General Rant Thread? General Rant Thread.

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ThatPsyGuy said:
The average post doc salary would be a bit over double of what I get now.

A gain is a gain is a gain.
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Keep living like a grad student or postdoc for a few years after finishing your training and you should be able to make up a decent amount of ground RE: investments and retirement.
 
cara susanna said:
The broader internet needs to learn that disagreeing is not invalidating
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I was just mentioning to a colleague that I REALLY wish the VA would have fewer 'speaker trainings' where experts without caseloads unidirectionally lecture to us, instructing us in 'best practices' on how to do what we do every single day and replace them with debates/discussions around issues that may be 'controversial' or actually worthy of discussion.
 
Fan_of_Meehl said:
I was just mentioning to a colleague that I REALLY wish the VA would have fewer 'speaker trainings' where experts without caseloads unidirectionally lecture to us, instructing us in 'best practices' on how to do what we do every single day and replace them with debates/discussions around issues that may be 'controversial' or actually worthy of discussion.
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In this case this was a celebrity calling out a fan on social media and, apparently, if we say that this person is overreacting we are "invalidating" them
 
MCParent said:
Good thing that’ll be over when you’re a postdoc faculty oops
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Pragma said:
I don’t even know what that is but agree immediately
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It means exactly what it sounds like it would mean, i.e., that neurodevelopmental disorders are spicy and quirky and add flavor to life. In my experience, it’s used by either self-diagnosed folks or folks with legitimate but low-support-needs neurodevelopment disorders who conveniently forget that some individuals with their same disorder deal with very significant functioning and QOL impairments and likely would give anything to not have those issues. It’s demeaning, in my opinion.
 
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Pragma said:
I don’t even know what that is but agree immediately
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I believe it was coined by the (largely online) neurodiversity affirming community. I've heard it mostly in the context of someone saying they/their child doesn't meet full criteria for a neurodevelopmental disorder but has some characteristics of autism or ADHD. So they aren't neurodiverse, just a a little neurospicy.
 
Psychai said:
I believe it was coined by the (largely online) neurodiversity affirming community. I've heard it mostly in the context of someone saying they/their child doesn't meet full criteria for a neurodevelopmental disorder but has some characteristics of autism or ADHD. So they aren't neurodiverse, just a a little neurospicy.
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Pretty soon we'll have "depressivish", and "small a-anxiety, because it's super important to pathologize normal variability.
 
What do people here think of the term neurodiverse, itself? I never even heard this until the past few years and now every master level therapist I run into or see marketing for online is 'neurodiverse affirming' or whatever. What does that even mean? Is this the new trauma-informed therapist/therapy that they all say they do so they don't look like the outcast?
 
AbnormalPsych said:
What do people here think of the term neurodiverse, itself? I never even heard this until the past few years and now every master level therapist I run into or see marketing for online is 'neurodiverse affirming' or whatever. What does that even mean? Is this the new trauma-informed therapist/therapy that they all say they do so they don't look like the outcast?
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I think that how it is used in online communities is not helpful, but when I do have a patient who uses the term, it sparks a discussion of strengths and weaknesses and how many domains of cognitive functioning there can be and the intersection of psycho-bio-social factors. The important part of to figure out what works for the individual and the more atypical someone is, then often the more challenging that can be because what works for the more typical might not be as effective for them. One example is community 12step groups. For patients that this type of social support works, they tend to work very well as a support, but for many of my patients, that is not the case for a number of reason. One that is in the literature is high levels of social anxiety, for example.
 
AbnormalPsych said:
What do people here think of the term neurodiverse, itself? I never even heard this until the past few years and now every master level therapist I run into or see marketing for online is 'neurodiverse affirming' or whatever. What does that even mean? Is this the new trauma-informed therapist/therapy that they all say they do so they don't look like the outcast?
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Sometime in the 90s, a sociology student in Australia wrote a dissertation where they used the term neurodiversity as a catch all to refer to individual differences in people's brains, arguing that those with autism are an identifiable minority whose rights should be protected. The social disability movement (which is ultra popular in the autism literature atm) and a number of journalists caught onto the idea and extended it further to include other neurodevelopmental disorders. The internet found it and organizations feared being seen as non-inclusive, ergo floodgates are opened.

IMHO, I think the term is a truism in the vein of 'you get what you pay for' or 'it is what it is.' What bothers me about it is that so-called advocates for neurodiversity can't explain to me in any coherent way the boundary between what is neurodivergent vs. what is neurotypical. Is major depression neurodivergent? Schizophrenia? Person with mild ADHD that finds ways of coping without intervention? People with ADHD whose symptoms remit before adulthood? Kids with dyslexia that respond well to reading intervention? It seems to me separating people into buckets of neurodiverse or not ignores time and symptom bounds. It also seems like advocates who label a person (either indirectly or directly) as neurotypical if they do not meet some prescribed category of neurodivergent betray their own interests.

