Diagnosed Best Quotes

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion. While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.

It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

After being diagnose as bi-polar...I feel that laughter is the best medicine for all. I find that I can't write humorously and be depressed at the same time.:)

He’s already run the standard battery of questions, checked the check boxes, computed the data: hears voices = schizophrenic; too agitated = paranoid; too bright = manic; too moody = bipolar; and of course everyone knows a depressive, a suicidal, and if you’re all-around too unruly or obstructive or treatment resistant like a superbug, you get slapped with a personality disorder, too. In Crote Six, they said I “suffer” from schizoaffective disorder. That’s like the sampler plate of diagnoses, Best of Everything. But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.

The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child without preconceived notions and judgements and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world.

Mental disorders should be diagnosed only when the presentation is clear-cut, severe, and clearly not going away on its own. The best way to deal with the everyday problems of living is to solve them directly or to wait them out, not to medicalize them with a psychiatric diagnosis or treat them with a pill.

The best doctors were not the ones that I consulted with, they were the ones whose books I read.

The author indicts "our culture's rush toward efficiency, speed, quantification, and distraction" and counters with the value of "the time and attention required to find the best words and images and then hold them together in ways that illuminate. This, she diagnoses, "is now wildly countercultural. It is inefficient. Its value is not readily quantifiable. Its utility is intangible.

The best doctor in the world is yourself: Diagnose yourself with your heart Treat yourself with your mind Take care of yourself with your spirit Maintain yourself with your body If all else fails get a second opinion.

I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore. In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried— haven't I tried? — to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned. I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend. I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.

just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward? CHAPTER 30 RHUBARB By my twenty-fifth day in the hospital, two days after the biopsy, with a preliminary diagnosis in sight, my doctors thought it was a good time to officially assess my cognitive skills to record a baseline.

However initially persuasive this thesis feels, it fails to diagnose what empathy truly involves. The way properly to enter the mind of another person is not to forget about oneself entirely; rather, it is to use one’s knowledge of oneself to penetrate the consciousness of another. The best way to unearth the secrets of complete strangers is to look honestly into our own hearts.

Often those objecting to the diagnosis will be using their objections to conceal an emotional agenda. They may be angry with the person being diagnosed. They may resent him for all his past sins, and they don’t want to see him get off with just a diagnosis. They want punishment. So they will grow angry at the notion of ADD, and try to discredit it. At these moments it is best to stay with the science, to stay with the facts we have about ADD.

It’s joyful to know you could be diagnosed with a mental disorder but to opt out, to say yes to yourself instead, to have the patience and care to resist the label that never got you anywhere before, that was voted into existence as an illness, that simply isn’t helpful in looking at your life. Nothing tastes sweeter than inching toward self mastery, self intimacy, the progress that comes slowly over a long period of taking good care of yourself, the very best way you know how to, and very imperfectly at that.

We become more successful when we are happier and more positive. For example, doctors put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56 percent. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

I love my passengers. I remember one woman in particular--a senior who had gotten on my bus. She seemed completely lost. She said she was going to a restaurant on City Island Avenue. I could see she was confused. There was just something about her. She looked so elegant, but with a fur coat on a hot summer day, so I said, 'Are you okay?' and she said, 'I'm fine, but I don't know what restaurant I'm meeting my friends at.' I said, 'Get on. Sit in the front.' I asked a gentleman to get up so she could sit near me, and I said, 'I'll run in and I'll check each restaurant for you.' So I checked the restaurants and no luck, but at the very, very last restaurant on the left, I said, 'It's got to be this one. Let me swing the bus around,' and I swung it around. I said, 'Don't move. Let me make sure this is the place before you get out.'It was a hot day, and she's got fur on. She could pass out. So I said, 'Stay here, sweetie. It's nice and cool in here.' I went in and I said 'There's a lady in the bus and she's not sure of the restaurant,' and I saw a whole bunch of seniors there and they said, 'Oh, that's her!' I ran back to the bus and I said, 'sweetie, your restaurant is right here.' I said, 'Let me kneel the bus.' Kneeling the bus means I bring it closer to the ground so she gets off easier. And I said, 'Don't move.' I remember my right hand grabbed her right hand. I wanted to make her feel special, like it was a limousine. It was a bus, but I wanted to make her feel like it was a limousine. And she said, 'I have been diagnosed with cancer--but today is the best day of my life.' And I've never forgotten that woman (Weeping). She's diagnosed with cancer and just because I helped her off the bus, she said she felt like Cinderella. Can't get better than that. And doing your job and getting paid to do a job where you can do something special like that? It's pretty awesome.

I believe the perception of what people think about DID is I might be crazy, unstable, and low functioning. After my diagnosis, I took a risk by sharing my story with a few friends. It was quite upsetting to lose a long term relationship with a friend because she could not accept my diagnosis. But it spurred me to take action. I wanted people to be informed that anyone can have DID and achieve highly functioning lives. I was successful in a career, I was married with children, and very active in numerous activities. I was highly functioning because I could dissociate the trauma from my life through my alters. Essentially, I survived because of DID. That's not to say I didn't fall down along the way. There were long term therapy visits, and plenty of hospitalizations for depression, medication adjustments, and suicide attempts. After a year, it became evident I was truly a patient with the diagnosis of DID from my therapist and psychiatrist. I had two choices. First, I could accept it and make choices about how I was going to deal with it. My therapist told me when faced with DID, a patient can learn to live with the live with the alters and make them part of one's life. Or, perhaps, the patient would like to have the alters integrate into one person, the host, so there are no more alters. Everyone is different. The patient and the therapist need to decide which is best for the patient. Secondly, the other choice was to resist having alters all together and be miserable, stuck in an existence that would continue to be crippling. Most people with DID are cognizant something is not right with themselves even if they are not properly diagnosed. My therapist was trustworthy, honest, and compassionate. Never for a moment did I believe she would steer me in the wrong direction. With her help and guidance, I chose to learn and understand my disorder. It was a turning point.

You’ve dated a shoplifter. A drug addict. A girl who claimed that her roommate kept her locked in a dumpster. She was admitted to Mulberry not too long ago, if I recall, right? They diagnosed her with schizophrenia.” Reece nodded reluctantly. “For the record, I only dated her for two months. And also for the record, she’s doing a lot better.” “Hmm,” Camden replied. “There’s the one who put salt on all her food then complained incessantly of bloating problems. Oh yeah! And the one who wanted you to tie her up and beat the shit out of her every night.” “All right already!” Reece snapped. “I get it. I haven’t had the best of luck with normal women.

AUTHOR’S NOTE Dear reader: This story was inspired by an event that happened when I was eight years old. At the time, I was living in upstate New York. It was winter, and my dad and his best friend, “Uncle Bob,” decided to take my older brother, me, and Uncle Bob’s two boys for a hike in the Adirondacks. When we left that morning, the weather was crisp and clear, but somewhere near the top of the trail, the temperature dropped abruptly, the sky opened, and we found ourselves caught in a torrential, freezing blizzard. My dad and Uncle Bob were worried we wouldn’t make it down. We weren’t dressed for that kind of cold, and we were hours from the base. Using a rock, Uncle Bob broke the window of an abandoned hunting cabin to get us out of the storm. My dad volunteered to run down for help, leaving my brother Jeff and me to wait with Uncle Bob and his boys. My recollection of the hours we spent waiting for help to arrive is somewhat vague except for my visceral memory of the cold: my body shivering uncontrollably and my mind unable to think straight. The four of us kids sat on a wooden bench that stretched the length of the small cabin, and Uncle Bob knelt on the floor in front of us. I remember his boys being scared and crying and Uncle Bob talking a lot, telling them it was going to be okay and that “Uncle Jerry” would be back soon. As he soothed their fear, he moved back and forth between them, removing their gloves and boots and rubbing each of their hands and feet in turn. Jeff and I sat beside them, silent. I took my cue from my brother. He didn’t complain, so neither did I. Perhaps this is why Uncle Bob never thought to rub our fingers and toes. Perhaps he didn’t realize we, too, were suffering. It’s a generous view, one that as an adult with children of my own I have a hard time accepting. Had the situation been reversed, my dad never would have ignored Uncle Bob’s sons. He might even have tended to them more than he did his own kids, knowing how scared they would have been being there without their parents. Near dusk, a rescue jeep arrived, and we were shuttled down the mountain to waiting paramedics. Uncle Bob’s boys were fine—cold and exhausted, hungry and thirsty, but otherwise unharmed. I was diagnosed with frostnip on my fingers, which it turned out was not so bad. It hurt as my hands were warmed back to life, but as soon as the circulation was restored, I was fine. Jeff, on the other hand, had first-degree frostbite. His gloves needed to be cut from his fingers, and the skin beneath was chafed, white, and blistered. It was horrible to see, and I remember thinking how much it must have hurt, the damage so much worse than my own. No one, including my parents, ever asked Jeff or me what happened in the cabin or questioned why we were injured and Uncle Bob’s boys were not, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Karen continued to be my parents’ best friends. This past winter, I went skiing with my two children, and as we rode the chairlift, my memory of that day returned. I was struck by how callous and uncaring Uncle Bob, a man I’d known my whole life and who I believed loved us, had been and also how unashamed he was after. I remember him laughing with the sheriff, like the whole thing was this great big adventure that had fortunately turned out okay. I think he even viewed himself as sort of a hero, boasting about how he’d broken the window and about his smart thinking to lead us to the cabin in the first place. When he got home, he probably told Karen about rubbing their sons’ hands and feet and about how he’d consoled them and never let them get scared. I looked at my own children beside me, and a shudder ran down my spine as I thought about all the times I had entrusted them to other people in the same way my dad had entrusted us to Uncle Bob, counting on the same naive presumption that a tacit agreement existed for my children to be cared for equally to their own.

