Crap Psychologist May Lose Job Over Racist Article

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa stooped to new levels of awfulness in his post claiming “black women are significantly less physically attractive than women of other races.” His racist remarks could cost him his job at the London School of Economics.

According to the Guardian, many LSE students lodged complaints after Kanazawa’s offensive post made the rounds. Said Sherelle Davids of the LSE students’ union, “Kanazawa deliberately manipulates findings that justify racist ideology. As a black woman I feel his conclusions are a direct attack on black women everywhere who are not included in social ideas of beauty.”

The Death of Mental Illness

In writing this post, I may be crashing the American Psychological Association’s annual blog party. Naturally, I’m in favor of joining others to increase awareness and reduce stigma around psychiatric problems. But despite the spirit of solidarity, I’m perhaps an outsider, because I no longer believe ‘mental illness’ serves as a helpful concept.

…instead of decisively helpful treatments, the mental health system strung me along with decades of therapy and thousands of little pills, none of which improved my mood or outlook very much. It seems to me that if psychiatric diagnoses were truly valuable, they would guide clinicians to life-changing therapeutic choices. But how often do people diagnosed with ‘major mental illness’ leave the Psychiatry Department with an effective cure?

Plea to free children from ‘chemical cages’

A photograph of an unnamed boy in a cage features in Sean O’Carroll’s exhibition about Ritalin.

A BOY crouches naked in a steel animal cage, with the downcast eyes of a prisoner.

This confronting image, meant to represent a ”chemical cage” of drugs to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is part of an exhibition called Ritalin by photographer Sean O’Carroll.

O’Carroll, a former teacher, said the exhibition expressed his concern about the widespread administering of what he called addictive mind-altering drugs to young boys, which was ”a catastrophic failure on the part of our society to deal with the challenge of raising active, energetic and ‘difficult’ boys”.

WSJ: Feds want $1B settlement in J&J Risperdal probe

Johnson & Johnson could be on the hook for about $1 billion to settle the government probe into its Risperdal marketing. Prosecutors are looking for a settlement about that size, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources. That would be the third-largest marketing settlement between a Big Pharma company and the U.S. government; only Pfizer and Eli Lilly have made larger deals with the feds.