User:Kriegman

For information about me, you can check out the article on me that I started in 2003 as a "young" Wikipedian, i.e., before I knew that it was considered inappropriate to write about yourself :-) A more commercially oriented self description (originally developed to promote my private practice), can be found here. Here is a summary of some of the relevant areas of my interest/expertise.

Psychology
I am a clinical psychologist with a a lot of experience working with "difficult" patients.

Sex Offenders

For almost half a century, I have treated and evaluated (as an "expert witness") sex offenders. Sex offenders, contrary to popular opinion, have the lowest rate of recidivism of criminal offenders, according to the US Department of Justice statistics. In general, they can be treated successfully IF they want help and IF they see the treater as their agent, not as an agent of the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, the dominant treatment models run by folks trying to keep them incarcerated (not trying to treat and then release them) are built upon asking the patient to trust people who are working, despite claims to the contrary, to keep them incarcerated as long as possible.

A very small percentage of truly compulsive/repetitive sex offenders pose a terrible danger to society and should be locked up indefinitely. Unfortunately, we have only a very limited ability to differentiate these horrific offenders from the huge number of men who cross the legal line sexually. Politicians trying to outdo each other by claiming to be protecting us from "sexual predators," now have more and more states locking up as many sex offenders as they can for indefinite commitments. These commitments average 20 years or more (!) and begin AFTER the offender has completed serving the criminal sentences for their crimes.

That is, AFTER serving the sentences that a court considered appropriate for ("punishment that fit") the crime—even though in the vast majority of cases we cannot predict the future (a la Minority Report)—20 years of incarceration are "tacked on" via civil commitment so that politicians can each claim to be doing more than their opponents to protect you from sex offenders. In Massachusetts, these commitments are based on the testimony of "experts" who have no expertise whatsoever (often little or no experience prior to being recruited to evaluate and testify that sex offenders are dangerous) and who distort the empirical findings to claim an ability to reliably predict who will reoffend and cause serious harm. Since the empirical evidence so overwhelmingly supports our inability to make highly accurate predictions about human behavior, most (not all) of these commitments are based on bogus science.

These laws will be overturned and these commitments will end not because they, more often than not, are based on testimony of the same caliber as the Salem Witch Trials (which I prove scientifically in this two part article: Part I and Part II) and not because they are unconstitutional (which due to the use of bogus science to deprive individuals of their liberty, they are). Rather, these laws will be repealed when the staggering cost of incarcerating a small but significant part of the male population becomes overwhelming. (The current estimates run around $3,000,000.00 or more per commitment.)

"Psychoses"

In a completely separate area of clinical work, I believe in the treatment of "psychotic conditions" by good social support and psychotherapy, not by drugs (though drugs can be useful in a crisis for short periods and may have appropriate long term use in a small number of situations). There are mountains of evidence that we are destroying millions of lives with our Western paradigm of care for those who have suffered major emotional/psychological breakdowns. Outside of this treatment paradigm, the recovery from "schizophrenia" is around 60% (after one or two breakdowns). With better supports, I believe the recovery rate could be at least 75%, maybe more.

Within the Western paradigm, however, the recovery rate is "officially" zero! That is, the patient and their families are told that schizophrenia is a biological condition that will require lifelong treatment with drugs. The drugs have terrible long term side effects that destroy the quality of life (tardive dyskinesia, diabetes, tardive dementia, mental dimming, and many other ailments, etc.) and/or cause early death (from diabetes, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a heightened rate of suicide, etc.) of most patients who take them for many years. Yet, the psychiatric drugs have been the major product that moved a tenth rate industry of no economic significance (in the 1930's) to the third largest and most profitable industry in the world (after military and energy industries).

So, 60% or more of the young people who experience "psychosis" would have recovered from emotional breakdowns without medication. Yet, our standard treatment for what is called "schizophrenia" locks almost everyone who enters the mental health system into lifelong treatment with lucrative drugs that will destroy most of their lives. At least for those 60% or so who would have recovered without medication and whose lives are, at best, slowly (but eventually, massively) diminished by these toxins, "treatment" based on this mindset is … murder. For profit. (What else would you call it?)

Evolutionary Biologist
As an evolutionary biologist, I co-created the psychoanalytic paradigm of evolutionary psychoanalyis and have written extensively about the evolution of the human psyche and behavior.

I have a particular interest in the overlap between religion and intergroup violence (war, genocide, etc.). My theory is that humans evolved into religious, meme system group identifying animals specifically because of the adaptive advantage provided for effective violence in intergroup conflicts. The thesis is deceptively simple: Those strongly identified groups held together by religious and pseudo-religious "false-kin ideologies" were more effective at killing off outsiders (and stealing their possessions/land) and preventing other groups from doing the same to them. Thus, humans evolved a powerful religious propensity.

Yoism
One response to the horror of what religion has wrought is to eschew religion and promote atheism. There are several problems with that solution. The major problem is that it leaves our world in the control of those deluded folk who actively harness religious or pseudo-religious ideologies in the pursuit of power. It is in response to this problem that I joined together with others to form Yoism: The World's First Open Source Religion (which is also the first religion inspired by Wikipedia, see Open source religion). The notion is that sanely harnessing the human propensity to form religious groupings is the only way to effectively compete for power with those currently controlling our world and leading us headlong into disaster.

And besides that, Yoism is … true :-)