No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global

[ed. Words fail.  wtf...invited to be interviewed?]

A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

The hurdles to building a criminal case were always high with MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy in October after a huge bet on European debt unnerved the market. But a lack of charges in the largest Wall Street blowup since 2008 is likely to fuel frustration with the government’s struggle to charge financial executives. Just a few individuals — none of them top Wall Street players — have been prosecuted for the risky acts that led to recent failures and billions of dollars in losses.

In the most telling indication yet that the MF Global investigation is winding down, federal authorities are seeking to interview the former chief of the firm, Jon S. Corzine, next month, according to the people involved in the case. Authorities hope that Mr. Corzine, who is expected to accept the invitation, will shed light on the actions of other employees at MF Global.

Those developments indicate that federal prosecutors do not expect to file criminal charges against the former New Jersey governor. Mr. Corzine has not yet received assurances that he is free from scrutiny, but two rounds of interviews with former employees and a review of thousands of documents have left prosecutors without a case against him, say the people involved in the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

by Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess, Dealbook |  Read more:

Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

A Novel Asks Seattle to Laugh at Itself

[ed. Love the quote about hairstyles.]

Maria Semple made an instant, jarring discovery when she moved with her boyfriend and daughter from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city whose Patagonia-clad inhabitants like to talk about bicycling, the environment and the eternally dull question (in her opinion) of whether it might rain.

“It’s just not a funny place,” said Ms. Semple, a novelist and veteran comedy writer who worked on the television shows “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You.” “I was in a miserable mind frame, and I found that I was driving around and all I was thinking about were funny things about how awful Seattle was. I would do these riffs in my head and I would polish them in my head. It was poisonous and self-pitying.”

But from those silently brooding riffs came an idea for her next heroine: Bernadette Fox, a difficult, creatively frustrated misanthrope who, like Ms. Semple, had relocated to Seattle from Los Angeles and loathed her new city.

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” published this week by Little, Brown & Company, has emerged as one of the most absorbing novels of the summer. It tells the story of Bernadette, a former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school.

In Bernadette’s eyes Seattle is an earnest, unfashionable, bewildering place where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly ubiquitous — “turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman,” Bernadette rants. “It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.”  (...)

Last week at the Elliott Bay Book Company, an independent shop in Seattle, a buyer, Rick Simonson, listened in as two browsing women were chatting about Ms. Semple’s book. One of them said she wanted to read it; another huffily pointed out a Bernadette zinger that has been repeated in reviews, mocking Seattle residents for having only two hairstyles: “short gray hair and long gray hair.”

“She was pretty miffed by that line,” Mr. Simonson said, adding that he compared the response to Ms. Semple’s book to the attention brought to Portland, Ore., by the satirical television series “Portlandia.” “I think the reaction will be communal and social that way, and I think it’s a book that people will talk about. In a way, Seattle hasn’t had anyone really do anything that makes it look at itself and laugh.”

by Julie Bosman, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams

Zoe Pawlak: Blue Holding
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National Night Out

[ed. I'll admit I'd never heard of this initiative until today (and I read a fair amount, which tells me it might have a bit of a marketing problem). But what a great idea. Almost like Halloween for homeowners.]

The first Tuesday in August is a red-letter evening in many towns and cities—National Night Out. This year August 7th is the occasion for tens of thousands of people across the U.S. to renew their commitment to stopping crime by looking out for one another. It’s also a celebration of community and all that we share as neighbors.

Up to 30 million people take to the streets and parks, with no one calling the cops. Indeed, local police departments helped organize this evening of block parties, neighborhood festivals, and music performances. The idea is that when people step out of their homes to meet the neighbors, communities are safer. People who know one another are more likely to work together to prevent crime in their community.

For most people, neighborhoods are a form of the commons that is most familiar. Nearly every one of us lives in one, and they are important to our lives whether we realize it or not. If your home is burglarized while you’re away, it’s your neighbor who calls the police. Even more likely, your neighbor’s presence strolling down the sidewalk or keeping on her porch light discourages hoods from breaking in at all.

