via:

We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.

Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.

Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.

Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why?

Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.

In the short term you don't seem especially worried about existential risks that originate in nature like asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes and so forth. Instead you have argued that the majority of future existential risks to humanity are anthropogenic, meaning that they arise from human activity. Nuclear war springs to mind as an obvious example of this kind of risk, but that's been with us for some time now. What are some of the more futuristic or counterintuitive ways that we might bring about our own extinction?

Bostrom: I think the biggest existential risks relate to certain future technological capabilities that we might develop, perhaps later this century. For example, machine intelligence or advanced molecular nanotechnology could lead to the development of certain kinds of weapons systems. You could also have risks associated with certain advancements in synthetic biology.

Of course there are also existential risks that are not extinction risks. The concept of an existential risk certainly includes extinction, but it also includes risks that could permanently destroy our potential for desirable human development. One could imagine certain scenarios where there might be a permanent global totalitarian dystopia. Once again that's related to the possibility of the development of technologies that could make it a lot easier for oppressive regimes to weed out dissidents or to perform surveillance on their populations, so that you could have a permanently stable tyranny, rather than the ones we have seen throughout history, which have eventually been overthrown.

by Ross Andersen, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Chema Madoz
via:

via:

The Era of Small and Many

Earlier this year, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office—instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird a hundred different policies?

Or another way to say it: can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?

Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.  (...)

Many of us get a preview of life in the age of small and many when we sit down at our computers each day. Fifteen years ago we still depended on a handful of TV networks and newspaper conglomerates to define our world for us; now we have a farmers’ market in ideas. We all add to the flow with each Facebook post, and we can find almost infinite sources of information. It’s reshaping the way we see the world—not, of course, without some trauma (from the hours wasted answering e-mail to the death of too much good, old-school journalism). All these transitions will be traumatic to one extent or another, since they are so very big. We’re reversing the trend of generations.

But the general direction seems to me increasingly clear. Health care? In place of a few huge, high-tech hospitals dispensing the most expensive care possible, all the data suggest we’d be healthier with lots of primary and preventive care from physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners in our neighborhoods. Banking? Instead of putting more than half our assets in half a dozen money-center banks that devote themselves to baroque financial instruments, we need capital closer to home, where loan officers have some sense for gauging risk and need.

by Bill McKibben, Orion Magazine |  Read more:

Painting: Suzanne Stryk

The Mouse Trap

Mark Mattson knows a lot about mice and rats. He's fed them; he's bred them; he's cut their heads open with a scalpel. Over a brilliant 25-year career in neuroscience—one that's made him a Laboratory Chief at the National Institute on Aging, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, a consultant to Alzheimer's nonprofits, and a leading scholar of degenerative brain conditions—Mattson has completed more than 500 original, peer-reviewed studies, using something on the order of 20,000 laboratory rodents. He's investigated the progression and prevention of age-related diseases in rats and mice of every kind: black ones and brown ones; agoutis and albinos; juveniles and adults; males and females. Still, he never quite noticed how fat they were—how bloated and sedentary and sickly—until a Tuesday afternoon in February 2007. That's the day it occurred to him, while giving a lecture at Emory University in Atlanta, that his animals were nothing less (and nothing more) than lazy little butterballs. His animals and everyone else's, too.

Mattson was lecturing on a research program that he'd been conducting since 1995, on whether a strict diet can help ward off brain damage and disease. He'd generated some dramatic data to back up the theory: If you put a rat on a limited feeding schedule—depriving it of food every other day—and then blocked off one of its cerebral arteries to induce a stroke, its brain damage would be greatly reduced. The same held for mice that had been engineered to develop something like Parkinson's disease: Take away their food, and their brains stayed healthier.

How would these findings apply to humans, asked someone in the audience. Should people skip meals, too? At 5-foot-7 and 125 pounds, Mattson looks like a meal-skipper, and he is one. Instead of having breakfast or lunch, he takes all his food over a period of a few hours each evening—a bowl of steamed cabbage, a bit of salmon, maybe some yogurt. It's not unlike the regime that appears to protect his lab animals from cancer, stroke, and neurodegenerative disease. "Why do we eat three meals a day?" he asks me over the phone, not waiting for an answer. "From my research, it's more like a social thing than something with a basis in our biology."

