Psychiatric Reform

A panel based solution to proper mental evaluation

The transition period from current societal embrace of negative psychology to one of much needed positive psychology will be a turbulent one. In order for psychology and psychiatry to get good social reputations again (to make this transition quickly and smoothly) three key problems need to be tackled:

1) Serious and debilitating split between psychiatrists and psychological therapists (with corresponding lack of synergy between the two in creating holistic improvement of the individual). 

The split has occurred due to different breeds of humans that go into the fields of therapy and pill prescription. The amount of schooling (10+ years) and training that is required to become a full pledged psychiatrist is enormous. It takes a certain type of reptilian cold blooded patience and unemotional personality to become a doctor and then do additional cramming to be able to prescribe hard hitting narcotics to children as young as 5 (and sleep at night). The final result is that many psychiatrists are just neurologically not built for empathic understanding of their patients. It comes as no surprise then that after such herculean effort to make money, many become easily corrupted by big pharma. They get just a few minutes with their clients and could care less about what happens to them.

Therapists on the other hand are an emotional empathic bunch but just don't have the patience and attention to detail to go through over a decade long ultra boring journey to become professional pill pushers. They genuinely care about humans and are emotional sponges (that subconsciously get a feeling of power from endlessly listening to other people's troubles and feeling better about their own turbulent inner emotional world through comparison).

I exclude remaining psychoanalysts and specialists who specialize in ultra wealthy clientele. The dichotomy problem mentioned affects to vast majority of the patient demographic. People who are physiologically capable (have the right serotonin and dopamine production in their brain) of emotional understanding AND who have the ability to become excellent PhD psychiatrists are few in number. Therapists most likely are ENFJ/INFJ Myers-Briggs personalities and can get joy from helping troubled children whereas psychiatrists are probably INTJ/ISTJ leaning who can get a kick out of molecular chemistry.

2) Corporate and political domination of psychological research, consensus building, and norms.

This is likely a more difficult problem to take care of. As mentioned in my previous article, the members of American Psychiatric Association are thoroughly compromised. They are the ones who write the mental health bible [DSM] and descriptions of ailments thus creating industry standards and norms.

"Of the 170 panel members, 95 (56%) had 1 or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. In 6 of 18 panels, more than 80% of the panel members had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies".

The corruption among top medical professionals in APA is especially serious because within the scientific hierarchy, many youthful upstarts have to cite these bought off clowns in order to have their peer reviewed papers be taken seriously. In other words, there are a few hundred people with high enough "seniority" whose research has to be integrated and over half of them are partially if not fully in the pocket of international corporations. This creates the absurd situation analogous to agricultural scientists having to indirectly cite the thoughts of McDonalds board of directors when writing their research papers. Of course this analogy is extreme (and done for illustration) considering this top down rot is very indirect. But if done long enough and on a large enough scale, it becomes Soviet in its abuse of the field of psychiatry. At a certain point, when politically significant numbers of the herd are medicated and are part of the "clientele", ruling factions become involved by trying to use the APA the way they use other influential structures (mass media organs, department of education, etc). Thus we see an unholy monstrosity of a couple hundred cold blooded 60 year olds sandwiched between corporations and the government defining what ails school children.


And people wonder why psychology/psychiatry has such a bad reputation. In its current form, it is a very advanced form of Brave New World-esque social control. Soma now comes in many flavors. I wont go further into the profit driven pill pushing abuses as there have been many articles concerning this in recent years.

3) Severe fundamental and structural confusion in the field since many of the "disorders" are just intense physical characteristics of certain human breeds that are exacerbated by their socioeconomic environment.

This third problem will be naturally and gradually resolved by itself as more and more research gets connected from across the planet in the coming years. It will then be finally understood that psychology and psychiatry mostly treat symptoms of certain socioeconomic developments and their effects on the two legged animals. In the future what is done now will be seen as obscene as giving anti-depressants to a moody elephant forced to do tricks in a circus.

What's the solution?