Messiah thought back, his mind floating back in time to the day he’d taken Mo to Stepping Stone Falls to let her high come down. That morning. He’d found out that morning. He had been diagnosed with cancer. It was the biggest reason he had warned Morgan that he would never be able to stay. That he would hurt her. That they would never be. There was no future with him. No wedding. No growing old together. He knew that it would hurt her to only have him for a little while, but that small moment of time that they had carved out was the best days of his life. Those days outweighed every ounce of pain he had ever felt. He looked at his illness as a blessing, because he would have never crossed the line with Morgan if he hadn’t been diagnosed that day. Hearing that he was sick made him want to risk what little time he had left on her. Messiah couldn’t allow himself to die without indulging in an angel. Morgan had been his biggest blessing and he had been her biggest curse. She would never know how sorry he was. He would never be able to tell her. “It’s been awhile. About a year or so,” he said. “You’re 180 pounds. According to your records from your doctors in Michigan, you were 225 at your last visit. You know what that means, right? They should have told you what to look for. The signs. You should have…” “I know,” he said. “I was busy living. I didn’t want to take the time out to die. I found a girl to love me for a little while. It was worth it.” Messiah stepped down and the woman looked at him in stun.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

In 1978, an activist named Judi Chamberlin published one of the movement's most revered manifestos called 'On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System.' Chamberlin had been diagnosed with a mental illness and found traditional psychiatric intervention unhelpful and even traumatic. She did recover, however, and she credited that recovery to an alternative mental health care facility she stayed at in Canada. Chamberlin and many other madness pride activists believe that people with 'lived experience' should not only have a proverbial seat at the table when it comes to the creation of mental health care systems, but that such people are uniquely equipped to understand what constitutes the best treatment. A slogan Chamberlin sought to make famous was 'Nothing about us without us.

I’m the living dead. I feel no connection to any other human. I have no friends and I don’t really care much about my family any longer. I feel no love for them. I can feel no joy. I’m incapable of feeling physical pleasure. There’s nothing to ever look forward to as a result. I don’t miss anyone or anything. I eat because I feel hunger pangs, but no food tastes like anything I like. I wear a mask when I’m with other people but it’s been slipping lately. I can’t find the energy to hide the heavy weight of survival and its effect on me. I’m exhausted all the time from the effort of just making it through the day. This depression has made a mockery of my memory. It’s in tatters. I have no good memories to sustain me. My past is gone. My present is horrid. My future looks like more of the same. In a way, I’m a man without time. Certainly, there’s no meaning in my life. What meaning can there be without even a millisecond of joy? Ah, scratch that. Let’s even put aside joy and shoot for lower. How about a moment of being content? Nope. Not a chance. I see other people, normal people, who can enjoy themselves. I hear people laughing at something on TV. It makes me cock my head and wonder what that’s like. I’m sure at sometime in my past, I had to have had a wonderful belly laugh. I must have laughed so hard once or twice that my face hurt. Those memories are gone though. Now, the whole concept of “funny” is dead. I stopped going to movies a long time ago. Sitting in a theater crowded with people, every one of them having a better time than you, is incredibly damaging. I wasn’t able to focus for that long anyway. Probably for the best. Sometimes I fear the thought of being normal again. I think I wouldn’t know how to act. How would I handle being able to feel? Gosh it would be nice to feel again. Anything but this terrible, suffocating pain. The sorrow and the misery is so visceral, I find myself clenching my jaw. It physically hurts me. Then I realize that it’s silly to worry about that. You see, in spite of all the meds, the ketamine infusions and other treatments, I’m not getting better. I’m getting worse. I was diagnosed 7 years ago but I’m sure I was suffering for longer. Of course, I can’t remember that, but depression is something that crept up on me. It’s silent and oppressive. I don’t even remember what made me think about going to see someone. But I did and it was a pretty clear diagnosis. So, now what? I keep waking up every morning unfortunately. I don’t fear death any more. That’s for sure. I’ve made some money for the couple of decades I’ve been working and put it away in retirement accounts. I think about how if I was dead that others I once cared for would get that money. Maybe it could at least help them. I don’t know that I’ll ever need it. Even if I don’t end it myself, depression takes a toll on the body. My life expectancy is estimated to be 14 years lower as a result according to the NIH. It won’t be fast enough though. I’m just an empty biological machine that doesn’t know that my soul is gone. My humanity is no more

Still, the appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made. When we fail to acknowledge our hard-won progress, we may come to believe that perfect order and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs, and that every problem is an outrage that calls for blaming evildoers, wrecking institutions, and empowering a leader who will restore the country to its rightful greatness. I have made my own best case for progress and the ideals that made it possible, and have dropped hints on how journalists, intellectuals, and other thoughtful people (including the readers of this book) might avoid contributing to the widespread heedlessness of the gifts of the Enlightenment. Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too. Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Argentine national football player from FC Barcelona. Positions are attacks. He is the greatest player in the history of the club, as well as the greatest player in the history of the club, as well as the greatest player in history, most of whom are Pele and Diego Maradona [9] Is one of the best players in football history. 저희는 7가지 철칙을 바탕으로 거래를 합니다. 고객들과 지키지못할약속은 하지않습니다 1.정품보장 2.총알배송 3.투명한 가격 4.편한 상담 5.끝내주는 서비스 6.고객님 정보 보호 7.깔끔한 거래 신용과 신뢰의 거래로 많은VIP고객님들 모시고 싶은것이 저희쪽 경영 목표입니다 믿음과 신뢰의 거래로 신용성있는 비즈니스 진행하고있습니다 비즈니스는 첫째로 신용,신뢰 입니다 믿고 주문하시는것만큼 저희는 확실한제품으로 모시겠습니다 제품구입후 제품이 손상되거나 혹은 효과못보셨을시 저희가 1차재배송 2차 100%환불까지 해드리고있습니다 후회없는 선택 자신감있는 제품으로 언제나 모시겠습니다 텔레【KC98K】카톡【ACD5】라인【SPR331】 ◀경영항목▶ 수면제,여성최음제,여성흥분제,남성발기부전치유제,비아그라,시알리스,88정,드래곤,99정,바오메이,정력제,남성성기확대제,카마그라젤,비닉스,센돔,꽃물,남성조루제,네노마정 등많은제품 판매중입니다 2. Childhood [edit] He was born on June 24, 1987 in Rosario, Argentina [10] [11]. His great-grandfather Angelo Messi moved to Argentina as an Italian, and his family became an Argentinean. His father, Jorge Orashio Messi, was a steel worker, and his mother, Celia Maria Quatini, was a part-time housekeeper. Since he was also coach of the local club, Gland Dolley, he became close to football naturally since he was a child, and he started playing soccer at Glendale's club when he was four years old. In 1995, he joined Newsweek's Old Boys Youth team at age six, following Rosario, and soon became a prospect. However, at the age of 11, she is diagnosed with GHD and experiences trials. It took $ 90 to $ 100 a month to cure it, and it was a big deal for his parents to make a living from manual labor. His team, New Wells Old Boys, was also reluctant to spend this amount. For a time, even though the parents owed their debts, they tried to cure the disorder and helped him become a football player, but it could not be forever. [12] In that situation, the Savior appeared. In July 2000, a scouting proposal came from FC Barcelona, ​​where he saw his talent. He was also invited to play in the Argentinian club CA River Plate. The River Plate coach who reported the test reported the team to the club as a "must-have" player, and the reporter who watched the test together was sure to be talented enough to call him "the new Maradona." However, River Plate did not give a definite answer because of the need to convince New Wells Old Boys to recruit him, and the fact that the cost of the treatment was fixed in addition to lodging. Eventually Messi and his father crossed to Barcelona in response to a scouting offer from Barcelona. After a number of negotiations between the Barcelona side and Messi's father, the proposal was inconceivable to pay for Meshi's treatment.

Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.

Prescribing a drug results from clinical judgment based on a thorough assessment of the patient and the patient’s environment, the determination of medical and nursing diagnoses, a review of potential alternative therapies, and specific knowledge about the drug chosen and the disease process it is designed to treat. In general, the best therapy is the least invasive, least expensive, and least likely to cause adverse reactions. Frequently, the choice is to have nonpharmacological and pharmacological therapies working together.

It sure can feel like you’re in the boxing ring of life sometimes. The bell goes off, and you go in swinging with all your might, doing the best you can, fighting the good fight. Then you receive a blow from out of nowhere. You’re stunned! You can hardly breathe, and you aren’t sure you’ll ever rise again. Well, whether you’ve lost a job, been diagnosed with an illness, or found yourself in some other difficult situation, God is there with you. In fact, He got into the ring the moment you did. He is right there ready to help you get back on your feet. Isn’t it great to know you’re not out there taking on the world all by yourself? No matter how many blows the world delivers, God is with you—always and in all ways! Your Promises from God Today OCTOBER 23 Evening The LORD preserves all who love Him, But all the wicked He will destroy. PSALM 145:20 Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand. ISAIAH 41:10 We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:8

The goal of the research on my ward was to determine whether psychotherapy or medication was the best way to treat young people who had suffered a first mental breakdown diagnosed as schizophrenia. The talking cure, an offshoot of Freudian psychoanalysis, was still the primary treatment for mental illness at MMHC. However, in the early 1950s a group of French scientists had discovered a new compound, chlorpromazine (sold under the brand name Thorazine), that could “tranquilize” patients and make them less agitated and delusional. That inspired hope that drugs could be developed to treat serious mental problems such as depression, panic, anxiety, and mania, as well as to manage some of the most disturbing symptoms of schizophrenia.

Ours is a technologically proficient but emotionally deficient and inconsistent medical system that is best at treating acute, not chronic, problems: for every instance of expert treatment, skilled surgery, or innovative problem-solving, there are countless cases of substandard care, overlooked diagnoses, bureaucratic bungling, and even outright antagonism between doctor and patient. For a system that invokes “patient-centered care” as a mantra, modern medicine is startlingly inattentive—at times actively indifferent—to patients’ needs.

Most of us would like “America’s Doctor” to properly diagnose our illnesses using the best science, and then instruct us on how to get healthy. What if, instead of spending their entire budgets developing profitable pharmaceutical products, Dr. Fauci and the heads of other NIH institutes deployed researchers to explore the links between glyphosate in food and the explosion of gluten allergies, the link between pesticide residues and the epidemic of neurological diseases and cancers, the causal connections between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease, between mercury from coal plants and escalating autism rates, and the association of airborne particulates with the asthma epidemic? What if NIH financed research to explore the association between childhood vaccines and the explosion of juvenile diabetes, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis, and the links between aluminum vaccine adjuvants and the epidemics of food allergies and allergic rhinitis? What if they studied the impacts of sugar and soft drinks on obesity and diabetes, and the association between endocrine

Experts have been revered—and well paid—for years for their “It is my opinion that ... ” judgments. As James March has stated, however, such reverence may serve a purely social function. People and organizations have to make decisions, often between alternatives that are almost equally good or bad. What better way to justify such decisions than to consult an expert, and the more money he or she charges, the better. “We paid for the best possible medical advice,” can be a palliative for a fatal operation (or a losing legal defense), just as throwing the I Ching can relieve someone from regretting a bad marriage or a bad career choice. An expert who constructs a linear model is not as impressive as one who gives advice in a “burst” of intuition derived from “years of experience.” (One highly paid business expert we know constructs linear models in secret.) So we value the global judgment of experts independently of its validity. But there is also a situational reason for doubting the inferiority of global, intuitive judgment. It has to do with the biased availability of feedback. When we construct a linear model in a prediction situation, we know exactly how poorly it predicts. In contrast, our feedback about our own intuitive judgments is flawed. Not only do we selectively remember our successes, we often have no knowledge of our failures—and any knowledge we do have may serve to “explain” them (away). Who knows what happens to rejected graduate school applicants? Professors have access only to accepted ones, and if the professors are doing a good job, the accepted ones will likewise do well—reinforcing the impression of the professors’ good judgment. What happens to people misdiagnosed as “psychotic”? If they are lucky, they will disappear from the sight of the authorities diagnosing them; if not, they are likely to be placed in an environment where they may soon become psychotic. Finally, therapy patients who commit suicide were too sick to begin with—as is easily supported by an ex post perusal of their files.

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As you’ll read in Chapter 11, when colic was first described in the 1950s it was the hot new thing. And throughout the latter twentieth century whenever a baby cried, she was diagnosed with colic. It was a constellation of symptoms positioned as a diagnosis that had no clear treatment. For better or worse, colic was the label that kept pediatricians free and clear from fixing the problem. There was no fix. Fast-forward to the early twenty-first century. Reflux is the new colic. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues have fallen into the habit of labeling every inexplicably fussy baby with reflux. What’s worse, some act on the impulse and prescribe medications when they’re not indicated. Some of this is a function of a new label. Part of this may be a consequence of doctors seeing more and more babies in the same eight-hour clinic day. A label and the promise of a pill have a certain appeal when facing a desperate, tired mom in a six-minute follow-up visit. So proceed with caution if your doctor hears crying, sees a dirty burp cloth, and immediately wants to start medication. Remember that you are your baby’s lead advocate. Take the time to consider all that we’ve talked about over the past few pages before assuming medication is the only and best solution.

Data released later by the president’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, showed that Trump didn’t have detectable antibodies of his own when he was first diagnosed with COVID.13 That could have been because his antibodies were measured early in the course of his infection, before his body had had enough time to mount a response. Or, as seemed possible, it could have been because the president was among the subset of patients, usually older individuals, who don’t mount a robust initial immune response to the virus, putting them at more risk. It’s for these patients that the antibody drugs seem to work the best. What happens in these situations is that the virus replicates largely unchecked because patients don’t develop antibodies to interrupt its progress. By the time their immune systems kick in, a lot of virus has accumulated. Faced with a high load of virus, their bodies will then overreact to the infection and dump a whole lot of immune cells into the bloodstream.14 This is the immune system becoming overcharged all at once, the “cytokine storm” that can damage organs.

Or maybe you're like me - a mental health professional who has been faithfully filling out insurance forms for thirty years, jotting down those five-digit codes from the DSM that open the money taps, rendering diagnoses even though you are pretty sure you're not treating medical conditions, and for just a moment you hesitate, contemplating the bad faith of pouring a lie into the foundation of a relationship whose main and perhaps only value is that it provides an opportunity to look someone in the eye, and, without fear of judgment or the necessity to manipulate, speak the truth. And, having contemplated it, you tell yourself whatever story you have to and you sign the paper, and the best you can do is to curse the DSM in a kind of incantation against your own bad faith.

