Which brings me to my problem. My fiancé and I have been together for over six years and we just got engaged. I love him with every ounce of my being and our relationship is sincere and stable. I’m lucky to be with him, which is why I get so mad at myself when my anxiety creeps in and starts fights between us. For example, my fiancé and I have different privacy boundaries, which is to say that I have none and he has some. He likes some privacy when surfing the Web, checking email and sometimes talking/texting on the phone. To make things clear: He’s not being sneaky. If I ask him what’s up, who is he talking to, he tells me without hesitation, and I believe him. And I try not to ask!

It’s just that when I’m having a particularly anxious day (for reasons that I’m not always aware of, usually exhaustion), I key onto things like, “Oh, he just snapped the computer shut when I walked by” and cannot let it go. An “argument” ensues, in which I ask him why he just did that, he says it’s for no reason, that’s just how he is and he didn’t want to make me feel uncomfortable, and can’t I just trust that he’s telling me the truth? He knows his desire for privacy can sometimes make me uncomfortable, and he has made fair compromises to help put me at ease. He’s even asked if I want to look at his email, but I said no because I hate that idea. I am not the police, nor am I his mother. I trust him, so it’s not that, but rather, in the specific moment, I’m convinced that some colossal problem is here to rip our home apart, and I cry and cry, and then, after much talking, realize that there is no colossal thing here to rip our home apart, I’m just spiraling and he’s just being himself and everything is really OK.

I’ve seen a counselor about this. She suggested that when I start to panic I try shelving the anxiety for a moment and see the emotion underneath. I told her the emotion underneath is anxiety and asked her what that might mean. She suggested, given my childhood (it’s always the childhood … sigh), that I might be reacting to a fear of being left alone. Which makes sense to me.

My mother, who is also my friend, had her hands full with my trouble-prone younger brother from Day One of his birth, and there are many times when I was (unintentionally) ignored because my parents only had so much energy and that energy was best spent on keeping the crazy child from accidentally killing himself. In order to get some attention, I developed a great knack for overachieving. This has served me well in almost every regard. I’m working on the ways in which it hasn’t served me well, namely that I often overachieve to earn love I’d really like to (and can) have without working so hard.

I know I don’t have to work so hard. I know my life is good! I have wonderful, appropriately conditional love from my friends, amazing unconditional love from my mother and my father, and a healthy combination of both from my fiancé. It just makes me so anxious to think my anxiety could mess that last one up.

Thanks for any insights or advice you might have.

Anxiety Girl

Dear Anxiety Girl,

It sounds like your therapist was on to something.

If you are still seeing her, ask her to take you through this anxiety business again. Tell her you wish to spend some more time exploring what’s behind your anxiety. You were probably on the right track. It might take more than one try. It may take some camping out around the idea but eventually something will emerge.

I mean, I can relate to what you said to her — What’s underneath my anxiety? More anxiety!

Of course! That’s what it feels like. But if you keep looking, and enlist her help in focusing you on what precedes the anxiety, I predict that something will emerge; something will become clear to you; you will sense a connection and that will be a starting point to eliminating much of your anxiety.

The key point is that anxiety is not a feeling but something we do to ward off feelings. That’s how my therapist put it to me, anyway, if I understood him correctly: Anxiety is a strategy we use to avoid feeling things.

That’s why seeing what’s behind it can make it go away. Once you see what’s behind it, you no longer need it. You go, Oh, it’s just that! And let me reassure you, whatever feelings or memories there may be behind your anxiety, they can’t hurt you today. They’re just feelings and memories from the past that got misplaced in the present.

So that’s my general take on anxiety. I’m not saying you can fix it overnight. It’s a matter of retraining yourself, and learning, and like any learning it can take time. But you can definitely change.

As to your fiancé and his need for privacy, it could be that he just wants his privacy. It’s also possible that from time to time he is looking at things on his computer that he would be ashamed of, or that he would not want you to see. Also, if he has noticed your tendency to become anxious, he may be trying not to alarm you. Of course, as with our anxiety responses, this doesn’t ultimately really help. It just makes things more confusing.