But Mattson wasn't so quick to prescribe his stern feeding schedule to the crowd in Atlanta. He had faith in his research on diet and the brain but was beginning to realize that it suffered from a major complication. It might well be the case that a mouse can be starved into good health—that a deprived and skinny brain is more robust than one that's well-fed. But there was another way to look at the data. Maybe it's not that limiting a mouse's food intake makes it healthy, he thought; it could be that not limiting a mouse's food makes it sick. Mattson's control animals—the rodents that were supposed to yield a normal response to stroke and Parkinson's—might have been overweight, and that would mean his baseline data were skewed.

"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions eat more and grow bigger than their country cousins. At the National Institute on Aging, as at every major research center, the animals are grouped in plastic cages the size of large shoeboxes, topped with a wire lid and a food hopper that's never empty of pellets. This form of husbandry, known as ad libitum feeding, is cheap and convenient since animal technicians need only check the hoppers from time to time to make sure they haven’t run dry. Without toys or exercise wheels to distract them, the mice are left with nothing to do but eat and sleep—and then eat some more.

That such a lifestyle would make rodents unhealthy, and thus of limited use for research, may seem obvious, but the problem appears to be so flagrant and widespread that few scientists bother to consider it. Ad libitum feeding and lack of exercise are industry-standard for the massive rodent-breeding factories that ship out millions of lab mice and rats every year and fuel a $1.1-billion global business in living reagents for medical research. When Mattson made that point in Atlanta, and suggested that the control animals used in labs were sedentary and overweight as a rule, several in the audience gasped. His implication was clear: The basic tool of biomedicine—and its workhorse in the production of new drugs and other treatments—had been transformed into a shoddy, industrial product. Researchers in the United States and abroad were drawing the bulk of their conclusions about the nature of human disease—and about Nature itself—from an organism that's as divorced from its natural state as feedlot cattle or oven-stuffer chickens.

Mattson isn't much of a doomsayer in conversation. "I realized that this information should be communicated more widely," he says without inflection, of that tumultuous afternoon in Atlanta. In 2010, he co-authored a more extensive, but still measured, analysis of the problem for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, titled " 'Control' laboratory rodents are metabolically morbid: Why it matters," laid out the case for how a rodent obesity epidemic might be affecting human health.

Standard lab rats and lab mice are insulin-resistant, hypertensive, and short-lived, he and his co-authors explained. Having unlimited access to food makes the animals prone to cancer, type-2 diabetes, and renal failure; it alters their gene expression in substantial ways; and it leads to cognitive decline. And there's reason to believe that ragged and rundown rodents will respond differently—abnormally, even—to experimental drugs.

by Daniel Engber, Slate |  Read more:
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.

Friend Me, or Else

If you think privacy settings on your Facebook and Twitter accounts guarantee future employers or schools can't see your private posts, guess again.

Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and some are demanding full access from job applicants and student athletes.

In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall.

Previously, applicants were asked to surrender their user name and password, but a complaint from the ACLU stopped that practice last year. While submitting to a Facebook review is voluntary, virtually all applicants agree to it out of a desire to score well in the interview, according Maryland ACLU legislative director Melissa Coretz Goemann.

Student-athletes in colleges around the country also are finding out they can no longer maintain privacy in Facebook communications because schools are requiring them to "friend" a coach or compliance officer, giving that person access to their “friends-only” posts. Schools are also turning to social media monitoring companies with names like UDilligence and Varsity Monitor for software packages that automate the task. The programs offer a "reputation scoreboard" to coaches and send "threat level" warnings about individual athletes to compliance officers.

A recent revision in the handbook at the University of North Carolina is typical:

"Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings,” it reads. "The athletics department also reserves the right to have other staff members monitor athletes’ posts."

All this scrutiny is too much for Bradley Shear, a Washington D.C.-lawyer who says both schools and employers are violating the First Amendment with demands for access to otherwise private social media content.