To diagnose means grasping things as they really are, so as to do the right thing. Hence, in medicine, diagnosis at its best entails etiology, for the penetrating view arrives at causes and deals with patterns of cause-and-effect relations in the course of illness.

I had several reasons for writing this book. First and foremost was to tell the story of Donna’s courageous battle against triple-negative breast cancer. Moreover, I felt writing would help me deal with my profound grief following the loss of my wife, soul mate and best friend. Furthermore, I sought to increase awareness about this form of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer affects less than 20 percent of all breast cancer patients. Triple-negative breast cancer is more aggressive and difficult to treat than other forms of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer is also more likely to spread beyond the breast and be fatal within five years. It is my hope that this book will be helpful for caregivers who find themselves looking after a loved one who is fighting this terrible disease! When Donna was diagnosed, I had no idea what that entailed or what I needed to do to support her. I learned on the fly, made mistakes along the way, and witnessed how vital a caregiver’s support can be.

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Our lives are, in so many ways, shaped by the microorganisms that live on us, inside us, and around us. The estimated forty trillion bacteria in our gut, for example, help us digest everything we eat. Disturbing the healthy bacteria that colonize our gut can lead to dangerous blood infections. Today, to diagnose blood infections like those or lung infections like pneumonia, we take a sample of blood or sputum and grow the accompanying bacteria in a lab under special conditions. Eventually, the bacteria are stained and inspected under the microscope and exposed to various antibiotics to determine which ones can kill them. This process takes days. Meanwhile, we treat the patient with our “best guess” antibiotics. In the future, we will sequence those bacteria immediately and map their DNA to

I’m sure our newcomers appreciate hearing that being diagnosed with HIV is not all doom and gloom.” The leader’s gaze swept over all the others in the circle. “With an attitude like Duncan’s, great things will happen to you. Don’t let the disease define you. Make the disease work for you instead.” An hour later, the meeting was over. John had gotten the opportunity to introduce himself to the group, something he would have preferred to have skipped, but that wasn’t allowed. Everyone must participate in that part; only the question and answer session that followed was optional. He hadn’t mentioned that he used to be a cop, certainly not that he had been fired. He’d just said that he was a private eye and that he would be happy to be their spy if they needed one. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” Linda asked John when they were outside the room and in the hallway, where donuts and coffee and tea were served. Most of the participants milled around there, connecting with each other. John shrugged and grabbed a jelly donut. “I guess not.” The bespectacled leader named Robert came up to them then. He was on the short side and had an emaciated face with delicate features. He stuck out a bony hand toward John. John took it and gave it a firm shake. “John, it’s so nice to have you join us today,” Robert said with a broad smile that displayed big, graying teeth. Robert was HIV-positive as well, and in the chronic HIV stage. “Thank you for having me,” John said and returned the smile as best he could. “It’s been very…educational. I’m glad I came.” “Great,” Robert said, then his attention went to Linda. “Thanks for bringing your friend, Linda. And for coming again yourself.” “Oh, of course,” Linda said and smiled. Her hazel eyes glittered with warmth. “It’s a great group and you’re a great leader.” “Thank you. That’s so kind of you to say.” Robert tossed a glance over his shoulder, then leaned in toward John and Linda. “I just wanted to apologize for Doris.” “Apologize?” Linda repeated. “What did she do?” “Well, for starters, she’s not 33. She’s 64 and has been infected for thirty years. She’s also a former heroin addict and prostitute. She likes to pretend that she’s someone else entirely, and because we don’t want to upset her, we humor her. We pretend she’s being truthful when she talks about herself. I’d appreciate it if you help us keep her in the dark.” That last sentence had a tension to it that the rest of Robert’s words hadn’t had. It was almost like he’d warned them not to go against his will, or else. Not that it had been necessary to impress that on either John or Linda. John especially appreciated the revelation. Maybe having HIV was not as gruesome as Doris had made it seem then. Six Yvonne jerked awake when the phone rang. It rang and rang for several seconds before she realized where she was and what was going on. She pushed herself up on the bed and glanced around for the device. When she eventually spotted it on the floor beside the bed, it had stopped ringing. Even so, she rolled over on her side and fished it up to the bed. Crossing her legs Indian-style, she checked who had called her. It was Gabe, which was no surprise. He was the only one who had her latest burner number. He had left her a voicemail. She played it. “Mom, good news. I have the meds. Jane came through. Where do you want me to drop them off? Should I come to the motel? Call me.” Exhilaration streamed through her and she was suddenly wide awake. She made a fist in the air. Yes! Finally something was going their way. Now all they had to do was connect without Gabe leading the cops to her. She checked the time on the ancient clock radio on the nightstand. It was past six o’clock. So she must have slept

A year later, Maurice Rappaport at the University of California in San Francisco announced results that told the same story, only more strongly so. He had randomized eighty young newly diagnosed male schizophrenics admitted to Agnews State Hospital into drug and non-drug groups, and although symptoms abated more quickly in those treated with antipsychotics, both groups, on average, stayed only six weeks in the hospital. Rappaport followed the patients for three years, and it was those who weren’t treated with antipsychotics in the hospital and who stayed off the drugs after discharge that had—by far—the best outcomes. Only two of the twenty-four patients in this never-exposed-to-antipsychotics group relapsed during the three-year follow-up. Meanwhile, the patients that arguably fared the worst were those on drugs throughout the study. The very standard of care that, according to psychiatry’s “evidence base,” was supposed to produce the best outcomes had instead produced the worst. “Our findings suggest that antipsychotic medication is not the treatment of choice, at least for certain patients, if one is interested in long-term clinical improvement,” Rappaport wrote. “Many unmedicated-while-in-hospital patients showed greater long-term improvement, less pathology at follow-up, fewer rehospitalizations, and better overall functioning in the community than patients who were given chlorpromazine while in the hospital.

Our attitude may also be unfair. Our negative view of confidence may be overly dependent on the quirks of our own histories, on the sort of people we first encountered confidence in who were not its best or most reliable representatives. Our real problem may not be confidence so much as a lack of other virtues such as manners, charm, wit and generosity. We may be wrongly diagnosing the root of our objections. There may be a few people at risk of growing into braggarts, self-seekers and blowhards. But confidence is in its essence entirely compatible with remaining sensitive, kind, witty and softly-spoken. It might be brutishness, confidence, that we hate.

For you cannot trace the guidance of the Spirit of God or diagnose His operations in the secret rooms of the soul: He seems at times to let good go and to bring instead good out of evil, and light into voluntary darkness. . . At the best, therefore, all that is possible is to describe the external features of the country through which the soul has passed - the crossroads, the obstacles, the ravines - and to give some sort of account of the consultations held by the way. Faith, after all, is a divine operation wrought in the dark, even though it may seem to be embodied in intellectual arguments and historical facts; for it is necessary to remember that two equally sincere and intelligent souls may encounter the same external evidences and draw mutually exclusive conclusions from them. The real heart of the matter lies somewhere else. . . . Catechumens, therefore, must remember that while on the one side they must of course clear the ground by the action of the intellect, on the other side it is far more vital that they should pray, purify motives, and yield themselves to God.

Unfortunately, for some children, “gray” thinking doesn’t develop readily. These are the kids who sometimes end up with diagnoses on the autism spectrum, but regardless of diagnosis they’re best thought of as black-and-white thinkers living in a gray world. They often have significant difficulty approaching the world in a flexible, adaptable way and become extremely frustrated when events don’t proceed in the manner they had originally conceived. More specifically, these children often have a strong preference for predictability and routines, and struggle when events are unpredictable, uncertain, and ambiguous. These are the kids who run into trouble when they need to adjust or reconfigure their expectations, the ones who tend to overfocus on facts and details and who often have trouble recognizing the obvious or “seeing the big picture.” For example, a child may insist on

I anticipate diagnostic AI will exceed all but the best doctors in the next twenty years. This trend will be felt first in fields like radiology, where computer-vision algorithms are already more accurate than good radiologists for certain types of MRI and CT scans. In the story “Contactless Love,” we see that by 2041 radiologists’ jobs will be mostly taken over by AI. Alongside radiology, we will also see AI excel in pathology and diagnostic ophthalmology. Diagnostic AI for general practitioners will emerge later, one disease at a time, gradually covering all diagnoses. Because human lives are at stake, AI will first serve as a tool within doctors’ disposal or will be deployed only in situations where a human doctor is unavailable. But over time, when trained on more data, AI will become so good that most doctors will be routinely rubber-stamping AI diagnoses, while the human doctors themselves are transformed into something akin to compassionate caregivers and medical communicators.

