Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

An October 4, 2024 Wall Street Journal essay ("Why Do Older People Waste Their Time Playing Dumb Phone Games?") aroused these thoughts - Getting old isn't easy. It causes anxiety which the mind naturally tries to reduce using its innate obsessive-compulsive ego defense and video game playing is heavily obsessive-compulsive. This explains why such games are popular with other age groups too,  especially anxious troubled teenagers since it reduces their anxiety while playing them.

While both participants made good suggestions (the need to "harden" schools against intrusion; hire more security staff; provide more student mental health services) what is equally important is public education. Children aren't born with parenting instructions and the general level of knowledge of child psychological development and developmental psychopathology (a term coined by my doctoral advisor) among the public, teachers, doctors, and the legal system is low.

The basic ego capacities, those governing control of behavior and thinking, modulation of mood, distinguishing reality from fantasy, and developing a sense of who one is (the "sense of self") depend on experiencing a "good-enough" though not perfect parenting. The great power of the unconscious over behavior during childhood and adult life is another critical factor.. Pamphlets and instructional video explaining this, in a supportive non-judgmental fashion, might produce significant benefit at relatively low cost.

Newspaper reports of Ryan Routh, the man who was arrested for allegedly attempting former President Trump's assassination, describe Routh's long attempt to find a mission in life by making arms deals and recruiting soldiers for Ukraine and Taiwan with none succeeding. When younger he was rejected for military service and there was no news mention of current romantic interest though stating he was divorced and had children. Yet love or its equivalent is instinctive to all animals of which humans are a part. For humans, love, ideally, is when the other's welfare is made equal to one's own and honesty and communication is total. When absent, aloneness produces unbearable anxiety and a prison to escape. The total failure to achieve this can result in psychosis, a withdrawal from the outside world with behavior based on delusions during which the pain of separation disappears.
To be separate means to be helpless, arousing shame which can also be avoided by involvement in religion or artistic creation or obsessive work though the fulfilling solution for most is through love. Was Routh's obsessive involvement in his missions motivated by underlying problem with intimacy?

His behavior may also have reflected depression, the sense of having deep problems and cry for help, or the desire for what is termed "suicide-by-cop." The unconscious is very powerful and one must respect its power.

Note: This item was updated as further information became publicly available.

A Wall Street Journal Article ("Parents and School Shooters/Georgia has charged the father of 14-year-old Colt Gray. Is that fair?"/September 6, 2024) aroused several thoughts: 1. Babies are not born with parenting instructions and knowledge of child psychological development is greatly lacking among parents, doctors, lawyers, and politicians. 2. There is evil in the world which must be punished. 3. The unconscious is very powerful and one must respect its power. 4. Mental illness creates tunnel vision making crazy thoughts seem very real though when out of it one wonders how they could have once believed them. 5. Mildly poor parenting behavior shouldn't be criminalized but where to draw the line can be difficult to determine.

A Wall Street Journal article ("Less Painful Ballet Shoes Are Here. Some Dancers Refuse to Use Them"/August 25, 2024) aroused a thought. Having no interest in ballet and never viewing one I remembered my long-ago, now deceased friend, a martial art student who met dates by taking ballet dance notation classes ostensibly to document his martial art moves. "The women starved themselves and were hungry for a good meal," he said, explaining his success.

My thoughts on the danger of parenting (Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2024, "Parenting Is Hazardous to Your Health, the Surgeon General Warns") - 1. Be leery of startling statistics. 2. Babies demand that their parent's personality change to best meet their survival needs. Which must create great parental stress since the mind is naturally conservative and loathe to change. 3. The mother is the most critical figure in the first three years of a child's life, the father then becoming equally important to break the maternal bond and move the child into the larger world. 4. Ignorance of child psychological development is widespread among parents, doctors, politicians, and the general public. Thus do spurious advice and solutions abound.

"Court-Ordered Therapy That Separates Kids from a Parent They Love Stirs a Backlash/A controversial treatment used in custody fights can keep family members apart for years against children's wishes./'It all absolutely destroyed me.''' begins the article.