Even in an enlightened welfare/human centric society of the future, psychology/psychiatry will remain important as there are genuine neurological ailments and environmentally acquired conditions. In addition, even individuals in a healthy socioeconomic system will want to reach new heights of development through positive psychology and not just "treat" themselves "back" to some notion of homeostatic normalcy. This would be analogous to wild and free elephants seeking augmentations to be even more empowered in the wild.


In the meantime, we need to focus on problems 1 and 2 mentioned above. The obvious solution to the first problem is to have a panel analyze an individual.

An example would be 2 therapists and 2 psychiatrists and perhaps 1 sociologist make a joint simultaneous assessment of the patient. This automatically greatly reduces the problem of false diagnosis when it comes to prescribing pills. Different assessments by individual practioners being made is a legendary problem in the field. The first session should be lengthy and the doctors in the room would be aided by the empathic understanding of the 2 therapists present.
The follow up sessions can then minimize the doctors' role and just leave the patient with 3 people to work on him or her. The sociologist would provide environmental explanatory framework.

The obvious benefits is that the 5 professionals would learn from each other and have a more holistic outlook in the future. The patient benefits from 1 democratically reached opinion that is the product of 5 brains. These brains will work harder as well since they'll want to demonstrate their will to power and expertise to their educated peers. This will boost confidence of the client and the people augmenting him. A human being's psyche is too important a thing to leave in the hands of one person. Problems of salary, time, and economics are but engineering problems that can be resolved with sufficient effort.

When it comes to the second problem mentioned, only muckraking and structural reform can resolve it. Different countries have different levels of corruption in their psychiatric bodies. Perhaps some term limits or age limits are needed to constantly bring new blood into psychiatric leadership. Those countries that are at the bleeding edge of progress should create joint bilateral education programs with other states. Eventually United Nations should deal with the issue of abuse and non-interference when it comes to mental health.

Screening Psychopaths in Government

Before any meaningful societal reform is possible, a screening method has to be applied to separate the predatory 1% from levers of power. The time is ripe to filter psychopaths out of key socioeconomic functions



The time is ripe for a worldwide effort to formulate simple standardized procedures to filter acutely psychopathic individuals from positions of economic, political, and social leadership. This is the very first step necessary before we start implementing policies for international recovery of the real physical economy. This is due to the fact that meaningful reform will simply not be possible with highly unempathic clinical intraspecies predators remaining in charge of socioeconomic management.

Lets look at the numbers. Clinical psychopaths are only 1% of population yet are disproportionately represented in prisons (over 20%) and on Wall Street (close to 10%). Government functions are less studied but should be comparable to if not higher than business. In addition to these numbers there are subclinical psychopaths (who have just enough empathy, emotional understanding, and narcissism to be a career politicians) and highly unemotional introverts (non-psychopathic schizoid strategists). This makes for a total % of people often working against the general population at 6%+. Thus there is a predatory core within a predatory core with clinical types influencing the others within 6% in unhealthy ways and counteracting the influence of over 90% of the population.

I have written previously that Myers-Briggs Personality Test is a good way to identify personality types most likely to be the human herd's biological predators. ENTPs/ENTJs with Thinking function of 100 would be most likely to be clinical psychopaths and ENTPs/ENTJs with a T of 70-80+ would be most likely to be subclinical (helpers and ambassadors to the "human" world). ESTJs and ESTPs with a hyper strong T and lack of emotion are of course also dangerous but their lack of intuition prevents them from climbing and thriving within institutional power hierarchies as effectively. If one is to accept the theory that ADHD prone people (extroverted Ps) are genetic remnants from the pre-agricultural hunter gather days (when their physiology and psychological traits helped in food acquisition and tribal defense) then the notion of creative intrahuman hunt takes a new more literal meaning.