Actually, looking back, it was hugely obvious, and I just didn’t want to see it. The best I can diagnose myself here is I thought being able to ignore a thing was the same as its resolution, or the same as it not existing.

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

The mental health field also maintains authority through selectivity of its members and suppressed dissent. There is a pretense of certainty propagated by leaders in mental health, with oft repeated promises of supporting evidence to be discovered soon; it is taken for granted that their authoritative stance is merited. Despite this political posturing, several areas of concern actually leave much to question, for instance: it is rare for findings to be replicated (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), with only about 3% of journals even being willing to accept articles attempting to repeat previous studies to see if their findings were more than just a fluke (Martin & Clarke, 2017); the peer -review process of journals is biased toward recognizable names and against newcomers or detractors (Bravo, Farjam, Grimaldo Moreno, Birukou, & Squazzoni, 2018), setting up a sort of “good ol’ boys’ club” dynamic; the rates of authors retracting their studies due to problems or false findings are rapidly rising (Steen, Casadevall, & Fang, 2013); the subjects used in studies are consistently biased (Nielsen, Haun, Kartner, & Legare, 2017) and based on samples that are among the least representative of humans, in general (e.g., Arnett, 2008); spurious and meaningless correlations are frequently reported as exciting new discoveries (see Richardson, 2017); gold-standard “evidence-based treatments” are, on average and at best, only helpful for about 25% of people (Shedler, 2015); selective reporting, guild interests, and researcher allegiance heavily bias psychiatric research (Leichsenring et al., 2017; Whitaker & Cosgrove, 2015); and, perhaps most important, with all the purported advances in treatment, the prevalence and long-term outcomes of diagnosable mental disorders has not decreased in the last century (Jorm, Patten, Brugha, & Mojtabai, 2017; Margraf & Schneider, 2016), while disability rates continue to rise exponentially (see Whitaker, 2010 for an analysis on this trend).

How would you diagnose a patient who walks back and forth screaming at the top of his lungs one minute, then sits in a chair weeping uncontrollably the next?" A young man in the rear raised his hand and answered, "A basketball coach?

she had to wait until she went to college to act on her own. “Getting diagnosed with ADHD,” she told our class, “was one of the best days of my freshman year because someone actually saw that I wasn’t stupid or lazy,

Besides the guilt I’ve carried around for ten years, I owe my best friend a favor. Fifteen years ago, my little sister was diagnosed with leukemia. Her dying wish was to marry Nikolai. When I asked him to give my dying sister her wish, he didn’t hesitate. Not once did she doubt whether he really loved her. During her final days, she was happy. I owe Nikolai, and this is the favor he wants.

If you have been misunderstood your whole life, take heart, you are not alone. There are many people who have been diagnosed with ASD as adults. It is never too late to receive a diagnosis.

…another kind, by no means uncommon, in which one person sucks the vitality of the other, one receives what the other gives, but gives almost nothing in return. Some very vital people belong to this bloodsucking type. They extract the vitality from one victim after another, but while they prosper and grow interesting, those upon whom they live grow pale and dim and dull. Such people use others as means to their own ends and never consider them as ends in themselves. Fundamentally they are not interested in those whom for the moment they think they love, they are interested only in the stimulus to their own activities, perhaps of a quite impersonal sort. Evidently this springs from some defect in their nature, but it is one not altogether easy either to diagnose or to cure. It is a characteristic frequently associated with great ambition and is rooted, I should say, in an unduly one-sided view of what makes human happiness. Affection in the sense of a genuine reciprocal interest of two persons in each other, not solely as means to each other's good but rather as a combination having a common good, is one of the most important elements of real happiness, and the man whose ego is so enclosed within steel walls that this enlargement of it is impossible misses the best that life has to offer, however successful he may be in his career. Ambition which excludes affection from its purview is generally the result of some kind of anger or hatred against the human race, produced of it is impossible misses the best that life has to offer, however successful he may be in his career. Ambition which excludes affection from its purview is generally the result of some kind of anger or hatred against the human race, produced by unhappiness in youth, by injustices in later life, or by any of the causes which lead to persecution mania. A too powerful ego is a prison from which a man must escape if he is to enjoy the world to the full. A capacity for genuine affection is one of the marks of the man who has escaped his prison of self.

My mother had told me more than once about James Joyce bringing his daughter Lucia to see Carl Jung after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The writer protested that Lucia was simply doing what he did, playing with language, but Jung told Joyce that he was diving to the bottom of a river; his daughter was sinking.

Children who act out their pain rather than locking it down are often diagnosed with “oppositional defiant behavior,” “attachment disorder,” or “conduct disorder.” But these labels ignore the fact that rage and withdrawal are only facets of a whole range of desperate attempts at survival. Trying to control a child’s behavior while failing to address the underlying issue—the abuse—leads to treatments that are ineffective at best and harmful at worst. As they grow up, their parts do not spontaneously integrate into a coherent personality but continue to lead a relatively autonomous existence.

asked if there’s a simple hormone test that can tell if you’re nearing menopause or are already past it. The answer is no. Blood tests can be helpful but are not necessary to diagnose menopause. If you suspect that you’re in perimenopause or want to know if you’re past menopause, the best thing to do is to have a complete medical examination by a qualified healthcare professional. The diagnosis is based on age, medical history, symptoms, and period frequency. Blood work can be used as supportive information, but more often than not, it isn’t needed.

Figure 2.2 Number of connections over 25 years across brain areas. This process — neural exuberance followed by pruning of connections — makes the human brain highly adaptable to any environment. Is the infant born in an urban or an agricultural society? Is it the year 2012 or 1012? It doesn’t really matter. The brain of a child born in New York City or in Nome, Alaska, is similar at birth. During the next two decades of life, the process of neural exuberance followed by pruning sculpts a brain that can meet the demands, and thrive in its environment. Brain differences at the “tails” of the distribution As with any natural process there is a range of functioning, with most individuals in the middle and a small percentage of individuals being far above and far below the mean. While the general pattern of increasing and decreasing brain connections is seen in all children, important differences are reported in children whose abilities are above or below those of the average population. To investigate children above the normal range, Shaw used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to follow brain structure in 307 children over 17 years. Children with average IQs reached a peak of cortical thickness (and therefore number of neural connections) around age 10, and then pruning began and continued to age 18. Children with above-average IQs had a different pattern: a brief pruning period around age 7 followed by increasing connections again to age 13. Then pruning ensued more vigorously and finished around age 18. There were also differences in brain structure. At age 18, those with above-average IQs had higher levels of neural connections in the frontal areas, which are responsible for short-term memory, attention, sense of self, planning, and decision-making — the higher brain functions. At the other end of the spectrum, individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, compared to normal children, lose 3% more connections each year from age 10 to 18. Symptoms of schizophrenia emerge in the late teens, when the cortical layer becomes too thin to support coherent functioning. A thinner cortical layer as a young adult — about 20% less than the average — could account for the fragmented mental world of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Who is in control? Neural exuberance — increasing and decreasing connections — is genetically controlled, but the child’s experiences affect which connections are pruned and which remain. Circuits that a child uses are strengthened. So a youngster who learns to play the piano or to speak Italian is setting up brain circuits that support those activities — she will find it easier to learn another instrument or language. ​Warning to parents: This doesn’t mean you should inundate your toddler with Italian, violin, martial arts, and tennis lessons. Young children learn best when following their natural tendencies and curiosity. Children learn through play. Undue stress and pressure inhibits the brain’s natural ability to learn.

It is all too easy, in the atmosphere of intellectual fog that pervades Liberal and Humanist circles today, to allow sympathy for an unfortunate person to pass over into receptivity to his ideas. The Nihilist, to be sure, is in some sense "sick," and his sickness is a testimony to the sickness of an age whose best--as well as worst--elements turn to Nihilism; but sickness is not cured, nor even properly diagnosed by "sympathy." In any case there is no such thing as an entirely "innocent victim.

