Tag: psychology

SCOTUS To Decide If Free Speech Applies To Biology-Affirming Therapists And Their Clients

n Oct. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar. This is the latest in a seemingly unending series of cases from Colorado that my colleagues at Alliance Defending Freedom have argued. The cases stem from the state’s apparent aversion to the First Amendment.

Not content with their failed attempts to coerce speech from artists like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop or Lorie Smith of 303 Creative, and not deterred by clear rebukes from the Supreme Court in those cases, the state of Colorado has set its sights on professional counselors.

The law in question bans specific, voluntary counseling conversations, silences the viewpoint disfavored by the government, and leaves struggling youth and their parents with only one government-approved option. Colorado’s law bans counselors like Kaley Chiles from helping minors realign their thoughts and feelings with their biological sex — even when that is the young person’s goal for counseling.

Counseling that affirms so-called “gender transition” is fine by Colorado. Counseling that affirms biological reality is fined by Colorado, up to $5,000 per offense, and could include the loss of licensure.

This is not just an esoteric debate for law school faculty lounges; children’s health and well-being are at stake. Colorado’s defense of this blatant viewpoint discrimination and government censorship hinges on the contention, without a hint of irony, that the state is regulating conduct, not speech. How do Kaley Chiles and her clients engage in the “conduct” of talk therapy without it being speech? Perhaps a high-stakes game of charades? The notion would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.

If government places an authoritarian thumb on the scale, allowing only one viewpoint, invading the vulnerable space between counselor and client, and dictating one outcome, the victims are children and their families. If the Supreme Court does not protect the speech of counselors like Kaley Chiles and her clients, children in Colorado and more than 20 other states with similar censorship laws will be trapped on a one-way journey to the perils of “gender transition.”

The eventual destination is one of irreversible physical damage, potential sterilization, and a lifetime of being a patient. Our nation’s struggling youth deserve compassionate counseling directed by their goals with assistance from loving parents and professionals, not a government-sponsored pathway to chemicals and surgeries that can leave permanent mental and physical scars.

Adding rhetorical insult to injury is the fact that under Colorado’s law, counseling clients to align their feelings with their biology is deemed “conversion therapy,” while counseling a client to transition from his or her sex to the opposite sex is “gender affirming care.” The assault on common sense and the English language may pale in comparison to the harm suffered by Chiles and her clients, but the First Amendment protects speech because words matter, truth matters, and any attempt by government to silence citizens matters.

Keep reading

‘Blatant Viewpoint Discrimination’: Alito Slams Colorado For Telling Therapists They Can’t Affirm Kids’ Natural Sex

Associate Justice Samuel Alito exposed the absurdity of a Colorado law prohibiting so-called “conversion therapy” for minors during a high-profile case before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The moment came during oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case focused on a legal challenge brought by Colorado resident Kaley Chiles. A licensed therapist who provides counseling to children struggling with issues related to sexual orientation and gender dysphoria, Chiles alleges that the Centennial State’s “conversion therapy” law infringes upon her First Amendment right to free speech by inhibiting the types of discussions she has with her minor clients.

When questioning Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson, Alito posed a pair of hypothetical scenarios undermining the state’s argument that the statute does not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.” Alito’s questioning exposed the state’s policy of permitting therapists to encourage a child’s homosexual- or transgenderism-related behaviors, while at the same time prohibiting therapists from offering counseling that could help a child overcome them.

“So in the first situation, an adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist and says he’s attracted to other males, but he feels uneasy and guilty with those feelings. He wants to end or lessen them, and he asks for the therapist’s help in doing so,” Alito said. “The other situation is a similar adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist, says he’s attracted to other males, feels uneasy and guilty about those feelings, and he wants the therapist’s help so he will feel comfortable as a gay young man.”