The brilliant psychological theorist and author Andrew M. Lobaczewski has formulated and described the process of how psychopathic individuals gradually infiltrate socioeconomic institutions and movements. His groundbreaking book "Political Ponerology" (here's my review and summary of it) emphasizes that the human herd must develop an immune system type screening mechanisms to identify psychopaths, educate the vast majority of the population about their influence, and to prevent these individuals from being in charge of key things like the economy and social policy. Total lack of conscience and empathy for the general population should be an obvious disqualifier when hiring a policy maker. This will gradually begin to reduce frequency of events like famines, wars, and overall misery from economic mismanagement and stagnation.

There are already methods to screen psychopaths such as combination of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, seeing body's reaction to fear and emotional stimuli (galvanic skin reaction, heart rate, and respiration rate), and brain scans that show if certain parts of the brain light up or don't when presented with emotional input. All the up to date tests must be combined into an integrated package that is standardized with key countries of the world. The overall test must be constantly augmented with continuous research. Recently, President Medvedev has supported psychopath screening in the police forces to reduce instances of police brutality and mismanagement. This is a solid first step that other countries should look at and implement on a wide scale.

Screening must begin gradually yet forcefully and after sufficient amount of people have been educated on the danger of psychopathy in societal management (or mismanagement as is often the case in declining society that has been thoroughly infiltrated). We don't want a knee jerk violent reaction from top psychopathic officials and theorists if they feel they are being rapidly cornered out of their privileges and wealth. Therefore the process will most likely begin with screening entry level hierarchical members who will then gradually displace the older intrahuman predators on the top as they retire.

Another key thing to consider is that although clinical psychopaths tend to be incompetent, the subclinical variety and the highly unempathic introverts (acute INTJs/INTPs who are not able to understand large swaths of humanity at the fundamental emotional level) often have extremely useful objectively derived theoretical and conceptual knowledge to contribute. Therefore, we cannot just crudely purge management of those 1% without a conscience along with a number of "psychopath-lites" and then draw some arbitrary line in the sand of how much emotion you need to participate. There would be chaos. The essential thing is to separate the clinical psychopaths from having influence on the semi-conscienceless/semi-psychopathic NTs (lites) and then formulate ways to compartmentalize the influence of the lites while making them useful to society.

Thus whereas 1% of population will gradually be separated from jobs in management over time (a less arbitrary line based on thorough international screening test), there should be mechanisms of taking and making use of the input of 1-5% of population who are lites (NTs with T in the 60-90 range). Efforts should be taken to avoid a scarlet letter type branding while diluting the physical influence of semi-conscienceless theoreticians through social direction/training. Their input must be taken (with a clear understanding of where it's coming from) and mixed with input of emotional idealistic theorists (such as INFPs/ENFPs) to make use of the practical parts (good) while dumping the inhumane parts (bad). An argument can be made that the Internet belongs to INTPs and INTJs since they are the most likely (disproportionately to their population) to participate in online forums and arguments. Their support is essential in the future in the struggle against predatory extroverts.

The separated predatory psychopathic 1% should not be mistreated but made useful in some other way so they do not form a criminal/revolutionary faction once not in control of key levers of power. This problem is an article in itself but the problem is a lot smaller than the one of having many of the 1% faction integrated into highest levels of business and government because they were born into wealth or conned their way to the top.

"Psychological Disorders": Just Maladaptive Qualities of Intense Myers Brigg Personality Types? Part 2

Are some MBTI types more likely to be labeled with certain "disorders" more than others? I suggest they do and list the connections that seem most obvious.




In part 1 of the discussion, I touched upon psychological disorders just being the neurotic aspects of different breeds of humans. Let's start the journey towards matching what Myers-Briggs breeds are more likely to get a certain "disorder" classification for one of their more extreme members. As a baseline, the MBTI types to be matched are acute ones (60 or more on each letter). Some disorders may require only one function to be abnormally (statistically) high such as 100 F. Therefore, not all acute MBTI types would necessary match disorder descriptions but those acute MBTI types within the already acute pool of their brethren. This is an incomplete and imperfect list that will be upgraded as the time goes on. It is to serve as a starting point for discussion.

