Neuro-politics and academic paralysis
I commend Dr. Nasrallah for his brief, precisely defined, scientific editorial “Neuro-politics: Will you vote with your cortex or limbic system?” (From the Editor, Current Psychiatry. October 2020, p. 14-15,63). Furthermore, he has demonstrated an admirable intellectual juggling ability to discuss politics while staying off it. This is no easy task when we witness stress, fear, and loathing from the media in the streets and academic institutes.
I would like to see Current Psychiatry and the academic psychiatric community dig deeper into what I will term as the emerging academic paralysis. Psychiatric forums and publications have been sheepish about addressing, probing, and analyzing the bitter divisions in the United States and in other nations. It appears apropos to Dr. Nasrallah’s editorial that the limbic system has trumped the prefrontal cortex. As in adolescence, this process has risks, because brain regions governing reward, impulsivity, and sensation-seeking have become—due to the choice of the “Bon Ton” political-correctness church—more influential than higher-order cognitive regions regulating behavioral inhibition, decision-making, and planning,
Similar to a hurricane or tsunami that pushes water into a river, this retrograde shift of feedback pathways is demonstrated by emotional narratives that have flooded the public and drowned facts and evidence-based practice. Furthermore, the science of convenience has emerged, where facts are eligible only if they justify the narrative. Any discussion, debate, or questioning of the rationale of the approach is met with hostility, naming, shaming, and even loss of employment at universities. I have sadly learned from frightened colleagues and from reading reports by academicians whose publications have been either rejected or coerced for revision following acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal or even retracted post-publication due to complaints, harassment, and threats by the politically correct “thought police.” Diversity of thinking and freedom of speech—core values and principles in academic dialogue—have been violated. Academicians are as perplexed as laboratory rats that need to learn which lever to push in order to receive a reward and avoid punishment in an ever-shifting environment. People have been pondering, “Is it time for flight, fright, or fight?” As Buffalo Springfield’s legendary Vietnam 1960s–era song “For What it’s Worth” states: “There’s battle lines being drawn and nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”
What we have learned from history is that the majority of people exercise passivity and hope as bystanders in order to avoid becoming victims of “collateral damage.” Are there no modern Giordano Bruno (the martyr of science), Copernicus, or Michelangelo who would challenge the “Church of the People” that has created new language, terminology, and culture and is on the verge of creating nouveau scientific principles that could lead to a monopoly of one segment of society that threatens pluralism of thought. Do we need dystopic books such as 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, or the experience of the French and Russian revolution (epitomized by the guillotine and the gulag) to remind us that we are a step away from education and reprogramming camps that used to be called universities? The American Association of University Professors’ most recent announcement on academic freedom ominously avoids using terms such as freedom of speech, diversity of opinions, or even pluralism.
I hope that psychiatrists will lead the way back to sanity, starting with focus groups and forums. It would amount to a group cognitive-behavioral therapy of immense proportion following a paradigm of “Problem Solving,” according to Albert Bandura’s social learning model. There is simply no other constructive way to get to the cheese at the end of the maze.
Yifrah Kaminer, MD
Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Pediatrics
University of Connecticut School of Medicine
Farmington, Connecticut
Disclosures: The authors report no financial relationships with any companies whose products are mentioned in this article, or with manufacturers of competing products.