Sometimes, if you are reading or looking at the computer, you are just in your world and you do not want to share. I can sympathize with your boyfriend. On the other hand, he may be looking at porn and be trying to hide it. Ask him. It would be good to know. Just raise the issue and see what he says. It might clear the air and save some guessing and confusion.

But your anxiety is the main thing. I think if you continue to work with your therapist you will discover what is happening in that moment before you become anxious. It may surprise you. In fact, if you’re doing it right, it will definitely surprise you.

In the East Indian Islands, the inhabitants thought a malign spirit could be channeled into leaves which were held against the patient, then thrown away. In China, kites were used to spirit sickness away; in the Aleutian Islands it was weeds. In Indonesia, villagers built little boats to carry away their demons. In India they buried their sins in a jar, which any unwary passer-by could stumble upon, like an unwitting Pandora (there was little concern with what subsequently happened to the expelled evil). In the Himalayas dogs were stoned to death to expiate sin; Iroquois Indians painted and decorated their oldest friends; in Scotland the dogs merely got chased. In India and Egypt cows were the animal of choice. And so on. All of this is a logical step towards transferring evil to another human.

Human scapegoats came to be used more frequently in time. The animals that were sacrificed as scapegoats were usually of high value, but their human counterparts tended to be society’s marginal figures – criminals or the disabled. Sometimes they could be priests, whose holy status protected them from this contact with evil. Or they could be actors who were paid for their duties and the risks they took on. These scapegoats were used either as part of a regular ceremony or in the aftermath of disaster. Some cultures had ceremonies in which the scapegoat was dressed in fine robes and led through the crowds as they cast their sins upon him. He would then be driven out of the village and stoned, or thrown into a river or off a cliff, thus carrying away all the people’s ills.

This method of removing sin has evolved over the centuries. What was once an ancient expiatory ritual, aimed at deflecting the wrath of the gods and cleansing a society, has mutated into a method by which rulers can channel the anger of their subjects away from themselves and onto some poor unfortunate. Over time the term “scapegoat” has come to refer to any group or individual on whom falls the outpouring of anger and blame following disaster. There are essentially two types of modern or post-ritual scapegoats: those created unconsciously, as an expression of our rage and incomprehension, in whose guilt everyone believes; and those created as a conscious act, by those seeking to deflect blame away from themselves. The unconscious ones came first, and existed the moment disaster struck. But in time it became a conscious process – as conscious as the ancient rituals, but lacking the sense of theatre and the acknowledgement that the victim was just that, a victim.

Scapegoating is suddenly no longer a ritual act, but a behavioural pattern; no longer a way of safeguarding a community, but instead one that protects one or two people. Every time there is a catastrophic event the majority finds a minority to blame. Sometimes it happens almost organically, at others the mob is steered towards its victim by the king.

In the twenty-first century, we are faced with more choice than ever before – in what we believe, in what we eat, in everything we do. Similarly we have a greater range of things to blame when things go wrong. Whereas our ancestors had to content themselves with the perennial scapegoats – namely women, Jews and certain animals – we are able to apportion blame in ever more imaginative ways for the aspects of our lives and ourselves that disappoint us. The one thing we will not do under any circumstances is accept ourselves as we are. We prefer to find an explanation for why things are not perfect, and these rarely stand up to close scrutiny.

For the wider malaise that affects us all, there are dozens and dozens of conspiracy theories, all rooted in the idea that some shadowy force is to blame – whether it be the Freemasons, the Illuminati or giant lizards; Communists, Jews or Catholics. For our individual problems, we have endless possible explanations; whole industries have sprung up to provide more authoritative ones. Blame has gradually become a product, to be bought and sold like any other. And those who trade in it have tended to become extraordinarily successful.

The relationship between the blamer and the blamed is a complex one. Really, the opposite of the prince is not the pauper, it is the scapegoat. As we will see later, the ruler creates the scapegoat so he doesn’t share his fate. We like to have our hate figures, just as we like to have leaders (though we tend to loathe them both equally). They are inextricably linked, reverse sides of a coin, one the shadow of the other – much in the way God and the Devil are in Christianity. The basic rule is as follows: the more a leader promises, the more he or she will subsequently have to apportion blame. Once we thought our kings were divine and therefore infallible, that disaster had to be the fault of another. These days we elect our leaders on the back of unrealistic promises which we choose to believe. They fail in these and we replace our leaders rather than overhaul the system, which resists change. And so the cycle of promise and blame begins all over again.