That’s why police want to mobilize the power of the commons to fight crime. Spending many years out on the streets, they have come to understand that government and the private sector can only do so much to assure public safety. A lot depends on people themselves, working together in informal but powerful ways to protect their community from violence, theft, and vandalism.

by Jay Walljasper, Guernica |  Read more:

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Who Picks Assisted Suicide?

Dr. Richard Wesley has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the incurable disease that lays waste to muscles while leaving the mind intact. He lives with the knowledge that an untimely death is chasing him down, but takes solace in knowing that he can decide exactly when, where and how he will die.

Under Washington State’s Death With Dignity Act, his physician has given him a prescription for a lethal dose of barbiturates. He would prefer to die naturally, but if dying becomes protracted and difficult, he plans to take the drugs and die peacefully within minutes.

“It’s like the definition of pornography,” Dr. Wesley, 67, said at his home here in Seattle, with Mount Rainier in the distance. “I’ll know it’s time to go when I see it.”

Washington followed Oregon in allowing terminally ill patients to get a prescription for drugs that will hasten death. Critics of such laws feared that poor people would be pressured to kill themselves because they or their families could not afford end-of-life care. But the demographics of patients who have gotten the prescriptions are surprisingly different than expected, according to data collected by Oregon and Washington through 2011. (...)

Oregon put its Death With Dignity Act in place in 1997, and Washington’s law went into effect in 2009. Some officials worried that thousands of people would migrate to both states for the drugs.

“There was a lot of fear that the elderly would be lined up in their R.V.’s at the Oregon border,” said Barbara Glidewell, an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University.

That has not happened, although the number of people who have taken advantage of the law has risen over time. In the first years, Oregon residents who died using drugs they received under the law accounted for one in 1,000 deaths. The number is now roughly one in 500 deaths. At least 596 Oregonians have died that way since 1997. In Washington, 157 such deaths have been reported, roughly one in 1,000.

In Oregon, the number of men and women who have died that way is roughly equal, and their median age is 71. Eighty-one percent have had cancer, and 7 percent A.L.S., which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The rest have had a variety of illnesses, including lung and heart disease. The statistics are similar in Washington.

There were fears of a “slippery slope” — that the law would gradually expand to include those with nonterminal illnesses or that it would permit physicians to take a more active role in the dying process itself. But those worries have not been borne out, experts say.

Dr. Wesley, a pulmonologist and critical care physician, voted for the initiative when it was on the ballot in 2008, two years after he retired. “All my career, I believed that whatever makes people comfortable at the end of their lives is their own choice to make,” he said.

But Dr. Wesley had no idea that his vote would soon become intensely personal. (...)

In both Oregon and Washington, the law is rigorous in determining who is eligible to receive the drugs. Two physicians must confirm that a patient has six months or less to live. And the request for the drugs must be made twice, 15 days apart, before they are handed out. They must be self-administered, which creates a special challenge for people with A.L.S.

Dr. Wesley said he would find a way to meet that requirement, perhaps by tipping a cup into his feeding tube.

The reasons people have given for requesting physician-assisted dying have also defied expectations.

Dr. Linda Ganzini, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, published a study in 2009 of 56 Oregonians who were in the process of requesting physician-aided dying.

“Everybody thought this was going to be about pain,” Dr. Ganzini said. “It turns out pain is kind of irrelevant.”

At the time of each of the 56 patients’ requests, almost none of them rated pain as a primary motivation. By far the most common reasons, Dr. Ganzini’s study found, were the desire to be in control, to remain autonomous and to die at home. “It turns out that for this group of people, dying is less about physical symptoms than personal values,” she said.

by Katie Hafner, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Leah Nash

Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall

Making a weekly newsmagazine has always been a tough racket. It takes a big staff working on punishing deadlines to aggregate the flurry of news, put some learned topspin on it and package it for readers. But that job now belongs to the Web and takes place in real time, not a week later.

Tina Brown may have understood the digital insurgency that was disrupting the publishing business, but that didn’t stop her from stepping into the maw at the end of 2010, after Sidney Harman bought Newsweek. She married her Web site, The Daily Beast, with Newsweek in an attempt to put the paddles to a franchise gone cold, but Mr. Harman is now gone and his family has withdrawn its financial support. With losses continuing to pile up, that leaves IAC/InterActiveCorp, which also owns The Daily Beast, holding the bag.