Narcissistic Disorder The basic premise of this personality disorder is an inflated sense of self worth. This trait is often emphasized by a need to be appreciated and admired although someone with this disorder usually is unable to have any empathy for others; no matter what their situation. People with this disorder will often be fond of overly grand gestures and will assume they are the most important part of anyone’s life; even if you met them just five minutes ago. There are very few scenarios where this inflated sense of self worth is appropriate in modern society. Surprisingly, under this façade there is usually a very fragile self esteem which needs the consistent bolstering of ego that their behavior attracts. People with this disorder will often appear to be snobbish, disdainful or simply patronizing and condescending. They are likely to give out opinions on the failings of others at the drop of a hat without acknowledging their own shortcomings. The belief that they should be the most important person in any room can lead to issues when dealing with relationships at home or at work; this will be particularly noticeable if someone else is praised and you are not. In situations such as these, it is common for someone with this disorder to react angrily or impatiently; making it very difficult to build a long term relationship. The Symptoms Again, in order for someone to be diagnosed with this condition they will need to display at least five of the following symptoms and to have had these issues for at least one year. •   A sufferer has a hugely inflated opinion of their own self worth. They will usually inflate their achievements and skills to ensure they are the best in the room. They are unlikely to be able to substantiate any of these claims. •   They often indulge in a fantasy world where they have unlimited success, power, money and love. This indulgence can occur at any time. •   They will have a belief that they are very special and that there are only a few other people in the world which are on the same level as them. This belief means they will often try to associate with these people and no one else; as these are the only people who will understand them. •   The belief that they are special necessitates them to expect and demand your praise and adulation at all times of the day. They expect to be admired simply for being who they are. This belief extends to expecting others to provide them with favorable treatment and to know their expectations without being told them. •   This feeling of their own self worth will cause many people with this disorder to take advantage of others in order to achieve their own goal. They are unlikely to see this as exploitation; instead, it is just others doing what they should to satisfy their needs. •   It is usual for someone with this personality disorder to lack empathy towards others, particularly those who they feel are beneath them; which is almost everyone. •   Envy is a common trait in people with this disorder. They are liable to be envious of anyone who has something they do not and they will believe others are envious of them; because of their importance. •   People who suffer from this illness will often come across as arrogant, haughty or even rude. This disorder occurs in more men than women and current estimates suggest that the disorder is present in approximately six percent of the population. Symptoms associated with this disorder will always be present, even when a child; but the constantly evolving personality is likely to mask this and it is not usually possible to diagnose the condition until the late teens or early twenties.

Get in agreement with God In the Bible, David said, “Lift up your head and the King of glory will come in.” As long as your head is down and you are discouraged, with no joy, no passion, and no zeal, the King of glory will not come. Instead, get up in the morning and say, “Father, thank you for another day. Thank you for another sunrise. I’m excited about this day.” When you’re really alive, hopeful, grateful, passionate, and productive, then the King of glory, the most high God, will come in. He’ll make a way where it looks like there is no way. We all face difficulties. We have unfair things happen. Don’t let it sour your life. I heard the saying, “Trouble is inevitable but misery is optional.” Just because you had a bad break doesn’t mean your life is over. I know a popular minister who led his church for many years and was such a great speaker he was in constant demand. But a few years ago, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He eventually lost the ability to speak. He had to resign from his church. He once was so eloquent, strong, and vibrant, but it looked as if his career was over. It looked as if his best days were behind him. But just when things started to look really bad for him, he sent me a manuscript with a note: “Joel, as you know, I can’t speak anymore, so I’ve taken up writing. Here’s a look at my newest book.” Just because you can’t do what you used to do doesn’t mean you’re supposed to sit on the sidelines. If you can’t speak, write. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t stand up, just sit up. If you can’t dance, shake your head. If you can’t sing, tap your foot. Do whatever you can do. As long as you have breath you have something in you. Don’t lose your passion. Think about the apostle Paul: he was thrown in prison at the peak of his career. Just when it was all coming together he had this major disappointment. Paul could have become depressed and thought: “Too bad for me.” He could have given up on his dreams. Instead, he kept his passion. While in prison, he wrote more than half of the New Testament. What looked like a setback was really a setup for God to do something greater in Paul’s life. You may have been through some bad breaks and unfair situations. Stay passionate. God is still on the throne. If you keep your head up, the King of glory will still come in and guide you to where He wants you to be.

21. Even the best books on politics and public policy tend to have the same flaw: The bulk of the book consists of a subtle, in-depth analysis of deeply worrying trends. Then, the conclusion suggests glib, hurried suggestions for what to do about them. This is no coincidence: It’s much easier to diagnose problems than to solve them. A deep understanding of a problem does not necessarily point the way toward a sensible solution. And even when a proposed solution looks to be right on the merits, it is often obvious that it would never be adopted. All these problems apply to my topic as much as they would to most others. And that is why I want to offer the reader a simple deal before I launch into my own account of the potential remedies to democracy’s crisis: Finding solutions to the deep challenges I’ve outlined in the book is incredibly hard. I have taken the task seriously, and identified some promising ways of approaching the problem. I genuinely think—and fervently hope—that thinking about the challenge in the way I outline here, and even adopting some of the concrete policies I mention, would maximize our chances of rejuvenating our democracies, and keeping authoritarian populists in check. But I will not pretend that these suggestions are magic bullets. Nor can I promise that adopting them would ultimately be enough to save liberal democracy. They may well turn out not to be enough; but if we are serious about saving liberal democracy, they are the best we can do.

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Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Matt?” I ask. And I really want to know, because it’s unfathomable to me that he’s single. He’s handsome, and he’s so kind. He shakes a finger at me. “There’s a story there,” he says. I settle into the sofa a little deeper and turn so that my feet are pointed toward him, my legs extended. My toes almost touch his thigh. But then he lifts my feet and slides under them, scooting closer to me. “I was in love with a girl. For a long time.” “What happened to her?” I ask. He starts to tickle across my toes, and then his fingertips drag down the top of my foot. It’s a gentle sweep, and it feels so good that I don’t want him to stop. His fingers play absently as he starts to talk. “When I got the diagnosis,” he says, “she couldn’t deal with it.” “Cancer?” I ask. He nods. His fingers drag up and down my shin, and he slides around to stroke the back of my knee. I don’t stop him when his hand slides beneath my skirt, although I do tense up. He smiles when he finds the top of my thigh-highs, and he unclips the little fastener that attaches them to my garters. He repeats the action on the other side, his hands teasing the sensitive skin of my inner thigh as he frees the stocking and rolls it down. He pulls it all the way over my foot, and does the same with the other side. I am suddenly really glad I shaved my legs this morning. I wiggle my toes at him, and he starts to stroke me again. I don’t ever want him to stop. “This okay?” he asks. But he’s not looking at my face. He’s looking at my legs. “Yeah,” I breathe. “Keep talking. You got diagnosed…” “I got diagnosed, and the prognosis wasn’t good. I went through chemo and got a little better. But then I needed a second round. Things didn’t look good, and we were flat broke. I couldn’t work at the tattoo parlor anymore because my immune system was too weak, so I had no money coming in. I was poor and sick, and she didn’t love me enough to walk the path with me.” He shrugs, but I can tell he’s serious. “She cheated with my best friend.” He shrugs again. “And that’s the end of that sad story.” “You still love her?” I ask. I don’t breathe, waiting for his answer. He shakes his head and looks up. “I did love her for a long time. And I haven’t been looking for a relationship. I haven’t dated anyone since her. But I’m not in love with her anymore. I know that now.” “Why now?” I ask. He looks directly into my eyes and says, “Because I met you, and I feel really hopeful that you’ll want to go after something real with me. I know we just met and all, but I was serious about making you fall in love with me.” He laughs. “Then you hit me in the nose tonight, and I knew it was meant to be.” “What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about. “When my brother Logan met Emily, she punched him in the face. And when Pete and Reagan first started dating, she hit him in the nose.” He reaches up and touches his nose gently. “So, when you hit me tonight, I just knew it was meant to be.” He grins. “I hope you feel the same way, because I really want to see where this thing is going to go.” “So the women your brothers fell in love with, they committed bodily harm to them and that’s how you guys knew it was real?” “We kind of have a rule. If a woman punches you in the face, you have to marry her.” He laughs. “I didn’t punch you.” “Same difference,” he says. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The problem was I knew innately I didn’t want to be controlling and I was never happy, regardless. It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome that my behavior changed. Now, before an event, I no longer subconsciously create drama in an attempt to release emotion. I didn’t consciously decide to change this; the change happened naturally. Now, I am hyperaware of why I am upset. I recognize my emotions in detail and the triggers that lead to anxiety. It might seem that knowing myself more would make the anxiety level decrease, but actually the anxiety is more intensified because I am no longer subconsciously utilizing displacement. I am not displacing my own dread about an event onto another event. I am not using or finding a scapegoat. I am not creating drama in order to diffuse my own tension. Instead, tension keeps building and I have no way to release it. Now that I am more aware of my own behavior and emotions, and the triggers, I do much more stimming, e.g., flick my nails, flap my hands, clear my throat, click my teeth, repeatedly saying “okay,” and so forth. I also have anxiety dreams related to upcoming events. In addition, on the day of a happening I have extreme fluctuations of emotions and physical symptoms, such as hives and/or stomachaches. I am now taking in the full experience and my body is responding. I don’t know if this is better or worse than the displacement. What is also happening is instead of “freaking out” before an event, I am often “freaking out” after the event. (Sir Brain and LV running around in circles in full panic after climbing out of the swimming hole, exhausted, to discover they are naked!) I feel very much like a child who holds herself together at school for the better part of the day, only to return home and have a meltdown. I have found, to date, the best way to handle my anxiety is to not turn it into the enemy, or something to be eradicated and ejected, but instead something to be accepted. The more I fight the anxiety, the worse I feel, for there isn’t any feasible avenue of solution that leads to rescue. I have to go through the discomfort in order to feel relief. The process is similar to a minor panic attack or adrenaline rush, but it passes. And the more accepting I am of the process, the quicker it passes.