But in today’s political culture of spin, modern leaders are less ready than ever to admit fallibility. The phrase ‘mistakes were made …’ has entered the political lexicon, as the most passive and detached way of acknowledging error, rather than responsibility. It has been a particular favourite of twentieth-century American politicians, from Nixon and Kissinger to Reagan and Clinton. These three words were used repeatedly by Republicans in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

This brings us to the most dangerous use of scapegoats – the blaming of certain individuals to give governments the freedom to act in certain ways. This is an age-old strategy, and, most recently, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were all similarly demonized. The latter was used to prove a non-existent link between the first two, giving the American public the sense of a greater threat against them than in fact existed, and justifying the use of military force in Iraq. As one can see, the urge to blame is sometimes incited in us, and this form of demonization has been employed for centuries.

In 2007, the world entered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It had been caused by the bursting of the American housing bubble, leading to the spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The fallout was global, and saw plenty of scapegoats targeted – from rich bankers and their bonuses, to short-selling hedge fund managers thought to have profited from the downturn, and chief executives whose self-interested, rash decisions led to this calamity. How much easier it is to attribute responsibility to them, rather than face the truth of our own involvement. The notion of collective responsibility is one that we prefer not to engage with. Only those who were financially very prudent can exempt themselves from blame. The rest of us were happy to run up more debt than could be sustained for long by a banking system that depends, like so much of institutional life and commerce, on public confidence. This debt was parceled up and reshaped in a way that, for a while, concealed its origins. But ultimately it choked the system. And we shrieked at the likes of Fred Goodwin, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, blaming him for what we had lost. He was criticized for excessive spending and labelled ‘the world’s worst banker’ after RBS posted an annual loss of £24.1bn, the largest in UK corporate history. As details of his pension emerged, his house was vandalized, as the public sought redress.

There are many theories as to why we have this urge to blame, and all we can be certain about it is that it is an intrinsic part of our being. We used to scapegoat out of fear of divine retribution; now for the most part we do it to live with ourselves. As individuals, we create a narrative of our lives that makes sense to us, and that fits in with our concept of ourselves. Often we shape our memories accordingly. Certainly we keep some and subconsciously discard those that do not fit, demonstrating what psychologists call confirmation bias. We can find ourselves using our brains more to construct explanations and excuses once we’ve done what our emotions dictated, so we can pretend to ourselves that we are rational beings. But we aren’t wholly rational beings, as a succession of thinkers and experiments have showed.

We possess a strong self-serving bias that makes us feel special. Through this we can account for our failures and protect our sense of worth. We overrate our abilities in all sorts of ways, from intelligence to honesty. Research has shown that we all think ourselves better drivers than the norm. Likewise, we are inclined to think that we are more sensitive, loyal and in possession of a better sense of humour than others. This is particularly prevalent among men, who see themselves as 5 IQ points cleverer than they are, according to psychologist Adrian Furnham.

Australians suffer from the same misplaced confidence – 86 per cent of them rate themselves as above average in their performance at work. But we cannot all be excellent drivers, or else there would be no accidents. We can’t all be above average like in Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon community; the laws of maths and nature ensure that some of us are below average. But we are inclined to believe that we are all special, that we’re somehow different and ‘it won’t happen to us’, leading us to take risks. With this capacity for self-delusion it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that we seek to blame others. The idea of Attribution Theory states that we have an urgent need to find reasons for an event, and this leads us to leap to conclusions and hold others responsible. A bad situation couldn’t possibly be our fault, after all. When we fail at things it is because of others; those who are below average bring us down. Whereas when we succeed it is due to our innate abilities (and when others succeed, we often put it down to luck).

We develop this ability to blame very early on in life. Just as children naturally express their unhappiness through tears and sobbing – designed to tell adults swiftly that something is wrong – so they, faced with the possibility of adult sanction for their actions, are quick to pass responsibility onto someone else, and quickly learn to use language to achieve this. ‘He started it’ is a familiar refrain in domestic life. As we move towards adulthood we should shed this defence mechanism, but really we only start to use it more.

