"Let the punishment fit the crime" is more than a legal maxim. It explains why in Western culture we do not chop off a man's hands when he steals a loaf of bread and why we do not stone a woman to death for committing adultery.

The...

Johnny was a Vietnam War vet and one of my first patients. He had had over four dozen surgeries in a heroic effort by the Veteran's Administration to transform him from a hideously disfigured victim of shrapnel to a somewhat less hideously disfigured victim of shrapnel. There was no question...

A blog I wrote earlier this week was challenged by Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, in a piece published Tuesday in the Huffington Post.

I appreciate Dr. Seligman's response. Dr. Seligman admits he provided the training I alleged he did to the CIA when it was developing...

The Army knew that Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan was shouting political and religious harangues to patients during his therapy sessions at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

When that happens in a psychiatric setting, it is time to radio Houston that we have a problem.

Instead of...

The danger Fox News poses to America is not that it is a biased or partisan arm of the Republican Party, as the Obama Administration contends. Fox is a danger because it is a cult and uses the same destabilizing psychological techniques cults use to undermine the independent functioning of...

I hate to name drop, but Joe Wilson is my Congressman.

As a psychologist it is not the disrespect for our first African American president shown by my congressman that has me concerned. Instead, it is the potential breakdown of paranoid defenses behind his behavior that worries...

This column is not for the squeamish. There have been "death squads" in American health care now for over twenty-five years. I can bear witness to them.

I bear witness to a mother from the heartland seeing post-mortem pictures of her deceased eighteen- year- old son, who repeatedly...

Why are there so many "crazies" coming out of the woodwork to attack public officials with their views that defy reality? And why are they so angrily insistent on those views?

As a psychologist I believe the answers to these two questions have profound significance for our nation's mental...

A 14-year-old boy, "Jimmy," has been seriously depressed and is receiving inpatient treatment in an adolescent residential facility because he is suicidal. His father, a state employee, has private health insurance through work that is paying for the care. The insurance company determines that Jimmy's care is no longer "medically...

In my blog last month, I described the complicity of psychologists and the American Psychological Association (APA) with torture under the Bush Administration's War on Terror. I also described APA's transition from an organization highly sensitive to human rights to one that supported the Bush Administration's torture interrogation program. I...

A seventeen-year-old boy is locked in an interrogation cell in Guantanamo. He breaks down crying and says he wants his family. The interrogator senses the boy is psychologically vulnerable and consults with a psychologist. The psychologist has evaluated the boy prior to the questioning and says, "Tell him his family...

In my most recent two blogs I have discussed from a psychological perspective both John McCain's authority problem and his emotional instability. As the pressure of the presidential campaign mounts, McCain's immaturity takes new forms and suggests a pervasive fault line in his psychological stability.

The debates have been fatal...

Make no mistake about it. John McCain's defiance of authority is what kept him alive in the Hanoi Hilton. But it has been a different story in the rest of his life.

The final piece fell into place for me last night watching John McCain's acceptance speech. The day before...

As a psychologist we learn quickly that we are all subject to subtle, subliminally transmitted "rules" that we let control us. In my book State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, June 2008.) I have described several ways these...

Why do negative campaign ads work?

Negative campaigning works because it harnesses the enormous and ubiquitous blind energy of envy. Envy is as fundamental to the mind as hunger is to the body. In fact envy is frustrated psychological hunger. The paradigm of wanting something, feeling frustrated at not...