Welcome to From Insults to Respect.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have become disenchanted with the mental disorder/mental illness/medical model for addressing psychological concerns (see, for example, HERE). Today I describe how this came about, along with my reasons for preferring a psychological maturity approach.

My Disenchantment With The Mental Disorder Model

Let’s begin with my early education as a psychologist. At first, I was quick to adopt the medical model for dealing with the types of concerns that lead people to seek psychological services. This was because I was incredibly impressed with the medical model for dealing with physical illnesses.

You see, when I was very young, I had seen films of polio victims stuck in iron lungs. My generation was the first to benefit from the vaccine Dr. Jonas Salk came up with to prevent these awful infections, and he was hailed as a “miracle worker.” Later, I hurt my leg in a football game and to my extreme distress, I couldn’t walk on it. The doctor I went to took an x-ray and saw I had broken my fibula. He put a cast on my leg, and three months later, I was starring on my high school baseball team with absolutely no pain. Grateful for preventing polio infections and healing my leg, coupled with the respect others in my community had for medical doctors, I had become primed to think that the same model would be helpful for psychological concerns.

Then, in the early part of my undergraduate psychology courses at Brooklyn College, the various psychological concerns were all described as various mental illnesses, psychopathologies, and mental disorders. At first, this seemed to make sense. But then, in more advanced courses, doubts began to emerge.

In the courses that taught principles of science, I began to see that the definition of “mental disorder” and the various types of “mental disorders” are seriously flawed. Studies were coming out indicating that doctors looking at the same data about a case did not reliably come up with the same diagnosis. When reliability is low, so too must be validity according to well established principles of statistics. Meanwhile, the chemical imbalance theory that had been viewed as support for the notion that these concerns were illnesses just like physical illnesses proved to be unsupported by the evidence. In courses on the history of psychology, I learned that utilizing the medical model for psychological concerns led to lobotomies, shock treatment, and drug treatments that, from my scientific literature review, convinced me that they resulted in far more harm than good.

To be clear, I recognized millions of people that received drug treatments for their mental health concerns reported they found them helpful, but I also found that millions of others came to the opposite conclusion. I began to wonder if there was an approach that would be less likely to have people end up feeling they were harmed.

Meanwhile, I learned that many psychologists and counselors who provide mental health services also recognize the flaws in the medical model approach. Although they don’t prescribe drugs as a treatment approach, to their dismay, in order to have a viable professional practice, they are required to utilize the same invalid medical jargon as drug prescribing doctors because insurance companies require for reimbursement a mental disorder “diagnoses.”

Given this educational background, I began a search for an alternative model for providing psychological services.

Discovering a Developmental Psychological Maturity Model

In one of my classes I began to learn about Abraham Maslow, who had recently been elected president of the American Psychological Association. Rather than treating people as a bag of mental disorder symptoms, he focussed on identifying people who exhibited the most mature aspects of life, and he looked to see how these developed. He referred to those at this highest developmental level as self-actualized.

Maslow’s approach focussed on this highest level of maturity, but at about this same time period, I began to come upon other researchers who described various aspects of psychological development as a process of going through four or five stages. In these models, higher stage functioning is viewed as “better” than lower in the long run.

After graduating with a masters degree and getting a job in which I was to address various psychological concerns, having this developmental model in mind proved enormously helpful. The two most common concerns that I addressed were depression and anxiety. From Maslow’s model, a major impediment to reaching the highest level of maturity is not having one’s basic needs met. So, in addition to providing a safe place for my clients to get emotional support, which is one basic need, I also focussed on coming up with my clients plans that can better achieve their other basic needs. For example, when seeing someone who was dealing with poverty, and therefore was insecure about food and shelter issues, we would work on a career development plan.

At the same time, many clients had difficulties fulfilling their love and belonging needs. When I explored this issue with them, it became clear that the way they handled criticism was a major hinderance. They would describe nasty, attacking interactions which left a bad state of affairs for both parties. These began with either someone criticizing them, or they criticizing others. Further discussions led me to understand that when they made mistakes they utilized the same nasty, attacking criticism style directed at themselves.

With the developmental stages model in mind, I developed a five stage model for handling these criticism situations; the higher the stage, the more mature the approach (see HERE, HERE and HERE). To find out how people perceived the five stages, I made a lot of TV shows with a variety of actors, each one depicting a scenario in which someone responded to criticism.

When I showed these videos to students in conflict resolution classes that I had been teaching, they rated the actors who displayed responses to criticism in a style consistent with the higher levels as more likable, respected, and mature.