On an everyday level we blame others to reduce cognitive dissonance – this is the state of tension that arises when we hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously (according to Plato, when desire conflicts with reason there is a disease of the soul, which is not so different from the concept of cognitive dissonance). Most of us have an innate sense of ourselves as decent people, and every bit of evidence to the contrary causes us pain and discomfort. We mitigate these feelings in a variety of ways. If we admit to having behaved badly, we might excuse this behaviour by saying ‘it was the drink’. We might say ‘I wasn’t myself’. Or we could straightforwardly blame another. In a failing relationship, couples often find themselves blaming each other for their unhappiness. With infidelity, the wronged person often finds her/himself blaming the other woman/man for their partner’s betrayal, allowing them to preserve their relationship – on the surface at least.

We like to personify our pain, to find one person to embody it. And so we can convince ourselves that everything would be much better if they were in our lives (as with unrequited love) or out of our lives (as with a scapegoat). But in reality it’s a lot more complex than that. Ultimately, we make scapegoats out of those we have come to believe are incapable of suffering – we dehumanize them, making them easier to hate. We create the idea that these other people are inferior to us. That develops into the idea that they therefore deserve their treatment. We deny them the same capacities for thought, emotion and values as us, and treat them accordingly. We can do this consciously or unconsciously, but the results are the same.

To see how innate this instinct is to us we can refer to Jungian psychology. Jung may not be widely followed these days but his ideas are interesting and relevant to the concept of the scapegoat. He believed that we all share the archetype of the shadow – the innate psychic structure that personifies everything we will not acknowledge about ourselves. It is the archetype of the enemy and is with us from birth; as infants we will greet our mothers with joy, while we recoil from strangers with fear and caution. We deny the existence of the shadow, and instead project its characteristics onto others, allowing us to preserve our own sense of goodness. Jung believed that there are several layers to the shadow, the top ones being unique to the individual, qualities that he or she repressed. But the bottom layer is a collective one. And it is that that has been successfully exploited in instances of mass scapegoating. By recognizing our own shadow, we make it less likely that we will project it onto others.

Reprinted with permission from Duckworth Overlook © Charlie Campbell, “Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People.”

It’s not always like this. A month or so I thought of some life options that could fill me with energy and hope. Just THINKING about them helped. But now I’m having trouble following through. I’m scared that I’m going to sabotage myself again like I’ve been doing all my life — turning away from things I really want because I’m afraid I won’t get them or, worse, just unwilling to do anything serious to make them happen.

I don’t believe this can all be chemical. There’s something bigger at work here. I want to have a life. I want to have a fabulous life full of friends and creativity and work that I love. At times in my life, I’ve even had that, and I want it back so badly.

Why can’t I do something more toward achieving that besides writing you a letter? Why can’t I wake up in the morning and fill out a hundred job applications and network and do paperwork and all that horrible, soul-destroying stuff that actually makes things happen?

I’m blinking back tears as I write this letter. I doubt this is publishable, but any response from you would be greatly appreciated. You described your writing once as lyrical, and it is. It’s also strangely reassuring. I could use just a little reassurance right now.

Thanks. No seriously, thanks

Saboteur

Dear Saboteur,

I’m writing back to you primarily because of one thing I found interesting and hopeful in your letter.

You see, I am interested, as an amateur, in the science of depression. As someone who just recently fell into a rather bleak and desperate spell of depression, and sought medical help for it, I have more than a personal interest in it.

I get excited whenever I see a glimmer of hope.

So when you say, “I thought of some life options that could fill me with energy and hope. Just THINKING about them helped,” I get excited. I also get excited when you describe the kind of life you want, and when you say that you have had this kind of life in the past.

So I’m going to suggest — and this may be way unscientific but I’m not claiming to be a scientist — that you repeat the action that made you feel better. In this case, it’s thinking about those life options. That made you feel better. Do more of that.

Plunge into that. Make that your lifeline for now. Do whatever it takes to magnify and enhance those thoughts. Draw them. Make cartoons of them. Write dialogue. Create characters who act out these life options. Make a collage. Find photos and artwork and articles that relate to these life options and tape them onto a big piece of paper. Visualize these life options. Just spend time thinking about them. Write about it. Talk about it. Make it real to yourself. Live there. Spend some time living in this new life. At least in your mind. It will cheer you up. You’ll enjoy it. There’s no law against it. It will help.