As the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Ms. Brown was an odd choice to be Newsweek’s savior. Even in its diminished state — Mr. Harman bought it for a dollar in addition to assuming some $40 million in liabilities — the magazine is aimed at a mass audience in the kind of Middle America places where Ms. Brown, a hothouse flower of Manhattan media, rarely visits. Still, she has been able to maneuver The Daily Beast into the middle of the conversation and she has never lost her touch for getting people talking. But a newsweekly is a brutal, perhaps unwinnable, challenge.

Because of changes to the informational ecosystem, weeklies have been forced to leave behind the news and become magazines of ideas. Ms. Brown understood that; it’s just that some of her ideas weren’t always very good. Sometimes she tried too hard — Barack Obama was depicted as the first gay president — and sometimes not hard enough, as with last week’s cover about fancy dining around the world.

People who predicted that her effort would come to tears might be tempted to do an end zone dance now. But that would be dumb. The problem is not Tina Brown or her conceptual obsessions, or even the calcified formula of the weekly magazine.

The problem is more existential than that: magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.

Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.

I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, “When the airplane suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn’t crash, you still end up with your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers.”

by David Carr, NY Times |  Read more:

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Need an Expert? Try the Crowd

In 1714, the British government held a contest. They offered a large cash prize to anyone who could solve the vexing “longitude problem” — how to determine a ship’s east/west position on the open ocean — since none of their naval experts had been able to do so.

Lots of people gave it a try. One of them, a self-educated carpenter named John Harrison, invented the marine chronometer — a rugged and highly precise clock — that did the trick. For the first time, sailors could accurately determine their location at sea.

A centuries-old problem was solved. And, arguably, crowdsourcing was born.

Crowdsourcing is basically what it sounds like: posing a question or asking for help from a large group of people. Coined as a term in 2006, crowdsourcing has taken off in the internet era. Think of Wikipedia, and its thousands of unpaid contributors, now vastly larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Crowdsourcing has allowed many problems to be solved that would be impossible for experts alone. Astronomers rely on an army of volunteers to scan for new galaxies. At climateprediction.net, citizens have linked their home computers to yield more than a hundred million hours of climate modeling; it’s the world’s largest forecasting experiment.

But what if experts didn’t simply ask the crowd to donate time or answer questions? What if the crowd was asked to decide what questions to ask in the first place?

Could the crowd itself be the expert?

That’s what a team at the University of Vermont decided to explore — and the answer seems to be yes.

by Joshua E. Brown, University of Vermont |  Read more:

Photo: James Cridland

Casinos as the Bleak New Senior Citizen Center

As with many adventures, I didn't realize I was on one until I was deep in the belly of a southern Louisiana casino where 35 cent bets flowed faster than the free Diet Coke. My elbow rested on the walker of an elderly gentleman who was teaching me slots. He worried I was going to waste all my money. I appreciated his grandfatherly concern even as I struggled not to ask him, "Is this really a responsible thing to do?"

As a hospice professional and pastor, I realize the importance of communities encouraging active lifestyles among the elderly. By 2030, over 20% of our US population will be over 65. Caregivers, churches, and governments will be looking for recreational outlets that offer community and fun while honoring the independence and dignity of older Americans. Half of all adult visitors to casinos last year aged 50 and older, so I decided to observe the American Gaming Association's (AGA) "Responsible Gaming Education Week" -- which is held annually since 1998 in the first week of August -- by asking: do casinos do justice to our seniors? What does it mean for anyone, much less vulnerable aging people, to gamble "responsibly"?

In an oft-quoted AGA survey from 2002 , the Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., and The Luntz Research Companies report that 62 percent of seniors see casinos as merely an inexpensive day out for someone on a fixed income. They argue that "90% of seniors don't want someone telling them how to spend their time or money" and that "senior citizens believe gambling is a question of personal freedom...[that] they should be able to go into a casino, have their own budget, and spend their disposable income the way they want." The AGA uses their annual "Responsible Gambling Education Week" to suggest that pathological gambling is rare. But reading between the lines of the "educational" factoids and pop quizzes they offer it is easy to see the real message: there is NO such thing as luck. The longer and faster you play any "game," the more money the house guarantees you will lose.

