I have to wonder how helpful it truly is to be playing armchair psychiatrist, when you’ve never personally interviewed the person under discussion. Imagine all the things we could just hypothesize about any celebrity, based only upon a snippet of their public behavior (a snippet we carefully choose, of course).

There’s a profession that does something like this. They’re called publishers, and they publish tripe such as “Us Weekly” and “Star” magazine. They take a piece of gossip and write an entire story based upon nothing more than speculation, imagination and hype.

So I found it more than a little disappointing (but perhaps not surprising) to find a representative of the mental health profession, Dr. Keith Ablow, on Fox News Sunday night doing just that. He spoke during a “Medical A-Team” segment where a group of doctors talked about the vice-presidential debate.

Should a psychiatrist be discussing differential diagnoses of the Vice President of the United States — especially if they’ve never even met the man?

I was a bit mystified at Alice G. Walton’s piece on Forbes today about the “new” mental disorder, Internet Addiction Disorder (traditionally called IAD, but the DSM-5 draft has confusingly renamed it the unfortunate Internet Use Disorder, or IUD).

As readers of World of Psychology know, Internet Addiction has been around since 1996. Indeed, we published our Guide to Internet Addiction back in 1999.

Here it is 13 years later, and there’s still no clear answer on whether this disorder actually exists.

Indeed, the DSM-5 working group on addictive disorders wasn’t convinced either. That’s why it is not going to be included as a diagnosable disorder in the new DSM 5, out next year.

Yet the Forbes piece makes just the opposite claim. So what’s going on?

Gawker, which makes its living reporting on the banality of celebrities’ lives, says that a YouTube video of a man committing suicide at the end of car chase is ‘news.’

Its definition of news is simple — if people are interested in it, it’s news. Kitten videos? Yes! Christina Aguilera’s vagina? Yes! Suicide accidentally aired on a news network? Yes! More kitten videos? Yes!

Yes, a day as an editor at Gawker must be very difficult.

But there’s actually a rationale not to link to a video showing someone committing suicide. Gawker and its ethics-challenged staff doesn’t seem to care about that rationale, but I thought it might be valuable to review anyway.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Larissa Rzemienski.

On a recent episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, the Kardashian clan decided to visit a family therapist. The family’s innermost emotions and struggles came to light as they met with Dr. Nicki J. Monti.

Dr. Monti utilized the systems approach of family therapy to understand how each individual family member is impacted by the larger family system.

Rob, Kim, Kourtney, Khloe and Kris participated in their first family therapy session. So what happened and what can we learn from it?

Most of us have been touched by suicide. If your life hasn’t been, count yourselves among the lucky and the fortunate. It’s hard to get out of this life without knowing someone who left early.

Between ages 10 and 55, suicide is one of the top four reasons people die in the U.S. every year.

Yet you hear more about heart disease, HIV, diabetes and cancer on the nightly news than you ever do about this fatal but preventable problem. Why is that?

Society and the media appear to continue to believe — and through their belief, reinforce — the lies and the half-truths about suicide.

Today is a day to end your own false beliefs about suicide.

Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac
Yeah, the boy’s a time bomb.
~ Rancid

Who is James Holmes and why should you care? He’s the 24-year-old guy in Colorado who allegedly shot and killed 12 people in a movie theater more than a month ago, and left 58 wounded.

News media have been desperately trying to piece together information about Mr. Holmes’ life, because he had so little of a digital footprint. And because the neuroscience graduate program he attended at the University of Colorado, Denver has been tight-lipped about his short time there.

So the New York Times did some good old-fashioned reporting, digging into his friends, social life, and even talking to a few of his professors to cobble together a glimpse of the life and personality of James Holmes.

What emerges is a list of traits that — while they could be associated with a mass-murderer — could just as easily be associated with any introspective, quiet person in America. And that’s what makes such arm-chair psychologist profiling especially dangerous.

Tom Keane, writing in this Sunday’s Boston Globe, trots out all of the old fears and misconceptions about assisted suicide to scare people in Massachusetts to believe it is not an option that should be available to those who might opt for it. Keane believes that others — not you — know what’s best for you. Even when you’re dying of a terminal disease.

