Scott Smith LCSW

23/12/2025

Despite the awful pop psychology title, this is a surprisingly reasonable article!

3 Reasons You Miss People Who Were Bad For You, By A Psychologist - Forbes https://apple.news/A_HUu-6Z7QCGGevn3D5EHhw

Why do we miss people who were bad for you, even when you know, logically, that going back would only hurt more? Here’s what research says.

21/12/2025

"For anyone trying to improve their wellbeing, our findings are an important reminder that you don’t have to constantly 'work on yourself' or pursue happiness. Experts in wellbeing rarely rely on dramatic life changes or wellbeing programmes.

"Instead, they quietly cultivate a mindset that helps orient themselves toward what really matters. It’s not about chasing happiness or forcing ourselves to think positively on a bad day. It’s about gently moving toward the things that make life feel more worthwhile, in ways that fit who you are. That shift in mindset is something that all of us can adopt."

You don’t need to make dramatic life changes to improve wellbeing. A simple mindset change can help maintain long-term wellbeing.

20/12/2025

“Research on mental disorders has been guided by hopes of finding specific causes that define specific disorders. That strategy worked for the rest of medicine, so it was enthusiastically adopted by psychiatry. The descriptions of mental disorders in the 1980 DSM-III were viewed as placeholders until research could discover the specific causes that would define specific disorders. Four decades of intensive research later, it is increasingly clear that psychiatry’s Holy Grail does not exist.

“Hopes of finding specific genes that cause specific disorders motivated studies that found thousands of relevant variants, but they each have only tiny effects and most influence many disorders. Hopes that specific disorders resulted from excesses or deficits of specific neurotransmitters or receptors were well worth pursuing, but they too have not been fulfilled. Hopes of finding abnormalities at specific brain loci have spurred development of incredibly sophisticated methods that have revealed unimagined details about brain structure and function, but no specific brain abnormalities that cause specific disorders. It is time to accept the evidence: what we have been searching for does not exist in anything like the simple form we hoped for.”

We need a medical view of disorders as failure modes in functional systems

19/12/2025

Confronting Dr. Amen On His Viral Brain Scans

We reached out to the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine for their comments regarding what Dr. Amen says at 1:03:31. They responded with the following ...

19/12/2025

“While acknowledging that ADHD-diagnosed children may receive drug combinations for a variety of reasons, such care is often a function of the “prescribing cascade” wherein one drug is used to treat the adverse effects of another drug. This is precisely what we observed long ago, when the rate of ADHD diagnosis and polypharmacy treatment in Hampton Roads was unconscionably high. What’s critical to underscore is this: there is no scientific evidence base for routine use of multiple psychiatric drugs. Research has clearly demonstrated that psychiatric polypharmacy is unhealthy when used to treat adults. It increases the risk of drug interactions, weight gain, severe side effects, relapse, and a shortened lifespan. We know little about the impact of psychiatric polypharmacy in children but we know plenty about the harms of drugs that are commonly added to ADHD stimulant prescriptions.”

We Must Stop the ADHD Prescribing Cascade, Not Perpetuate It - Mad in America

More than two decades ago, as clinical psychologists engaged in health research, we identified a region-specific tendency to use psychiatric drug combinations to treat childhood ADHD.

19/12/2025

“These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace,” said Stephens. “Swearing is literally a calorie-neutral, drug-free, low-cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance.”

Study finds dropping an expletive can raise confidence and help people push harder during physically demanding tasks

17/12/2025

“The three examples outlined—self-diagnosis as a source of prestige, the strategic use of children’s diagnostic labels as extensions of maternal identity, and the performance of emotional refinement within gentle-parenting frameworks—illustrate a consistent pattern in contemporary female narcissism. Each provides the transformation of ordinary difficulties into narratives of exceptional burden, insight, or sensitivity. Each converts relational environments into stages on which moral identity can be constructed and defended. And each is sustained by a cultural moment that treats women’s self-presentations as intrinsically credible, interprets emotional language as a sign of psychological depth, and resists attributing self-serving motives to maternal behaviour.”

The Contemporary Expression of Female Narcissism

Three Mechanisms Through Which It Is Socially Rewarded

17/12/2025

For starters, he has little patience for the standard (and impoverished, if you ask him) assumptions about feelings, such as the idea that they come in six basic universal flavors—happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. In the 1960s and ’70s, the psychologist Paul Ekman identified these six emotions, which he thought were hardwired into every human. This perception is still fairly embedded in our culture. Just consider the success of Pixar’s Inside Out, Boddice suggests, which anthropomorphized some of these distinct sentiments as cartoon characters (anger, for example, is squat and red, and has a head that ignites like a furnace) pulling levers behind a console inside our minds. Much of the social-skills curricula for elementary-school children are built around the same idea: choose from a list of prepackaged emoji ranging from smiley to frowny. There is nothing unusual about a desire to distill and name emotions in this way. For one thing, it might be the source of empathy. Having a shared “happy” that refers to what you are feeling and what I am feeling seems essential to relationships, and probably also to building any kind of human society.

But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards through time. Love for us can’t be that different from what it meant to Heloise and Abelard writing letters to each other in the 12th century. The laborers who hauled stones to build the pyramids in Giza felt anger that is our anger. We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and standards of personal hygiene.

Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same—that the experience of being human in another era, with all of its component feelings and perceptions, even including something as elemental as pain, is so foreign to us as to live inside a kind of sealed vault. “There is nothing about my humanness that affords me insight into humanity,” Boddice has said. Rather than being a constant—extending across space and time—human nature for Boddice is a variable and unstable category, one with infinite possible shades.

The historians who want to know how our ancestors experienced love, anger, fear, and sorrow

16/12/2025

Therapists say that “therapy-speak” has invaded their patients’ sessions and lives—and it’s making things difficult on everyone, Olga Khazan reports. https://theatln.tc/SGJZv553

“Gaslighting” and “love-bombing” are just two of the terms that couples therapists told Khazan their clients are misusing, typically after seeing descriptions of the ideas on social media. But according to the therapist Terry Real, no phrase is used as frequently as this one: “I’m the spouse of a narcissist.”

“True narcissistic personality disorder is marked by, among other traits, an abnormally high sense of self-importance and a lack of empathy,” Khazan explains. “And in reality, it’s very rare.”

Still, the therapists Khazan spoke with said that their clients seem very sure this unusual diagnosis must apply to their spouse. “People are incredibly confident in these conclusions and are not curious, are not open to discussing them and figuring out if they’re accurate,” another therapist told Khazan. “They’re coming in as the experts.”

“Most of the therapists I spoke with said they are glad that people are learning more about mental health,” Khazan continues. But “before the advent of social media, people picked up these ideas in self-help books, psychoanalysis, and pop culture.” Now, therapists say, too many people are getting sucked into online posts about pop-psych concepts—and they misapply them to their own relationships.

“Spouses’ attempts to diagnose each other can become a problem in couples’ sessions, these therapists said, because they distract focus from the dysfunctional patterns that both members of the couple are likely perpetuating,” Khazan writes. As one therapist told her, these labels can, in effect, say: “I’m not gonna change anything about our relationship. You have to change your personality or change all your behaviors to stay with me.”

But therapy-speak language appears to be here to stay. “‘I’ve got issues,’ which originated decades ago as a psychological euphemism for ‘I’ve got problems,’ is now so much a part of the lexicon that it no longer registers as originating in therapy,” Khazan writes. “Perhaps ‘gaslight’ and ‘narcissist’ are headed there too.”

📸: George Marks / Getty

15/12/2025

15 Therapist Green Flags

Many enter the therapy professions. Few provide expert care.

14/12/2025

An excellent article from The Guardian:

"Another unintended consequence: as trauma saturates our culture, those most harmed are eclipsed by those who are most prolific. Online performances of distress, Javanbakht argues, risk trivializing the suffering of people who have endured truly debilitating harm.

He pointed out: 'How many survivors of torture, how many refugees, how many veterans, how many firefighters, how many people coming from extreme poverty have you seen on TikTok or social media talking about their trauma?'”

In an economy that rewards confession and self-labeling, pain is no longer something to survive – but something to brand, sell, and curate