When I described these stages to my counseling clients in a way that did not claim they represented an absolute truth, but was a starting point to think about these issues, I found that there was something about the stages that seemed to them plausible. And then, after a few practice sessions in which we would rehearse using the highest level, the feedback that I got from clients was very rewarding. Long standing flareups with family members and others often completely disappeared, and criticism situations changed from being nasty to playful fun, and a valued learning experience. Clients also reported that this increased the amount of respect they received from others, as well as their own self respect. This led me to feel I was on to something that might be better than the medical model approach for dealing with psychological concerns.

I then went on to study for my PhD at the University of Minnesota.

There, one of my professors, Norman A. Sprinthall, published a paper in the American Psychologist that further validated my new way of thinking. It reviewed the research evidence demonstrating the value of reaching higher levels of maturity. Thus, Dr. Sprinthall wrote:

“By providing detailed information on the content and structure of the multiple domains of psychological development, contemporary theorists are filling in the gaps and advancing more accurate successive approximations to critical definitions of developmental stages and sequences.”

He then discussed several studies that found life skills and success after the completion of formal education are more closely related to psychological maturity than to scholastic aptitude or grade point achievement. For example, a Ford Foundation study followed for over 16 years a group of “at risk students” who had scholastic aptitude scores about 150 points below average for college students. Estimates of their psychological maturity by counselors and principals when these students were in high school were a more effective predictor of success than their academic record, not only for college itself, but also in the following years.

Finally, Dr. Sprinthall summarized six studies that provide support for the contention that certain education programs can be designed to successfully promote psychological maturity. In all of them, those in the experimental maturity promoting programs improved their level of psychological maturity; those who were not in these programs did not.

To be successful, Dr. Sprinthall argued, these programs must include a constant interplay between opportunities to learn some basic principles of psychological maturity, opportunities to apply the principles to one’s own actual, real world experiences, followed by readings to help illuminate the possible meanings of such experiences. More recent research suggests that certain narratives such as found in novels in which readers can identify with characters dealing with the types of situations requiring higher levels of maturity can also promote this type of development.

This body of research sometimes falls under the three headings of “emotional intelligence,” “social intelligence,” and “positive psychology.” When all three are taken together they cover much of the same ground as the more general concept of “psychological maturity.”

Given these findings, I found myself in recent years taking to heart something psychologist George A. Miller promoted in a classic 1969 paper. There he urged psychologists to give psychology away. What he meant by this was that elder psychologist professionals should create a new psychology that could be given away to the public. These professionals, he advocated, should select principles and practices that the public could use in their own behalf. He wanted a psychology not for the profession, not for the Library of Congress, and not for graduate student’s eyes only, but a psychology that everyone could use, a practical psychology that would help each person manage his or her own life with greater effectiveness and competence.

This blog, From Insults to Respect, aims to do exactly that. It is completely free, and I have been drawing on what I have found to be the most helpful principles and practices that, once learned, can be used by the average Joe or Jill in any way they might choose. Early posts, which can be retrieved by beginning HERE, introduce some basic ideas, and I then describe the following tentative description of psychological maturity:

Psychological maturity is “better” in the long run, it considers more variables, and represents more comprehensive cognitive problem solving. Individuals who tend to act at higher levels of psychological maturity can think more critically, logically, and scientifically while acting civilly to people with whom they disagree; they can graciously admit they are wrong when information comes in supporting such a conclusion; they welcome receiving criticism, respond without getting defensive, though they know it can be emotionally concerning for them; they are hesitant to provide uninvited criticism, only doing so when they can formulate it in a way that promises to be specific enough to be helpful, and they do so without insulting tones of voice or name calling; they can role-play and empathize with the emotions of a wide variety of human beings and can process moral dilemmas according to standards of democratic justice and the golden rule; they understand that melancholy and anxiety, rather than symptoms of mental disorders, are part of the natural process of addressing concerns about losses and fears; and they have the ability to puzzle through the tough problems of living, to take a stand, and yet to remain open to possible revisions and new information—thus demonstrating a capacity to make successive approximations toward more efficient, effective, economical, and beautiful accomplishments.

Such a description of maturity, in a general sort of way, can be a valuable aid to challenge each of us to begin to consider what psychological maturity means. It is not claimed that it is absolutely true for everyone and every conceivable situation. The paragraph is my personal best effort to summarize what respected theorists have written, and there is some preliminary evidence that it describes a type of functioning that is predictive of life success, and interventions can help to promote higher levels of functioning.

When, in my posts, I offer suggestions for dealing with specific types of situations, I aim to stay consistent with the summary, while providing additional details for handling such situations. In many of them, I describe a little assignment that provides an opportunity for readers to apply what they have just read to some event in their own personal life. Moreover, to get a deeper sense of handling specific situations, readers are encouraged to access my three novels (see HERE).

So, in conclusion, I invite readers to give this free approach a try.

Assignment: If you will, reread the paragraph in italics that describes, in summary form, psychological maturity, and then write a paragraph or two about how the various phrases in the description relate to your own way of dealing with life.

Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence.  To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.