Knowledge of child psychological development is greatly lacking among doctors, the legal system, and the general public. Children are not easily swayed, being fully capable of deciding who most loves them. The concept that a child needs both parents in their life for healthy psychological development is untrue. What most often reflects such Family Court conflict is parental narcissism, the lack of self-knowledge.

I have known children who were overjoyed when their parents separated, one teenager telling her mother that if she divorced the alcoholic father she would get a job to help support the family. A seven-year-old once told me, "I need a new family."

As every lawyer will tell you, the Family Court is a Wild West show where the parent with the most skilled lawyer usually wins despite the best interests of the child being the sole deciding mandate which should occur. In New York State two children were recently murdered by their abusive parent after being returned to them from foster care despite the opposition of mental health professionals. Nuff said.

Ignorance about mental health conditions is widespread, fostered by such reductionist psychiatric nonsense as "chemical imbalance" and the FDA's love of psychotropics and electrical gadgets. Depression is merely the "depressing" of feelings which can occur for one or more of several reasons: feeling that one's difficulties are great and giving up; the loss of ability through illness or injury or a beloved's death; or uncertainty about a decision and being "stuck." PTSD symptoms reflect the mind's healthy attempt to recover its equilibrium after an excessive stressful event(s).

The publicized benefits of drugs, which are often based on inadequate or faulty research, tend to be vastly exaggerated with their side-effects being downplayed. The ignorance of child psychological development and developmental psychopathology, widespread among doctors and the general public, motivates this search for miracle psychotropic solutions, and people getting "high" on dangerous substances instead of life.

Alcohol is an acquired taste best left unacquired. Having said this, the tendency to develop substance abuse problems derives from early childhood experiences during which basic ego capacities governing thinking, behavior, and others develop. Usually arising during adolescence, it isn't easy to treat since the pleasurable/quickly acting drug substance must be given up before psychotherapy can affect the needed change of damaged personality which aroused its use.

But personality tendency matters too, an instinctive need for self-control, and also learning from others that unfortunate and sometimes deadly things can happen when using such substances. Nuff said.

One reason might be the ease of self-publishing with many considering their life story and imagined fantasy of value to a wider public, and another being the generally poor state of public education in which literacy is no longer considered the minimal requirement for high school graduation.

The encouragement of reading by parents may also be less prevalent with some parents failing to read first to and then with their toddlers, this being a time when the child can naturally learn reading since the mind has an inherent capacity to induct the nature of reading just as it does the grammatical structure of the language of the nation into which they are born.

A smaller factor, I believe, is that reading involves a loss of self-control while immersed in the written words which is unconsciously scary for anxious youth. I having known good readers who never read, preferring video game play which is heavily obsessive-compulsive, one of the mind's natural ways to reduce anxiety and thus powerfully motivating. 

1. Schizophrenia is greatly misdiagnosed particularly when substance abuse is present. 2. The benefits of psychotropic drugs tend to be exaggerated and their side-effects downplayed. A 1970s extensive study found the lowest rate of recidivism for severely disturbed hospitalized patients being when no medication was given, the next best result when medication was prescribed only during hospitalization, and the poorest outcome being when patients were told they need take medication after discharge (by believers of the "chemical imbalance" myth). 3. Explaining psychodynamics to patients can have a powerful healing effect as that paranoia is simply being overly watchful. Simple organization incompetence is often misinterpreted as conspiracy. As an aside, long ago the Silicon Valley guru, Andrew Grove, then head of Intel, wrote a famed book, Only The Paranoid Survive. 4. Information from mental health professionals varies in validity depending on their training, talent, and experience with some being worthless or even harmful. Still, people don't go to clinicians for advice, they almost always knowing what they want but being unable to achieve it and with which they need help. 5. Suicide reflects complex motive deriving from long term unhappiness exacerbated by recent stress, it often involving drug or alcohol use since there is a powerful biological imperative to live.