Autism Spectrum

More likely among ISTPs -The high Sensing function of close to 100 seems key as the nerves leading to the eyeballs are thicker than in most people. Here is a great video of a speech by an autistic woman who explains that she "thinks" in images rather than symbolically. She humorously mentions that the introverted scientists/inventors/technicians in the audience are probably touching the boundary of autism in some cases and that helps them in their detail specific work. The high Introversion explains the super low interpersonal communication skills and avoidance of social situations that are energy draining for the autistic. The high T and emotionlessness explains the lack of close attachment to objects within the world during those rare times when the autistic person does decide to engage with the world (a blip of extroversion). The high P contributes to paralysis of action and super sensory overload. The brain is probably overcloked with video/audio inputs without a biological way to pleasingly utilize the data. The overall result is a person acting very much like somebody on dissociative drugs (capable of being closest to perfect robotic objective perception of the world without emotion clouding it).

Mood Disorders - Depressive and Bipolar (For emotional roller coasters to happen in the first place, one needs a super strong F function (again 90-100 range) to feel the extreme highs as well as the extreme lows. Other functions determine the specific mood disorder at work.)

Depression


More likely among ISFJs and ESFJs - Our current ENTJ/ENTP dominated society is very unfriendly to the self sacrificing SFJs. Rapid technological and cultural change, atomization of society and family by free market, and the dog eat dog interpersonal interactions are the most likely to have greatest negative impact on SFJs. Their helpfulness is not rewarded but ridiculed and duty bound SFJs are less likely to relax and party like their FP counterparts. Strong S makes them focus on their constant lack of affirmation by others in the here and now while the J contributes to an inflexible and emotionally charged moralistic system that is constantly seen by the S as being violated. Strong J also anchors the person in a depressed brooding mood with fewer interruptions into happier more elevated mode (see below).

Bipolar 

More likely among the ENFPs and ESFPs - Considering the manic extroverted phase of a bipolar person, the high E appears key contributor alongside the very high F. The high P contributes to rapid switching of moods and their uncontrollability (contrasted to long continuous brooding on a certain emotional plane by a strong J). The extroverted FP goes towards the world full of energy and inspiration but gets shot down by the cynical social environment. Acute sensitivity to criticism and a strong P to observe how such criticism is warranted from many angles creates a severe emotional collapse and withdrawal into depressive phase. The constant emotional switching adds to mental confusion and sense of lack of control. These are the people who love to party and are all over the place but face severe crashes when encountering an environmental obstacle. Extroversion must be maintained and not bottled up unhealthily.

ADHD

More likely among ENFPs, ESFPs, ENTPs, and ESTPs - Key appears to be constant switching of perceptive angles by a P over 60 and a strong extroversion that makes the person go towards the world and feel dulled when that desire is frustrated. Also appears to be just a common childhood exploration phase of toddlers and children of most MBTI types.

Schizoid Personality

More likely among ISTJs, INTJs and possibly INTPs - Schizoids are marked by social isolation, emotional coldness, and indifference to others. Very impaired social functioning, extreme loneliness, and grandiose visions of extroversion. The above characteristics are obviously caused by same strong I and T as in the autistic but the schizoids are not totally overburdened with a sensory overload. This allows them to be creative at times. Political Ponerology makes an interesting case that Schizoids (due to them spending lots of time alone looking at the fast moving world with often vengeful fantasies) write the literature and constructs that inspires subclinical and clinical psychopaths.

Psychopathy

More likely among ENTJs, ENTPs - These are human herd's natural predators and feast on it if they get into power instead of improving it. The essential elements are a maximum high T of 100 for clinical psychopaths and a T over 60 for subclinical ones (the milder ones who have a foot in both the human world and the predatory world and who make natural politicians). This makes sure there is no emotional empathy for fellow homo sapien. They literally cannot feel the way others feel and this makes most people seem irrational and weak to them. The closest they have to emotion (that they confuse the concept with) is sexual arousal and aggression. The strong E makes them go towards the world and socialize intensely with their prey while the strong N intuition allows them to rapidly learn how to mimic their prey (smile, know what words with emotional meaning to say, etc). There is debate in literature about whether the psychopaths cluster on J (left brain) or P(right brain) side or whether it's but a continuum of psychopathy. Most likely it's a continuum with different specialization of labor among predators. They share all the same characteristics except for ENTJ being mindlessly goal driven regardless the human cost (the bully) whereas the ENTP is disorganized but better able to emulate/get along with different humans and creatively exploit that ability (the Con Artist). Their lack of emotional intelligence and desire for exploitative shortcuts makes them poor technocrats, manual laborers, and high tech specialists. The subclinical ones could be steered in the right direction and made productive members of the community. They have additional "disorder" characterizations of hypomania and narcissism.

