Psychological Misinformation
Myths
In the context of the horrific death of Sonya Massey, I hope that helping people challenge psychological misinformation can help us make safer responses to each other. In part 1, I described myths regarding how people with mental health diagnoses reason, and whether they are unpredictable or dangerous. Let’s now look at another couple of myths. As a reminder, I’m not making any statements regarding Sonya or the police officer specifically, just situations like this one.
Myth 3: Mental Illness is brain disease. People with a psychiatric diagnosis have something wrong with their brain.
This is a more difficult myth, and one wherein many people in psychology/psychiatry may disagree with me. Interestingly, I think those people might balk at the second statement while agreeing with the first one, even though the second follows logically from the first. And that logical flow is why this myth is so dangerous. This misunderstanding of how brains/people function creates stigma. You could extend this idea of disease to everyone, and say that everyone has a brain disease, but that makes the idea completely useless. We all have hearts, but that doesn’t mean we say we all have heart disease.
If you don’t extend disease to everyone, you are instead drawing lines. Saying some people have something wrong with their brain, while others do not. This belief is what psychologist Steve Hayes calls The Assumption of Healthy Normality. The idea that there is a healthy, normal way for brains and minds to be.
Psychological misinformation: The assumption of healthy normality
This assumption has two major problems. First, if this were true, we could diagnose mental illness with MRI/fMRI scans. You’d look at a scan, find telltale patterns, and give a diagnosis. However, that’s not what happens. As any physician will tell you, there are no diagnostic scans for any mental illness. Why not? Research has had decades of data on identifying patterns in the brain, and there is plenty to say and plenty more to find out about these patterns. Nevertheless, there are two further challenges here. First, you can find a pattern for any behavioral style: the brain has a role in all behavior. Just because I can identify a brain pattern for people with a fast gait, and a different pattern for people with a slow gait, does not mean that one group’s gait is diseased.
Additionally, all of the research uses grouped or averaged brain scans. I don’t know about you, but I only have one brain, formed from my unique experiences. When you group the images, you enhance the ability to show broad, common features. But you wash out factors that may be important, and lose the sense of variation. Remember, our brains develop independently, have different sizes and shapes and folds. Grouping forces researchers to make assumptions about areas mapping onto one another. This is by no means a given. As a result, small groups may appear to have a pattern they don’t, lose a pattern they do, or show a pattern in a spot that isn’t even for that in them.
Context is essential
The second problem with the assumption of healthy normality is that separating out “abnormal” generally, and separating out the brain specifically, decontextualizes our experience. The brain is just one of many intertwined systems. Yes, within the body – think about all the research now on the gut microbiome as just one example. But also beyond the body. Our individual systems reciprocally interact with other individual systems, and group systems, and communities, and cultures, and the ecosystem, and the universe.
To call a brain “diseased” is to erase all of that context and influence, and put all responsibility and perceived control on the individual. Never mind that your job is overworking you and finances are tight and your blood pressure is high and your commute is longer due to construction and you learned the plastics you use for food and drink may be slowly poisoning you and your individualistic culture tells you that it’s all on you to be in charge of all of it. When you, in consequence, feel persistent anxiety, that’s your brain disease. Does that make any sense?
Phew. That brings us to myth 4.
Myth 4: Individual control
This is a very American myth: I’m in charge of my fate. This psychological misinformation is written into our “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. It says, “If I have the strength and the resolve, I can do anything.” In myth 3, I already described many ways this is not true. When we approach behavioral challenges, this often sets up an interesting paradox. Because of this belief in self-determination, when I see I’m not in complete control of my thoughts, feelings, experiences, or behaviors, the logical conclusion is that I’m weak or broken. Even though this limit on control is the natural state of things. Whereas people who continue to believe they are in complete control are seen, except in extreme situations, as “healthy” and “normal,” even though they are in fact deluded in their belief.
You can perhaps see where this is going. Someone who believes in their own control, and interprets another as being out of control, may end up with a much more deluded impression of what is happening than someone who recognizes their own lack of control.
Additional relevant biases
Alongside these unnecessary myths, there are cognitive biases that, just like illusions, are a sometimes negative biproduct of cognitive systems working as we expect them to. For example, we are prone to confirmation and actor-observer biases regarding reasoning and predictability. Remember, we are all both reasonable and unreasonable, predictable and unpredictable. Actor-observer biases make us attribute stable, internal traits to others’ unreasonable and unpredictable behavior. That’s what they’re like. And lead us to attribute our own behavior (and that of others “like us”) to situational factors. I was having a hard day. I’ve gotten hurt by that in the past. Once we’re interpreting behavior differently, confirmation bias kicks in and makes it seem like fact, rather than opinion. We will seek out information that confirms stable attributions. Why is this woman acting confused? Of course: she has a mental illness. Why am I afraid? I must be under attack.
Tying it all together
In going over these myths and biases, I have left the emotional core of this essay in the distant past. It’s time to bring that back. When a horrible loss like Sonya’s death happens, – and before the next one – how can we grow as a community? First is to honor the value of our emotional responses. Our grief, fear, and anger all play a role in reminding us how important our strengths and failings are in how we treat each other.
Next, is to take a look at the myths and biases we carry with us, and which pervade our cultural systems. Myths that suggest that people with mental health diagnoses reason differently; or are unpredictable or dangerous; or have something wrong with their brains; or are lacking in control. Basically, that someone given a diagnosis is any different from someone not. We all vary, according to similar frameworks, in all of these ways. Including biases, based on psychological misinformation, that lead us to select skewed information about others, and then only look for information that confirms this skew.
What can we do?
With all of that knowledge, we can recognize that we have more – and less – control over preventing these tragedies than we think we do. More in that these myths only persist when we all continue to act on them. They are our myths, and we can correct them. Correcting them in how we talk to each other – listening, instead of assuming – and how we treat each other: with compassion, instead of judgment. Correcting them through cooperative action: fixing the many systems that hold onto these myths as facts and promote ongoing harm. And correcting by not being just a bystander, but an ally. There was a second police officer present at Sonya’s death. It is this officer’s perspective we witness in the footage. Bystanders can have a lot of power to diffuse tensions, slow people down, and inject compassion in the midst of fear.
And less control. Less in that when we feel off, or see someone else seeming off, many of the factors in control of the situation have already happened. Less in that when we go in believing we are in charge and have control, we really lose control, stop listening, and act on predetermined biases.
Psychological misinformation: Our social contract
I’ve already talked about our legal system elsewhere, and its systemic challenges in seeking justice. Sonya’s death, and the loss of many others like her, focuses me on our social contract. Systems like the law and the police and healthcare are made by us and for us, not vice versa. We set them up to protect and take care of each other, and we must not lose sight of that.