{"id":40390,"date":"2013-09-28T22:37:56","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T02:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=40390"},"modified":"2013-09-28T22:37:56","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T02:37:56","slug":"to-listen-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/09\/28\/to-listen-to\/","title":{"rendered":"to listen to…"},"content":{"rendered":"
You don’t get to have many really original thoughts in life [and invariably when you do, you find out many before you have already had the same thought]. One of mine had to do with authority<\/font><\/strong><\/em>. Like many, I have an ambivalent relationship with authority – not just with others but with myself. When I ended my first training as an Internist, I was placed in a situation where I was the authority<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, and I didn’t like it. At the same period of life, I was in the Air Force, a place where authority was defined by the insignia on your collar. I didn’t like that at all [in either direction]. I figured out that there were two kinds: the authority of knowledge<\/font><\/strong><\/em> or wisdom [earned]; and the authority of power<\/font><\/strong><\/em> [usually designated]. Like Einstein was an authority in physics versus "by the authority of invested in me by …." I decided that the first kind was preferable, except in desperate straights when somebody needs to take charge. <\/div>\n

Personally, I preferred the collaboration of psychotherapy to the seeming asymmetric relationship in physical medicine. It wasn’t always that way, but more often than suited me. I liked earned authority better, and I liked listening. I had more time to think. That may sound odd considering how a lot of people see psychiatry these days, but it’s how I see it. All of this is my lead-up to the interchange between Allen Frances and Eleanor Longden, both of whom most of you know already. Allen Frances is the Emeritus Chair of Psychiatry at Duke, the former Chair of the DSM-IV Revision Task Force, and more recently an outspoken critic of the DSM-5, who has continued with a campaign against over-diagnosis and over-medication he calls "Saving Normal." Eleanor Longden is a mental health worker who suffered long with hearing voices and found recovery, not from hearing voices but from a broken life by treating her voices as what they are – part of her mental life. Now she is a part of the Hearing Voices Movement. Her Ted presentation was unique, powerful, moving: <\/p>\n

After it was published, Dr. Frances wrote a piece about it at the request of Huffington Post, followed by a dialog between them. Here’s a catalog of their public dialog if you haven’t seen it:<\/div>\n