The Bush appointee went on to argue that Colorado’s interpretation of the statute “dictates opposite results in those two situations … based on the viewpoint expressed.” “One viewpoint,” he noted, “is the viewpoint that a minor should be able to obtain talk therapy to overcome same-sex attraction, if that’s what … he or she wants,” while “the other is the viewpoint that the minor should not be able to obtain talk therapy to overcome same-sex attraction, even if that is what he or she wants.”

This “[l]ooks like blatant viewpoint discrimination,” Alito said.

In response, Stevenson claimed that both examples would “be permissible” under Colorado’s law “because it didn’t sound like in either case the goal was to actually change sexual orientation.”

“And again, that’s the touchstone because that’s where the harms come from,” Stevenson said.

Keep reading

Supreme Court to Decide If Colorado Ban on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Violates Free Speech

The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider on Oct. 7 a free speech case involving a Colorado law that bans therapists from providing so-called conversion therapy to minors experiencing same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.

A therapist challenging the law argues that it violates her First Amendment rights. On the other side of the debate, Colorado contends that it has the right to regulate mental health treatments for minors that it deems harmful and ineffective. It is among more than 20 states with such bans.

Colorado’s Prohibit Conversion Therapy for a Minor law, passed in 2019, prohibits licensed therapists from trying to “change an individual’s sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Therapists who violate the law could be stripped of their licenses and face fines of up to $5,000.

Colorado has stated that its regulation was enacted in response to “overwhelming” scientific evidence that conversion therapy for minors is unsafe and not effective in the long term.

A practitioner of such therapy told The Epoch Times that the therapist’s work focuses on mending psychological wounds and is not coercive or harmful.

Opponents of conversion therapy, including the American Medical Association, point to practices such as electric shock and negative feedback methods such as smelling salts or chemically induced nausea to create a psychological aversion to the unwanted behaviors or attractions.

However, according to licensed counselor Christopher Doyle of the Institute for Healthy Families, modern therapists avoid these methods and instead favor exploring clients’ attitudes on sexuality, trauma, self-perception, and relationships.

Keep reading

You Can Trigger ‘Time Expansion’—Meaning You Can Stretch Seconds and Warp Reality, Scientists Say

Time isn’t nearly as immutable as it first seems. Ask any astrophysicist, and they’ll likely regale you with mind-bending descriptions of gravity’s effect on space-time (i.e. the more massive the object, the slower time appears to travel around it). Some cosmologists even wonder if entire pockets of the universe—whether filled with galaxies or endless nothing—experience time at different rates.

However, the perception of the speed at which time passes can also vary within our minds. And it’s this mental realm that Steve Taylor—a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University—is exploring in a new paper and a new book called Time Expansion Experiences.

Taylor’s interest in these altered temporal moments—which he calls “time expansion experiences,” or TEEs—began when he and his wife were involved in a car crash back in 2014. “Everything went into slow motion,” Taylor describes in a post on the Leeds Beckett University website. “I looked behind, and the other cars seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, almost as if they were frozen. I felt as though I had a lot of time to observe the whole scene and to try to regain control of the car. I was surprised by how much detail I could perceive.”

Keep reading

The Pandemic Of Fake Psychiatric Diagnoses

On 12 September, UK child and adolescent psychiatrist Sami Timimi published “When mental-health diagnoses become brands, the real drivers of our psychic pain are hidden” in the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper.

In his superb article, Sami carefully explains how he arrives at his painful conclusion:

You see there is a truth that we (in the mental-health business) hope no one will notice – we literally don’t know what we are talking about when it comes to mental health.

An obvious problem is that all definitions of psychiatric disorders are subjective. They are not objective facts such as a broken bone is. This means they can be expanded in a myriad of ways to capture a kaleidoscope of distress, alienation, and dissatisfaction, and that psychiatric diagnoses are consumer brands, not medical diseases. 

In medicine, a diagnosis is aimed at determining which disease explains a person’s symptoms and signs, which enables effective matching of a treatment to address specific disease processes. 

This is not the case in psychiatry. And all psychiatric drugs have nonspecific effects that are not directed against some cause of a disease. Their effects are similar to those of alcohol, narcotics, and other brain-active substances. 