"I can't believe some people think it's OK to do this,” he said. “Maybe it's OK if you live in a totalitarian regime, but we still have a Constitution to protect us. It's not a far leap from reading people's Facebook posts to reading their email. ... As a society, where are we going to draw the line?"

by Bob Sullivan, MSNBC |  Read more:
Image via: Mashable

Fred Phleger / Robert Lopshire. Ann Can Fly.
Random House, 1959
via:

To Putter, Divine

As fantasies go, this one is beyond innocent, involving neither a bemuscled UPS man nor an indulgent yoga boot camp with my best friend in Tulum. In it, husband and child are elsewhere but safe, returning home soon but not imminently. I have an hour alone in the apartment, with which to do what I please. And what pleases me is to putter.

Puttering (or pottering or putzing, depending on your tribe) is an activity, if it can be properly called that, of desultory bliss. It’s a mental and physical wandering that helpfully repels any impulse to be genuinely productive. The word—which evokes other varieties of ineffectuality, such as spluttering and stuttering—has an archaic taint, bringing to mind biddies in their rose gardens and widowers with their coin collections. But modern life has elevated puttering to an aspirational necessity. Just as generations of working men yearned for their Sunday-morning tee time, now overbusy people choose to celebrate their individuated Sabbaths with a round of fussing about.

In a survey on the uses of free time among American women commissioned by Real Simple magazine and conducted by the Families and Work Institute, 71 percent said that they most like to spend their free time “just relaxing.” On a long list of leisure choices, it came in third, ahead of reading, watching TV, seeing friends, playing sports, or listening to music; tied with “going out for a special meal” and spending time with pets (which in any case is obligatory; the dog has to be walked); and behind only spending time with their kids or partner. Since respondents were given so many specific options to choose from, this “just relaxing” seems to encompass … nothing in particular. “It’s puttering,” Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, theorizes. “It’s the abandonment of our forever to-do list. I’m so happy when I have time to just putter. I might look at the flowers and decide they need watering. I might think about calling my sister. I might think about calling my college roommate.” And then she might half-do something entirely different, before meandering to the next diversion.

Despite two generations of gains made by women in the workplace and a growing acknowledgment that men can work the dishwasher and clothes dryer, too, the Real Simple survey found that American women retain a ­Puritanical streak: They spend considerable amounts of their free time catching up on housework, even though they hate it, because they feel they cannot enjoy themselves properly until all their chores are done. It’s here that puttering finds its greatest value, as a way out of this self-defeating bind. It offers respite from the relentless obligations of a life in which even relaxing can feel like something that needs to be scheduled in, and it does so with a ruse. Putterers carry an aura of being importantly occupied (picking up, gardening, sorting coins) even as they’re doing nada. It’s the cover of busyness that creates the insulating bubble, for it shields you from the disapproval of onlookers—and even from yourself.

by Lisa Miller, New York Magazine
Photo: Alamy

vitreOus via: Flickr

Pere Salinas
via:

A Better Brew

The rise of extreme beer.

Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they’ve been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are wired for inebriation.

The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer. Gasparine is a businessman from Baltimore. He owns a flooring company that uses sustainably harvested wood and he sometimes goes to South America to talk to suppliers. On the trip in question, he had noticed that the local wood-carvers often used a variety called palo santo, or holy wood. It was so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings. It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink. The South Americans used it for salad bowls, serving utensils, maté goblets, and, in at least one case, wine barrels.

Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek. (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was “Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.” It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries. Gasparine decided to send a note to the owner, Sam Calagione. Dogfish was already aging some of its beer in oak barrels. Why not try something more aromatic, like palo santo?

Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery’s answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine’s idea was different. It spoke to Calagione’s own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn’t be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. “I told him to get a shitload,” he remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.”