Schizotypal Personality Disorder

More likely among INTPs and INFPs - The key element seems to be a super high P that can create an overflow of perceptive data creating a pseudo-hallucination effect. An N of 100 and a P of 100 can easily create conspiracy theories that aren't there.

Borderline Personality Disorder

More likely among ESTPs - These very bored emotionless people (high P and T) live on the edge and thus make good soldiers or criminals. They don't have the intuition to be psychopaths and don't interact with too many diverse people as often since they wont get along. A super high E is key and makes them seek pursue entertainment in the here and now (S) that would be overwhelming to most.

This brings to a close the brainstorming secession. Once again, the article doesn't imply that each Myers Briggs type matches a cluster of descriptions that are labeled as a specific disorder. It does imply that among intense MBTI types, there exist even more intense minority within them whose behavior (if stressed/guided enough by society) matches certain disorder descriptions more often than others.

There are certainly overlaps that I failed to mention along with some types that were excluded (for now) such as ESTJ, INFJ, ISFP, and ENFJ.

Find out which type you are here. ;)

To be continued...

The Future is Positive Psychology

Positive psychology focuses on strong healthy individuals and thus finds ways to improve everybody regardless of label

Current negative psychology studies and helps miserable people and thus creates a counterproductive black and white duality of  broken vs. healthy









Psychology is a very young science. It only began to blossom productively once the power of the field's 19th century founding fathers declined. It only really started integrating biology and the corresponding physicality of pharmaceuticals half a century ago. Nothing seems fundamentally more important than the study of our mental faculties and of constructs to better explain why we think or feel the way we do. That is the road to finding ways to modify ourselves more to our liking.

We've heard the ancient suggestion "know thyself" many times but we still treat psychology as the co-equal of other soft "sciences" like sociology, economics, or cultural anthropology. Surely all those are important, have connections with psychology, and should be studied alongside it in an integrated manner. However, as Nietzsche put it, psychology is the mother of the sciences and we need to prioritize study of ourselves over groups, rockets, and interest rates. We as humans and our thoughts and personalities are more important and more physically tangible than concepts of marginal tax rates, legislative structures, and cultural evolutions. Understanding how we think and feel, learning to augment and modify ourselves, and to think in new ways obviously has direct effect on how we approach and view other sciences.

So why the socio-cultural neglect of psychology? The answer, besides it being such a young science, is that being labeled crazy, dumb, and different often got you killed (often horribly) for most of human history. Psychology did a lot of classification of human behavior and has labeled much of that behavior maladaptive and in need of change. However, most humans have a difficult time thinking in shades of gray so anything different or maladaptive is viewed through the binary lens of normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, self reliant/dependent, good/bad, crazy/sane etc. Nobody wants to be on the other side of the absolutist fence. In most of the world, you either buck up and survive long enough to have kids or you might as well not live at all.

 Reality is much more complex. Human population varies greatly in how much personal power individuals have. Personal ability to influence the environment directly affects how many resources one will have, how one will be treated, how likely one is to combine one's genes with a really good mate, etc. The more power one has, the more one is happier, wealthier, and better treated by others. People give attention/support to expanding growing organisms and create a virtuous cycle for that organism. Powerlessness as we all know creates a vicious cycle.

Figure 1, which is just grafted onto an IQ bell curve chart for a rough example, shows that most of the population just has an average amount of personal influence that is physiologically possible. Personal power is determined by a multitude of factors (many of them roughly co-equal in importance) which can combine in various way and which all influence each other.

