A. The development of emotional or behavioral symptoms in response to an idetifiable stressor(s) occurring within 3 months of the onset of the stressor(s)

B. These symptoms or behaviors are clinically significant as evidenced by either of the following:
(1) Marked distress that is in excess of what would be expected from exposure to the stressor
(2) significant impairment in social or occupational (academic) functioning

C. The stress-related disturbance does not meet the criteria for another specific Axis I disorder and is not merely and exacerbation of a preexisting Axis I or Axis II disorder.

D. The symptoms do not represent Bereavement.

E. Once the stressor (or its consequences) has terminated, the symptoms do not persist for more than an additional 6 months. (Though there is a “chronic” specifier to be used if the symptoms last for 6 months or more )

Crap, bollocks, and balderdash.

So if something really unpleasant happens to you, and you are so upset by it that you can’t concentrate at work or school, or don’t feel like going out and socialising … you have a psychiatric disorder. Apparently. Srsly, I quote: “…a reaction to a stressor that might be considered normal or expectable can still qualify for a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder if the reaction is sufficiently severe to cause significant impairment”. So a normal and expectable reaction can indicate the presence of a psychiatric disorder.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: sometimes I despair for my profession.

My team sees scores of young people harming themselves or trying to kill themselves, often over relationship breakups, or bullying, or some other sort of existential angst. Occasionally it’s the result of actual psychiatric illness, but much more often it’s not at all. Schools are getting bags more money for chaplains in the utterly vain hope it will address that sort of thing. They’d do better putting this guy on retainer for a continual tour talking to schoolkids around the country.

However…

That was frakkin’ ridiculous. Gillard, Labor, you need to sort your shit out. Srsly. We came thiiiiis close || to becoming a theocracy with Tony Abbott channelling George bloody Pell. That shouldn’t have happened, and I don’t think it needed to. I present humbly (or perhaps not so humbly) my recommendations to your government:

Ditch Conroy’s filter.

It’s an odious, loathsome idea, condemned by every rational person outside China, Saudi Arabia etc. And quite apart from that it Will. Not. Work. Just add a ? to the end of the url and you’ll be able to go to any website on the list. That gets blocked? Add another character. FFS. And there are half a dozen other easy and quick ways around it. The list will leak, and be a great directory of suggested dodgy sites for anyone who wants to know. And finally, most of the really bad stuff isn’t on the web. The World Wide Web does not equal the Internet, and most of the bad stuff (so I hear from people who know more about this than I) is circulated via all those back alleys of the Internet, rather than the glossy shop fronts of the WWW.

So chuck it. It was a major point of difference between you and the Coalition, and one that was clearly in their favour.

Stop being dicks about marriage.

Let people get married to the people they love. SRSLY. It doesn’t matter if they’re straight, gay, bi, male, female, transgender, what-bloody-ever. Just stop being dicks. Stop pandering to loud conservative idiot pressure groups. I’m about 80% sure I read recently that most of Australia really doesn’t have a problem with the idea of gay marriage. It’s just loud noisome twits like George Pell and Jim Wallace et al.

For who do you work? The religious right, or the majority of the people of Australia?

Meaningful action on pollution

Australia is right up there with the worst per capita CO2 emitters in the world. Some hard action is going to be needed – the coal industry’s unhappiness notwithstanding. It is not an issue that can be sensibly ignored, nor is it rational to withold action until we can say with 100% certainty that it is all anthropogenic. By then it is likely to be too late. Sure, Australia can’t fix the whole world, but that’s not a reason to let your own backyard go to shit. Nor is other countries’ reluctance to act justification for inaction.

Stop unfairly privileging religion.

What is it? Twenty-two million dollars MOAR for school chaplaincy? Untrained, ideologically-based, exclusionary … Simply, efforts at indoctrination. What about more school counsellors? More training and support for school counsellors.

And Special Religious Education. Bloody hell. School time made available for religious instruction? That should be down to parents. End of story. And if you don’t want to do the religious stuff you can’t have actual teaching and learning happen? Ethics. Ethics classes would address in reality what SRE is ostensibly there for – and at which it is demonstrably failing: just look around you. Look at what the SRE “teachers” are teaching. As we’ve seen up in Queensland, they can be shoving young earth creationism down our kids’ throats. SRE is about indoctrinating children into christianity, pure and simple. That has no place in schools.

Aren’t we all supposed to be equal?

And on that note, how is it that by calling your organisation a religion, you can avoid paying taxes and rates? That’s just wrong – at a very basic level. They argue that they do good charitable work. Fine. Set up your charity, open the books, and be not-for-profit and tax-exempt. The church itself is not a charity; being a church does not equal doing charitable work. If a church has a charity, that charity can fairly be tax-exempt, but not the church itself. That’s simply unjust. The same argument applies against their exemption from paying rates.

To Stay in Government:

In all seriousness, Prime Minister Gillard, the closeness of this election should serve as ample demonstration you and your party need to take a good hard look at what you are doing. The above are a few things which honestly are simple, sensible, and just; they would differentiate your party from the Coalition (such differentiation being sadly lacking at the moment), and I think (for what my opinion is worth) they would increase your chances of remaining in government 3 years hence.