But, as Sami explains, increasingly, youngsters are getting diagnosed with ADHD, trauma, depression, anxiety, PTSD, autism, and often several such diagnoses. Their conversations may address gender identity, neurodiversity, and “having” a mental health disorder such as ADHD. 

The facts are that virtually no one is in doubt about whether they are male or female; neurodiversity is a meaningless concept used by psychiatrists to impress the public about how knowledgeable they are but it just means that all people are not the same; and one cannot “have” ADHD, which is just a name for a subjective description of rather common behaviours and therefore cannot explain anything. 

What people should realise is that it is part of being human to have difficulties that can be handled better if we don’t give people psychiatric diagnoses and drugs. Difficulties often have a cause that has nothing to do with being ill, e.g. poverty, trauma, inadequate housing, social injustice, marital problems, discrimination, exclusion, bereavement, unemployment, and financial insecurity. Life is not easy, but if you have difficulty coping with its challenges, you can easily get one or more psychiatric diagnoses. 

There is a lot of misinformation that leads people astray, in scientific articles, newspapers, TV, radio, and social media. When youngsters look up descriptions of people who say they “have” ADHD on social media, they may be convinced they “have” it too and may even self-diagnose. There is an element of social contagion in this, and the criteria for ADHD are so vague and ludicrous that when I lecture and ask people to use the adult ADHD test on themselves, it never fails that one quarter to half the audience test positive. 

Keep reading

The psychological and neurological parallels between sports fandom and religious devotion

An in-depth exploration of the psychology of sports fandom has revealed striking similarities between the neurological and psychological patterns of devoted sports fans and religious dedication.

These similarities are explored in a new book, “The Psychology of Sports Fans,” which demonstrates how, for nearly 5 billion people globally, sport fulfills fundamental psychological needs for belonging, identity, and meaning.

The comprehensive analysis shows that sports fandom stems from evolutionarily ingrained tendencies which enhance social unity and therefore survival.

Professor Aaron C. T. Smith explains, “Our minds possess an incredible ability to believe; an ability that has been crucial for survival throughout human history. Now, like a muscle that’s been trained to the extreme, we can’t resist flexing our beliefs. Investing in certain beliefs, particularly those associated sports and players, brings us significant personal and social rewards.”

From Japanese baseball to New Zealand rugby, the psychological phenomenon is not unique to any one culture or nation, Smith argues, but creates powerful emotional connections that bind communities together globally.

Keep reading

New ‘Mind-Reading’ AI Predicts What Humans Will Do Next

An artificial intelligence system can now predict your next move before you make it. We’re not just talking about whether you’ll click “buy now” on that Amazon cart, but rather how you’ll navigate complex decisions, learn new skills, or explore uncharted territory.

Researchers have developed an AI called Centaur that accurately predicts human behavior across virtually any psychological experiment. It even outperforms the specialized computer models scientists have been using for decades. Trained on data from more than 60,000 people making over 10 million decisions, Centaur captures the underlying patterns of how we think, learn, and make choices.

“The human mind is remarkably general,” the researchers write in their paper, published in Nature. “Not only do we routinely make mundane decisions, such as choosing a breakfast cereal or selecting an outfit, but we also tackle complex challenges, such as figuring out how to cure cancer or explore outer space.”

An AI that truly understands human cognition could revolutionize marketing, education, mental health treatment, and product design. But it also raises uncomfortable questions about privacy and manipulation when our digital footprints reveal more about us than ever before.

How Scientists Built a Digital Mind Reader AI

The research team started with an ambitious goal: create a single AI model that could predict human behavior in any psychological experiment. Their approach was surprisingly straightforward but required massive scale.

Scientists assembled a dataset called Psych-101 containing 160 experiments covering memory tests, learning games, risk-taking scenarios, and moral dilemmas. Each experiment was converted into plain English descriptions that an AI could understand.