It might not cure your depression right away, but it will help. It will be a refuge.

Next: Definitely look into cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy is built on the very connection you discovered between thought and mood when you found that thinking certain things made you feel better.

You also discovered the converse of that — you saw how your negative thoughts can affect you.

It looks like what you did was move prematurely from the wonderful, life-affirming effect of thinking these thoughts to the deadening, discouraging effect of implementation failure. You devalued these thoughts by moving immediately to the implementation phase, where you could predictably fail.

So spend more time developing your vision of where you want to be. You don’t have to implement right away. Strengthen your vision. If it seems silly, think of it as preparation. Think of it as research and refinement. Acquire information. Become an expert. But don’t set yourself up for failure by going to the implementation phase too fast. Acquire tools and equipment. Fortify yourself. Do the actions that make you feel strong.

You also ask, “Why can’t I wake up in the morning and fill out a hundred job applications and network and do paperwork and all that horrible, soul-destroying stuff that actually makes things happen?” There is another body of psychological knowledge regarding motivation. I read a book about it once.  That book was for writers. It was called, “Motivate Your Writing!: Using Motivational Psychology to Energize Your Writing Life,” by Stephen P. Kelner Jr.

Though it was for writers, the nugget of truth I took from it was that where we find the motivation to do things is in our emotional makeup, not necessarily in our aspirations. I took the little test that was in the book and actually got some surprises, so I’d recommend that book even to somebody who isn’t trying to write, but just trying to get motivated to do something.

Also, and perhaps more important, because what you really need to do is apply what you’ve noticed about the connection between your thoughts and your mood, get that book, “Feeling Good,” by Dr. David Burns. And get yourself some cognitive therapy. If the person who prescribed you the medication will help you find a cognitive therapist, or if that person practices cognitive therapy, that would be great.

You obviously have found the key. The key is to change your thinking so instead of driving you into depression your thinking is driving you into happiness, joy, optimism and energy.

I know it sounds maybe too stupid and simple to be true. But that’s the obvious truth of it. It is pretty simple. Scientists have discovered that the repetition of certain negative thoughts leads to depression, and by altering that practice, a person can emerge from depression.

One might wonder how thinking can change mood. My layman’s assumption would be that since mood can be changed electrochemically, and because thought is an electrochemical action, that it’s not so surprising that thinking could alter mood.

On the other hand — and here’s where I part with people who say that thinking can make money appear in your pocket! — the connection between visualizing something and making it actually materialize seems more remote. What is the medium of connection between my thought and a pile of money? Maybe there is some unseen connection, but I find it a lot easier to understand how thinking could affect our mood than how thinking could affect our bank account.

And, as I say, what was so interesting and cool was that you discovered it, experimentally, empirically, on your own. You just didn’t have a program to back it up. Cognitive therapy is that program.

So get with it. You don’t have to go down that road. You don’t have to be depressed. You can be cured.

A complete cure might not be immediate. You might have lapses. But give it a shot. You don’t have to be depressed.

Since 1952, a tome called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as the DSM, has been reducing to a few digits the psychological malady said to afflict a patient. This bible of mental health treatment, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), provides a list and description of every mental health condition known to—or invented by—psychiatry, from histrionic personality disorder (301.50) to transvestic fetishism (302.3).

Over the decades, the manual, adapted from a guide for mental diseases developed by Army and Navy psychiatrists, has ballooned. The number of listed disorders tripled to nearly 300. A few have been discredited and dumped along the way. Most famous were battles over the inclusion of homosexuality. Successive iterations of the manual listed homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” then modified that to describe a more limited “sexual orientation disturbance” among people who were “in conflict with” their attraction to people of the same sex. That was later replaced by a disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality,” applied to those whose homosexual arousal was a source of distress. That item was dropped in the DSM-III-R, published in 1987.