That’s too bad. Because we now have a couple of years of evidence from Washington state and nearly 15 years of evidence from Oregon — who have allowed for assisted suicide — that demonstrate fears about allowing assisted suicide are based largely in irrationality, not data.

Assisted suicide for those who are at the end of their lives, often in unbearable pain, is an option that should be available for all Americans. It is unconscionable that Keane believes he knows what’s best for you and I when it comes to our end-of-life decisions. It’s my life, and it should be my choice to die with dignity.

I don’t want Keane — or the government — telling me I have to suffer just because medicine or some random doctor says I have to. I want to die on my terms — in peace, not in pain.

One thing is clear — Rep. Todd Akin probably should be talking to a few more real medical doctors before speaking about issues he clearly understands very little about. Because no matter what your views are on abortion in America, your views on rape should be pretty clear cut if you’re not living in the 1950s.

Women do not asked to be raped. It doesn’t matter what kind of clothing a woman is wearing, or what she said or did beforehand. There are no cases of “legitimate” rape.

And there is nothing the human body does that says, “Oh, I’m being raped, I’d better ensure I don’t get pregnant from this.”

Only an ignorant, sad and sadly misinformed politician could somehow think these things — much less say them in a television interview during the time he’s trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate.

Read on for the full quote and video…

I’m not sure when the scale tipped in the other direction, but there is a whole generation of children growing up who’ve been made fearful of the potential threat of germs by well-meaning but over-protective parents.

Germs are indeed potentially harmful to our health. But so is being driven around in a car to soccer or dance practice. And while most germs won’t kill you, many automobile accidents will.

Because germs are everywhere, in virtually every environment you live or work in, it’s silly to believe you can somehow “escape” them (short of living in a clean room). The key is to take reasonable measures to help protect yourself from germs — but not to give into some irrational fear of them.

That’s why touchless soap dispensers are just plain silly and have far more to do with marketing to our irrational fear of germs than doing much of anything to actually help us wash our hands better.

TV as we know it today is dying.

While visiting my college-aged nephew in Cincinnati over the weekend, I asked him if he misses TV (since his apartment lacked one). “Miss it? I never even watched it back at school.”

And his experience is not a lone voice. Querying more than a dozen other people his age and in their mid-to-late 20s — and the experiences of their friends as well — all produced eerily similar responses.

Generation Y — the Millennials — and every generation after it has little interest in television, especially once they hit their teens. As young adults, they simply don’t watch it.

Instead, they turn to the Internet, and use it for virtually all of their entertainment needs (save for video games, which are also played on their computers, and to a declining extent, dedicated gaming consoles).

Will anyone care if traditional TV watching goes the way of radio before it — used to watch a select few programs a couple of times a week?

Should politicians and celebrities see it as their responsibility to share the specific details of their mental illness or mental disorder diagnosis in order to help reduce the prejudice surrounding these conditions?

That’s the question Torrie Bosch asks over at Slate and arrives at this conclusion — yes, it is a politician’s duty and responsibility to offer full disclosure about their mental health concerns.

But I think Bosch is missing a key component here. When in the throes of a full-blown episode (whether it’s bipolar disorder, depression, or something else), one shouldn’t be making any life-changing decisions or decisions that could forever alter one’s future career.

While it’s easy to believe that politicians and celebrities are something special, underneath their public persona beats the heart of an ordinary person — someone who is entitled to his or her privacy. Especially for health or family concerns.

I guess I need to stop believing the media can cover a topic such as humanity’s interaction with technology without bias. Newsweek provides one of the most biased, non-neutral pieces that I’ve seen ever written about technology, psychology and human interaction in last week’s paper issue (also available online).

Cherry-picking from only the research that supports his hypothesis — that technology is evil and making us all crazy — writer Tony Dokoupil doesn’t provide a nuanced, complex review of what researchers have discovered. Instead, he provides a sledgehammer-to-the-gut hit piece meant to infuse fear and continued ignorance into the complex findings in this area of psychological research.

And in an accompanying video piece, Dokoupil feels perfectly free to dispense mental health advice — as though by writing about the topic, he’s suddenly become a psychology or mental health expert.

So let’s dive in.