If I'm being more charitable, the original idea that there are differences in social and occupational functioning which should be celebrated rather than punished into conformity is a good one. I've worked with many patients whose social and occupational functioning looks different from mine, which in no way diminishes or promotes their value as a human being. But I also don't think it belies the concept of dysfunction. The nuances between the two can be tricky and person-specific, which in my mind is an argument for why we need well-trained, empirically-based clinicians in the field that can make these distinctions though doing so in the face of politic pressure will always be a bit tricky.
 
AbnormalPsych said:
What do people here think of the term neurodiverse, itself? I never even heard this until the past few years and now every master level therapist I run into or see marketing for online is 'neurodiverse affirming' or whatever. What does that even mean? Is this the new trauma-informed therapist/therapy that they all say they do so they don't look like the outcast?
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I h8 it. I also h8 it when ppl say ND, too.

Can we delete the term AuDHD?
 
AbnormalPsych said:
What do people here think of the term neurodiverse, itself? I never even heard this until the past few years and now every master level therapist I run into or see marketing for online is 'neurodiverse affirming' or whatever. What does that even mean? Is this the new trauma-informed therapist/therapy that they all say they do so they don't look like the outcast?
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The way I look at it, the term is not meant for me as a clinician. It's not defined tightly enough to have the validity or reliability for clinical usage. However, I totally understand the importance of groups having their own internally derived and generally neutral-to-positive valances labels for themselves, without some of the "loadedness" of the terminology that us clinicians come up with/use. It makes much more sense to me that a group would want to self-identify, as a whole, with a term like "neurodiversity" rather than "autism spectrum disordered" or something more clinically precise but pejorative and suggesting some overall limitation. From my perspective, it's both a relatively valuable term for a group to use, conveying less clinical "stuffiness" and negative connotations than some of the labels in the DSM5 or other diagnostic systems. Like any term, it can misused, overused, or underused, but when I hear somewhat say it I have a pretty decent sense of what it means colloquially. It ain't perfect, but what is a better option? Also, if you hang around long enough, you do realized that terms (including our real clinical ones) evolve and change or become abandoned and replaced. Not worth getting too upset about it.
 
ClinicalABA said:
It makes much more sense to me that a group would want to self-identify, as a whole, with a term like "neurodiversity" rather than "autism spectrum disordered" or something more clinically precise but pejorative and suggesting some overall limitation.
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To be clear, I have no issues with people forming community around a shared identity though I personally would choose a different term. I do have issues with people seeking a diagnostic label to engender a sense of belonging. That is a clinical issue.
 
R. Matey said:
To be clear, I have no issues with people forming community around a shared identity though I personally would choose a different term. I do have issues with people seeking a diagnostic label to engender a sense of belonging. That is a clinical issue.
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A big issue too is that people start using laymen terms like this to create labels clinicians don’t use in order to invalidate clinicians. “My clinician doesn’t understand my neurodiversity; he says I’m not autistic but he doesn’t seem to recognize neurospiciness”
 
I see neurodiversity refer to mental illness in general and I don't like that, because it implies that all mental health diagnoses have a neurological cause

I also don't really agree that there's such a thing as "neurotypical."
 
R. Matey said:
To be clear, I have no issues with people forming community around a shared identity though I personally would choose a different term.
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I certainly did not mean to apply that you did!
R. Matey said:
I do have issues with people seeking a diagnostic label to engender a sense of belonging. That is a clinical issue.
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Agreed! If someone comes to a clinician looking for a "neurodiversity" diagnosis, I think it's imperative that we help that person understand the difference between clinical and non-clinical categorical terms in the context of the topological systems that we use, including a discussion of the limitations of that topological system outside of the clinical setting.
 
Rant:

Polling data that moves 0.2 pts in a margin of error of 3 pts and gets reported by media as a change.

Polling data that ran polls from Monday to Wednesday, that gets released on Friday, that media on Saturday reports reflects opinions of something that happened on Thursday.
 
What the hell is going on in some of these group practices in terms of standards? Was just carousing indeed for fun and wanted to look up unrestricted license positions (LCPC, LCSW, etc.)

The amount of 50/50, evenings required, non-competes, with HYPER-unrealistic, damn near going to misleading (i.e "Posted salary is standard for 30-35 pts per week. 20-25 is expected to be *insert dumpster pay*") salary standards are astounding.

Why are we trying to scalp the practitioners in our own field? Are we our own worse enemies?