Some examples of many are:

1) Bodily health (getting up every morning and coughing blood or feeling pain is no way to live even if wealthy or attractive)
2) Wealth
3) Neural structure (psychological health. getting up every morning with panic attacks and phobia of the outside is also not a way to live even if famous and intelligent)
4) Attractiveness
5) Intelligence
6) Uniqueness/strength/attractiveness of personality
7) Social class
8) Race
9) Age
10) Ethnic background
11) Gender

The factors vary from culture to culture and contribute to personal influence in constantly changing ways. To illustrate with a simple mathematical example, say there are 10 factors and each can be measured on a scale of 1-10. We can easily see how 2 people can roughly have the same amount of power while having very different factor strengths. Such measurement is obviously impossible but is useful to keep in mind as a construct. Many of the factors can obviously be lumped together or further subdivided.

The socially determined nature of some of these factors can have a drastic effects on the individual. Lets say there is a very bigoted society and there are 5 people in the room. They are all roughly the same in intelligence/neural structure/attractiveness/forceful personality/health (these 5 come close to being universal in terms of being socially constructed internationally). If one of the people in the room is of the race/gender/ethnic group/age/social class that is being discriminated against, that person will not be given as much power through attention/support. That person can be level 70 while others around him/her are level 68-71 yet the discriminated person will not feel like an equal. A person discriminated against has to be stronger than nearby people just to be treated as an equal.

As soon as two people meet each other their brains do a very rapid unconscious appraisal of the other person's strength versus their own. Immediately, the person labels the other as either a weaker competitor in the world, roughly equal competitor, or a stronger competitor. Often the initial meeting is enough for such assessment but often it becomes distorted through being in an atypical state such as on some drug or being extremely tired. The above mentioned factors all give a person a sense of where he should rate the person he meets as well as himself in the larger social sphere. Obviously if a person is a recluse, his ability to self rank and rank others is greatly dulled since social intelligence is not as developed. The sense of one's influence in the world as determined by the natural biology and environment is fluid and can swing forward and backward on the Figure 1 bell curve. Every person on the planet wants to expand personal influence infinitely in all directions. It is a very useful genetic command since it allows more reproduction, nutrition, as well as adapting the environment to oneself rather than the other way around. Infinitely means just that.

Let's use an extreme silly example. The genetically hardwired desire for influence reaches for the stars by wanting to 1) control all the resources on the planetary surface, 2) having everybody else think exactly like him/her self by liking his/her ideas so much as to internalize them completely, 3) having every female utilize same donor sperm so one's genes are in all the world's population and thus "win" (or in case of female, have the finest genetic material from world's top men and then have her sons compete and the winner impregnate everybody). Such an extreme bodily goal obviously is ridiculous but it allows the person to never fully be satisfied with one's current position. Such a goal is the best motivator toward better quality of life since no matter how high one rises, there are always equals to overcome and struggle against. It might never create satisfaction or contentness but it gives an endless journey of improvement and feeling that one's influence is rising. Although all may be programmed to want that, everybody reaches a major obstacle as he/she comes across everybody else. That's when reality sinks in and various individuals find ways to expand their influence in creative ways that is based on their physiological predisposition. An emotional actor does it one way, a big hearted public speaker in another, an aggressive soldier in another, and a calm mathematician in another. Many even blatantly admit they want everybody on the planet to think and act like them (just ask people heavily into organic farming/veganism or religious missionary work).

What does this have to do with positive psychology?

For most of psychology's history, it was negative. That meant that psychologists looked at the statistically small amount of people on the weaker side of the power bell curve. Why the weaker side and not the other extreme? That is because powerless individuals are the most likely to have a lifestyle that is labeled "maladaptive". They are the most likely to not acquire basic things on Maslow's pyramid of needs such as shelter, self-esteem, love, nutrition, and sex. People want to have constant supply of these basic things so they can focus on self-actualizing or making the most of their physiology/social position to increase influence. They need all of them (obviously to various degrees) like one needs a constant supply of food/sleep to fully function. Not having love for example can be as detrimental as not having sex/self esteem/quality nutrients every once in a while.

