In the Media
Dr. Smaller has had numerous letters to the editor published in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times and Saugatuck-Douglas Local Observer.
He has also appeared on local and national television and radio including Chicago Tonight with John Calloway, Fox News, ABC News, NBC News and National PBS and NPR radio.
Some clips..
Therapists say stop diagnosing Britney (Associated Press Jan08)
Layoffs Cause Self Esteem Problems, Author Finds PBS Setp04 2006)
Color and Trauma (Apsaa Public Forum Dec 1997)
Therapists say stop 'diagnosing' Britney
"Britney's Mental Illness." "Bipolar Britney?" And so on. Under such headlines, articles have gone on to quote psychiatrists or psychologists who've never met Spears, saying she exhibits "classic" signs of one disorder or another. "I've been very upset about this," says Mark Smaller, a psychoanalyst from Chicago who attended last week's meetings at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. "This idea of making a diagnosis of someone they've never met is completely inappropriate, and it gives mental health professionals a bad name." Not to mention that it's medically wrong. Smaller says that to make any real diagnosis, it can take several thorough consultations with a patient at the very least. "Trying to make such a diagnosis based purely on someone's behavior" - and worse, their behavior as portrayed selectively by the media - "is scientifically impossible," says Smaller, also director of the Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation. But even more, say Smaller and other therapists interviewed, it could actually harm Spears by preventing her from getting the real help she needs. And on a broader scale, such therapy-by-media could discourage other troubled people from seeking care as well. "It's not right to this one person," says Dr. Gail Saltz, a New York psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. "But on a grander scheme, it also makes people afraid. They're afraid their confidence might be broken. Or they're afraid they'll become labeled. And labels are very frightening to people." It's hardly a cause for wonder how coverage of Spears has reached the point of quibbling over which mental illness might afflict her. Each development in the Spears story, including Wednesday's sudden departure from court before a custody hearing, has upped the scandal ante. From her "mommy foibles," which now seem positively quaint, to her head-shaving incident to her attacking a car with an umbrella to her painful custody dispute, her story gets so much more dire with each passing month that you wonder what could possibly be next. But the moment that set headline writers into overdrive came on Jan. 3, when police were called to Spears' home after she refused to turn over her two boys to a representative for ex-husband Kevin Federline, locking herself in a room with one boy. Police, who said she was intoxicated, had to restrain her; paramedics were called and she was whisked away to a hospital, paparazzi in pursuit. That's when TV's "Dr. Phil" McGraw paid a visit, then made public statements later that she was in dire need of medical and psychological help. Relatives said he'd crossed the line in talking about her publicly, and he later said he regretted making the statements. But numerous other psychiatrists and mental health professionals have been quoted as well, speculating on what might afflict Spears. And that, says People magazine's deputy managing editor, Peter Castro, was a necessary element of the story. "What people need to realize is that we had sources very close to Britney - more than one - telling us that they believed she did indeed suffer from mental illness, and some even used the term bipolar disorder," says Castro. "So it was only responsible on our part to ask a specialist in this kind of behavior. You had a woman here who was hospitalized. This is the first time we were hearing that hey, all this nutty behavior may really have something to do with mental illness, maybe bipolar disorder." The National Institute of Mental Health defines bipolar disorder (also known as manic-depressive illness) as a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in a person's mood, energy and ability to function. About 5.7 million American adults or about 2.6 percent of the population age 18 and older are said to have the disorder. It is often treated with medications known as mood stabilizers. Saltz, who comments regularly in the media, says she's frequently been asked to comment on Spears. It's one thing, she notes, to discuss what concerns a doctor might have when a young woman has two toddlers, is going through a divorce and is suspected of substance abuse. It's another thing, she says, to speculate she has something specific like bipolar disorder. After all, Saltz says, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder is a very complicated one - one that takes knowledge and context, a lot of questions and a lot of patient history. "It's not like a blood test," she says. "Brains don't have a check box." Others point out that it's exceedingly hard to diagnose any mental illness, let alone bipolar disorder, when substance abuse plays a possible role. "How do you know what's going on?" asks Dr. Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist and analyst in New York. "It confounds the diagnosis because you don't have a clean slate." Jaffe says another contributing factor has to be considered: the strain of the constant media coverage itself. "What's all this media stress doing to her?" she asks. All the speculation over Spears' mental health strikes Jaffe, for one, as unseemly, and for a reason entirely unrelated to the medical issues. "Everyone's standing around and watching her fall apart, and that's just very sad," says Jaffe. "This is someone's life." Source Miami Herald |
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PBS NewsHour: Originally Aired: September 4, 2006
Layoffs Cause Self Esteem Problems, Author Finds
Click the streaming video tab to view Dr. Smaller talking about the effects of Layoffs at the American Psychoanalysic Meeting.
