David Smail's Blog

Thanks to Neil Kynaston for drawing attention in his comment below to what he quite rightly (in my view) calls the ‘pseudo-scientific bollocks’ of  ‘attention deficit disorder’. The report in The Scotsman he cites makes depressing reading indeed, but is a very familiar story of how the interests of psychiatry and the drug companies flow together to create and extend diagnostic categories that are, to quote Richard Bentall, ‘about as scientifically meaningful as star signs’.  Bentall’s new book, by the way, is a useful source of ammunition against the afore-mentioned interests, though I think he’s a bit too kind to psychologists.  For anyone interested I wrote a review of the book in Times Higher Education.

Another good example of bollocks – this time managerial bollocks – also came to my attention this week.  This is the story of the extent to which academia (in this instance Kings College London) has become penetrated by the relentless Philistinism of ‘the market’.  God help us all.

Two interesting comments on my first post of ten days ago and so far no unwelcome ‘troll’ activity: that’s pretty encouraging.

The triumphant domination of Business ideology which Neil Kynaston points to as having so thoroughly infected education (along with everything else) still amazes and bewilders me even though it has been in place for decades now.  It’s easy to forget that no one under the age of forty has really heard anything much other than the hyperbolic, fatuous, not to say deceptive,  language of advertising applied to every aspect of life and experience.  Just as one example, younger people seem so often to accept without difficulty that modesty (if it is any longer a comprehensible concept) is a weakness, and that talking about oneself is indistinguishable from selling oneself.  But then if you’ve never heard anything else, if you’ve never really experienced anywhere but the Dragons’ Den, if you’ve been continuously subjected to competitive struggle with others – whether in sats at school or exhibitions of ‘reality’ TV strife – perhaps it’s not so surprising that old ideas of virtue seem simply irrelevant.  The part played by ideological power in all this – in particular of course the media – is enormous.  Make-believe is the principal tool of 21st century capitalism and it’s extraordinarily hard to avoid or resist.  But it is also terribly dangerous as it drags us further and further from an understanding of material reality.  I hope that, as Richard Abendorff suggests, a ’scientific’ account of how make-believe (along with much else)  is generated within the politico-economic structures of society will lead us to avoid some of its worst consequences, but there is something about the readiness of people to opt for wishfulness over experience and magic over science (see how the bankers get away with it and how the populace prepares to vote the Tories in again) that causes me, for one, profound misgiving.

I have made a few attempts at getting some ‘interactivity’ on the site, so far with less success than I’d hoped for.  I started with ‘reader responses’ to my ‘internet book’  Power, Responsibility and Freedom.  There were some interesting responses, but they soon fizzled out, and in any case I was not very adept at handling the technical challenges of comments on responses to responses, etc.  My ‘Guest Essays’ spot was quite successful initially, but I have had no contributions for years now, so I have decided to move the link to it off the homepage onto the ‘Psychology and Psychiatry’ page.  The Forum that I have recently removed from the site  had some good contributions from faithful contributors, but they were buried in piles of junk that got increasingly tiresome to handle.  So here goes with a blog. As far as I can tell the blog format should be easier to handle, though it may well foreground contributions from me in a way I have so far avoided.  Never mind, at my age the idea of pontificating bad-temperedly about the state of the world is quite attractive, even if I have to pretend to myself that someone is actually reading what I have to say.  My posts will, I’m sure, be pretty sporadic, and I am hoping that other people will join in, not only with comments, but with contributions of their own. In the light of past experience I shall be quite controlling about what gets posted and what doesn’t.  For more on this please click on Blog guidelines on the right.  I certainly don’t want to put anyone off joining in, and I particularly welcome people who really have something to say but feel very diffident about saying it. Well, let’s see what happens!