My adventure begins with a leisurely, summer weekday morning drive down River Road in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The casino boat parking lot is nearly full at 11:30 a.m. Valets are using casino-logoed scooters to assist disabled drivers from their cars and through the sliding glass doors. They shout "Good luck to you!" as nurse's aides, clad in scrubs, unload other seniors from nursing home and assisted living facility vans, pushing their wheelchairs into the brightly lit facility.

Inside, an elderly man sleeps with his walker at his side. I am looking for the buffet ($2.99 senior day) but am soon lost, and I end up wandering down the descending ramp that leads to the gambling boat. When I pass through a turnstile three blazer-clad security men offer a jovial, "Good luck to you! Good luck to you!" A silver-haired man, tripping on the high pile of the carpet, redirects me to the buffet.

by Amy Ziettlow, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Reuters

Just a Friendly Robocall

Hi there. I hope I am not disturbing your dinner. This is Arnold Landis, calling to discuss a most crucial choice you’re going to have to make this upcoming November. You know what’s meant a lot to me? All of those times we attended each other’s birthday parties, back-yard barbecues, and watching each other’s kids play soccer on Saturday mornings. What memories! And while my marriage is ending, our friendship has only just begun. This November, when the Landis divorce is finalized, do the right thing. Choose Arnold Landis as your friend for the future. Paid for by Arnold Landis.

Hello. This is Maxine Landis, and I want to talk to you about something very valuable to me. Loyalty. Through the years, I have enjoyed the friendship of just so many honest, hard-working people. People like Walter and Marie Pollard, who have welcomed me into their wonderful monthly canasta nights. People like Lester and Susan Fenner, who, in 2006, helped me organize a block-wide sidewalk sale, only to see it blossom into an annual and much cherished tradition in our development. I believe that these bonds were forged and strengthened thanks to one simple thing: loyalty. This November, stay loyal. Stay friends with Maxine. Paid for by Maxine Landis.

Hello, friend. This is Arnold Landis calling. Maxine Landis has been speaking a lot about loyalty of late. I’ve seen firsthand how easily such “loyalty” can be tested. I’ve seen Maxine Landis coldly cut off friends over something as minor as an unreturned serving dish. I’ve seen names get crossed off Maxine’s invite list as retribution for a perceived snub at the supermarket. I’ve seen Maxine Landis refuse to attend holiday parties in protest against what she considered a garish Christmas-light display. If loyalty comes easily to Maxine Landis, disloyalty comes even easier. Don’t get stuck with a backstabber. Choose Arnold Landis as the friend you keep this November.

This is Maxine Landis. I wasn’t alarmed by Arnold Landis’s recent turn toward name-calling, since I’ve heard Arnold Landis call his so-called friends much, much worse. People like Martin Powter, whom he once referred to as Captain Baldspot. People like Elisabeth Tandy, whom Arnold nicknamed The One With the Alcoholic’s Nose. People like the Blitsteins, whom Arnold called The Shitsteins. Do you want to remain constantly on guard, wondering what horrible names you’ll soon be called behind your back? Of course not. Go with Maxine.

by Mike Sacks and Bob Powers, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Jules Fieffer

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The Typeface of Truth

I know in my heart that graphic design is important. Sometimes the fate of nations depend on it, sometimes it's the missing link between a soft drink brand and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, sometimes it just makes you happy. But I also know that the ingredients used by graphic designers — colors, shapes, typefaces — are fundamentally mysterious. What do they mean? How do they work? Why does one work better than another? What criteria should we use to choose?

This ambiguity can be maddening, especially to clients, who in desparation will invoke anecdotes and folk wisdom to help control an otherwise rudderless process. I've been told in meetings that triangles — to take one example — are the "most energetic" (or the "most aggressive"?) shape. I've been asked if it's true that white means death in Japan. Or is it black? Or red? Or China?