The paper subsequently written by Amos with Redelmeier* showed that, in treating individual patients, the doctors behaved differently than they did when they designed ideal treatments for groups of patients with the same symptoms. They were likely to order additional tests to avoid raising troubling issues, and less likely to ask if patients wished to donate their organs if they died. In treating individual patients, doctors often did things they would disapprove of if they were creating a public policy to treat groups of patients with the exact same illness. Doctors all agreed that, if required by law, they should report the names of patients diagnosed with a seizure disorder, diabetes, or some other condition that might lead to loss of consciousness while driving a car. In practice, they didn’t do this—which could hardly be in the interest even of the individual patient in question. “This result is not just another manifestation of the conflict between the interests of the patient and the general interests of society,” Tversky and Redelmeier wrote, in a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. “The discrepancy between the aggregate and the individual perspectives also exists in the mind of the physician. The discrepancy seems to call for a resolution; it is odd to endorse a treatment in every case and reject it in general, or vice versa.” The point was not that the doctor was incorrectly or inadequately treating individual patients. The point was that he could not treat his patient one way, and groups of patients suffering from precisely the same problem in another way, and be doing his best in both cases. Both could not be right. And the point was obviously troubling—

Gout Every single year, thousands upon thousands of people are diagnosed with, and suffer from a condition known as gout. Gout is basically a form of severe arthritis, in various joints on the body. The ankle for instance, is especially susceptible to gout, making it a very painful condition to have to deal with. It is brought on by elevated levels of uric acid levels in the blood stream. This acid actually crystallizes, forming crystal deposits on the various joints in the body. Kind of like lime scale affects shower heads, and heating elements. There are pharmaceutical medicines and lotions etc out there, many of which are basically useless and only mildly effective at best. Many of these medicines are based on pain relief, meaning that they only mask the problems, rather than curing them. The good news is that natural remedies have been proven to be especially effective when treating gout, specifically, apple cider vinegar. A normal and perfectly healthy range of uric acid in the blood should be between 3.6 mg/dL and 8.3 mg/dL. This uric acid is perfectly normal, and all bodies produce it, the problems occur when the body can no longer remove excess levels of the acid, once it is produced. Apple cider vinegar is a proven natural remedy for a whole host of other health and beauty related conditions, and gout is no exception. With its anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-fungal properties, it is being hailed by some people as a medical wonder. Apple cider vinegar helps to increase your PH levels, making your body more alkaline, this makes it especially effective at eliminating uric acid, which can lead to gout. The Malic acid contained in apple cider vinegar, helps to dissolve sodium urate crystals, the same crystals responsible for gout. To help rid you of painful gout like symptoms, how about you: Drink the water and vinegar solution at least three times daily - Simply mix three table spoons full of vinegar, with a glass of water, or even apple juice if you wish, and chug it down. Try

Infatuation is one of those slightly comic illnesses which are at once so undignified and so painful that a nice-minded world does its best to ignore their existence altogether, referring to them only under provocation and then with apology, but, like its more material brother, this boil on the neck of the spirit can hardly be forgotten either by the sufferer or anyone else in his vicinity. The malady is ludicrous, sad, excruciating and, above all, instantly diagnosable.

Doctors end up adopting the role of automaton, following recipes and doing as directed, but no longer empowered to listen, to think, to diagnose, and to heal. Patients end up believing that their role is to help speed the checkbox ticking as quietly and as obediently as possible. Worse still, they begin to internalize that this is the best and only way to receive medical care.

14. God and Suffering Question: Why did God kill my father and we suffered because we became orphans? If God is all good and almighty, why do we observe earthquakes and babies diagnosed with terminal illnesses? Why do bad things happen if God wants the best for us?

Modern civilization’s mindless energy and power, symbolized by the mighty turbine he had seen at the Chicago Exposition, stood in opposition to the spiritual serenity of the past, symbolized by the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary. “All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” However, Henry Adams refused to allow Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres to be printed, except privately, until after his death. He made the same decision about his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. Like Burckhardt, he could see no cure for the ills he had diagnosed except resignation and withdrawal. In the face of the clamoring forces of modernity, he decided, “beyond a doubt, silence is best.

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Most autistics will reveal their perseverative interests when they are interested in finding someone else to talk to about them. Sometimes, however, self-diagnosed autistics, misdiagnosed autistics, and wannabees will come into the conversation and try to “best” autistics with their own supposed perseverative interests. After a little bit of time goes by, it usually becomes apparent that the “perseverative interests” of these self-diagnosed autistics, misdiagnosed autistics, and wannabees are actually just “interests.

If your plant leaves are turning weird colors (purple, yellow), they might have nutrient deficiencies. Nutrient deficiencies cause highly predictable results, and it’s usually possible to diagnose whether a nutrient deficiency is a problem by looking at the plant. The diagram below shows the symptoms caused by the most common nutrient deficiencies. GROWING TIP If you see nutrient deficiency problems in your plants, test the soil pH. If the pH is too high or too low, it won’t matter if you fertilize—the plants won’t be able to get the nutrients from the soil.

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For the hardest problems—the ones we really want to solve but haven’t been able to, like curing cancer—pure nature-inspired approaches are probably too uninformed to succeed, even given massive amounts of data. We can in principle learn a complete model of a cell’s metabolic networks by a combination of structure search, with or without crossover, and parameter learning via backpropagation, but there are too many bad local optima to get stuck in. We need to reason with larger chunks, assembling and reassembling them as needed and using inverse deduction to fill in the gaps. And we need our learning to be guided by the goal of optimally diagnosing cancer and finding the best drugs to cure it. Optimal learning is the Bayesians’ central goal, and they are in no doubt that they’ve figured out how to reach it. This way, please …

Patrick doesn’t want to embarrass Will. But he’s nervous and out of his routine. He’s never been good with the social skills at the best of times. If he’d been born five or six years later than he was, he’d probably have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. As it is, he’s always been inappropriate and weird and he knows he does life wrong.

When Marian was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the Jordans in essence retired and closed the hall closet for good. She died on April 7, 1961. Jim lived to be 91, succumbing on a date in 1988 that seems appropriate for one of radio’s best jokers: April 1st.