The great book’s coming edition, the DSM-5, is slated for publication in May 2013. As the task force producing it has posted drafts on its website, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction has exploded into a full-scale revolt by members of U.S. and British psychological and counseling organizations. The chief complaint is that the newest version will lower the criteria needed to diagnose some conditions, creating “subthreshold” disorders, and generally making it easier for healthcare professionals to label a person with a psychiatric disorder and medicate him or her.

The latest rebellion against the DSM-5 began with a salvo from across the Atlantic. In June, a special committee of the British Psychological Society complained in a letter to the APA that “clients and the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences.” The committee criticized the proposed creation of an “attenuated psychosis syndrome”—a sort of poor-man’s psychosis with less severe symptoms—“as an opportunity to stigmatize eccentric people.” They also objected to a proposed reduction in the number of symptoms needed to diagnose adolescents with attention deficit disorder (ADD) because it might increase diagnoses and the use of meds.

Then David Elkins, professor emeritus at Pepperdine University and president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association, formed a committee to discuss similar objections and draft a petition enumerating them. In October, he posted the petition online. “I figured we’d get a couple hundred signatures,’’ Elkins said.

The response stunned him and his colleagues. The petition attracted more than 6,000 signatures in three weeks; as of mid-December it had topped 9,300 signatories and garnered the endorsement of 35 organizations. On Nov. 8, American Counseling Association president Don Locke jumped in with a letter to the APA objecting to the “incomplete or insufficient empirical evidence” underlying the proposed revisions and expressing “uncertainty about the quality and credibility” of the DSM-5.

“This has become a grassroots movement among mental health professionals, who are saying we already have a national problem with overmedication of children and the elderly, and we don’t want to exacerbate that,” says Elkins.

For many critics, Exhibit A is childhood ADD. As the disorder describing fidgety, easily distracted kids morphed from “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood” to the current “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” the number of children given the diagnosis exploded, fueling, by one account, a 700 percent increase in the use of Ritalin and other stimulants in the 1990s. Diagnosis requires checking six of nine boxes from a list of symptoms that include “often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly” and “often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat.” Sound familiar, parents?

Two other newly proposed disorders singled out as problematic in the petition are “mild neurocognitive disorder” in the elderly and “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” in children and adolescents. Both lack a solid basis in research and may fuel the use of powerful antipsychotic medications, which cause weight gain, diabetes and a host of other metabolic problems, the petition says.

“We are gravely concerned that if this is published as is in 2013, it will create false epidemics where hundreds of thousands of children and the elderly who really are normal will be diagnosed with a mental disorder and given powerful psychiatric medications that have dangerous side effects,” Elkins says. “That is not tolerable.”

David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who chairs the task force overseeing the manual’s preparation, says he expects the final number of disorders included in the DSM-5 to be about the same as in the current book. He says he welcomes the criticism and that nothing is final. The task force has been testing proposed new diagnoses in 2,300 patients at seven adult treatment centers and four adolescent centers that are acting as field-test sites, he says.

“There’s a myth that all the decisions have been made, when in fact, all the decisions haven’t been made,” he says. “Just because [things have] been proposed doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll end up in the DSM-5. If they don’t achieve a level of reliability, clinician acceptability, and utility, it’s unlikely they’ll go forward.”

The most surprising critic of the DSM is a one-time pillar of the psychiatric establishment. Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University, chaired the task force that created the DSM-4. Now he’s railing against both the process and proposed content of the new DSM in blogs on the website for Psychology Today that blast the new revision as “untested” and “unscientific.”

Psychiatric diagnoses are loose enough already, Frances  told me, and that laxity has led to “epidemics of over-diagnosis in child psychiatry” causing huge numbers of children to be unnecessarily labeled with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder and treated with medications.

“DSM has to be a safe, reliable and credible guide to current clinical practice,” he says. “It can’t be an untested program for future research.’’

The user revolt against the DSM-5 has emerged as a major challenge to the document, Frances says, and its future is looking unclear. He and Elkins are proposing that an independent committee of experts review the proposed draft and make recommendations.

The fight over the DSM-5 pits some of the greatest minds and biggest egos in the world of psychiatry, but it’s more than a battle among 301.81s (narcissistic personality disorder). For people seeking help for life’s problems who don’t want to be labeled mentally ill or have their treatment limited to medication, and for clinicians who want to help people without reducing them to a category, the stakes are high.