Also the whole LPC, LSW, LCSW, LCPC, LMFT, PsyD, PhD listings makes me roll my eyes into the back of my head.
 
cara susanna said:
In this case this was a celebrity calling out a fan on social media and, apparently, if we say that this person is overreacting we are "invalidating" them
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I’m assuming this has to do with the whole Wicked incident

If so, the celebrity may have been overreacting, but considering her demographics and the context of the situation she was complaining about, her “overreacting” probably has some sociocultural aspect to it. Past experiences influencing her current perception and so on. So the conversation shouldn’t stop at her overreacting, I think it should extend to why she would’ve overreacted in that particular instance. Then it wouldn’t seem as “invalidating“.

If nothing I wrote is ringing a bell, then never mind lol
 
PsyDWannabe said:
I’m assuming this has to do with the whole Wicked incident

If so, the celebrity may have been overreacting, but considering her demographics and the context of the situation she was complaining about, her “overreacting” probably has some sociocultural aspect to it. Past experiences influencing her current perception and so on. So the conversation shouldn’t stop at her overreacting, I think it should extend to why she would’ve overreacted in that particular instance. Then it wouldn’t seem as “invalidating“.

If nothing I wrote is ringing a bell, then never mind lol
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No, it's the right event for sure, but I'm familiar with this person as a Broadway fan and I can say that she's been doing this sort of thing for years. In fact, allegedly she's been blacklisted from the Broadway stage because of a previous social media incident years before she was cast in Wicked.
 
cara susanna said:
No, it's the right event for sure, but I'm familiar with this person as a Broadway fan and I can say that she's been doing this sort of thing for years. In fact, allegedly she's been blacklisted from the Broadway stage because of a previous social media incident years before she was cast in Wicked.
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It was such an overreaction, and it was gross how she weaponized her audience against a small artist. She got a lot of pushback, which I was glad to see.
 
Just left a lifespan brain injury session at NAN and the ABPP-CN speaker highlighted that everyone should read The Body Keeps the Score and recommend it to our patients
 
RxPsych said:
Just left a lifespan brain injury session at NAN and the ABPP-CN speaker highlighted that everyone should read The Body Keeps the Score and recommend it to our patients
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Definitely doesn't ensure competence to have that ABPP. I think it increases chances of competence compared to the general provider, but still some hacks out there.
 
ThatPsyGuy said:
Was just carousing indeed for fun and wanted to look up unrestricted license positions (LCPC, LCSW, etc.)
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Carousing or perusing?
(tbh I've been job hunting long enough that I might swap from perusing to carousing myself soon)
 
WisNeuro said:
Definitely doesn't ensure competence to have that ABPP. I think it increases chances of competence compared to the general provider, but still some hacks out there.
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Also, why it's important for neuropsychologists to get actual psychotherapy training prior to specializing.
 
RxPsych said:
Just left a lifespan brain injury session at NAN and the ABPP-CN speaker highlighted that everyone should read The Body Keeps the Score and recommend it to our patients
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Why is that every time someone brings up that book, I get images of Matthew McConaughey playing the bongo drums in my head and faintly smell weed?

"The body keeps the score! Alright, alright, alright!"
 
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Fan_of_Meehl said:
Overdiagnosis of PTSD --> exponential growth of disability (veteran and SSDI) compensation year to year

The secret is out. It is a 'gold rush' situation (PTSD is based on self-report). The sky's the limit. There's no 'governor' or controller on the explosion of cases and disability claims.

Most people (even in the field, even at VA) are either (a) totally unaware of the issue, (b) aware of the issue but terrified to say so and therefore pretend that it doesn't exist, or (c) are aware of the issue but cynically 'go along' with it to their advantage.

Most people (even in the field, even at VA) think that 'compensation and pension' exams for it (or SS disability exams) are somehow 'thorough' and 'accurate' for this condition. If you know anything about the nature of the average (and majority) of such exams, you know that they are pathetically inadequate and almost always 'confirm' the presence of the condition for disability purposes.

And, just in the past couple of weeks, we have the following news developments: (1) basically, though enjoying MASSIVE budget increases, year-to-year, VA is defending a decision to 'not fill' and 'not hire' for healthcare and mental healthcare provider positions (we have several at our site, I am currently doing the job that THREE FULL-TIME psychologists did for years); and (2) VA 'senior executives' (over 180 of them) at central office received bonuses last year between approximately 60k-100k and, though they did an OIG investigation, found it was improper, and are 'trying' to claw back the money (and getting resistance), why the hell do we need 180+ 'senior execs' at central office pushing paper around and why are they getting such MASSIVE 'bonuses' while we say we don't have the funds to fill psychotherapist positions (while being backed up in clinics for months)?
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Well it might be an issue, but so is over diagnosing bipolar disorder, ignoring legitimate PTSD (with psychotic features), and other related trauma. I cannot speak direclty to the VA since I never worked there, but in the broader world there seems to be a lack of qualified professionals equipped to deal with trauma.
 