[D]iagnosis needed to rest in order to let research catch up. It made no sense to keep rearranging the furniture of descriptive psychiatry, creating new diagnoses or altering the thresholds of existing ones, based only on the whims of the experts who happened to be in the room. [...] Changes in diagnoses should be few and far between until we gained much deeper understanding of what causes the mental disorders and how best to define and treat them.

new research in psychology and neuroscience shows that it works the other way around: We become more successful when we are happier and more positive. For example, doctors put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56 percent. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.

1. He knew I loved him unconditionally: He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure six years ago. 2. I like him: He’s my best friend. 3. I respect him. 4. I make sure that his needs are met both physically and emotionally: He’s a very passionate Hispanic guy. 5. I make him smile. In return for these things, he showers me with love, respect, kindness, jewelry, anything I want. Recently, I told him that I wanted to quit my job as an executive to start my own consulting business. He didn’t bat an eye—because he knew that it would make me happy.

In the introduction to my 2001 best-selling book Beyond Prozac, I wrote that within so-called developed societies, much emotional and psychological distress has for decades been re-packaged as ‘mental disorders’. I wrote that I would refer to ‘mental illness/mental disorders’ within inverted commas, to illustrate ‘my disquiet at the widespread acceptance of these terms without debate about what the terms mean and what might be better words to use’.[3] I added that the experiences themselves were real and valid in their own right. This situation continues to this day. None of the psychiatric diagnoses have any scientific validity.[4] Throughout this book series therefore, I also use inverted commas when referring to these commonly accepted concepts. I do this to signify that these are not what they are claimed to be; they are not verified medical illnesses.

Sporadic cases of plague were discovered throughout the summer and fall of 1900. Most alarming, at least to the native-born American population of San Francisco, was the first white plague victim discovered in August. In January 1901, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage, who oversaw both the Marine Hospital Service and the Immigration Bureau, commissioned three nationally prominent plague experts to investigate the health conditions in San Francisco. Their report, using the best bacteriological methods then available, confirmed that plague did, in fact, visit San Francisco. The experts explained that the wisest precaution to take against plague's potential return was not to isolate people based on race but, instead, to intensify cleansing and fumigation efforts in any area where plague was found. Between March 1, 1900 and February 29, 1904, 121 cases of plague were diagnosed in San Francisco with 113 resulting in death. Of these deaths, 107 were Chinese, 4 were Japanese, and 2 were white.59 Alas, this episode hardly brought an end to the all-too-reflexive impulse Americans often have in establishing quarantine or public health policy based on race, ethnicity, or social disen-franchisement.

For a leader to diagnose a church for a culture compatible for developing leaders requires a good bit of courage and even more humility. The leadership task of discovering problems rather than ignoring them is not necessarily a well-worn path in the world of Christian leadership. We struggle to admit something is off or wrong in our cultures. For many, “ministry success” is the only acceptable narrative, and the demand for it has been fertile soil for hubris that has plagued leaders longing for or envious of ministry celebrity status. But if we are to be churches that train the very best leaders, we must put our egos to death. For the leader who longs for the church to repent, change often begins with the leader’s repentance. While we are wasting our time if we only address behavior while ignoring the wrong convictions, to discover what a culture fundamentally believes, a leader must work backward from the behaviors. While it is foolish and futile to attempt to change culture by only addressing behavior, one can learn the culture by watching the collective behavior of the church, by observing what is applauded and what is seen as normal. By observing the aggregate behaviors of the people, one can get a good sense of what the church really believes. We offer the following framework to help church leaders assess if the culture actually believes in and values leadership development. While this list of attributes does not cover everything that can or should be present in a church culture, we believe this list includes critical cultural attributes necessary for leadership development. The framework was built from the theological beliefs outlined in the previous chapter along with potential deviant expressions that corrode a church culture. As you consider your church culture, do the attributes on the left describe the church or those on the right? Working backward from the behavioral analysis, it is possible to make some theological assessments for church culture.

If we want to help organizations increase insights, we must first diagnose what is going wrong. In many cases, organizations are preventing insights by imposing too many controls and procedures in order to reduce or eliminate errors. Organizations value predictability and abhor mistakes. That’s why they impose management controls that stifle insights. If organizations truly want to foster innovation and increase discoveries, their best strategy is to cut back on the practices that interfere with insights, but that will be very difficult for them to do. Organizations are afraid of the unpredictable and disruptive properties of insights and are afraid to loosen their grip on the control strategies. Never mind that these strategies work best in well-ordered, rather than complex, settings. Organizations may need to keep their desires for predictability and perfection in check.

It’s never too late to take stock of one’s work, relationships, and life. What dreams of yours are unfulfilled, and why have they been pushed aside? Sometimes circumstances or economics are the unavoidable roadblock to achieving your dreams. When things are outside of a person’s control, all one can do is to evaluate how best to deal with these obstacles, and then take action. That was my personal approach when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The best thing about my cancer was that I realized how many people cared about me and wanted to help. I am not very good at asking for help and, unfortunately, many people are the same. Family and friends are a grossly underrated asset, which is why I centered my debut novel, To Tuscany with Love, on a group of friends who help each other save, and forgive, themselves. A surprising occurrence is that sometimes we ourselves, like my characters, have become the obstruction to achieving our goals. Passionately investing in your relationships and dreams is the first step to molding yourself into the person you dream of being and in the process, achieving happiness and fulfillment.

THERMOGRAPHY Misinformation abounds as to the true nature of breast cancer and what causes it. With so much public focus on breast cancer awareness, very little attention is given to breast health, which we know is governed by things like clean eating, routine detoxification, energy balance, and stress reduction, among other things. These other things include not blasting radiation at the breasts in the form of mammograms, which only exacerbate breast cancer risk. Dr. Martin Bales, L.Ac., D.A.O.M., a licensed acupuncturist and certified thermologist at the Center for New Medicine in Irvine, California, has for years been administering one of the best-known alternatives to mammograms: thermograms. As its name suggests, thermography utilizes the power of infrared heat—hence the root word “therm”—to detect physiological abnormalities indicative of a possible breast cancer diagnosis. Dr. Bales’s father first pioneered the technology in the late 1970s with the development of the world’s first all-digital infrared camera, which was used for missile detection purposes during wartime. Its capacity to track the heat signature of missiles was applied to the field of medicine in the 1980s, which eventually gave way to thermographic medical devices. Dr. Bales opined during a recent interview: “In the early eighties, a group of doctors approached my father and said, ‘You know, we’ve heard the body—obviously with its (blood) circulation—we can diagnose a lot of diseases by seeing where there’s hot spots and where there’s cold.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll make a medical version for you.’” And the rest is history: thermography machines that identify hot spots in the breasts later hit the market, and select doctors and clinics offer it as a safe, side effect–free alternative to mammograms. “The most promising aspect of thermography is its ability to spot anomalies years before mammography,” says women’s health expert Christiane Northrup, M.D., about the merits of thermography. “With thermography as your regular screening tool, it’s likely that you would have the opportunity to make adjustments to your diet, beliefs, and lifestyle to transform your cells before they became cancerous. Talk about true prevention.

I went from believing the propaganda that the USA healthcare system is the best in the world to recognizing that they were never going to correctly diagnose and treat me.

An extravert should make friends more easily than an introvert, whereas a conscientious person should meet more deadlines than a person who is not conscientious. Mischel found, however, that the typical correlation between personality traits and behavior was quite modest. This news shook up the field, because it essentially said that the traits personality psychologists were measuring were just slightly better than astrological signs at predicting behavior. Mischel did not simply point out the problem; he diagnosed the reasons for it. First, he argued that personality researchers had underestimated the extent to which the social situation shapes people’s behavior, independently of their personality. To predict whether a person will meet a deadline, for example, knowing something about the situation—the consequences of not meeting it, how much time the person has, how much work remains to be done—may be more useful than knowing the person’s score on a measure of conscientiousness. Situational influences can be very powerful, sometimes overwhelming individual differences in personality.5 This argument set off a turf war between personality psychologists, who place their bets on individual differences as the best predictors of behavior, and social psychologists, who place their bets on the nature of the social situation and how people interpret it.

cure, but 25 percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia recovered completely within the first two years, a surprising and hopeful statistic often drowned out by the dread sound of the diagnosis.