Moar srsly, Lolshrink do not want byarsed infurmation, and even tho I wearz impervius-to-bullshit suit, I’s not stoopid enuff to bullshit myself. Teh drug companees onlee giv us fings because they shure it work. Hell, studees even done on it.

So Lolshrink haz taken pledge to not accept any pressents or noms.

Even cheesburger.

When I replied to him that I thought it was great he was going to this trouble, he wrote that he works on the principle that he hopes someone else would do the same for him. That’s not a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” notion, mind you, as there’s no immediate or even necessarily likely tangible benefit to Duane. He’s not doing this so that someone will return a media player he lost the week before or something. What this shows to me is empathy. Duane knows how he would feel if he lost so many photos, and can suppose that the original owner must feel pretty much the same – and he wants to prevent/stop that.

Thinking some more, it occurred to me that empathy like this is an excellent candidate for explaining the evolution of moral behaviour. The idea is sometimes raised that without the existence of an external authority (for example a god) there can be no absolute morals. Unsurprisingly I disagree with this, and it seems to me that empathy goes a long way to explaining how various absolute morals have evolved.

Quite simply, if you can tell how someone else is feeling – or in fact to recognise how someone probably will feel given a certain set of circumstances/events, you’re just not going to want to do unpleasant things to them. You’re not going to beat them up, because you know you would feel sad and upset if you were beaten, and you don’t want to cause that distress to another. You’ll not steal from another, because you know how you’d feel if someone stole from you, and you can suppose that others would feel the same way. To the extent there are absolute morals, I think a strong capacity for empathy pretty much covers it.

Most animals seem to get by without empathy. I would suggest that this is because the groups are small enough and the interactions simple enough. Take say a group of cats (big or small): one bites another – it’ll get quickly smacked around the head for it, which is likely to reduce the probability it’ll do it again. That’s probably fine to manage group behaviour when there’s a limited and simple repertoire. As hominids began to do more complex things, in larger groups, this direct concrete feedback (aka being beaten about the head ) might not have been enough.

Enter empathy. Perhaps some of our ancestors happened to have some capacity for empathy, to recognise the way others were feeling, and to want to prevent them feeling bad. I can definitely see that leading to increased social cohesion (as they were doing good things for each other and not having to box each others ears quite so much), and that increased group cohesion could have led to better survival, compared to groups with fewer empathic individuals. Thus there could have been a positive selection pressure for the capacity for empathy, and as our species gradually evolved to be more empathic, we developed as moral agents; instead of not stealing each other’s food because if they caught us they’d hurt us, we’d not steal because if we did it would make them hungry and unhappy.

I thought as I started typing this that I should look to see what’s already written about morals and empathy. A book called “Empathy and Moral Development. Implications for Caring and Justice” (link is a pdf of the first 20 pages: introduction and overview) by Martin L Hoffman seemed to be the main thing coming up in my google search. I was a bit disconcerted to find that the idea that empathy is an important determinant of the development of morals seems to be held mainly by one guy, who’s been working on it for 30 years Does make me wonder a bit if perhaps an incorrect tree is being barked up … but it’s an idea that still does seem to me to make a lot of sense.

When I was a psychiatric registrar (trainee) I worked for 6 months in a forensic psychiatry unit. I was interested to find when we went through doing careful diagnostic reviews, that of my 25 patients, 5 or 6 had diagnosable pervasive developmental disorders (autistic spectrum disorders). Given that autistic spectrum disorders have a prevalence of about 6 per 1,000 that was a lot. One of the primary deficits in autistic spectrum disorders is in empathy; Simon Baron-Cohen talks about “mind-blindness“. That’s not to say that people with ASD are necessarily immoral; it just measn that because they lack some or all of a normal capacity for empathy, their moral development depends to a larger extent on other factors, such as actually paying conscious attention, for example. Their moral development is likely to be more susceptible than average to harsh, abusive and antisocial upbringings, so that combination could lead more easily to a poorly-developed moral sense.

The other 20 of course didn’t have ASD, but there was an unsurprisingly high incidence of antisocial personality and even psychopathy – both of which involve a lack of empathy. So reflecting back on my time there (anecdotal though it is) serves for me to reinforce the way I’m thinking about empathy and moral evolution.

Conclusion:

In summary, what I think might lie at the base of the evolution of a moral sense – and some moral absolutes – is the capacity for empathy. The more of someone’s else’s pain, unhappiness and distress you can recognise and feel yourself into, the less likely you will be to do something to cause pain, unhappiness or distress to others. That could have led to better group cohesion, as it allows for more complex social interactions than a box around the ears provides for, and that increased cohesion could have conveyed a survival advantage, thus creating a positive selection pressure for the capacity for empathy – and hence morals.

I’d be interested in any comments – especially from any moral philosophers or evolutionary scientists who might stumble across this.