To tell you the truth, I've always appreciated this ambiguity. Like other experienced designers, I appear to navigate this miasma of hearsay with confidence. For the truth is that in our field, to quote screenwriter William Goldman, "Nobody knows anything." Black can be ominous or elegant. Triangles can be trendy or timeless. And typefaces? Hmm! Typefaces can be...anything you want them to be, right? There are many reasons to pick any one typefaces, all of them more or less arbitrary.

So imagine a client demands that text be set in "the most credible typeface." I would probably hide a smile and say there's no such thing.

But there is such a thing, says Errol Morris.

Several weeks ago, Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, posted a simple quiz in his New York Times Opinionator blog. Ostensibly, the object of the quiz was to determine if the reader was an optimist or a pessimist. You read a short introduction about the likehood of an asteroid hitting the earth, and then an indented passage from a book by David Deutch, The Beginning of Infinity, in which he claims "we live in an era of unprecedented safety" and will likely be able to defend ourselves against such an impact. Morris then asked the reader to agree or disagree with the truth of that claim, and to indicate the degree of confidence the reader had in his or her conclusion. The result, supposedly, was to determine how many of us are optimists (finding Deutch's statement to be true) versus how many are pessimists (finding the statement to be false).

But it was all a trick. Morris was actually testing something completely different: the effect of fonts on truth. "Or to be precise," as he points out in his followup post today (part 1, part 2), "the effect on credulity. Are there certain fonts that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?"

To find out, he had a colleague, Benjamin Merman, create a program that changed the font of the indented David Deutch passage each time the article was first opened. Each person taking the quiz would read the passage in one of six randomly assigned fonts: Baskerville,Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, or Trebuchet. So the test had nothing to do, really, with optimist or pessimism. Instead, it was meant to find out if setting the passage in one typeface or another would lead people to believe it more.

Now, if you're like me, you already know what the least trustworthy typeface is, right? It's got to be Comic Sans: goofy, unloved, mocked Comic Sans. And it turns out we're right. According to Morris, people seem to be consciously aware of Comic Sans: it was in the news as recently as a few weeks ago, when it caused a minor dustup in the midst of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle. This awareness seems to engender, in Morris's words, "contempt and summary dismissal." And good riddance, say I and countless other graphic designers.

But what about the other side of the equation? Is there a font that inclines us to believe that a sentence that's set in it is true? After analyzing the research, Morris says the answer is yes. And that typeface is Baskerville.

To Morris's surprise, the results of the test showed a clear difference between the performance of Baskerville and other fonts — not just Baskerville and Comic Sans (no contest); or Baskerville and Trebuchet or Helvetica (a clear serif versus sans distinction); but even Baskerville and Georgia (a lovely, and arguably even more legible serif by Matthew Carter). Compared to versions in the other typefaces, the passage set in Baskerville had both the highest rate of agreement and the lowest rate of disagreement. This led Morris to the inevitable conclusion: Baskerville is the typeface of truth.

by Michael Bierut, Design Observatory |  Read more:
Image: John Baskerville, The Book of Common Prayer, 1762.

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A Greener, Safer Empty Lot

Vacant lots in neighborhoods can mean trouble. Often overgrown and kind of creepy, these places can be magnets for crime, with tall grasses and bushes that can conceal criminal activity or serve as hiding places for weapons. They may even be good places to stash a body.

But not all empty lots breed crime. New research suggests that vacant lots that are cleaned up and maintained see reduced crime in their immediate surroundings. Cleaning and greening empty lots can even make people feel safer, according to the study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, published this week in the journal Injury Prevention.

The research is based on two separate clusters of vacant lots in Philadelphia – one set that was eventually cleaned up and maintained and one that wasn't. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society helped by removing debris from some sites, planting grass and trees, building fences and doing maintenance every two weeks. The researchers analyzed police records for these areas for the three months before the empty lot greening and the three months after and found a decrease in total crime as well as drops in assaults with and without a gun. Residents living near the greened lots reported feeling significantly safer than those living near the untouched empty lots.

The study builds on the previous work of one its main authors, who analyzed thousands of greened and non-greened empty lots over the course of more than a decade and found significant decreases in gun assaults around the areas that had been greened.

