain rules. Yeah, you read my mind. I was
Speaker 1: just going to think about risk, right, because you know,
Speaker 1: like our theory, I think also lends itself to thinking
Speaker 1: about ways to intervene for people who have risky personality
Speaker 1: profiles without you know, stigmatizing them by saying they have
Speaker 1: a mental disorder, but saying like, with that particular profile
Speaker 1: that you have, you are at serious risk for things
Speaker 1: going badly down the road, right, And so maybe we
Speaker 1: want to intervene in certain ways, like you know, young,
Speaker 1: like if you have kids, for example, who show what
Speaker 1: are called callous and unemotional traits, which are essentially the
Speaker 1: antecedents to psychopathy, right to having this kind of total
Speaker 1: callous disregard for other people and fearlessness and meanness and disinhibition.
Speaker 1: If you see kids who have those traits, you might
Speaker 1: want to figure out if there's something that you can
Speaker 1: do to steer them in a way that will not
Speaker 1: lead to to something that might later be called psychopathy. Right.
Speaker 1: But there's also a cause that psychologos have that if
Speaker 1: you're a risk of hurting like children or killing yourself.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm also thinking about those which your theory
Speaker 1: is not going to change that some of the basic
Speaker 1: fundamental principles there, right, because I mean, you know, people
Speaker 1: who are at risk of hurting themselves generally, you know,
Speaker 1: want generally want to live. Like yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it becomes tricky when you get into questions like around suicide,
Speaker 1: right because I you know, I mean, I guess one
Speaker 1: of the things that our theory would uh I would
Speaker 1: say it was possible, was that there you could that
Speaker 1: you could make a case for uh a justified allowing
Speaker 1: of of of of people ending their own lives, right,
Speaker 1: like with terminal illness. Some countries already had this. I
Speaker 1: think that if when it's done right, it is it
Speaker 1: is very enlightened. Right if you're saying I'm going to
Speaker 1: I'm going to be suffering, I'm going to be you know,
Speaker 1: dead in five years from this terminal illness. I want
Speaker 1: to end my own life. I don't think that you
Speaker 1: should be considered to have a mental illness, right. I
Speaker 1: think that there are there are circumstances under which that
Speaker 1: might be reasonable and uh and not a sign of
Speaker 1: that and mental health. Well, but in most circumstances, when
Speaker 1: people are suicidal, it's a symptom of a lot of
Speaker 1: things going wrong for them, and they're and that they're
Speaker 1: not able to, you know, get what they want or
Speaker 1: need in life. And so you know, then it clearly
Speaker 1: is indicative of psychopathology from our perspective, I hear you,
Speaker 1: I should have not even brought the suicide one because
Speaker 1: that that's the one you used double clicked on. But
Speaker 1: I'm thing harmed to others, you know, criteria like pedophiles,
Speaker 1: who might you know, are at risk of acting on it,
Speaker 1: you know, their urges or other things like that. Yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: And so I think that's a clear case where somebody
Speaker 1: is putting themselves at risk. You know, so pretty much
Speaker 1: nobody wants to go to jail, right If you're going
Speaker 1: to jail, like, that's probably gonna thwart a lot of
Speaker 1: your your goals, the things you value, what you want
Speaker 1: in life. And you know, so sometimes let's say somebody
Speaker 1: makes a mistake, does something illegal, goes to jail. They
Speaker 1: might be able they can avoid mental illness potentially by
Speaker 1: temporarily adjusting their goals, trying to adapt to their situation.
Speaker 1: You know, when they get out of jail, they might
Speaker 1: go back to pursuing some of the former values. Hopefully
Speaker 1: they've also maybe changed some of their goals to avoid
Speaker 1: getting that kind of trouble again. You know, So we
Speaker 1: can think about that process of adaptation. But when you've
Speaker 1: got somebody who is at risk of destroying their own lives,
Speaker 1: not to mention the lives of others, like somebody with
Speaker 1: pedophilic tendencies, for example, then certainly there could be a
Speaker 1: good reason to intervene, right, And so you know, that's
Speaker 1: a situation where you've got both the mental health issues
Speaker 1: coming up with somebody who's characteristics are putting them at risk,
Speaker 1: and you've got legal issues where their characteristics are putting
Speaker 1: other people at risk. Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right. Well,
Speaker 1: something I really like about your theory though, is that
Speaker 1: it even just recognizes fundamentally that different people have different goals.