Gasparine, by then, had begun to have second thoughts. No lumbermill he knew had ever cut so much palo santo, and he wasn’t sure that any could. Bulnesia sarmientoi is a weedy, willowy tree, sometimes called ironwood. It’s difficult to get large boards out of it, and even small ones can dull a saw blade. Wood experts rate a species’ hardness on the Janka scale—a measure of how many pounds of force it takes to drive a half-inch steel ball halfway into a board. Yellow pine rates around seven hundred, oak twice as high. Palo santo hovers near forty-five hundred—three times as high as rock maple. It’s one of the two or three hardest woods in the world.

by Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Martin Schoeller

via:

Extreme Makeover

The story behind the story of Lawrence v. Texas.

In 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Lawrence v. Texas, ruling, by a six-to-three margin, that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Even those of us who followed the case had a rather gauzy notion of what had triggered the litigation. On the night of September 17, 1998, someone made a phone call to the police, warning that a black man was “going crazy with a gun” in an apartment just outside Houston. A clutch of sheriff’s deputies stormed the apartment, and found no gun, but they arrested John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner for having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. And, in an unlikely series of legal twists, the arrests of Lawrence and Garner became a vehicle for challenging old anti-sodomy laws that were used solely to shame and stigmatize gay couples. Lawrence and Garner were arrested for simply doing what loving couples do.

The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his decisive majority opinion, it was even about the physical dimension of love: “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” The opinion used the word “relationship” eleven times.

That is the story that Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, seeks to untell in his important new book, “Flagrant Conduct” (Norton), a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really got to know, and back again through centuries of laws criminalizing “unnatural” sexual activity. What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex? What if, in the end, Lawrence v. Texas was less a whodunnit than a who didn’t? And, if there was no sex, let alone an intimate relationship, in John Lawrence’s apartment that night, how did the case come to be about both?

by Dahlia Lithwick, New Yorker |  Read more:
ILLUSTRATION: Laurent Parienty

The Sugar Daddy Recession

Rian is offering a “monthly allowance” for a “sweet and caring [girl] who appreciates all I do for her.” He’s in his 30s, works in IT and earns good money — so how about $1,000 dollars a month if the sex works out?

He’s not looking for a “professional.” Liam wants to pay for “cuddles” and “fun” from a “hard-up” student. Call it what you like — an arrangement, a delicate excuse for sex work or modern love at its most upfront — there are hundreds of thousands of men all over the world looking for it, and as the job market explodes, more and more women are desperate enough to take them up on it. The women call themselves sugar babies; men like Rian are known as sugar daddies.

For me, it all started with an innocent bit of apartment hunting. Scrolling through online listings for only slightly bedbug-infested sublets in the Bronx last year, I noticed several offers of free room and board “for the right girl.” Wealthy, professional middle-aged men — or people pretending to be wealthy middle-aged professionals — were advertising rooms in their houses for “students” or other young women “having difficulty meeting their costs.” In exchange for free rent, an appropriately pretty and poor girl would need offer sex, affection — and perhaps a little housework.

In the investigative spirit, I decided to reply to some of these “sugar daddies.” Using a dummy email address and the handle gigglesandsparkles86, I pretended to be a hard-up student, and painted a broad-brushstroke picture of a naive, bookish, ingenue, the sort of girl who likes kittens and bubbles and walks in the rain — and exists mostly in the imaginations of lonely men on the Internet or Zooey Deschanel sitcoms. I kept the details brief — “Amy” was 25, like me, a literature student finding it hard to make ends meet, and interested in more details about the arrangement. I had her respond to every ‘”sugar daddy” ad on Craigslist New York and Craigslist London on three separate days. When necessary, I sent a picture loaned by one of my prettiest and furthest-away friends, explicitly asking her for a shot in which all trace of human complexity is hidden behind hair and sunglasses. It took approximately three minutes for the emails to start flooding in.

by Laurie Penny, Salon |  Read more:
Photo: Victoria Andreas via Shutterstock

Priscilla Heine
via:

Relax

A year ago, the Argentinian surfer Jorgelina "Lina" Reyero spent the day at Wategos Beach in Byron Bay, Australia, with a camera attached to her board. Rest Your Eyes production company then "glued up the tapes for your viewing pleasure." (Soundtrack: Fleet Foxes, "Mykonos.")

via: The Hairpin

Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France

“In my view, health is a business in the United States in quite a different way than it is elsewhere,” says Tom Sackville, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government and now directs the IFHP. “It’s very much something people make money out of. There isn’t too much embarrassment about that compared to Europe and elsewhere.”