Lack of sufficient influence over the environment creates a vicious cycle. Since people on the left of the bell curve are weak, they compete less effectively. Since they competitive skills are lacking, they are deprived of things they want and most others get. Since they are deprived, they stagnate in function or decline and demonstrate to the world that they are less successful than most of the population. Since they are less successful, they are treated as failures and the gap widens even more. They compare themselves to their competitors and see most people as stronger and more capable. They are forced to interact with people who are their equals or those even weaker than themselves so they can rank themselves better. Not struggling as often with those stronger than them (out of fear of failure) stagnates the competitive skills even more.

Then 20th century comes around and psychologists come along. They start studying the failures and labeling the weak by categories. Many of the weak come to the psychologists and offer them money to get help in acquiring things they know they want. Psychologists then see similar narratives and the categorization process is sharpened. Small amounts of powerful people on the right side of the bell curve are less likely to seek help. People in the middle would rather not even dabble with such things lest they be labeled by professionals or society. People on top of the bell curve want to be like the strong and so give them power through attention/support, and label the statistically abnormal (often very rare and abnormal) as successful.

Psychologists are stuck studying the weak population which they call unhealthy, sub-obptimal, "abnormal", or deficient. Since people in the middle of power bell curve make up the majority of the population, psychologists use them as a guide and call them "normal" and use them as a point of comparison when it comes to the weak. Since most people are numerically "normal", they are the ones who shape cultural perceptions. Thus everything left of the fatty bell curve or in need of psychological help is seen in horrid black and white terms. Even slight deviations are unconsciously associated with the worst extremes. A mildly depressed person can easily fall in society's eye into the same category as a suicidal person whereas there would be a vast gap between the two. Nobody wants to be labeled as below average in social functioning even when only a narrow aspect of life is affected. The historically ingrained connotation is too strong as it has to do with weakness, failure, lack of offspring, danger, foreignness, and unacceptable behavior.

Let's re-imagine Figure 1 and see the extent of the problem caused by negative psychology. Figure 2 shows that being born into certain conditions can mask certain neural structures that are causing the person to function below full capacity. A person with high attractiveness and intelligence factors can easily fit into statistically "normal" category even while having severe psychological disposition that would make a less attractive/intelligent person fail in many situations. Thus many people think they can wing it without help if they expand influence against the world with average intensity. A person further right on the power bell curve, is even less likely to understand that his/her thoughts/feelings can be enhanced (and thus corresponding influence/functioning).

click to enlarge

Now that neural science is rapidly expanding with better scanning technologies and techniques, a new pharmaceutical era is about to open. We are well aware that anti-depressants and mood stabilizers can do wonders to improve a person's standard of living and functioning. The people who are in deep enough of a hole to seek help from such drugs are those that repeatedly failed to improve in non-pharmaceutical ways. Most societies don't have pro-active testing of the population so the person has to be pro-active him or herself. That is often done when the person has already fallen below what is considered average functioning in some key life area. Most people getting pharmaceutical help these days have began their medication in an unnecessarily weakened state to begin with. A person who is a 45 on the power scale can become 55 with a drug. Similarly a person with similar neurology who is in the higher "normal' band of 65 can become a 75. A very successful powerful individual who is an 85 perhaps can even push up to 90.

Figure 3 shows the progress that can occur once psychology becomes positive and once statistically "normal" are encouraged to better themselves regardless of their current status. Once we figure out what neural structures are the most common in human populations (through constantly improving brain scan technology), we can begin to engineer precise mind enhancing drugs for vast majority of people. For that to happen and for the quality of life to rise for all we must get rid of the focus on the unhealthiest/weakest members of society and focus on the strongest and most successful.

Psychology must lose its negative association and develop a strong positive active one. Hopefully in 20-30 years one can be "doing" psychology like ones does yoga or exercise.