Speaker 1: I mean, even that's a revolutionary reframe. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and I guess we try to strike a balance between
Speaker 1: the fact that there are some goals that are pretty
Speaker 1: universal to human beings. Right, this is like the whole
Speaker 1: idea of basic needs, right, I don't need to tell
Speaker 1: you about basic needs. Yeah, but yeah, so we recogn
Speaker 1: but then even there, like we put more emphasis on
Speaker 1: the possibility for those to vary than some theorists would right, like,
Speaker 1: for example, you know, the need for relatedness or connection
Speaker 1: or belonging or whatever you want to call it. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe there's somebody who's a hermit who's been living in
Speaker 1: the woods for twenty years. Do you ever read that
Speaker 1: story about it's like the last hermit, this guy who
Speaker 1: lived in Maine in the woods. No, that's a really
Speaker 1: fascinating story. I'll send it to you. But you know,
Speaker 1: so there are real people like this who are happier
Speaker 1: without human contact and who seem to have you know,
Speaker 1: minuscule amounts of what is supposedly this universal human need
Speaker 1: for affiliation. And to us, you know, that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that they are defective or mentally ill or disordered or whatever,
Speaker 1: because it might be that they just have a really
Speaker 1: unusual personality profile and if they can figure out a
Speaker 1: way to live that satisfies their other goals, you know,
Speaker 1: then they can be healthy. More power to them. But
Speaker 1: most people obviously have more of a need for affiliation
Speaker 1: than that, and so it is important. Like if I
Speaker 1: was thinking about this clinically, I would say, well, you
Speaker 1: want to check in on the things that people have, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, most people have or have a need for,
Speaker 1: like connection to other people and sense of autonomy and
Speaker 1: sense of competence or capability or you know, esteem or
Speaker 1: you know, you could use anything on Maslow's list or
Speaker 1: your updated version of mass Laws list. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you do ever write more on a specific uh
Speaker 1: you know, collaboration of the interventions that are implied by
Speaker 1: your theory, I would like to please consult me, because
Speaker 1: I think we can. We can, we can bring in
Speaker 1: a lot of humanistic psychology and and the kind of
Speaker 1: things I've been thinking about in terms of how the
Speaker 1: goal of self actualization and actually not forgetting the transcendence
Speaker 1: is a need among many humans as well, you know. Right, So,
Speaker 1: so yeah, we should keep talking, I guess, is what
Speaker 1: all I'm saying there. Yeah, so let's just end with
Speaker 1: just a couple more of the implications for intervention. You know,
Speaker 1: I can even read quotes from you. You say, because
Speaker 1: our theory defines no, because you say it so well here,
Speaker 1: Because our theory defines psychopathology in terms of failure of
Speaker 1: characteristic adaptations. Behavioral and talk therapies most act direct act
Speaker 1: most directly on the problem, and biological interventions are effective
Speaker 1: only in as much as the changes they make to
Speaker 1: cybernetic mechanisms subsequently allow people to develop and maintain effective
Speaker 1: characteristic adaptations. In fact, but once we unpacked what that means,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good suggestion for clinical psychologists
Speaker 1: who want to apply your theory. Yeah. Right. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that we are is skeptical about the
Speaker 1: amount that pharmaceuticals are used to try to help people
Speaker 1: with mental health problems. And you know, to be clear,
Speaker 1: we think that there's always going to be a place
Speaker 1: for pharmaceuticals for some types of problem. You know, controlling
Speaker 1: mania for example. You know, people use lithium to do
Speaker 1: that with a fair amount of success for many people,
Speaker 1: you know, those there are things where there the system,
Speaker 1: some of these basic mechanisms of the system may be
Speaker 1: so extreme that if you don't intervene directly on them
Speaker 1: with drugs, that may be really hard for the person
Speaker 1: to make contained stability and to be able to pursue
Speaker 1: their goals effectively in life. But for many problems, I
Speaker 1: think we should be paying more attention to what we
Speaker 1: can do with behavioral interventions, talk based interventions. You know,
Speaker 1: things like CBT, DBT A c T, all the all
Speaker 1: the acron or abbreviations CBD, CBD. Well that's a drug intervention,
Speaker 1: my friend. Yeah. Which, again, I have no opposition to