With the increase in outsourcing jobs to maintain a competitive edge in the global economy, Americans are facing more frequent layoffs at the workplace. This phenomenon is causing low self esteem and other psychological problems among people losing their jobs.
Trauma caused by unemployment
AL DUNLAP, Former CEO, Scott Paper Co.: I had a corporation where every person stood the chance of losing their job, so, I got rid of 35 percent of the people. But 65 percent of the people have a more secure future than they've ever had. And we did this without a single labor interruption or a single grievance. We must have been doing something right.
PAUL SOLMAN: Or something wrong. Dunlap, already know as "Chain Saw Al," was later pursued by the SEC for fraud, and settled by paying out millions and being banned from corporate America for life. Yet, his book back then, "Mean Business," became a best-seller -- layoffs, a more and more acceptable way to boost a firm's stock price by making it leaner and meaner.
Now, in his new book, "The Disposable American," Lou Uchitelle argues that this legitimizing of layoffs has come at a devastating cost to workers and American society as a whole.
LOUIS UCHITELLE: My book is not about unemployment. It's about the blow, the trauma that people suffer when they're told they don't have value.
PAUL SOLMAN: The evidence of that trauma comes not only from laid-off workers, it turns out, but those in whom they have confided, like their psychotherapists.
How many of you have had a patient or patients who have been laid off, lost their jobs? And that's just virtually everybody here. How many of you have had patients who have been traumatized by that event?
"The Disposable American" was the trigger for this session at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, chaired by psychiatrist Ted Jacobs, on the psychic costs to those laid off.
TED JACOBS, American Psychoanalytic Association: Depression, severe anxiety, panicky feelings, crises of self-esteem, and regressive behavior are not at all uncommon.
PAUL SOLMAN: Now, a cynic might argue that these shrinks are themselves in a shrinking profession, so, they're projecting their own anxieties onto their patients. But their case histories suggested otherwise: people scarred by an economy that now treats layoffs as a get-over-it fact of life.
DR. MARK SMALLER, Psychoanalyst: I cannot underscore the kind of reverberation this had in his life, in his family.
PAUL SOLMAN: Mark Smaller's talking about a friend, also a therapist, who was counseling laid-off workers when he himself was laid off. He got a better job, right away, but:
MARK SMALLER: A year ago, he called me and said, this weird thing had happened, that his super, his boss of the company, had called him on a Friday and said, there's something I need to speak with you about, but it can wait, and I will talk with you on Monday. And the entire weekend, he was anxious and couldn't sleep, because it had stirred up the whole trauma all over again.
PAUL SOLMAN: The news is that research now quantifies such traumas for white- and blue-collar workers alike. The average layoff, it turns out, takes years off your life.
MICHAEL MARMOT, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, Royal Free and University College Medical School: The facts are that people who become unemployed have a 20 point higher mortality rate than others from the same socioeconomic strata who remain employed.
WELCOME to the Public Forum of the American Psychoanalytic Association: Creation of a Self: Color and Trauma in the Life of a Child
Despite all the progress of the last 30 years, racism remains an endemic feature of American life. An often tragic example is an unfortunate tendency among professionals to ignore the powerful influence violence and trauma can have on the development of children of color -- traumatic conditions not tolerated in the suburbs tend to be ignored in the inner city.
The
Public Forum presented in this
web-site attempts to redress that
tendency. It provides professionals
and concerned lay-people with
information necessary to combat the
tendency to ignore.
The forum was held December, 1997 at
the meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association
TRUTH and EMPATHY
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Dr.
Smaller's Introduction
Average Fidelity
Dr.
Smaller's Introduction
Higher Fidelity
To discuss any of these presentations, please contact Mark D. Smaller, Ph.D. at the above email or telephone number.