Friday, November 19, 2010

Psychotherapy religion vs. psychotherapy science

While the conflict between religion and faith is not a new one, in the field of psychotherapy skepticism is as essential as it is in medicine. Theories of psychotherapy in their infancy or even still in gestation can be presented to the public as if they were already proven true. People depend on the "experts" to have the training to know the proven from the experimental and advise them competently. They have to assume that we are giving them the best available help and advice. Yet perhaps their lives and certainly their well-being depend on what we do to help them.

It's good that new theories and practices arise. Even when the new theories have not yet been tested, or are based on the wildest of suppositions, we have to start somewhere. When we try out new ideas that have promise, the explanations for how they work may lag by years. We can see if they appear to have any validity or if they can be modified so that they are more effective. We can test various aspects of them, keep the valid and dump the others. Then the theories can be changed to support the findings and to suggest new approaches to be tested in their turn.

As long as the people on whom we are testing out new ideas are clearly aware that they are taking part in an experimental treatment AND that they have other alternatives that are not experimental, there is nothing wrong with trying the new ideas out. They should have a right to try an untested or experimental treatment if they are fully informed. Out of experiment and exploration come the ideas that develop into superior modes of treatment.

However, many practitioners of experimental and un-evaluated modes of treatment don't tell their patients. They offer the "latest and best" even though there is not yet any experimental validation. Our patients believe, reasonably enough, that we are providing them the best and most effective treatments, treatments they are not themselves competent to evaluate. Providing them with untested modes of treatment without their informed consent is certainly unethical and in my opinion fraudulent.

Recently a friend who is trained and legitimately credentialed as a psychotherapist wanted to convince me that the newest treatment she had encountered was truly wonderful. She could not provide me with any experimental evidence or journaled research publications. However, her "personal experience" convinced her that "it worked". The theory behind this therapy has absolutely no construct validity. It relies on unsupported beliefs in "energy flow" and "visualization of personal space". There's no question in my mind that some (or all) of her patients experienced something positive and in some cases believed they were "cured". In her mind this and her own experience is enough to convince her that she has found something true and useful. She therefore belongs to the huge class of people who develop beliefs without corroborating evidence and is therefore a "true believer". There's nothing wrong with being a true believer as long as the belief is not presented as factual truth. Essentially her new kind of psychotherapy is a religion and is supported by faith and belief and her personal skills in using it. For some people, single events are enough to convince; personal experience trumps the accumulation of evidence tested rigorously.

Since she is practicing a psychotherapeutic "religion", logical argument has no weight with her. She thinks I need to "experience it for myself", and she believes that this should be enough to convince me. I find it impossible to explain to her why personal experience is not and can never be enough for validation of a psychotherapeutic approach. Every religion believes in unsupported techniques; whether they are spinal manipulation or rain dances or prayer. No satisfactory evidence has ever been found to support these religious practices, but they do not require support since they don't depend on evidence, but only belief. My chances of convincing my friend are about the same as for any member of any religion being swayed by logic.

Every religion works miracles. Some of the time. Every psychotherapy has successes. Some of the time. Every belief system, no matter how weird or in direct contradiction to physical fact, has adherents who will die to support it. All we skeptics have to rely on is evidence. Since everything works (some of the time) we account for the successes by citing the "placebo" effect. The placebo effect itself is a complex topic and is itself effected by a number of factors. The more convincing the "salesman" of the effect, the greater the placebo effect. I have watched many sick people being "cured" in my younger days by tent revivalists. There has turned out to be no evidence for the long-range outcomes, but I'm sure some people were cured. The ones who died had no public complaints to make.

There's an old joke whose ending involves a man saying to his wife (who has caught him with another woman) "Are you going to believe me or believe your lying eyes?" My psychotherapist friend is convinced by what she has seen. As an amateur magician, I'm glad to have a credulous audience, but I don't want credulous believers in charge of my treatment. I know better than to believe my eyes and my own experience. While personal experience can be convincing, for the helping professions it certainly should not be enough.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Photography contests

I just read a book on how to win photography contests. It's well written, with lots of examples, maybe 200. Of all those, only one or two pass the "wall test". This test simply asks "Would I put this picture in a frame over my mantle?"

The criteria for winning a contest have almost nothing to do with the creation of art. While some of the principles are good ones ("Take pictures of what you love to see"), most of them have only to do with how to get a judge to look favorably on your particular photograph.

It has to have immediate appeal. It has to be an unusual point of view. Of course it should be technically perfect, or at the least be interesting in its imperfection. It should have as subject matter something that will appeal to the judges, who have seen every postcard photograph ever sold. It has to be composed well.

The prize-winning pictures certainly met these specifications. But were they art? Absolutely not. They were great postcards or pretty scenery or unfamiliar countries or unusual landscapes. But they were not "wall-hangers". After you look at them for 3 or 4 seconds you've seen everything you need to see. There's nothing more to look at. There's no depth or mystery or deeper meaning implied.