Salon spoke with Sommers over the phone about Occupy Wall Street, online dating and Penn State’s Joe Paterno riot.

In the book you argue that this perception that, as you describe it, “What you see is what you get” is flawed and dangerous. Why are judgments based on first impressions misguided?

It’s our default assumption. It’s our fallback, automatic assumption about other people. It serves us well in a lot of respects. It makes the world a more predictable place. It allows us to make predictions about the world. But a variety of different research over the past few decades shows that this automatic judgment is a cognitive cutting of corners. It doesn’t give an accurate perspective on how human nature works. One of the really good examples is the quickness with which we turn to the “bad apple” explanation. When we read about bad behavior, whether it’s people committing crimes, rioting, etc., we immediately assume that that person is a bad apple, that we would never do something like that. It makes us feel better about ourselves at the end of the day, but it keeps us from solving some of the root issues at the heart of human nature.

In the book you discuss crowd mentality and conformity in detail. Reading these chapters, I couldn’t help thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Wall Street is all about power in numbers, but it seems that this may also be its downfall, since there’s no clear leadership.

It’s a good question. It can be related to the Tea Party rallies as well. I think conformity is the glue that holds our society together. Can you imagine walking down the street in Manhattan without conformity? It would be chaos, or more chaotic than it already is. The interesting thing is that we prefer being in groups of others who are similar. We like people who agree with us on issues, we even like people who imitate our own body movements. So, enjoying being in a group isn’t always the same thing as creating the most effective group. I think that is the big issue that faces the Occupy movement. Occupy has people feeling empowered, and surrounded by many other like-minded (or perceived to be like-minded) people. It feels good. At the same time, where is the mission statement or the list of directives? Where do you go from here? Conformity helps keep society together but it doesn’t always move us forward toward goals that are the most advantageous. That is one of the big challenges that Occupy is facing right now. You’ve got a bunch of people in the same place drawn together by similar concerns, but it’s unclear what those concerns are and where they are headed from here.

The Penn State riots over Joe Paterno’s dismissal in the wake of the Sandusky scandal seems to me a good example of crowd mentality gone awry.

As a social psychologist and a big-time sports fan from my days at Michigan, one thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t take much for any college football fan to riot. For most of us who don’t have a connection to Penn State, it was really jarring. We thought, How can you be upset about Paterno when we’re talking about dozens of children being sexually exploited? It seems crazy. It’s out of whack in terms of priority. But we need to remember what it’s like when something bad happens to a group with a strong affiliation. It’s amazing how able we are to rationalize things like this. As a Penn State fan, you are thinking, Paterno didn’t actually do anything wrong himself, he has done some great things for the University, he didn’t really know the full extent of Sandusky’s crimes, and now he is the subject of a witch hunt. You convince yourself into believing that. It’s not just being a sports fan, it’s human psychology to see the world through a self-serving filter.

I guess there is also validation in the self-deception when you have other people “on your team,” no pun intended.

Absolutely. There’s the bonding and validation of looking around and everyone supporting him. The library is named after him. They are thinking; I go to this university, Paterno is like a god here and he is a virtuous coach in a somewhat nefarious body of coaches in college athletics over the past couple of decades. You could see how, especially in a small town where everything is focused on football, you could view Paterno as being one of the victims here.

One point that I found particularly fascinating in the book is that we tend to have pretty skewed opinions of ourselves. You also mention that happier people are more likely to have an unrealistic self-perception.

I think most of us have the intuition that people who are sad or depressed are like Eeyore from “Winnie The Poo”: Woe is me, everything is terrible. What’s really interesting is that the research suggests that people with depressive symptoms often have a more accurate view of the self. People who are “normal” — or healthy, functioning individuals — tend to have a skewed view of themselves. It’s just skewed in a positive direction.

When you think about it, there are a huge number of tools in our toolbox of self-deception that make us look better to ourselves than we probably should. For example, 85 percent of us think we are above-average drivers, which is mathematically ridiculous. It ranges from that idea that “I’m better than average” to the behavior where we avoid situations in which we might not do well. There is research suggesting that people with more narcissistic personalities and high self-esteem are not particularly good at dealing with negative feedback. They don’t persevere when they struggle. Instead they cut their losses and try something else. The lengths we go to in order to feel good about ourselves are often considerable. Self-deception seems to be a pretty ubiquitous component with what we think of as “normal mental health functioning.” 