There is a simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.

That may sound obvious. But it is, in fact, key to understanding one of the most pressing problems facing our economy. In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America’s deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.

There are many possible explanations for why Americans pay so much more. It could be that we’re sicker. Or that we go to the doctor more frequently. But health researchers have largely discarded these theories. As Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan put it in the title of their influential 2003 study on international health-care costs, “it’s the prices, stupid.”

As it’s difficult to get good data on prices, that paper blamed prices largely by eliminating the other possible culprits. They authors considered, for instance, the idea that Americans were simply using more health-care services, but on close inspection, found that Americans don’t see the doctor more often or stay longer in the hospital than residents of other countries. Quite the opposite, actually. We spend less time in the hospital than Germans and see the doctor less often than the Canadians.

“The United States spends more on health care than any of the other OECD countries spend, without providing more services than the other countries do,” they concluded. “This suggests that the difference in spending is mostly attributable to higher prices of goods and services.”

On Friday, the International Federation of Health Plans — a global insurance trade association that includes more than 100 insurers in 25 countries — released more direct evidence. It surveyed its members on the prices paid for 23 medical services and products in different countries, asking after everything from a routine doctor’s visit to a dose of Lipitor to coronary bypass surgery. And in 22 of 23 cases, Americans are paying higher prices than residents of other developed countries. Usually, we’re paying quite a bit more. The exception is cataract surgery, which appears to be costlier in Switzerland, though cheaper everywhere else.

Prices don’t explain all of the difference between America and other countries. But they do explain a big chunk of it. The question, of course, is why Americans pay such high prices — and why we haven’t done anything about it.

by Ezra Klein, Washington Post |  Read more:
Image via:

Stone hut at 14,000 ft in Pheriche, Nepal approaching Mt. Everest.

Houseboat on a beach in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

via: Cabin Porn

Does Couples Therapy Work?

We've all had that horrible experience: you throw a party or invite a couple over for dinner, and they start fighting, right there in front of you — the character assassination, the barely controlled anger, the neurotic transference of their cooled sexual attraction onto, say, the hygiene of the family dog, all of which makes you want to fake choking and hide. Surely bearing witness to couples’ quarrels feels less bad to the pros, those credentialed and compensated marriage and family therapists whose job it is to help significant others work through issues and pain?

“Oh, no,” says Terry Real, a prominent psychologist and one of a growing number of family therapists speaking out about how couples therapy feels from their chairs. “It’s so much worse.” At the dinner table, Dr. Real explains, you’re just a bystander, collateral damage. In a therapy office, he says, “You’re supposed to do something about it.”

The fact that couples therapy stresses out therapists has long been an open secret. The field, however, seems to have decided that now would be an appropriate time for its practitioners to address their feelings and vent. It started with the November/December issue of the trade magazine The Psychotherapy Networker and its cover package, “Who’s Afraid of Couples Therapy?”

“It’s widely acknowledged that couples therapy is the most challenging,” says Richard Simon, the magazine’s editor. “The stakes are high. You’re dealing with volatility. There are often secrets. We were just trying to make explicit something people who’ve done couples therapy already know: You often feel confused, at odds with a least one of your patients, out of control.”

Part of the problem is that the kind of person who tends to become a therapist — empathic, sensitive, calm, accepting — is generally not the kind of person who is a good couples therapist. “The traditional, passive uh-huh, uh-huh is useless,” Dr. Real says. “You have to like action. To manage marital combat, a therapist needs to get in there, mix it up with the client, be a ninja. This is intimidating.”

“It’s frightening to be faced with the force of two strong individuals as they are colliding,” he says.

Peter Pearson and Ellyn Bader, psychologists and founders of the Couples Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., which offers both therapy and training for therapists, describe the experience of counseling high-conflict couples in equally violent if metaphorical terms, as “like piloting a helicopter in a hurricane.”

by Elizabeth Weil, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Koren