You don't get it do you? If something is "mental" as in mental illness, it is not physical. If psychopathy can be proven to be physical in cause, it might be treated like epilepsy was when epilepsy was found to be physical. Will the state/Government then jail people just because they have a neurological brain defect? It brings criminal insanity, neurology and regular insanity into question. and if the doctor reading the fMRI doesn't like that particular "patient", can they send them away for ever? or if the doctor reading the fMRI is incompetent or corrupt who will listen to a mental(physical) patients protests?
Only ones criminal actions should be punished, not ones "criminal" mind.

Slamming the DSM is a bit like hitting a home run off Chan Ho Park or dating Paris Hilton. Everyone's done it at least once.

I saw that article and it scared me too. Of course there's neuroplasticity, now accepted which proves this research obsolete in which it has been proven that the structure of the brain changes in response to environment and of course all of the power goes to the guy who reads the test.

If you can find one criminal who doesn't have "psycopathic brain structure" and one person who does and has no criminal activity the theory is out the window. I don't hear anyone talking about rehabilitation for the people in prison without this brain structure anymore than anyone is willing to allow someone labeled smi to have a brain scan to prove they don't have "bipolar" or "schizophrenia."

Too, have they looked to the environments of the folks they are scanning.

Now what was the governing idea behind exterminating all of the Jews, oh yeah, just being of Jewish descent makes one dangerous and in need of destruction. That's exactly what this is.

Wonder if the researchers would volunteer to have their brains scanned and what sort of restrictions they'd be willing to apply to themselves if their brains come up hinky? What about their children? Bet they'd go to court or flee the country to prevent those scans, but when it comes to life imprisoned criminals, no so much.

What is so weird is that the criticisms these guys have of the DSM are right on point, except that they miss the point that the same criticisms apply to their work. The premise behind the DSM is that personality disorders are something you are born with, genetic in nature and incurable.

The DSM is not meant to indicate nature or nurture. The rest of us can take it either way or both. From DSM III onward, the philospohy has been to 1. find consensus, including but not solely upon or dependent upon, using best available evidence, to settle upon a set of diagnostic categories, diagnoses, and specifiers within diagnoses. 2. To define these in terms of symptoms that, to some degree, are OBSERVABLE or measurable, etc., versus conjecture/inference/etc., and 3. state the recipe for satisfying some range of symptoms (referred to as "Chinese Menu" type criteria, i.e., with these meals you get soup or eggroll), then 4. evaluate various competing conditions such as symptoms being due in part or whole to some other cause such as intoxication, physical illness, etc., then 5. you warrant the diagnosis.

Within ALL of this, DSM does NOT say whether ANYTHING is cause by limbic system, early childhood abandonment, birthsign, toilet training, etc.

It basically says: if you meet these fairly standard, measurable, definable criteria, you have the dx.

This was done deliberately in order to avoid the etiology-type issues.

Therefore, there is no dichotomy between a limbic system reasercher and an adherent of the DSM-IV.

As far as I know, DSM-V will be the same philosophy.

Sure, we all believe to some degree that various problems are "nature" (schizophrenia large consensus) and some are not. That has nothing to do with whether someone gets dx properly per DSM with "schizophrenia."

Meet the symptoms, get the dx. That's it.

This WAS a vast improvement, if you go back and read DSM I and II. THey had: "[fill-in-the-blank] neurosis" all over the place. Neurosis implies etiology. They erased that issue.

If you don't know this, that is just a detail that underlines how valuable it is to have knowledgable people, who have studied these issues in the classroom, be involved in these issues.

I haven't read the article yet but I'm not convinced that psychopathy isn't just like any other "disorder" and relates to brain changes caused by stress, abuse and trauma rather than some inherent structural difference. I suppose there is a point of no return in terms of what these stressors do to the brain but I think it's rather sweeping to say it can never be healed. I have heard some amazing stories from Dr. Bob Johnson about his work with hardened criminals. In fact he was fired from the English prison system because the authorities found his work "reforming" (really healing) murderers so threatening (and it sure wasn't by using drugs). Yes, fMRIs may show structural differences but that doesn't prove either that they always existed or that they are even irreversible. Using brain scans to make life long determinations about someone are just as bad as doing this using any other criteria.

Corporations do not have physical brain (for a defective paralimbic system to exist)yet are described as psychopathic in their behaviour.

wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation
"Corporations Need Treatment, Documentary Argues
by Stephen Leahy
Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2004
TORONTO - Corporations are not only the most powerful institutions in the world, they are also psychopathic, a new Canadian documentary on globalization elegantly argues.

While the corporation has the rights and responsibilities of ”a legal person”, its owners and shareholders are not liable for its actions. Moreover, the film explains, a corporation's directors are legally required to do what is best for the company, regardless of the harm created.

What kind of person would a corporation be? A clinical psychopath, answers the documentary, which is now playing in four Canadian theatres."

Chicken and egg problem with criminal brains if it exists. Which came first?
And remember the movie "clockwork orange"?

Scary that MacArthur is funding this given who else they have funded in the past. Also ridiculous to go to a prison to find psychopaths--he is only finding unsuccessful and dare I say less intelligent psychopaths and so even if fMRI's were not obsolete he would not have a broad sample of psychopaths. He is not going to meet the successful, intelligent psychopath who never gets caught or who wreaks his damage on people's lives through legal means such as state hospital directors.