In the book you discuss the ways in which we tend to rely more than we should on preconceived “differences” between men and women. You mention our tendency to force gendered behavior onto children, and I found this really relevant. Raising children in less gender-specific environments is a progressive goal, but unfortunately, I don’t see the policing of children’s gender coming to an end any time soon.

It’s a really deeply ingrained norm and expectation that we have. Parents of newborns take only seconds after their child is born to describe their infant with different adjectives for a boy or a girl. I really do think some of it is owed to “what you see is what you get”; men and women have different bodies and we like to hang our hat on difference. But newborn babies are the same and they don’t act noticeably different at that age. We still treat them differently and I think it’s an illustration of how we get caught up in what we assume to be internal and immutable difference instead of a cultural institution. I go to the toy store and they have different shelves for boys’ and girls’ toys. The guy at the fast food restaurant still needs to know the gender of my child before he can give them a happy meal. It’s everywhere.

In the book you allude to how circumstance affects romantic relationships. We tend to think of love in the proverbial “fairy tale” terms. But in the book you point out that love is more practical than we’d like to think.

My wife hates that chapter but I actually think it’s still optimistic. You ask people what are the factors that influence their attraction to someone and they think in terms of body type, appearance and personal traits. But the circumstances and the context in which we live play an enormous role in who we are attracted to.

Proximity is first and foremost. Whether we are talking about romantic relationships or our close friends, most of us would have very different intimate relationships if we had gone to a different college, worked in a different building, lived in a different apartment or joined a different gym. Similarity is another one. There is this “opposites attract” theory but there is not a lot of support for it scientifically. Similarity seems to influence who we end up with both in terms of similar interests and backgrounds, but also similar appearance level and similar physical characteristics. If we look at online dating, people don’t just send emails to the most attractive profiles. Instead, people who are highly attractive tend to send emails to other folks who are highly attractive. People who are more moderate in their levels of objectively rated attraction tend to send more emails to other people who are in that moderate level. It’s like we have an implicit sense of who is “in my league.” Similarity and proximity are hugely important, but I’ve actually gotten booed before in class when I’ve said that. People think that conclusion renders love less real and meaningful, but that’s not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that we have the potential to form romantic connections to a wide range of people. That’s actually liberating.

Your chapter on hate seemed to posit that we prefer others who are culturally and racially similar to us while we dislike difference. One interesting point that you make, which I found to be pretty accurate, is that people feel very uncomfortable admitting that these preferences are real. I’m thinking of the term “post-racial,” which came into popularity in conjunction with Obama’s presidency, but your research might suggest that we don’t in fact live in a post-racial environment.

We don’t live in a “post-racial” environment. Absolutely not. We have a way of viewing the world around us in terms of categories. It’s how we learn, as a child, to deal with things in our environment. We see people in terms of social categories like race, gender and age. This colors the way we interact with others and what we expect of them. A lot of people are resistant to accepting this or addressing it. If we continue to maintain this party line — the one illustrated by Stephen Colbert’s joke where he looks at a black person and says, “I don’t see color. Are you a black man?” — that doesn’t solve anything. My research suggests that that tactic backfires. People don’t tend to make a very good impression this way. They are viewed as disingenuous and distracted in diverse settings when they pretend not to notice race.

So how can we improve our approach to ethnic bias?

The more uplifting take on this is, if we can all accept that we see the world in terms of categories, we can make use of that information in navigating our social universe. We need to ask how to have these kinds of conversations and how to correct these kinds of tendencies. It’s a conversation we have on my university campus and in other organizations. It’s good to want diversity and to want to have people from different backgrounds together, but if we are going to pretend that we’re all the same, then it doesn’t really do us any good. I think that resistance to talking about race and accepting that race still makes a difference in our society and affects all of us, is a big problem. The “what you see is what you get” idea comes into bearing because often when we do have these discussions it becomes about who’s racist, is this behavior racist? And that’s a discussion that no one ever wins.