Then I look at some of the art that's in museums and it nearly universally recognized as "beautiful". A lot of it is simply pretty. Some is great, and that's because a deeper and more universal meaning is hinted at or implied. In Michelangelo's "Pieta" the universal sense of sadness and loss by a mother for her son, even the son of God, is poignant and powerful. However, the Rembrandt "Night Watch" is not. It's just a picture of a bunch of men who wanted their membership in a particular group recognized. We treat it as "a masterpiece" because the books all say it is great art. However, when I observed the people who came to look at it, after only a few minutes they lost interest. It was interesting and old, and that was about it. Even if I had a wall big enough to put that picture on, I wouldn't. It simply doesn't hold my interest.

I would have to agree with you if you pointed out that I simply am too obtuse or too tasteless or too uneducated to appreciate the quality of such work. How would I know that I'm simply artistically inadequate? On the other hand, how many of the readers of this blog note have copies of such great works of art on the walls of their dining rooms?

Just catching the attention of the viewer with a pretty piece of eye candy is not enough to treat the eye candy as serious art. Being an interesting photograph is not enough, or photojournalism would hang in people's living rooms. Where I struggle is with the issue of what the standards for genuine art in photography are?

Friday, November 05, 2010

Covert and Slow Suicide

Suicide may be a long-term option in dealing with life impasses. Suicide doesn't always have to take the form of a sudden, dramatic event, such as shooting or hanging oneself. It can be a slow and deliberate, barely conscious plan carried out over a period of years. In this latter form it's very hard or even impossible to identify.

Here's a sample scenario: A 40-year-old woman in an impossible and abusive marriage has strong religious beliefs that make the deliberate taking of her own life intolerable. The same beliefs absolutely preclude divorce as an option. She believes she cannot bear the thought of living as she has for the rest of her life. So she begins doing things that will clearly shorten her life span, but will not kill her immediately. She smokes more heavily, eats a lot of fast food and gains weight. Her blood pressure gets fairly high. She is advised to exercise and lose weight, but she doesn't do that. Her physical condition continues to slowly deteriorate. She sleeps and naps a lot, complaining of "being tired". She drinks too much and sometimes (not often, perhaps) drives while slightly intoxicated. Her fights with her husband intensify, and she may be assaulted by him, but never follows through with a complaint. She knows he has a gun, but she does nothing to get rid of it.

She's not directly killing herself, but she knows as a fact that her life expectancy is pretty limited. If her husband doesn't kill her, her health will continue to deteriorate fairly rapidly. The stress of her life style increases the likelihood that she may die of a stroke or heart attack, or even in a car wreck. However, such a death doesn't count as a suicide either in her mind or in the collective mind of the family, her religious community and authorities. Nonetheless, her life is deliberately limited, even though she may never put this intention into words. She has found a way of acceptably solving her problem. If you asked her how long she might live, given her current life style, she would laugh and avoid the question, or answer it in a way that makes it a joke not to be taken seriously (gallows humor) or she may become defensively angry.

Another scenario: A middle-aged man hates his job, doesn't get along with his wife and fights with his grown children. He fantasizes about changing his life, moving away, even getting a divorce, but knows he will never do it. The thought of such major changes provokes a lot of anxiety. He begins to drink more, and his smoking becomes heavy, as much as 2 packs a day. He talks about trying to stop smoking, but nothing seems to work. He spends more and more hours per week at work in a fairly demanding and high-stress job. He gains a lot of weight and signs up for a gym, but never seems to have time to go there. He gets anti-depressant medication from his family doctor but seems to get little benefit from it.

We are all making choices regularly that will impact on our life span. Some choices are simply short-sighted; some choices make our lives better and others may shorten our lives. People carrying out a covert suicide, however, consistently make choices that are known to lead to an early death. They get angry or laugh it off when asked or confronted, because the whole intent is to get away with suicide without being forced to recognize the truth of what they are doing. Much of the time the decision to slowly shorten one's life is not verbalized or even a consciously thought. It's a passive way of dealing with difficult problems and is congruent with people who use passive-aggressive defenses.

While people in the covert suicide category can be treated successfully in therapy, they are not likely to be willing to deal directly with this issue, since a key part of its usefulness lies in its easy concealment/denial. They may ask for help in "getting over being depressed" and will be readily compliant with anti-depressant medication. However, they invariably misidentify their unhappiness as depression, and so anti-depressants don't work very well. What they don't want to do is to be faced with the underlying issue of a miserably unhappy and "trapped" life. The anger and denial they express when confronted is a give-away. They have found a solution for an impossible situation (as they see it) for which they cannot be blamed and which cannot be prevented.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Teasing and "Kidding"

We all know teasing and kidding when we see it. Teasing and kidding in textual form are not so easy to recognize, since they depend for their interpretation on body language, facial expression and voice tone. In writing we might have to append "just kidding"in order to keep from being misunderstood.

Some forms of teasing are really forms of verbal abuse and bullying. I'm not talking about that kind of teasing now. For the purposes of this article, I'm referring to the kinds of things we say and do to people with whom we are friendly.

We want the teasing of friends not to be taken seriously. Frequently the content of a tease is on the edge of meanness or hurtfulness. In fact, it has to have the potential of being hurtful to meet the requirements for a tease. If a tease were totally irrelevant to the person being teased, there would be no point in it. In fact, the person being teased would be perplexed by it. A tease is an apparently hostile statement intended not to be taken seriously.

