Let’s face it: the comments section of most news and opinion articles on the internet is terrible. The opportunity provided by new technology to respond easily and anonymously seems to have lead to an increase in the amount of vicious insults and bad language on the part of commenters (I’m proud to say the commenters on this blog are a notable exception). At Psychology Today, Dalrymple outlines two different theories to explain this phenomenon, what he calls the Romantic theory:

Those who favour the hydraulic theory of emotions – for example that there is always a certain amount of aggression to be expressed, and if it is not turned outward in some constructive fashion it will turn either inward or outward in a destructive way – would presumably think that the bile was always there and was previously expressing itself in some way even more unpleasant than these internet posts.

…and the Classical:

…those who favour the view that an appetite grows with the feeding would think that the ability and willingness to express bile will simply result in the production and expression of yet more bile. In other words, the habit of expressing your bile or your venom makes you more bilious or venomous. If you control yourself, then, your bile and venom will tend to disappear.

As you already know, TD favors the latter.

Writing on opium addiction at his blog for Psychology Today, Dalrymple quotes from a book called “The Life of the Heroin User: Typical Beginnings, Trajectories and Outcomes” by Shane Darke of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Mr. Darke’s findings confirm many of the arguments Dalrymple has long made about addiction, for example, that users are not as easily and helplessly addicted as conventional wisdom and popular culture suggest:

“Whilst opioids are associated with considerable pleasure in their
subjective effects, they have a number of serious negative sequelae.
Use of the drugs, at least prior to the development of tolerance,
produces nausea and vomiting. The novice user has to work through
these effects to become the long-term user we discuss in this book.”

Now in my experience, at least, nausea and vomiting are highly aversive experiences. If I ate some berries from a tree that caused me to vomit I should certainly think twice about returning to them. In other words, to work through nausea and vomiting indicates considerable determination: indeed, of a degree that would be admirable if it were in pursuit of a worthier end.

Read the post here

At his new blog at Psychology Today, Dalrymple responds to an older post by another psychiatrist, Dr. Ken Eisold, that seeks to explain rioters:

In his article, Dr Eisold makes reference both to the social and economic frustrations of the rioters and to the events in Tiananmen Square. But demonstrations are not riots, though they can be turned into such by extremists, and perhaps by the provocation of the authorities. Nor is it true that every frustration is justified, or that it explains, let alone justifies, riotous and destructive conduct. If frustration explained riots, we would all be rioters. But even in riot-torn areas, rioting is not universal.

Read the full post here

Dalrymple writes at his Psychology Today blog on the problems of a pernicious modern concept:

When I told patients who complained of lack of self-esteem (admittedly on a selected basis) that at least they had got one thing right, they did not grow angry or upset, but laughed instead as if they had known all along that their complaint was a charade. Of course they had things to complain of – we all do, and they had more than most – but the notion of lack of self-esteem actually discouraged them from examining those things honestly.

Dalrymple reacts to a book called Becoming Your Real Self: A Practical Toolkit for Managing Life’s Challenges:

…I don’t really believe in our true self. Perhaps I have heard too many people who repeatedly did the most terrible things and said that those things were not expressions of their real selves to be other than impatient of the whole concept of the real self. We may sometimes act out of character, in fact we all sometimes do, but that is another thing entirely; we cannot act out of character all the time, because how we act all the time is our character.

Read the entire piece here

There really is such a thing as a pointless intellectual pleasure, but take all those Shakespeare scholars arguing over the real provenance of the man’s work. Are they really debating a matter of trivial importance, or do these partisans not hope to make something of a larger point about humanity? Maurice Morgann’s essay from 1777 on Falstaff is a good example:

..his Essay, by far his best-known work… was written, according to the author himself, purely for the intellectual pleasure of proving something of no importance. He wrote it for his own and other people’s pleasure, and for no other reason.

Actually, I think that here he was not being quite frank. Just as even the most cynical of hack journalists harbours the faint hope that a few of his pages might survive his death, so Morgann had a sneaking hope that his little book had more significance than he earlier claims for it.

Read the full piece at New English Review

Everywhere we go nowadays, we are subject to compulsory entertainment. Whatever happened to silent reflection?

Dr. Dalrymple informs us that he’s just begun blogging for Psychology Today. “Psychiatric Disorder: Against the idols of the age” is the name of his blog there, and he’s already written several posts which seem to touch on the intersection of psychology, current events and notable experiences from his own daily life — in keeping with his customary output then. In other words, more of the stuff we love!

The first post examines some interesting takeaways from the news that a woman has falsely claimed to be a relative of a victim of the Germanwings plane crash. Notice, for one thing, how easily she was believed:

She had only to claim to be a relative of the victim of the crash, that is to say to be a victim herself, to be believed. True enough, very few people would dare to commit such a fraud in this situation, so the company would not have been on its guard against such attempts; but there is also a general cultural atmosphere in which claims to victimhood are challenged, if ever at all, only very gingerly. This is because any such challenge can easily be parlayed by the supposed victim into further, or meta-, victimhood. Not to take someone at his word is to cause him further trauma.

Read the full post here

Dalrymple writes at Salisbury Review on the need for tort reform:

Every litigant should have something to lose and claim companies should be prohibited. Quite often I am telephoned by such companies to say they know that I have been involved in an accident and may have a claim for compensation. This is quite clearly dishonest but I suppose must be profitable, or it wouldn’t be done.

Read the full piece here