Speaker 1: CBD oil or any other drug. But I think that
Speaker 1: when we are talking about what people need, we often
Speaker 1: intervene with drugs. That it's sort of like driving a
Speaker 1: nail with a sledgehammer, right. We we use these drugs
Speaker 1: that have extremely dramatic consequences on brain function. They're not targeted,
Speaker 1: they're generally developed through trial and error. They work for
Speaker 1: some people, but not for many people. The success rates
Speaker 1: on them are you know, only marginally better than place
Speaker 1: ebos for a lot of commonly prescribed drugs. So I
Speaker 1: think that if we focused more on figuring out how
Speaker 1: to basically help people to reshape their own habits fundamentally
Speaker 1: right there, the ways that they think about the world,
Speaker 1: the ways that they act, the strategies that they use
Speaker 1: to manage some of their own idiosyncrasies and unusual qualities
Speaker 1: without pathologizing them, without stigmatizing them. You know, I just
Speaker 1: think that I think we could be doing a lot
Speaker 1: better job of helping people, And I think we could
Speaker 1: be you know, it's funny I say this because a
Speaker 1: lot of my own research is neuroscience oriented, right, I'm
Speaker 1: very interested in the brain systems that are involved in
Speaker 1: different personality traits and risks for different kinds of mental illness.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, I think that we should
Speaker 1: actually be spending a lot more money in research on
Speaker 1: interventions that are not based on drugs and on biological mechanisms,
Speaker 1: because I think that there's this sort of generally the
Speaker 1: biological mechanisms are what are the real problem, Right, there's
Speaker 1: a brain disease. But I don't think that's right at all.
Speaker 1: I think that the brain, whatever the patterns of brain function,
Speaker 1: they're just creating risks for people, and that the real disease,
Speaker 1: if you will, is that people can't figure out what
Speaker 1: are the right things to be pursuing in life and
Speaker 1: the right ways to pursue them and the right ways
Speaker 1: to understand their existence. That was beautiful. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: this makes a lot of sense what you're saying, because
Speaker 1: the things at the particular methods that psychologists can use
Speaker 1: for helping people to change those goals and interpretations of
Speaker 1: the world and tourn the strategies to be resilient and
Speaker 1: to reach those goals are more efficient changed by behavior
Speaker 1: or talk therapies then by biological interventions. Right, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that really explains it. I want to end our chat
Speaker 1: today with a quote of yours. You say, Ultimately, psychopathology
Speaker 1: can be overcome only by helping people to set aside
Speaker 1: characteristic maladaptations that prevent them from pursuing their goals effectively,
Speaker 1: and to adopt new adaptations that become persistent elements of
Speaker 1: their personalities or habits as you said, right, or we're
Speaker 1: new habits. You can sell this up as like, you know,
Speaker 1: figure out how to get rid of your bad habits
Speaker 1: and develop better correct, that's what we would say in
Speaker 1: layman lay person language. But but but I want to
Speaker 1: ender this note because I think that it's a really
Speaker 1: exciting new area that you're going into with your work.
Speaker 1: You know, you've done such great work on understanding the
Speaker 1: neuroscience of personality, understanding biological substrates of behavior, cognition, and personality.
Speaker 1: But to move more in this direction of trying to
Speaker 1: actually impact the day to day work that psychologists, you know,
Speaker 1: practitioners and psychiatrists are doing informed by real psychological theory.
Speaker 1: I think is quite revolutionary. So I just want to
Speaker 1: thank you Colin for coming on my podcast today and
Speaker 1: for unpacking all the complexities, because it is a very
Speaker 1: complex theory, for unpack them with our audience. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I hope, I hope the unpacking was comprehensible. I assume
Speaker 1: you'll put up some links. You can probably link to
Speaker 1: some of the papers if people want to read more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, it's been it's been fun and it's fun
Speaker 1: to talk about these things. Thanks you as special for sure.
Speaker 1: Thanks Colin. Thanks for listening to this episode of The
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way
Speaker 1: to something you heard, I encourage you to join in
Speaker 1: the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the
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Speaker 1: more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.