EnPsychlopedia said:
(Warning: this is going to be mostly stream-of-consciousness)

How the hell are we going to fix the state of undergraduate psychology education? We do a horrible job. We are oversaturated with undergraduate majors, most of who will not leave college with a fundamental grasp on the principles of scientific inquiry/methods and (proper) statistical sophistication required to even have a working capacity to evaluate social scientific claims. We are oversaturated with undergraduate majors who want a psych degree because either (a) they think it's easy (and in many ways, it is too easy...); (b) they think it's like Criminal Minds; (c) they think psychology is completely about mental health and nothing else; (d) they have been told they're a good listener and want to be a therapist for no other reason; or (e) they want to learn secret mind hacks and delve into the "mysteries of the psyche" *cringe.* We are oversaturated with undergraduate majors who want to be psychologists but have no idea what that entails, but damn it, a master's license just isn't enough! We are oversaturated with professors/instructors who don't have clinical backgrounds who themselves do not understand the nuances of mental health licensure pathways or the actual differences between a PsyD and a PhD (so that inevitably some student is like, "Well my psych professor told me a PsyD is more clinical than a PhD, and that's what I want to do because I don't like research!"). We are oversaturated and doing a horrible job at setting clear expectations in students' minds early on about what the field is actually about, what the epistemic methods actually are, and what/who grad school is for, and how to to know if it's for you. We are uniquely sucky among the sciences at providing students with proper career and educational guidance. Some of that is because we are such a massively broad field, true, but some of it is fixable and needs to fixed.
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This is definitely a problem. A variety of canned lectures, some history of psychology, some basic Excel/SPSS calculations, 'labs' in experimental psychology, a few papers, multiple choice tests and often a curve; voila one has a BA/BS.
 
statsprof said:
Really? What makes you say that? What is 'it' then?
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Severe cluster b characterological pathology. And I'm not being denigrative towards those folks. Often these patients do have legitimate trauma histories. Almost always. Let me be clear; dissociation is real. I've seen it happen in real time. But dissociating into "alters," well.... I've just never seen it. None of my colleagues have ever seen it. At least in the way it's laid out in Sybil, which then parlayed and proliferated into film. I've seen people CLAIM to be dissociating into alters. But they always recall what happens. The best example I can think of in real life of DID was the dude who claimed to have it who strangled all those women in the 1970s in California. He was a psych student and he played it perfectly. But it's really hard to keep that kind of thing up, and he was eventually found to be a fraud and using it as an attempt to get an NGRI.
 
BuckeyeLove said:
Severe cluster b characterological pathology. And I'm not being denigrative towards those folks. Often these patients do have legitimate trauma histories. Almost always. Let me be clear; dissociation is real. I've seen it happen in real time. But dissociating into "alters," well.... I've just never seen it. None of my colleagues have ever seen it. At least in the way it's laid out in Sybil, which then parlayed and proliferated into film. I've seen people CLAIM to be dissociating into alters. But they always recall what happens. The best example I can think of in real life of DID was the dude who claimed to have it who strangled all those women in the 1970s in California. He was a psych student and he played it perfectly. But it's really hard to keep that kind of thing up, and he was eventually found to be a fraud and using it as an attempt to get an NGRI.
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Thats a fair reply.
 
statsprof said:
Well it might be an issue, but so is over diagnosing bipolar disorder, ignoring legitimate PTSD (with psychotic features), and other related trauma. I cannot speak direclty to the VA since I never worked there, but in the broader world there seems to be a lack of qualified professionals equipped to deal with trauma.
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VA and non-VA are two different animals here due to the secondary gain issues in the VA. The best analogue in non-VA settings is ADHD or emotional support animals because that is where the secondary gain is.

As for the lack of professionals qualified to treat trauma. Depending on what the incoming administration does to the VA healthcare system, that may no longer be a problem.
 
WTH is up with the professional culture where you hate overhead lights?! It's just weird. And before you say it's a gender thing, it doesn't happen in other professions. My PCP doesn't have dimmed lights when I see her. My attorney doesn't hit the dimmer switch like Austin Power with her clients. It's unprofessional and creepy. This professional culture should change. There's a light switch on the wall. Use it.
 
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Sanman said:
VA and non-VA are two different animals here due to the secondary gain issues in the VA. The best analogue in non-VA settings is ADHD or emotional support animals because that is where the secondary gain is.

As for the lack of professionals qualified to treat trauma. Depending on what the incoming administration does to the VA healthcare system, that may no longer be a problem.
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Well, not to get political, but Trump has historically done nothing for veterans or for mental health. True on VA versus non-VA.
 
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