What are the rules and requirements for teasing, and what purpose does it serve in relationships? I'll start with the last question first. When we tease someone, we expect them to know us well enough to know we mean no harm. We rarely tease strangers.
Generally, the tease could literally be taken to be hurtful; it is the fact that hurtful intent is contradicted by the solidity of our relationship that makes it "funny". It is as if we were saying when we tease "You know I don't mean this because we like each other". In a way, the fact that one of us can tease the other reaffirms that our relationship is a positive one. Teasing is a way of increasing the trust in a relationship by reaffirming that we do not mean to hurt or cause harm. Sometimes teasing is a way of testing a new relationship in order to build it.

When we tease we have to send a duplex message (in the language of Transactional Analysis). The literal content of the tease is a critical statement. The covert content, carried by body language and tone or exaggerated content, is that we do not mean the message to be taken as true. The response, to be appropriate, must acknowledge that the recipient does not take the message to be true and is therefore not offended. The relationship has then survived a minor "test" and is shown to be a positive one.

The content must be relevant to the person teased, in the sense that it has to be a critical statement that could possibly be true. It has to have the potential to be harmful; the teasee affirms his trust in the teaser by not taking it seriously when he easily could do so. The relationship is therefore strengthened to a small degree. A tease that is totally irrelevant to the person being teased is simply meaningless.

Teasing may also be a form of flirtation. Sexual teasing is a way of indicating sexual interest in the other person which is at the same time plausibly deniable. If the person being teased isn't interested in a sexual relationship with the teaser, the teaser can easily retreat into the classic teaser position of "just kidding", or "I didn't really mean it that way". While it shares the overt intention of "strengthening the relationship" with regular teasing, the sexual tease is only aimed at strengthening the sexual aspect of the relationship, and if that is rejected by the person being teased, the relationship may well be weakened.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Some Thoughts About PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an unique disorder in several ways. It can occur in people who are exposed to a highly stressful event, but may not in all those exposed. It takes two forms: the acute form, which develops quickly after the stressful event, and the chronic form, which develops months or years after the event. In my opinion, acute PTSD is a normal reaction to an extreme event. Chronic PTSD, I believe, is the response of a more "neurotic" character structure to an extreme event, and is not a "normal" reaction.

In some ways PTSD can be seen as a response to a sudden exposure to unpleasant reality. The reality is that we live in a very dangerous world, and we manage our appropriate anxiety through the rather primitive defense of denial. We drive on the highway at 70 mph, with cars going the opposite direction at 70 mph only feet or inches away. We have the illusion of safety, even invulnerability, in our air-conditioned and quiet automobiles. We also know, though we avoid thinking about it, that we are a fraction of a second away from a terrible death. We don't want to know how vulnerable we are; in some ways we really can't afford to know how close we are to disaster.

When something happens to shatter our sense of invulnerability, it may shake us deeply. It breaks the wall of denial and suddenly we are forced to be aware of just how near we are to death at almost every second. We lose our illusions of safety. In a sense, acute PTSD is a mental state closer to reality than our "normal" state of comfortable illusion. We want to retreat to our previous state of blissful ignorance, but find that impossible to do easily. We become angry that we have lost our sense of safety. How we adjust to this sudden onslaught of reality determines whether we come to terms with what has happened and the precarious nature of our lives or whether we become chronically terrified. The more protected our lives have been, the more disturbed we are when we suddenly are exposed to the often terrible reality. The story of how Siddhartha Gautama was suddenly exposed to death and illness (which started him on his search for the philosophy that became Buddhism) is especially enlightening.

The events that result in PTSD are life-changing events. However, instead of seeing our reactions to trauma as necessarily pathological, we should consider that our mental state prior to the incident was one of ignorance or deliberate denial, and that our recognition of the potential awfulness of life, as unpleasant as the experience is, is more healthy and realistic. Our reaction to the necessity of changing our belief about reality may be pathological, but react and change we must. Some people bitterly resent the imposition of change and/or the recognition that they are not as safe as they believe they should be. Some become self-pitying or resentful or victimized or helpless. None of those reactions are healthy, but the reactions are not caused by the traumatic event itself. They are the result of the impact of the traumatic event on the dysfunctional attitude and belief system of the individual to whom they belong.

Monday, October 18, 2010

A Critique of Modern Poetry

Poetry has been an interest of mine since high school, and while I have never lost interest, in recent years I have been occupied with other things. Lately, however, I found myself going back and re-reading poets who have kept my interest over the years. In the process, I have been reading some critical books in an attempt to increase my understanding of the poet and the poem.

I am beginning to look at poems in what is for me a new way. The most important thing is that I see that I have only understood poetry in the most superficial way. I have read poems for the beauty of the line, the vividness and economy of its images and its sound. Unless the meaning was obvious, I paid little attention to what the poem was "about". Archibald MacLeish once said "A poem should not mean but be", a thought which was not too far from my somewhat naive initial understanding. I now think that this approach is itself naive, in that it makes the assumption that a writer must make a choice between the "being" of a poem (its sound and images) and the "meaning" of a poem. Clearly a poem can and should have both elements.

However, this debate/argument has been going on for many years. In the early 20th century, the "Imagiste" movement focused only on the image in the poem. Poems in this category have their beauty but have not really achieved the first rank. Pound, for instance, wrote the following poem, tiled "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Why this poem has not been "successful" is probably obvious. It's a simple image, clear and precise, with no meaning other than itself as an image. But there is no depth of meaning, no content to help us relate to it in a personal way, no poignancy. It fails (for me) to stir some more intense experience or emotion. Reading it is like looking at a photograph taken by someone else of a street scene on a rainy day. It might be mildly melancholy, but nothing more than that. It fails some quality of universality and communication beyond the image which should stir an idea or an emotion in me. (The article in Wikipedia on Imagism is excellent and need not be repeated here.)

Some poetry by T. S. Eliot fails me for the opposite reason. He has complex and multi-layered ideas which he attempts to express through his poetry. Some seems successful; some does not. He is also at times a master of the melodic and sonorous line. When the two come together, the poem is marvelous. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is an example of the good. "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" is an example of the failure of the union of meaning and image. The "meaning" of a poem should not be a puzzle to solve, nor should it depend on complex intellectual associations that are so unique to the author that no-one outside his head can connect the dots. Poems are not essays on religion or philosophy.

Pound's Cantos are another example of the latter failure. In spite of that failure, however, there are lines and images that are beautiful and powerful. In his earlier Translations Pound was able to translate meaning AND image from another culture and language into English. Perhaps because he could not depend on intensely and uniquely personal associations and recollections, he was forced to make the language simpler, and ultimately incredibly successful.

What are we trying to do when we write poetry? Recently I briefly took part in an on-line web site devoted to unpublished poets showing their work. Most amateur and unskilled poetry is written in the form of blank or free verse. One may presume that this is so that nothing can get in the way of the expression of feeling. But that's mostly what the poems were. They were adolescent outbursts of emotion with no discipline and little skill, though no one could doubt the intensity of the emotion. Each poem was written as if the author had never seen another poem and did not understand that their feelings were non-unique to the point of being trite. The occasional image or beautiful phrase might make itself noticed, but the meaning of all the poems I read was the same: "I and I alone have this FEELING! And it's important because I am the one who has it!" There is no suggestion among them that it is the universality of their feelings that can make it resonate with the reader. They did not want critical comment; they wanted praise and approval for their hothouse plant. They do not understand that the writing of poetry is a highly skilled task, demanding the utmost mastery of the language.

I too still find myself reading poetry in a simple and naive way, for the beautiful phrase and memorable image. The emotions being expressed are merely the context in which the language is placed. However, such a style of reading misses much of the content and simplifies or ignores the meaning. Still, I would rather read in that manner than read a scientific text or a sermon. So while image and sound are necessary for poetry, they are not sufficient for a poem to rise to the highest level.

What kind of “meaning” is appropriate for poetry? Considering that poems are not aimed primarily at the intellect, can we say they are aimed at eliciting emotions only? When Eliot describes the “objective correlative”, he refers to the attempt to elicit in the reader’s mind the same thoughts and emotions that were present in the mind of the author. But which is more important, thought or emotion? While there seems to be no limit as to the kinds of emotions expressed, some kinds of thoughts are clearly inappropriate, in the sense they can’t be easily expressed in such a format because they are non-verbal or abstract or even mathematical. Eliot attempts to express religious concerns and conflicts, and in that he owes much to the metaphysical poets of the 17th and 18th century. Pound tries to focus our thoughts on economics and politics throughout the centuries. In my mind, neither are successful attempts. I would rather find other ways to learn ideas.

Reading such attempts as the amateur in the local Poetry Society as well as the unsuccessful attempts by the famous helps clarify for me what it is that poems should do. An example of a successful attempt to universalize a loss and make it poignant and beautiful at the same time is found in the "Lucy" poems by Wordsworth. It can be done. We should know it when we see it. Wordsworth is not howling at the moon like a love-lorn teen. He is attempting (successfully, in my opinion) to speak to all who have lost someone of the universality of that loss and what it means to us. "A slumber did my spirit seal" is a successful blend of the emotion of loss with economy of line and with images that speak to us as well. I can find many poems who meet this criterion and am interested in those the reader of this essay can bring to my attention.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Why I Think Inheritance Taxes Are Good

The only way to prevent money (=power) from accumulating in the hands of a family, especially a family member who has neither motivation or brains to earn it him/herself, is to impose a confiscatory inheritance tax. The children of a brilliant entrepreneur should have no right to money they have not earned. Do we need more Paris Hiltons?

There are huge problems with doing so, of course. What to do with the money collected is important. It is also important to prevent a profitable company from being forced out of business. People think it is important to be able to provide for their offspring, though this issue is a cultural one rather than a real issue. There is no real reason why adult, competent and educated adults should be "provided for" by wealthy parents. Nonetheless, many parents are strongly (and wrongly) motivated to dd this and will undoubtedly attempt to find clever ways to circumvent any attempt to bring their children "down" to the normal level.

In an egalitarian society, every child shoud have the same opportunities. No society in which parents raise their own children can be truly egalitarian. Wealthy families have richer cultural opportunities. So, while it isn't really possible to start all children off with the same advantages, they can certainly be "evened out" to a great degree. For instance, money collected from taxing inheritances can be earmarked to provide nearly equal educational rights to all. Scholarships can be awarded to children who show intellectual promise and who are economically disadvantaged. Money can be spent to raise the standards of "ghetto" schools. Just because such a system can't be made trick-proof doesn't mean it can't be made to improve the educational system.

The intent is obviously two-fold. It is desirable to prevent families from accuring such wealth that they become oligarchs, potentates of small or large empires. It is desirable to assure that children have a more equal chance at higher levels of education. Such a system may not be perfect, but it can be "good enough" to be a benefit.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

A life-and-death problem in statistics

Drugs are accepted or denied by the FDA on the basis of their efficacy. Efficacy is defined as the excess of "success" over what might occur by chance. A drug which, for instance, resulted in no change in the average outcome for the disorder at which it was aimed could never be passed because it appears to be no better than a placebo.

However, basing success or failure on averages is a flawed procedure, as it assumes that the results lie on the normal, "bell-shaped" curve. Sometimes, however, they don't. Here's an example: Bill is dying of cancer, with a relatively short and painful time-span ahead of him. But suppose there is a drug which, in X percent of the cases, results in death immediately, but in the remaining percentage the patient is cured. Let us suppose that the drug, on average, does not change the average outcome, so it is not and will not be approved.

But for Bill, if he takes the drug, he will either die immediately or be greatly improved or cured. For Bill, taking the drug is a no-brainer. Of course he will chance dying, since he's dying painfully anyway and there is no escape. But if he takes the drug, he may be improved or cured. The flaw in FDA thinking is that there may be bi-modal or even trimodal results, and "averages" do not reflect the importance of this distribution of data.

I would appreciate any comments by someone knowledgeable about statistical analysis.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

War Economics

I'm puzzled about comments I've read from discussions on the topic of the costs of war. The implication is usually that war is expensive, that the money is "thrown away" in bullets and planes and materiel in general.

What puzzles me is this question: Where is the money spent? Is it not spent mostly in the US in factories that make the equipment soldiers use? The money doesn't leave the country. The products do, but they're paid for in the US, paid to workers and companies that produce things. When a bomb drops on Afghanistan, it doesn't cost us anything. It's already cost us the price of production, but that money went to US citizens for the most part.

So is it possible that one of the things that keeps our economy going at all is the artificial market caused by warfare? If we stopped buying munitions from our factories and planes and tanks and .. our economy would probably slump much further. A lot of people would be out of work. When we don't have a war to consume goods we can produce, the economy does poorly. I'm wondering if it's possible that wars are at times manufactured by our government to keep our economy going.

I recall reading, for instance, that the war with Japan in 1941 was deliberately provoked by our cutting their ocean supply lines for oil and gasoline. It appears we put them in an unsurvivable position and waited for them to take action against us, so that they were identified as the aggressors, even though we gave them no choices. Our economy at the time was terrible; we had just recovered from a depression caused by stock market gambling. WW II ramped us up big time, severely damaged our asian competition, and gave us control of the Pacific as well as a huge demand for military products, built in the US, of course.

I would appreciate comments or arguments. I wonder if my view is too simplistic or even naive.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Photographs as art

I've been reading a book about entering photos in contests. While it is useful for that topic, it has increased my awareness of the difference between pictures that can win contests and those that are "wall-hangers", genuinely artistically interesting. (For the moment I'm setting entirely aside the category of photos that are "newsworthy".)

Some years ago I was browsing through a very large rental/sale art gallery, considering art I might want to own. The manager of the gallery gave me a piece of advice that was excellent at the time, but over the years has come to carry a deeper meaning. He said that I should not buy a picture that I found immediately attractive or interesting; those pictures, he said, don't always "wear well". He strongly suggested that I rent a picture I was considering purchasing, hang it in a prominent place in my house, and keep it for one or more months. His final comment was that the most satisfactory pictures were not necessarily those that grabbed you, but those that somehow got your interest and increased it over time.

It has been said that an "art" photograph takes an everyday object or view and makes us see, as if for the first time, how interesting/beautiful it is. Changing the scale to a larger size, as in Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, is an effective way to accomplish this. Or a dozen other "darkroom tricks" such as changing the color, can have the same effect. I recently saw a painting of a pear, easily 4 feet tall, which was quite good. Every subtle gradation of color and shape were brought out. I stayed interested in that painting for several days, but it falls short of the ideal in that it failed to draw me into it more deeply over time.

That really sums up my thoughts about photos as genuine art. They have to be more than pretty, more than interest grabbers. Somehow they must pull you deeper into the image and sustain your interest. Now, however, we get into the question of what it is that constitutes real art. Of course, there's no answer to that other than the cliche about knowing what we like. We want to make people like our photos, but more than that, we want their interest to continue and deepen. Just being able to win a contest isn't even in the ball park.

I would welcome any comments on this topic.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Discipline in schools

We all know that disciplining children in schools largely stopped with the start of integration. As schools began mixing children from more economically different groups, the children themselves had come from more disparate backgrounds. Some came from homes with rules and discipline; others did not. At that time many of the non-white children admitted to middle-class public schools were from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and families. A higher percentage of these children were from single-parent families and had been "on their own" to a much greater extent than the average middle-class child of that time. These students, the majority of whom were non-white, presented a higher degree of disciplinary problems. School administrators did not want to be accused of being racially biased. They bent over backwards to avoid this eventuality; as a result, the standards of behavior were lowered for all students.

Teachers facing serious disciplinary problems were given less and less support in their attempts to impose behavioral limits, especially when the trouble-makers were non-white. School administrators feared the legion of lawyers eager to make bucks on racial conflicts, so they effectively disappeared. The teachers, left without adminstrative backup and fearing lawsuits or disciplinary actions themselves, adopted a "hands-off" policy toward all the students, irrespective of racial background.

Walk through any school hallway filled with 7th grade or higher grade students. The level of verbal and physical assault and sexual harassment is astonishing. If adults were to behave in this manner, criminal charges would be filed. But the young people in the hallways of these schools get no protection from frightened "authorities". There are few or no guardians to limit antisocial behavior. As a result, the kids live in a largely unpoliced jungle, where the bigger animals make their own rules. They turn to each other and form gangs. They lose any faith in the legal system or in the police. They are alienated from the system which does not, will not support and protect them. As adults they have learned that the only person who will look after them is themselves, and so they have no loyalty to the legal and political system.

Why should they? They depended on the adults to protect them, and we abandoned them to the lawyers and the gangs. We would never allow others to treat us in this fashion, but we do absolutely nothing to protect the children from their peers.

I want to be clear about this so that any argument is not based on irrelevant considerations: I favor school integration. I favored it when it happened and still do. This is not about race. I want all students of any color or background to be treated equally and equally required to obey the school regulations and society's laws. The disciplinary problem results from the sudden mixing of children from very different socio-economic backgrounds and not providing them with the protection from each other to which they were entitled. We have sowed the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Mental Health and Public Relations

One of the primary problems in presenting mental health issues to the public is that there are two very different problems combined under the same heading. On the one hand, "mental health" is about the seriously impaired people with various forms of schizophrenia who need support and medication simply to survive. On the other hand are the people with depressions and anxiety disorders; as many as 35% of the population (or more) will experience one or more episodes of these disorders. Lumping them together in the same category is like treating cancer and pneumonia as equivalent.

People with depression and anxiety don't want to be lumped into the same category as the people they read about in the paper who have hallucinations and delusions or who are so impaired they can't survive without help. The more dramatic images and news stories are about such people. Movies about mental health, no matter how well intentioned, focus on the dramatic and the disturbed: "The Snake Pit", "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", "Fatal Attraction" and the like come to mind.

People with depression and anxiety are just us; our disorders are not generally permanent nor disabling and we don't want to be thought of as "nut cases". We look and (for the most part) function just like everyone else. There are a lot of us. We all know people who have depressions and anxiety disorders, and they look like us because they are us. We/They don't want to be thought about as "insane" or "mentally ill". And that makes it hard for them to decide to get treatment. Many people with depression or anxiety never get the treatment they need because of the stigma. They may spend years enduring their discomfort simply hoping to "get better" by themselves, and many of them eventually do, but at the cost of greatly extended discomfort and limited function.

While we say we don't want to stigmatize the "mentally ill", nobody thinking about getting treatment for depression wants their employer to find out they have a "mental health history". Depressions and anxiety disorders, no matter how common, are not considered as simply illnesses; no matter what we say, we don't treat people with a history of mental illness like others. If people find out that you were treated for depression or anxiety, you may be refused a job. You lose any chance at political office. In the military you are eventually dumped, especially if you are an officer. Insurance companies in the past have refused to insure you or provide funds for your treatment.

My point here is that we treat these two very different classes of mental illness as if they were the same. Treatment for each group is very different. Schizophrenias and bipolar disorders are chronic illnesses which cannot, at the present, be cured. At best they can be ameliorated. Anxiety and depression are curable, for the most part, and have no long-term consequences. It seems to me that we need to see these groups of disorders as very different and separate.

Perhaps it would be best to separate these categories into "Mental Illness" and "Emotional Difficulty". They really are quite different.

Saturday, May 01, 2010

Film color casts

Many of the reviews of the several available films make reference to "color cast" of the film. Ektar, for instance, is said to emphasize warm colors more than Velvia. This has always been true of films, and back in the days when we had to have them printed by professionals it mattered more than it does now. We were pretty much stuck with how the print came out, although when I printed my own color prints I was accustomed to changing the filtration to adjust color. Of course that is time consuming in the extreme; you can't know how a change in filtration has affected a print until after it was developed.

With computers we can see on the screen how the picture will look when printed, and we can instantly make changes to suit our own tastes. So it no longer matters what colors are "favored" by a particular film. I have Photoshop. I can adjust it any way I like. What matters most now are the sharpness of the film and its range of shading (or shadow/bright detail). I don't care how contrasty or not the film is, if the detail is present I can adjust the contrast just as I can the color. But I can't easily fix poor detail, especially in the shadows.

When I finish running my tests I will probably post results and samples of enlarged detail to this blog. Gotta say, though, dragging three heavy cameras (or 2 heavy and one light), the tripod, a spot-meter and minor odds and ends is kinda heavy going. So far I've really enjoyed returning to film shooting. I'd forgotten the pleasures of taking pictures thoughtfully and carefully, rather than just shooting a bunch and throwing away the obvious losers. It's a little harder to grab a shot with my Rollei, because I have to use the spotmeter to calculate the f/stops and shutter speed separately, then dial them in. However, different cameras for different uses; I wouldn't use the Rollei for action photos anyway. The Pentax 645 is plenty quick and fairly simple to operate (compared to the Canon 5D). I'd use the Canon for people shooting, lower natural light, indoor work, and save the Rollei for landscapes and other scenics.

Anybody else out there testing this idea out?

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Film versus digital

My friend George and I have been carrying on a running debate for the last six months on the virtues of film photography and digital photography. We've been taking pictures for a very long time with a wide variety of cameras. For film he has Hasselblads and Leicas; I have a Linhof view camera, a Rollei twin-lens and a Pentax 645 and 67. For digital we both have Canon 5D Mk2 cameras.

There is no question that the Canon 5D Mk2 takes superb pictures. It has a full-size 35mm sensor and an excellent lens. The pix are 23 megapixel pictures, which blow up directly into 16x20 and larger, and with Creative Fractals to almost any imaginable size, without any loss of sharpness or detail. What more could we want (besides talent), you may ask? Well, the Canon is large, heavy, and very complex. There are more menus than you can shake a stick at, more options than you can keep in your head, and all of them take a lot of time to change or shift modes.

George's Leica (from the late 50s) has an attached light meter, weighs next to nothing, feels wonderful in the hand, and there ARE NO MENUS! He can put it in his pocket and take pictures he can hang on a wall at almost any size. My Pentax 645 is similar, though bulkier and more heavy; nevertheless, taking a picture with it is quick and easy. The meter is built-in and there are a couple of adjustments on the top that are quick and easy AND optional.

We can send our exposed films to a lab on the West coast and get the films developed and scanned with a very high quality scanner and then sent back to us as developed film and a DVD with the large scans on it. We still do our own printing, but that's a pleasure and gives us considerable control over the outcome; even the professional labs do ink-jet printing because there is almost no-one out there doing prints and chemical development. So there's a delay in getting results back of maybe a couple of weeks. Not the instant gratification of dropping a memory chip into a slot and looking at the pix immediately.

I'm planning to make a set of identical photos, matching digital camera with film. I should be able to see if there is a quality difference fairly easily. But beyond that the issue of ease of on-the-spot use comes up. When you don't take the camera with you because it's too much trouble, you don't take any pictures. There's some kind of balance with quality and ease of use that has to be considered. George actually loves the process of using his Leica. He says he has begun to think of the 5d as more of a "chore" than a pleasure.

Well, we're not professional photographers, far from it. The digital camera has made life hugely better for wedding photographers and many professionals. No delays, no developing expense, and you can put the pix on a web site immediately. But we don't have the pressure of quantity production. What we're doing is something we do for the love of it, and for the occasional picture of which we are truly proud. So we have the leisure/privilege of just seeing which we like better.

I would certainly value comments or experiences in this area.

Monday, April 05, 2010

Why not decrease salaries instead of firing people?

That really says it all. I think it's amazingly idiotic and short-sighted to favor firing X% of employees in an organization rather than to decrease salaries by a small and necessary percent.

This is clearly more appropriate when the organization sells services more than products. A declining market may mean less demand for the product, and as a result fewer employees are needed to run the company. However, when services are the primary product, cutting employees also means cutting services. It does not save money. It only reduces the services, and if the need for those services remains constant, everybody suffers.

For instance, in the field of state-supported mental health, the need for professional services continues to rise as the population increases and as the economy heads south. A "RIF" or reduction in force means that the population served will receive fewer and lower-quality services. Since at least some income is realized by providing these services, there is also a decrease in income.

Alternatively, expecting all employees of the Department of Mental Health to take a small percentage cut would accomplish the necessary reduction in expense, without reducing the quantity and quality of mental health services. We are quick enough, it seems, to demand increases in salary when the economy is booming. When the economy tanks, why not take a decrease rather than firing some percentage of the employees? I suspect the answer has to do with an individual's belief that the firings will be of "other people", so that's the gamble: a small chance (?) of being fired versus the certainty of a 10% decrease in salary.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Mental Health and the Legislature

State mental health functions get as little money as the legislature can give them. Some state legislator will get stock ponds in his attic before any money will trickle down to the mental health workers. Oklahoma is the worst in the United States in providing care for the mentally ill. We send people out to die in the underpasses and beneath bridges in cardboard boxes rather than provide minimal care for them.

We have just closed down the only inpatient treatment unit for drug abusers, so they are no longer admitted into the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. Something seem wrong with that sentence to you? Since we have not had any increase in personnel or hirings in ten years, while the number of people with mental health issues or substance abuse issues continue to increase, the number of staff decreases. That doesn't show much on the surface; we absorb the new patients somehow, but the quality of the services we provide decreases because there just isn't much to go around. The Center in which I work started with about 700 patients; now there are 2200, and there are NO additional staff.

It's not that the legislators don't recognize the problem. They probably do; it's that they don't care. The mentally ill are not frequent voters. They are more comfortably out of mind and sight and thought. They don't make a big noise. They don't have rallies of the mentally ill. I have this image of a lot of us showing up at the State Legislature with signs reading "Give the Mentally Ill some money or we'll come to your house to live!". How about "The Voices Said Give Us Money!" or "I vote for Mental Health ... and so do I!"

Better to joke than to cry.

Churches and Taxes

One of our founding fathers said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. While this is true, we all submit to taxing ourselves. Clearly it is not in the government's interest to destroy us, because we are the only source of revenue. In order to accomplish this, a large number of rules and regulations have been established, in a language only known to CPAs, which limit how taxes are applied. The same argument can be applied to churches.

Because churches are not taxed, many of them get bigger. A lot bigger. In my home town (or "here", as I like to refer to it) one or two churches are larger than the library or the public schools. Granted, more people go to church than to libraries, more's the pity. However, the rooms in the larger churches are mostly empty during the week, used for receptions or small group meetings, or mostly not at all.

I'm moving on toward a point. It was never contemplated that churches would become huge and profit-making enterprises. The intent of excluding them from taxes was so that local communities could have a place to worship indoors and be able to collect enough from weekly gifts to keep it open and functioning. There is nothing the matter with this idea, per se. On the other hand, as citizens, we don't owe churches the opportunity to make a profit, to pay pastors hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, to buy and sell real estate, to compete in the marketplace with those of us who do have to pay taxes.

Why could we not require churches to divest themselves of all properties not having an immediate religious function? Why could we not tax them on ANY income not used in the payment of reasonable salaries and reasonable maintenance? We could exclude taxing excess moneys (what a concept!) that might be given to the poor, sick and needy, and just tax the churches for moneys not used for religious purposes? The Catholic Church is the single richest organization in the world. Isn't that amazing? In Oklahoma the protestant churches are rich and everywhere, with buildings bigger than college campuses.

I'm not interested in being punitive for their greed and anti-religious behaviors. I am interested in their excess profits being taxed like the rest of us.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Why God?

I may or may not publish this comment. I know there are people who will regard any negative comments about religion as a personal assault. I know that there is no arguing with religious convictions since they are not rational thoughts but rather irrational beliefs. Clearly you can't dispute a belief with a rational position. They occupy non-interacting worlds.

Religious believers tend to want to equalize the playing field by treating genuine rational theories by simply asserting their beliefs, as if it should be self-evident that their position has logical merit. In fact, there is simply no logical merit to any religious belief system, and there cannot be, since belief systems are not based on rational assumptions in the first place.

Secondly, theories, such as evolution or quantum theory, are not belief systems. We should not "believe" in a theory. By definition, a theory is a working set of logical hypotheses that can be tested in the real world, at least in principle. I was asked recently if I "believed in evolution", as if I were a member of an antagonistic religion. The question itself is a contradiction in terms and can't be answered as asked. That fact alone should tell you something about the nature of the thinking process that gave rise to it. When a religious person wants to debate "theories", they do not have a right to assert their religious belief as a theory.

Nothing about any religion allows it to be considered as if it were a theory. I can and will change my theories about anything when contradictory facts of sufficient validity appear. But what religious person changes their belief system when such facts occur? A theory is not a tentative belief. It is an ongoing testable set of hypotheses. What religion has such things?

Besides the absurdity of attempting to place religion on the same level as science, I find myself wondering, as I get older and less afraid, why people need religion at all? And here I am speaking of the mythos of religion, not the ethos. Many religions have very good prescriptions for behavior; some of them work better than others, of course, but as guidelines they are certainly useful to society and help hold it together. But the mythos of any religion is basically absurd. Do we need to posit the creation of the earth via supernatural means when we can readily account for it by natural ones? Do we have to believe in the supernatural before we can adhere to a moral/ethical position? Do we have to posit an afterlife that makes up for the manifold injustices in this world, or should we better try to improve the world we live in?

It seems to me that when people talk about or debate religion, they focus on the supernatural aspects of it, and ignore the only part of religion that has any possible utility: the prescriptions for behavior. Perhaps some people are comforted by their belief in the "afterlife", but not all of us need to believe in fantasies and supernatural events, and perhaps their irrational beliefs in magic interfere with their apprehension of the real world. Why should we need irrational comfort to deal with the world as it is? It is difficult for all of us. We all have pain and loss of all kinds to deal with; believing in a fantasy afterlife doesn't return the dead to us, and funerals, even with all the trappings of religion, are not happy places with smiling people.

I certainly don't believe that we are rewarded or punished for our behavior in this world. We have only to read the daily paper to be disillusioned about the fairness of the universe. So what do I need a Big Daddy In The Sky for? Even for the believers, it must be horribly obvious that he or she isn't doing much of anything.