Yes Someone, since psychiatrists are the sole arbiters of who gets labeled insane, which for those labeled schizophrenic and many others is a literal death sentence, surely all psychiatrists will consent to having this fMRI just to make sure there aren't any psychopaths lurking among them and of course we'll want to look at the brains of all Supreme Court Justices, judges, lawyers, doctors, police officers, social workers, teachers...so why aren't these people responsibly lining up to get their brain scans. Why hasn't Kiehl himself publicized his?

Turns out mhp's can avoid the MMPI because they know to much about it and the results wouldn't be accurate, or so I was told by the psychologist who wanted to administer it to me when I told him I really wouldn't feel comfortable with him doing that until he provided me with the raw data from his MMPI.

It's sort of like Obama's idea of mandatory mental health screening for military (enlisted folk only of course;). You'd think he'd want the leaders who ordered the wars and the generals who manage them screened but no. And then there's the obvious teen screen in schools. Why no teacher screen?...

Obviously this is not about protecting society. It's much more scary.

This is directed to the comment by MedVsTherapy. Etiology means cause, right? So are you saying that with the DSM III, the dismissing of "cause" in a diagnosis was a good thing?

If that were applied equally across all medical disiplines, wouldn't that eliminate the desire or initiative to find cures? If you don't care what the cause is and are only concerned with treating symptoms, where's the incentive for prevention?

Take that approach even further and apply it to all of science. Doesn't seem we'd have much progress in our world.

Sorry, but I think you're out in left field.

SallyT, you raise an interesting point. In my mind, the DSM's dismissing etiology as relevant results is a perfect example of the way in which biopsychiatry moves the understanding of human distress backwards to a horrible place, in direct contradiction to the direction diabetes, the condition pshrinks love to compare mental illness to, is moving.

In traditional medicine, for years diabetes was treated chemically only with no attention whatsoever to diet and/or lifestyle. The fact that with regards to diabetes, diet and lifestyle are now taken into account is progress and the fact that lots of diabetics who were dependent on drugs are now free of drugs and control their diabetes with diet and exercise, med free, is progress.

Think about it, schools are actually beginning to understand that diet and exercise routines must be changed because the traditional public school diet and the change to taking pe of out schools has led to more diabetes. So the system is changed to improve the health of the individual and all society improves.

What if the "science" of psychiatry made similar recommendations to schools, what if psychiatry was scientific and pointed out to schools that the rise in behavior labeled adhd, bipolar, etc., mandated better diet and exercise? What if with the drastic rise in not just people with psych labels but people clammering to get them, psychiatry recommended changes to society to reduce the incidence of people getting these labels?

But no, "modern" biopsychiatry, being a business and social control mechanism masquerading as science, recommends drugs (that of course cause diabetes;) and social restrictions that cause the kind of response it purports to be trying to cure.

Psychiatry, as E and MedsVTherapy point out, is moving backwards, having decided that culture and environment don't matter, having with the DSM decided to look only at an isolated individual with no regard for the context of his or her life. Thus the indignities we have in psychiatry, the lack of science, the mockery and defensiveness.

Also, like diabetes, the behavior we label as mental illness, has a strong cultural component. Ironically as the entire world of diabetes research and treatment has begun to realize that culture and family are important in the cause, treatment, and cure for diabetes, with emphasis on drugs and genes decreasing, psychiatry has of course moved backwards denying that family and/or culture is in anyway relevant to the cause and cure of behavior labeled as mentally ill.

It's as if Eric Fromm and co. were on the verge of something truly great and the biopsych nazis came in and destroyed it which is of course what happened.

Hence the passion of many of us here. If Fuller Torrey wins, it's really a victory for that part of humanity capable of Nazi Germany, a true holocaust.

Meanwhile, the reason that prisoners and not prison guards, students but not teachers, mental health patients but not mental health professionals, clients accused of crimes but not lawyers or judges, soldiers but not officers, are tested whether with fMRI or with bogus instruments like the mmpi, is because no one wants such a test, and hence it's only the poor and powerless who get forced into being "evaluated" by the mental health industry.

SallyT:
"So are you saying that with the DSM III, the dismissing of "cause" in a diagnosis was a good thing?"

I did not make this up, hence I am not out in left field. Can we stop with the name-calling?

From Wikipedia entry on DSM-III: "A key aim was to base categorization on colloquial English descriptive language (which would be easier to use by Federal administrative offices), rather than assumptions of etiology, although its categorical approach assumed each particular pattern of symptoms in a category reflected a particular underlying pathology (an approach described as "neo-Kraepelinian”). The psychodynamic or physiologic view was abandoned, in favor of a regulatory or legislative model."

I don't think SallyT accused you of making this up. I think she was stating that it's a bad thing. To me your quote from Wikipedia is anti-psychiatry at it's finest (and in case you didn't know, I'm anti-psychiatry). Here I'll repost that quote:

"From Wikipedia entry on DSM-III: "A key aim was to base categorization on colloquial English descriptive language (which would be easier to use by Federal administrative offices), rather than assumptions of etiology, although its categorical approach assumed each particular pattern of symptoms in a category reflected a particular underlying pathology (an approach described as "neo-Kraepelinian”). The psychodynamic or physiologic view was abandoned, in favor of a regulatory or legislative model.""

Yep, read that a few times and all the problems with biopsych start peeking out.

(with apologies to SallyT who I'm not t

There's a cool article in Slate about how bogus fMRI data is: http://www.slate.com/id/2204590/

and then of course there's Carlat's piece from May which the Slate piece links to.