Psychology Today

Today's mental health professionals are over-emphasizing biological determinants of behavior and minimizing the importance of the environment, learning, and our ability to think.

Different schools of psychotherapy often use multiple names for the same phenomenon — and act like they're discussing completely different things. Here's a prime example.

People involved in repetitive dysfunctional family interactions may use the intrinsic ambiguity of language to mislead interested third parties. One way is make global judgments.

Whether an individual seems to be overly cautious or overly optimistic regarding their expectations of others is determined by experience and learning, not by brain abnormalities.

Purely genetic explanations for a variety of psychiatric and behavioral disorders are currently in vogue in many mental health circles. It is not the first time.

The children of immigrants to the United States from traditional societies often get double messages about which cultural norms they should follow, creating serious conflicts.

The concept of enabling in alcoholism is just one example of a much wider phenomenon seen in couples, and it is two-way street. It both connects a couple and drives them apart.

How does someone react if his or her parents, who had been guilty of abusive, neglectful, or invalidating treatment of them as children, dote on their grandchildren?

When parents neglect a large brood of children and leave child care duties to the oldest among them, dysfunctional patterns of relationships between the siblings as adults emerge.

A teen passes out drunk at a frat party and is raped. A woman whose husband beats her goes back to him repeatedly, despite having the ability to leave. Lately, anyone who even brings up the subject of risky behavior by people like this are accused of "excusing" the victimizer and "blaming" the victim. Nonsense. Though connected, these are two separate issues, not one.

How many times have readers read stories about how violent video games and movies are causing more youth violence? Youth violence has in fact fallen as media has become more violent. Many studies only measure short-term aggressive thoughts after watching these things, not actions. In fact, most kids who watch a lot of violent media are couch potatoes, not gang bangers.

If we assume as I do that they are not mad, bad, or stupid, how do we account for people with personality disorders who continue with the same disastrous behavior patterns repeatedly with the exact same disastrous results? Or who go from one extreme to the other, and still end up at the same place? Could it be that the end result is actually their goal? And why?

Child sexual abuse is a big risk factor for a wide variety of psychiatric disorders. But why do some victims turn out one way, others a different way, and still others turn out without any disorders at all? So called empirical studies of child abuse are limited to such variables as who the perpetrators were, what did they do, and how often. There's a lot more to the story.

People who exhibit symptoms of borderline personality disorder, despite being intelligent and showing no signs of psychosis, persist tenaciously in their troublesome, self-destructive behaviors. They will not stop no matter what other people try to do to get them to. They will not tell you about the horrifying reactions they get from family members when they act better.