Rather than building from scratch, researchers took Meta’s Llama 3.1 language model (the same type powering ChatGPT) and gave it specialized training on human behavior. They used a technique that allows them to modify only a tiny fraction of the AI’s programming while keeping most of it unchanged. The entire training process took only five days on a high-end computer processor.

Keep reading

Study: ‘More Diversity of Thought on the Political Right Than on the Political Left’ – And It’s Not Even Close

A 2023 study in the British Journal of Social Psychology has recently gone viral, confirming objectively what critical thinkers in the previous decade had already deduced: that the political right “diverges widely” in thought, whereas the political left “coalesces around a very narrow set of opinion.”

On Monday, June 23, Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell, whose record of predictive accuracy as a pollster stands alone among all pundits in the previous American decade, posted a highlight from the viral British Journal of Social Psychology study.

The most widely circulated response to Mitchell’s post linked the full fifteen page study from the British Journal of Social Psychology, which published five different charts, or “heatmaps,” all confirming, based on network modeling data, the same hypothesis that the researchers tendered: that, overwhelmingly, leftists tend to engage in “groupthink,” while members of the political right tend to think independently.

The psychological study posited that personal attitudes shape political identities. The researchers formed clusters of left-wing participants and right-wing participants within the study. Then, the researchers surveyed the extreme degree to which the participants held their views on key political issues.

Keep reading

Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too

Though porn addiction is not diagnosable, and never has been, there is a large self-help industry surrounding the concept. Mostly online (though in religious areas, such as Utah, there are numerous in-person treatment sites), this industry promotes the idea that modern access to the Internet, and the porn that thrives there, has led to an epidemic of dysregulated, out-of-control porn use, and significant life problems as a result.

Over recent years, numerous studies have begun to suggest that there is more to the story than just porn. Instead, we’ve had growing hints that the conflicts and struggles over porn use have more to do with morality and religion, rather than pornography itself. I’ve covered this surge of research in numerous posts and articles.

Now, researchers have put a nail in the coffin of porn addiction. Josh Grubbs, Samuel Perry and Joshua Wilt are some of the leading researchers on America’s struggles with porn, having published numerous studies examining the impact of porn use, belief in porn addiction, and the effect of porn on marriages. And Rory Reid is a UCLA researcher who was a leading proponent gathering information about the concept of hypersexual disorder for the DSM-5. These four researchers, all of whom have history of neutrality, if not outright support of the concepts of porn addiction, have conducted a meta-analysis of research on pornography and concluded that porn use does not predict problems with porn, but that religiosity does.

The researchers lay out their argument and theory extremely thoroughly, suggesting that Pornography Problems due to Moral Incongruence (PPMI) appear to be the driving force in many of the people who report dysregulated, uncontrollable, or problematic pornography use. Even though many people who grew up in religious, sexually conservative households have strong negative feelings about pornography, many of those same people continue to use pornography. And then they feel guilty and ashamed of their behavior, and angry at themselves and their desire to watch more.

Keep reading

NYC teen raped more than 30 times by female shrink known as ‘Big Foot’ at juvie jail: lawsuit

A Staten Island teen was allegedly raped dozens of times by his female counselor — known as “Big Foot” — at an upstate juvenile detention facility, while staffers joked about it, he claimed in a lawsuit.

The victim, now 21, was just 17 in 2021 when he was sent to Brookwood Youth Facility, about 45 minutes south of Albany, and first encountered associate psychologist Maya Hayes, who held frequent counseling sessions with him in her private office, according to the litigation.

The sexual abuse began about three months after the accuser, whose name is being withheld by The Post, arrived, the suit claims. It didn’t end until he had been raped more than 30 times, he claimed.

Hayes, 47, allegedly “groomed and manipulated [the victim] into trusting that what she was doing had some basis in legitimate care and treatment. It did not,” he said in court papers.

Hayes “used and exploited her position of trust and authority . . . to her disgusting advantage and her own depraved benefit . . . to sexually abuse and exploit as many children as possible under the guise of performing routine and necessary counseling sessions,” the teen alleged.

Keep reading