Though the findings of this newer study show only slight decreases in crime near the cleaned-up lots, they make a good case that neighborhoods with overgrown empty lots should clean them up. A little time with a weedwhacker may be all it takes to stop your block from becoming a crime den.

by Nate Berg, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo credit: Editor B/Flickr

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Psychiatry’s Legitimacy Crisis

About 40 years ago, American psychiatry faced an escalating crisis of legitimacy. All sorts of evidence suggested that, when confronted with a particular patient, psychiatrists could not reliably agree as to what, if anything, was wrong. To be sure, the diagnostic process in all areas of medicine is far more murky and prone to error than we like to think, but in psychiatry the situation was — and indeed still is — a great deal more fraught, and the murkiness more visible. It didn’t help that psychiatry’s most prominent members purported to treat illness with talk therapy and stressed the central importance of early childhood sexuality for adult psychopathology. In this already less-than-tidy context, the basic uncertainty regarding how to diagnose what was wrong with a patient was potentially explosively destabilizing.

The modern psychopharmacological revolution began in 1954 with the introduction of Thorazine, hailed as the first “anti-psychotic.” It was followed in short order by so-called “minor tranquilizers:” Miltown, and then drugs like Valium and Librium. The Rolling Stones famously sang of “mother’s little helper,” which enabled the bored housewife to get through to her “busy dying day.” Mother’s helper had a huge potential market. Drug companies, however, were faced with a problem. As each company sought its own magic potion, it encountered a roadblock of sorts: its psychiatric consultants were unable to deliver homogeneous populations of test subjects suffering from the same diagnosed illness in the same way. Without breaking the amorphous catchall of “mental disturbance” into defensible sub-sets, the drug companies could not develop the data they needed to acquire licenses to market the new drugs.

In a Cold War context, much was being made about the way the Soviets were stretching the boundaries of mental illness to label dissidents as mad in order to incarcerate and forcibly medicate them. But Western critics also began to look askance at their own shrinks and to allege that the psychiatric emperor had no clothes. A renegade psychiatrist called Thomas Szasz published a best-selling broadside called The Myth of Mental Illness, suggesting that psychiatrists were pernicious agents of social control who locked up inconvenient people on behalf of a society anxious to be rid of them, invoking an illness label that had the same ontological status as the label “witch” employed some centuries before. Illness, he truculently insisted, was a purely biological thing, a demonstrable part of the natural world. Mental illness was a misplaced metaphor, a socially constructed way of permitting an ever-wider selection of behaviors to be forcibly controlled under the guise of helping people. (...)

To address the embarrassment, one of the profession’s internal critics, Robert Spitzer of Columbia University, persuaded the American Psychiatric Association to authorize the development of a new diagnostic manual. The document he and his Task Force produced, approved and published in slightly modified form in 1980 as the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM III for short) launched a revolution in American psychiatry whose effects are still felt today. Versions III R (revised), IV, and IV TR (text revision) and DSM 5 (to be released in 2013) have been produced with numbing regularity. The advent of DSM III and its descendants constitute the backdrop to the argument presented in the new book by Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders.

Horwitz and Wakefield want to argue for the harmful impact of what is often called the neo-Kraepelinian revolution in psychiatry. Emil Kraepelin was the fin-de-siècle German psychiatrist who launched the fashion for descriptive psychopathology and first made the distinction between dementia praecox and manic-depressive illness. Horwitz and Wakefield suggest that the efforts of Kraepelin’s late-twentieth century successors to make psychiatric diagnoses more rigorous and predictable have instead enabled psychiatric pathology to get out of hand. They identify two problems: the psychiatric profession’s obsession with simplistic, symptom-based diagnoses, and the looseness of its criteria for defining mental states as pathology. All sorts of anxieties that are in reality part of the normal range of human emotion and experience have been transformed by professional sleight of hand into diseases. The upshot, they contend, is that whereas thirty years ago less than five percent of Americans were thought to suffer from an anxiety disorder, nowadays some widely cited epidemiological studies have decreed that as many as 50 percent of us do so.

by Andrew Scull, LA Review of Books |  Read more: