Colin DeYoung || Rethinking Mental Illness

their biological substrates. He developed a general theory of personality cybernetic Big five theory, which identifies psychological functions associated with major personality traits, as well as their connection to other elements of personality and various life outcomes, including mental illness. Colin, it's so good to chat with you again on the

Psychology podcast. That's great to see you. Scott. You are you may take the cake as top No, you do take the cake as top five of my closest friends and collaborators who have appeared on the podcast right on. So there you go. It's an honor. Well, it's a

real honor for me. I uh, it's it's been a nice, nice journey of getting you know you and all the topics that we debate and discuss, and it's really you've really enriched my life just want you to know that it's been a while now, right, What is it like, overdeteen years almost that we found each other? Decade and

a half almost. It's it's amazing, And I feel like, while we've both grown, there's still this like little child that comes out when we get together, like the playful you know that that that part of us I think still there. I hope so, I hope so too. But let's let's say I was just gonna say, we'll see how silly the podcast gets. Well, yeah, now we don't need to put pressure on ourselves to be silly, but

we should talk about all kinds of serious things. Yes, well your new theory, well, your new theory of psychopathology is pretty serious, I think so yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's hard to make too many jokes about that theory. So what is mental illness? Like? First of all, shouldn't we, as a field of psychologists and psychiatrists actually have a definition? Yeah? That's a funny thing, isn't it. You'd think that we

would know how to define the thing we're studying. But well, I mean, you've done research and intelligence, like how hard it is for people to agree on a definition of intelligence?

For example. But yeah, mental illness. I think that one of the reasons that there isn't as much focus as there might be on defining mental illness per se is that people usually think of it as a collection of more specific illnesses, specific disorders, and so they tend to look for definitions of schizophrenia, or definitions of orderline personality disorder,

or definitions of PTSD. Right, so the focus is often at the level of an individual disorder rather than stepping back and looking at the big picture and saying, well, what is mental illness in general? Yeah, and also just when it comes to like psychological theories of mental illness impacting the psychiatry the psychiatry field. When I was looking into the literature and reading your paper, it surprised me just the dearth of the extent to which psychiatry has

adopted any of these psychological theories. Yeah. Well, there's a lot that we could say about that, just in terms

of like the history of psychiatry and clinical psychology. I mean, there have been times in the past where people have thought more actively about what mental illness is in a general way, Like you can go back to the anti psychiatry movement from the fifties and sixties, you know, people like Thomas sasen Ardi Lang, And you know, that's like the one polar extreme of thinking about definitions of mental illness, which is that they are just purely social constructions, right,

that there is no thing in nature that's a mental disorder. It's all about the way in which society wants people to be certain ways, doesn't want them to be other ways, and then defines people who aren't the way that they want them to be as mentally ill. I mean, I think that, you know, going to both extremes is problematic, Like I don't think that's the right way to think about mental illness either, but you know that at some point that was a big topic of conversation, Like it's

mental illness something that's not just socially constructed. We can think about it kind of systematically. As one pole is just that it's purely socially constructed. The other pole is that it is purely naturalistic, right, like that there is something scientifically identifiable that is mental illness and it has nothing to do with societal norms or societal traditions or

beliefs or anything like that. And then in the middle you have what are probably the more popular positions today when people do think about this, which are described as hybrid positions, where the idea is that there is something really going on, you know, there is some kind of dysfunction that we can point to from a naturalistic perspective, but then that there's also some degree of societal judgment about, you know, like who is severely ill enough to get diagnosed.

I'll give you an example that's an analogy to something that's really trivial in I mean, it's not exactly true. It's a serious problem for people, but just in physical medicine, which would be blood pressure. Right, So you know, we all know that having high blood pressure is a risk for various cardiovascular problems. But where we say the line is where you have hypertension, right where you get a diagnosis from your doctor. That is a somewhat arbitrary line. Right.

Blood pressure is a continuum. You can have low blood pressure, you can have high blood pressure. It's on a spectrum, and the medical establishment has picked a certain point at which they say like, if you're above that, now you have hypertension. If you're below that, you don't, right, So you know it's not and they acknowledge that there is a certain degree of trying to pick a reasonable threshold

that is, you know, good for people's health. Nobody thinks that having a blood pressure of you know, one point fifty nine is qualitatively different from having a blood pressure of one sixty one. So you can see that there's this element like there's a real thing going on there. There's differences in blood pressure associated with differences in risk.

And then there is also a bit of social construction, which is to say, well, what's the level we're going to pick where we're going to give people a diagnosis, we're going to start giving them drugs, we're going to start treating them, you know, we're going to intervene. And all those same kinds of questions come up in in

issues surrounding mental illness. Yeah, as well as uh, issues of gifted education like one thirty IQ you're you're gifted five ideas, Sorry, you're you're actually ungifted because there's only only two categories we have. Yeah. Yeah, so look, uh, when we apply this to mentalness, we can see just how messy all this stuff gets. And uh, and what I like about your theory, I like, I really do like a number of things about your theories, not just

because I'm friends with you. I'm glad. Yeah, I was wondering if you could tell people about uh the theory, how your theory, how you define mentalness because you have a very specific definition that brings in cybernetic theory, and

then will unpack what cybernek theory is. Yeah, okay, And I think probably as I start to get into it, would probably would be helpful to say a little bit about how our theory fits in with these general types of theory that I've just been described, and also maybe to say a little bit about what's been happening in the world of science around psychopathology and mental illness in

the last you know, like twenty years or so. I think the most important thing to understand is that it's pretty widely acknowledged at this point that the traditional diagnostic system that comes out of like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual from the American Psychiatric Association, that's the DSM, that that system is not scientifically accurate. The probably the biggest problem with it is that it treats mental illness as if it was a categorically distinct phenomenon. So some people

have schizophrenia and some people don't. Some people have borderline personality disorder, and some people don't, And so it's treated as if there's this kind of clear dividing line, whereas if you look at the actual data more closely, what you see is something a lot more like blood pressure. People have various kinds of symptoms that cause them problems.

They have various kinds of unusual characteristics that can cause problems for them, can cause dysfunction, can cause impairment, can cause suffering, and there is no perfectly clear dividing line to say when those get severe enough that they actually count as a mental disorder or not, because it's on

a smooth spectrum. Right, The pattern of these qualities that people have that we identify as symptoms of mental illness are actually just kind of distributed in the whole population, and there's no clean separation of people who have the disease from people who don't. Right. It's not like a flu. It's not like covid, where you either have the virus

and it's infecting you or you don't. Right, It's much more like blood pressure, where you have a certain level of it and it gets to a certain level it starts to cause you other problems in your life, and so we decide, like we need to intervene in some way. But there's this persistent fiction in psychiatry, especially that these

are somehow categorically distinct entities. So one of the things that's been happening in research on mental illness is that people are trying to look at it more in terms of a spectrum or a lot of different spectrum, right, because it's not just one spectrum. You know, we already see that in some areas of studying mental illness, like we talk about the autism spectrum, and people increasingly now

talk about the schizophrenia spectrum. But really every common mental disorder is on a spectrum, right, And so that's one problem with the current system, is this use of categories instead of dimensions. Now, the other serious problem is that the way the categories are organized are not accurate in terms of describing how people's symptoms tend to go together.

And so what that means is that you end up with situations like within depression, people can have extremely different sets of symptoms and still get the same diagnostic label. For example, like you can have weight loss or you can have weight gain, and that could be a symptom of depression. You can have insomnia or hypersomnia where you sleep all the time, and both of those things can

be a symptom of depression. So it's also increasingly recognized that the current diagnostic categories don't do a very good job of actually identifying groups of people who have a similar problem that would help us to figure out how to treat them and how to help them, because that's ultimately the whole purpose of diagnostic systems is to try to help people to figure out what is wrong with them as accurately as we can so that we can figure out as best we can how to help them.

And the current system isn't really doing that. So one of the things that I'm a part of is this movement to try to create a new diagnostic system that would be based on dimensions instead of on categories. So I'm part of this group that's called the Consortium for the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, and that last part gets

abbreviated as high TOP. So what high TOP is trying to do is basically use actual empirical data about patterns of symptoms that appear in people and which ones appear together to describe the range of different symptoms of mental disorders that there are, and to group them together in ways that are actually based on real empirical data as opposed to just tradition and sort of medical intuition expert

opinion from doctors over one hundred years. So then you also have in the world of scientific research on mental health, the NIMH, which is the National Institute on Mental Health, and they do a lot of the funding of research for you know, trying to figure out the causes of

mental disorder. And about ten years ago or so, they also came to the conclusion that they needed to reject the categorical system that appears in DSM, and what they decided to do instead was to focus on specific what they call biobehavioral systems, right, so trying to understand the underlying brain processes and the patterns of behavior and cognition and emotion that go along with those, and to understand them again as a dimension just like blood pressure, where

you know, you might have a problem with your reward system or what they call your positive valence system, and if that's hyperactive, it could be associated with mania, for example. Right, So instead of saying, well, here's this thing bipolar disorder, right, and it's got to have all these features. Instead, what they say is, no, let's focus in on specific dimensions of symptoms like mania. What are the system what are

the psychological processes and brain systems that underlie it. Let's see if we can make progress on understanding mental illness that way. So you've got people from the clinical side working on this high top project to classify and describe mental illness in a dimensional way. You've got people on the scientific and biological side trying to describe it in

this dimensional way. And so our theory is basically trying to come in and say, it's great that we have all this progress toward these dimensional approaches that are more in keeping with what we actually know scientifically about mental illness. But still not enough people are thinking about this more general question of what mental illness is. Because once you've got a dimensional system, you still have to say, Okay, what's the threshold where do you decide when somebody is

mentally ill? And what does that mean? And so what I'll do is I will I'll read you our definition of mental illness and then I'll unpack it. So what we say is that psychopathology is persistent failure to move toward one's goals due to failure to generate effective new goals,

interpretations or strategies when existing ones prove unsuccessful. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack there, obviously now, and so you know, the way to understand this is in the in the context of this idea of cybernetics, which people now you hear that word. You think like cyberspace, cybersecurity, You think artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence. Absolutely, you tend to

think about things that are done with computers. But cybernetics is actually a discipline that is broader than just artificial intelligence, that also includes natural intelligence, and it includes the way in which organisms function as well as the way in which computers function. And it dates back to a scientist named Norbert Wiener in the late nineteen forties who had

this idea. He had this insight, which is that is operating in the context of the first artificial control systems, like, for example, in World War Two, you might design anti aircraft gun that is able to actually track a plane as it's coming in automatically to aim right in order to track the trajectory of the plane and to shoot at it accurately, and then you can get things like missile guidance systems. Pretty soon you're going to get things

like chess computers. So in the middle of the twentieth century you've got all of these artificial control systems being developed in different ways, like the first computers, various things for weaponry, et cetera. And what we are recognizes is basically that there have to be principles that are common to any kind of system that is able to pursue a goal based on feedback from what's happening and from

what it's tracking in the environment. Right, So like a missile guidance system has to take feedback in order to correct the course of the missile. A chess computer has to register what's happening in the game that it's playing

in order to try to win the game. And any organism has to pursue sources of nutrition and reproduction in order to be able to survive and reproduce, right, in order to have fitness from an evolutionary perspective, So what cybernetics is basically is that it is the study of the principles that govern goal directed systems that self regulate via feedback, so that are able basically to process input about the state of the world, to compare it to

some particular value or goal that is represented within the system itself, and then to act in various ways to enact a set of operators you know, behaviors or cognitive operations or whatever they are, to try to move toward their goals. And in psychology we often think of goals as things like where you have a very concrete idea the future that you're committed to working toward. But in cybernetics,

a goal is something more abstract. Basically, it is any representation within the system of a state that the system then works to bring about in the world. So plants are cybernetic systems. They carry out processes, you know, to acquire nutrients and moisture and to grow in various ways.

And so that's the basic insight, right, is that there have to be a set of principles that are responsible for governing any kind of cybernetic system, whether it's you know, a robot trying to accomplish something or a human trying to accomplish something, or a plant or a chest compute or whatever it is. And so there you know, that turned into a whole very successful field, and it was more widely applied in you know, in engineering, and all of our computer technology basically or much of it is

influenced by that field. But to an important extent, it was also influential in psychology. And so so when I was on your podcast once before, we talked a lot about my theory of personality in general, which is a cybernetic theory. It's called cybernetic Big five theory, and it's about the way in which personality traits. These kinds of broad personality traits like the Big Five that we study represent variation in these general cybernetic mechanisms that allow us

to pursue our goals and our needs effectively. Like we have to be able to be motivated by goals things that are going to reward us. We have to be able to carry out actions that move us toward them and to avoid distractions from those from those actions, and we have to be able to compare where we are with where we want to be or how we think things ought to be. And so we have a set of mechanisms in the brain that enables us to do

all those things. Now, the connection between the personality theory and the theory of psychopathology is basically that those same mechanisms that allow us to pursue our goals can break down in various ways, and most common forms of mental illness we can trace back to specific ways in which those human functions that allow us to pursue our goals and our needs effectively tend to break down. And sometimes

they break down because they are relatively extreme. Like somebody has what we could describe as a relatively unusual or extreme level of some personality trait and it causes problems for them in their lives, and that might lead to dysfunction. But I think the important thing about the way in which we're defining psychopathology is that it hinges on this

idea of cybernetic dysfunction. So what we're saying is basically, no matter how unusual you are, no matter how weird your personality profile is, you do not have a mental disorder. Unless means that yeah, well, I mean we could talk about your weirdness too if we want to. I was like, you better out brou we can do that later. That's that's for the psychoanalysis part of the of the podcast. I don't want you psycho analysy. Yeah, all right, I

won't not on err anyway anyway. So, but the basic idea is that you don't have a mental disorder, you don't have psychopathology on our definition, until whatever your unusual qualities are cause you to be unable to meet your needs or to be able to pursue your goals in

life effectively. And so in some ways that is already present in implicitly, at least in the DSM, because a lot of the diagnoses in the DSM emphasize that you're not supposed to give the person a diagnosis unless they meet the criteria for what it's called impairment or distress.

So what does that mean. Well, one of the things that it means is that you could have all the symptoms, for example, or you know, you can have a set of symptoms that would qualify you for schizophrenia, let's say, And at some fine I'll talk a bit about how from the perspective of our theory, schizophrenia as a categorical entity doesn't really exist. And it's not just from the

perspective of our theory either. As I was saying earlier, it's this new emerging perspective in clinical psychology as a whole that recognizes that the data say that these categories, the categories don't really exist as categories, and the symptoms aren't really organized in the way that the DSM says

they are. But just as shorthand for now, let's say you have all the symptoms or a set of symptoms that would qualify you for schizophrenia, but you're not impaired, like your life is going along just fine, and you know, you may have challenges once in a while, but you are able to overcome them and deal with them, and so in that case, and you're not particularly distressed either. In that case, you're not supposed to give a diagnosis. Now, your fist intuition when you might when you hear that

might be to say, how would that even be possible? Right, Schizophrenia that's supposed to be such a severe disorder. That's you know, there's that's psychosis. Right, It's characterized fundamentally by you have delusions or hallucinations or both, and plus a bunch of other qualities that you might have there that are likely to be impairing. So how could that not

be impairing? Well, there's a great study that we talk about in the paper that I sent you in which a group of psychics was compared to a group of diagnos clairvoyance. They were people who had auditory, regular, auditory hallucinations. That was what qualified them to be in the study, and they believed that those auditory hallucinations were them communicating with other realms, you know, whether that's with spirits of

the dead or other spiritual realms or whatever. So from the standpoint of you know, medical diagnosis, if you take somebody who come who presents with those symptoms, they that would classify as as psychosis because they have hallucinations, they have auditory hallucinations, and they have delusions. Yes, but the reason that you would not get a diagnosis of you know, schizophrenia for example, or some other psychotic disorder with those for those people is that you know, they're not impaired.

Some of them are maybe working professionally as psychics or clairvoyance, or you know, they could be you know, maybe that's just like a side hobby of theirs. But whatever, it suggests that they are able to pursue their lives effectively. They can make a living, they have normal social relations, you know, maybe some of their friends believe that they

really do have these powers. Maybe they are maybe they are humoring them, who knows whatever, But there is this crucial distinction that even the current system recognizes between whether you have some whether you have dysfunction or not. Hey, Colin, I was wondering if you could tell me how your theory differs from the class of theories that rely on statistical deviance, you know, the extent to which you have

a certain characteristic function that is way abnormal statistically. How does your theory differ from all those class of theories. So the the issue when we get to this general question of like what is mental illness? One of the ways that people have dealt with that is basically just to say that if you are far enough from the norm,

then you have a problem. You're abnormal. So there's you know, one of the one of the scientific journals that I've published papers in is called the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, and it's actually about to change its name to something else that doesn't use the word abnormal, because the idea

being that that word has become stigmatized. But it's important, I think, to think about what that word actually means because it means away from the norm, right, ab means away from and so it's basically saying that people have mental health problems, who are weird, who are unusual, who are different from the norm. And that is a pretty common way of approaching thinking about mental illness, even if it's not the official definition, it is often implicitly the

way that we approach people. Even the categories in the DSM are often that way, right, because they'll say, so, if you have some if you're having some kind of distress and you have five out of nine symptoms, for example, then you have this particular mental disorder. So they're basically

counting the number of symptoms you have. And once you get extreme enough, you know, once you get far away from the norm, because what's normal is for people to only have, you know, like zero symptoms or maybe one symptom of something, but they're not going to have like four or five or six or seven. And so the idea is that as you get up to have enough symptoms, then you're far enough away from the norm that we're going to say, okay, now you have a disorder. And

so our theory explicitly rejects that. And I was talking a little bit about this earlier because of the idea that just being unusual shouldn't be enough to say that you have a mental disorder or a mental illness, and it's often does so. The DSM often does require these

additional components, like the presence of impairment or dysfunction. But it's funny because in the book itself it says basically like that's just a that's just there because we don't have perfect diagnostic powers yet, you know, like once we know exactly what's going on the brain that's making this person weird in this way, then we'll be able to say, Okay, this person has a mental disorder without even asking whether they show empairment or distress. And to me, that's exactly backwards.

I think we should focus less on statistical deviance, whether you're unusual or not, whether you're extreme on some dimension, and focus more on whether you are impaired in your ability to pursue your goals in life, and by goals from a cybernetic perspective, as I was saying, we use that broadly to include things like your basic needs and just whatever it is that people are trying to get in life, even if they don't necessarily know it themselves, right,

Goals can be conscious or they can be unconscious. Well, that's what confuses me, and how you distinguish between competing goals, like if there's no priority there, because you know, one could act a certain way that is getting them towards let's say they're meeting goals but being catastrophic to there are any other goals they have in their life, right,

And that's yeah, absolutely, that's super important. And you know, so people have often asked us about that in relation to theory, like, well, what if somebody is an alcoholic and they're doing a really good job of you know, their goal staying drunk all the time? Right? Well, right, So the point is that from our perspective, it's not enough just to consider one goal. You have to consider you have to try to consider all of the person's goals and how they prioritize them and how they're doing

with that. And that would include you know, basic needs that most people have, like a certain degree of connectedness to others and you know, a sense of autonomy or whatever. And so you know, the person who's who's being successful at staying drunk, right, who's an alcoholic, they are probably undermining some of their other goals, like being able to earn a living effectively, or maintaining good relationships with other people,

or even just maintaining their own health, for example. So what's really important is that you look at the whole collection of what people are pursuing, what they value in their lives, and you look to see whether they are actually able to pursue those things effectively. Great. Great. Something that's interesting about your theory is that you distinguish between mental disorder and psychopathology. Isn't that right? And I think, yeah, that is right. This kind of relates to the kind

of new way you're thinking about the brain's role. Is there's not like a particular brain pattern you can find in the brain and say that person's mentally ill just because their brain shows it. So can you elaborate it? Sure? Yeah, I mean, and we think about that issue with with brain disease. Like one of the things we've said is

that mental illness is not brain disease. And you know that that doesn't mean we're dualists, right, We're not saying that there's some like you know, the mind is separate from the brain. Obviously, the brain is you know, producing the mind. The brain is doing the things that the mind is But what we mean is that merely having some particular unusual pattern of brain function does not in and of itself mean that you're mentally ill. It's just

like having particular symptoms like we were talking about. You know, you could be a clairvoyant and hear voices and you know, believe you're communicating with spirits, and that doesn't make you mentally ill if your life is nonetheless going well on functional functioning normally in other regards, right, And so the important thing is that whatever your brain is doing, it has to be causing you to not be able to pursue your goals effectively in life before we want to

call it psychopathology in terms of this distinction that you were you brought up between psychopathology and a mental disorder. Like so far in our conversation, I haven't been very careful about distinguishing between those two things, and you know,

many people in the field just use those interchangeably. But we think it's important to that there could be a distinction between something that is relatively naturalistic that we could, you know, from a scientific perspective, say, okay, this person is not only having trouble pursuing their goals, but then they're also unable to adapt and to come up with new ways to live or new ways to interpret their situation that would enable them to come up with new

strategies for pursuing their goals, or even to just develop new goals that would be better than the old goals. Right. So, one of the things about a cybernetic system is that it's not we can't really say it's dysfunctioning just because it's temporarily off course, because the whole point of cybernetic systems is that they can correct their course. Right. They use feedback basically to when they're veering off course to

get back on course. So they adapt. And so we all know that you're not going to say that somebody has a mental illness just because they have a bad day or even a bad week, right, or things go really wrong for them, or you know, some project that's really important to them gets undermined in some way and they might be depressed for a little while. That's totally

normal and totally healthy. Even when we start to be concerned about people and mental illness is when something like that happens and they can't figure out new goals or a new strategy to pursue their old goals or a new way of thinking about the world that would allow them to bounce back and get on course right and

to start pursuing their needs and goals again effectively. So that's why there's that other part of our definition, which is that it's not just about your ability to it's not just whether you are having trouble pursuing your goals. It's also then you are not able to develop new strategies or new goals or whatever that would allow you to get back on course. And we think that that's fundamentally something that is objectively true or not. Like a

person has a set of goals. People aren't necessarily totally conscious of all aspects of their goals or their needs, but they're in there, right, They're represented in the brain. And whether they are actually able to pursue those effectively or not, or to bounce back and get back on course when things go when things get challenging, that is that's like a matter of fact, right it's objectively true

or not, whether that's whether that's possible. But then there's another level, which is that we have to figure out how severior does that have to get before we intervene. Right, And that's where we use the term mental disorder because that's sort of the term that's typically used in psychiatry, like for a diagnosis, then you officially have a mental disorder.

So we kind of we recognize that there's still going to be some kind of discussion that's going to go on, negotiations, right between different players in medicine and in politics or whatever. That sets the threshold for when somebody is said to have a problem that severe enough that then we're going to spend resources intervene. It's just like blood pressure, right, we know that the higher your blood pressure is, the more risk you have, but we pick a level at

which we're going to intervene. And so basically we say psychopathology is just this fact that you're not able to pursue your goals effectively, whereas mental disorder is, you know, whatever decisions get made about when we're going to give somebody a diagnosis. Good. I really like this distinction quite a bit. You know, in a lot of ways. Your

whole theory is it's very like neurodiversity friendly. You know, It's like, you know, like that world would embrace it, you know, because there's lots of different forms of neurodiverses, you know that I'm very interested in, like autisms, but a lot of different kinds of spectrums. And the whole movement is moving towards this idea that like not to pathologize it just because it exists, right, I think that's

very much in line with with your theory. I think in further unpacking your theory, and I want to I'm trying to do a bit by bit here one to There's another piece I want to pull out, and that's the difference between character characters what do you call it

characteristic adaptations in personality traits? Okay? Can you define both and the difference to Yeah, And this is like a throwback to our last podcast that we did together, how Wet, where we were talking about the personality theory, because that's

kind of the center of that theory too. So the idea is basically that I think I said earlier even in this conversation that traits we think represent variation in these basic mechanisms that everyone has, like everybody has the capacity to experience being motivated by something, at least to some extent. Everybody has the capacity to experience fear, at least to some extent. All that, you can find people who are relatively fearless. Right, everybody is averse to certain things.

So there are these universal properties and there's variation in them, and that's what personality traits are fundamentally. So the way that I think about this is the test is would this make sense to describe differences between people in any culture at any time in human history? Like if you go back to prehistoric times, I'm sure you know you have hunter gatherers sitting around the fire, and some of them would want to argue with each other and some

of them would not. Right, Argumentativeness is probably something that's been different between people and useful for characterizing people for all of human history. And so anything that you can use in any human context like that is a personality trait. But then we have these ways that we specifically adapt to our own life circumstances and to the specific culture that we're a part of, and those are what we call characteristic adaptations, right, So they require learning, they're characteristic

of us because they're persistent over time. Right, Like I'm a professor, that is part of my persistent identity and my behavior. It shaps what I do. It's a role that I have, right, just like you know, being a lawyer would also be a different characteristic adaptation. It's the way that somebody has adapted to make do in their

particular situation. And so characteristic adaptations are the parts of personality that aren't really universal, but that represent variation between people that have to do with what we've learned in the circumstances that we're in. You know, what do you think about this density distribution model, like the fleecin sort of way of thinking about person That's exactly the way that I would think about personality that when we think about what a trade is. It is a tendency to

be in a particular type of states. But it doesn't mean that you're always that way all the time, right, Like you know, an extrovert isn't talking one hundred percent of the time, even though extroverts are more you know, talkative in general. Somebody who has an anxious temperament isn't

experiencing anxiety every moment of their lives. But when we say somebody has the trait, we're saying that they're more likely to experience those things more often, more intensely, and more situations, And so the density distribution, you know, that's just saying that there is an average and that's where

the person spends more of their time. But there's still a whole distribution, right, Like, so even the extroverts actor introverted some of the time, but on average, they're acting more extroverted, more outgoing, more talkative than somebody who is relatively introverted. Right. So, yeah, so it leaves room for variation within the person for their behavior, but points to the fact that people have these kinds of stable average tendencies over time. Right. So I'm glad that we talked

about that, and hopefully I didn't lose our audience. You can cut it if you need to. No, no, no, no, no. This is technical stuff. This is real time people stuff. You know, characteristic most people aren't probably aren't familiar with the term characteristic adaptations. They're maybe more familiar personality. So but this is central to your argument, Like, we really

have to make sure that that people understand this. You know, you're saying that people can use characteristic adaptations to help them manage or even thrive with the kind of brain imprint, imprint imprint that the DSM could even currently classify as a mental illness. Right, so you know what, you know what another good term for characteristic adaptations is that I've been using a lot lately habits. Well, that's much better. It's a lot short, right, Yeah, And I'm just gonna

say I didn't invent the term characteristic adaptations. That's not my fault. No, that's fair enough. That's fair enough. I'm not blaming you. I like it because it actually has a good description of what it is. It's like, we adapt to our situation in certain ways, and then those adaptations become habitual, right, and so we have habits of acting, we have habits of thinking, and those habits those ways that we you know, habitually act and think and habit

things that we habitually strive for. Right, Our goals are habits in a certain sense too, once they're concrete enough, you know, those are these characteristic adaptations. And yeah, people can have very unusual profiles, and they can have experiences that would be classifiable as psychiatric symptoms, like those clairvoyants, for example, hearing voices. It turns out that hearing voices is a lot more common than you might expect, and

and it's actually a lot of voice right now. Yes, come on, that's that joke Adedy made because you literally said, you know, people hearing voices is more common than you think, sometimes in their writing their ears, as if somebody's just speaking in their ears. Yeah, I realized I took out my headphones at some point, so hopefully this sounds not but you sound good to me anyway. Yeah. So, like, let's just imagine that you are somebody who heard voices. Well,

first of all, why do you do that? That's because your brain is designed to simulate the social world, right, It's designed to understand other people. Part of what you do is by imagining other people talking. So if you're the kind of person who spontaneously hears voices, that's just

your brain running its simulation programs. And you know, we've been talking a lot lately in other contexts about consciousness and free will and things, and you know a lot is going on in your brain that you don't have voluntary control over, right, And so let's say you are somebody who spontaneously hears voices that you can't control very well, how do you deal with that? Right? Well, you can get really panicked because we associate that with schizophrenia and

we stigmatize it. Or you could have a number of different possible ways of adapting to that. You could just accept, like, oh, I've got an active imagination that sometimes you know, talks to me, and I'm going to I don't know, maybe I'm going to turn that into something that helps me write novels, for example, because it's like I have dialogues

with characters in my head. Or maybe the way that you adapt is that you come to believe that you are communicating with other spiritual realms, right, and you launch a business as a psychic, and maybe that allows you to make a living and to get along with people.

Those are all different patterns of characteristic adapt patients, right, They're all different habits of thinking and acting and pursuing goals in the world, and they can be effective to allow people to meet their various needs and to coordinate all their various goals together adequately to get by and

even to thrive in the world. Right. And so to us, merely being unusual is not enough to indicate that you have a problem, because there's so many different ways that people can adapt with so many different habits that people can develop that can potentially allow them to you know, manage their own unusual qualities right, and to even have them be to even have them be benefits or gifts right that allows them to function well. So don't take this the wrong way, Colin. But what you your theory

is revolutionary. I think it's revolutionary, but it really shouldn't be. Yeah, I know, because because what you're saying to me is I'm like, well, duh, but but it's so weird that something where I would respond yet duh, is the complete opposite from the structure that has existed for for almost one hundred years. You know. Uh, well, I don't know

when when the first DSM came out. Well, right, Well, the d s M chains dratically in nineteen eighty, right, So there was DSM one and DSM two, which were basically Freudian psychoanalysis manuals that had lengthy descriptions about what different kinds of mental problems looked like and how they work that were all based on like, you know, Freudian

interpreting Freudian mechanisms in the brain. And then in nineteen eighty what you had was a group of psychiatrists who got together and said, we can do this better, We can do this in a more scientific way, and they created these, you know, sets of checklists for what are the symptoms going to be for each diagnosis that did not require drawing any inferences about what was going on

in people's unconscious minds. So, you know, they were trying to make a more systematic process and a better system for diagnosis. And you know, and I think in many ways that they did. But the fact remained, nonetheless that the sets of criteria that came up within the categories and the lists of symptoms were really just based on you know, the experience of peoples in the medical profession, psychiatrists experience, so you could think of it as like

the accumulated wisdom of psychiatry. It still wasn't very scientific by our standards today. And so the you know, the new movement to move towards these dimensional systems is because now we have enough actual data that we can see how different symptoms are likely to present together and to develop over time and all these things. Yeah, no, I love it. And I don't know if you've noted, if you've noticed the similarity to my theory of personal intelligence.

You know, and on gifted, arguing that we need to move away from intelligence models that are based solely on the decontextualized IQ test and look at the person's personal goals. You know, yeah, absolutely, I mean, and you know, you and I have talked a lot about that, of course, because I think we don't necessarily agree on, you know, whether intelligence should be or needs to be redefined. But that's only because we have, you know, we're just thinking

about different kind of perspectives. Let's say, like I'm thinking about it in terms of the scientific tradition of researching intelligence, whereas you're thinking about the way in which the concept of intelligence gets used in policy and in popular culture, and is you know, constraining on people who could potentially be facilitated to well, you know, live their best life, as you would probably say, right, And so you know, I absolutely see the parallels between what we're saying about

mental disorder and what you're saying about how we should help people to achieve well being. I guess we're probably not going to talk about this today, but as you know, I've also been developing this the cybernetic theory to be a theory of well being too, because we've got, you know, moving to try to take in mental health problems on

one side. But then you know, the mere fact that you don't have psychopathology doesn't mean that you have you know, the optimal amount of well being, and so you know, there again, our theory of well being is all about looking at what individual people value and what works for them as a set of values and goals in coordination with each other. That's what you're doing with Valerie TOI burs, right, Valerie Tiberius. Yeah, who's a friend of mine. Yeah, yeah,

so an idea of what yeah going. I just finally realized I never gave a shout out to Bob Krueger, who's you know, I keep saying we when I'm talking about our theory of psychopathology, but I should, obviously, you know, recognize Bob, who is really brilliant clinical psychologist and has been so involved in this whole movement toward better classification systems for psychopathology and understanding it better. This really is

revolutionary stuff. I mean, I hope the listener understands the gravity of what you're proposing, because it would really shake things up in the field of psychiatry psycho Yeah, well, so there's there's kind of like levels of radical in terms of changes that are being proposed. So first of all, you've got this hierarchical taxonomy of psychothology high top, right, This this new model that people in that CONSORTI room, including me, we would like that to replace the DSM. Right.

So instead of those categories, you get described as having levels of you know, a set of different dimensions. They're sort of analogous to the Big Five. Actually quite a lot of them are quite analogous to the Big Five in personality, where you have different levels of different potential, you know, symptoms that could be used to characterize people

who are having problems. But even some of the people who are working on that, then they still want to say, like, well, when you reach a certain level of symptoms, then we're

going to give you the diagnosis. Right, And so I think what's most radical about the theory that we're working on is that it even goes beyond that to say that no matter what level of these symptoms you have, it doesn't count as a mental disorder unless you have cybernetic dysfunction, right, unless you're not able to pursue the

things that you value and need in life. And so, you know, one way to describe I guess just how radical this theory is is that in some sense, there would only be one diagnosis that would be you have you know, you have psychopathology, you're having some kind of a you're having a problem in your life, and then we can go to try to figure out what's it like, right, and we can say, well, you know, you have you have these unusual characteristics and those seem to be into help,

you know, causing you trouble in these ways. And you've got these habits that are really kind of counter productive and that are undermining you that you know, maybe we can figure out where you pick them up, maybe we can figure out why, maybe we can figure out how to help you change them. So yeah, in some ways, but you know what's really interesting thinking about this, Scott, my observation is that in some ways this is what

people in the clinic typically do all ready. Like you know, not the people who are writing the DSM or you know, funding scientific research, but just clinical psychologists who are interacting with people. Somebody comes in, what do you do? You

try to you say what's wrong? You try to understand their problems, You try to understand like the pattern of their lives, the specific ways they think about things, the specific you know, personality profile that they have that might be like helping or hindering them, and then you know, you deal with that person as an individual. So in

some ways, I don't think it's that weird. It's just so counter to the way in which everybody is obsessed with, you know, identifying labels for people and slotting them into the right boxes, because that's how you know what to put on the insurance form, and in theory, that's how you know what pills to give people. Right, Because that's another thing we haven't even touched on yet, is the current obsession in psychiatry with treating everything with pills. Well,

that's a whole different conversation, but I hear you. I just I want to ask a follow up question, because you've talked a lot about trying to understand UH and and move move us away from thresholds of the actual characteristics themselves. But I want to talk about the other end. How do you find the cutoff for cybernetic dysfunction? You know, I mean, you know you you haven't. We haven't focused on that question as much as right, So that gets us back again to this distinction that you run up

between psychopathology and mental disorder. And so what we think is that actually, again it's an objective question or not whether somebody has cybernetic dysfunction, because remember that requires two things. First that you are you know, you're you're blocked from

moving towards you know, some of your important goals. And then the second thing is that you're unable to engage in the process that allows you to explore new possibilities, right like slopping in new goals, or finding new strategies to pursue the old goals, or just thinking about the world in a different way that it would allow you

to get past whatever you're stuck in. And as soon as you've got that being blocked and then also not being able to engage in effectively in the process of developing new strategies and new goals, then you've got psychopathology. So I think that that's I think it's reasonable to think about that as something that you do have or

you don't. But of course you could have a very you could have a pretty mild version of that right where you know, somebody might just I don't know, be really depressed and stuck in a way for a couple of weeks, and maybe if you went into the doctor at that point said I'm super depressed, things going badly, I don't know what to do. You know, let's say

it's lasted for a month rather than two weeks. Like eventually you're going to get to the threshold where even the DSM would say, Okay, now we're diagnosing you with the depression. But remember for them too, it's pretty arbitrary exactly how long that has to be. And so what we're saying basically is that whether or not you have psychopathology is something that we should be able to say

pretty clearly. But that doesn't mean we want to give you a diagnosis, right, because the diagnosis has to do with whether you need treatment or not, or whether we're just going to, you know, see whether you can you know, whether you can get by on your own, or maybe we give you just a little bit of advice or counseling or whatever. I mean, it's like it's rare that somebody goes in to see like a counselor or a

therapist and they get nothing. Right, they're not going to say they're going to say, well, you know, talk to me and I'll see how I can help you. But you know, maybe just that little bit of help might

be enough. And so figuring out how much cybernetic dysfunction somebody has to have before we're going to give them a diagnosis, that's a tricky question, right, And that's not really the business that we're in, because that's something that has to be worked out with the medical establishment, and you know, even sadly with things like insurance and all these things. They're all these players that come in to

defining exactly when somebody needs treatment. And I don't think that ultimately that can be a purely objective question because there's always judgments about when when you should help. There's a basic issue with medicine. It's not it's not just a science, because there's this there's imperative. There's the imperative to treat well. Also, I mean, if you have the money,

you can get service from someone. It's not like psychologists are turning people with They're like, you're not messed up enough to see me, you know, right, we're talking about psychoanalysis. You can go pay to land the couch will take you for five years. Yeah, yeah, so's we don't get

that precise. It's just like the PA, the patient has to reach a point in their life where they're motivated to change in some way or yeah, I mean, one interesting question is what do you do with people who have a problem but aren't motivated to change and they're destroying society and or become like a president? Right? Right? Well, so there's an interesting thing about narcissism and antisocial personality disorder, which is that those people who have those problems often

don't think they have a problem, I know. And so you know, one question we always get with our theory is like, well, how do you say when those people have a problem, because what if they are pursuing their goals effectively? And what we usually say is that, well, most of the time they're not, even if they think they are. Right, Like, if you are constantly stressed out and constantly in a rage because people aren't giving you the admiration that you feel you deserve, then you are

not actually successfully pursuing your goals. Right, So you know, you can still you can potentially diagnose people who don't want to be diagnosed, even using our theory. That's you say you say to a narcissist. You have some serious cybernetic dysfunction going on there. Yeah, well and they'll say, you know, screw you, right, I'm the greatest. I'm the

greatest of cybernetic dysfunction. Well right, well they probab wouldn't say that, but right, But that's you know again, when we say that, it's an objective question, like they have a set of goals, and whether or not they're actually effectively pursuing them is an objective question. Whether or not they recognize it, whether or not, you know, they're diluted about how their lives are going or not. So, you know,

I think that's a really interesting point. Another interesting one is what do you do with the what what people have called a successful psychopath, you know, like the person who is not in jail, but making people, making people miserable, making people suffer to get what they want. You know, is that person, you know, they're very callous, they have no consideration of other people's, other people's feelings or other people's needs, happy to hurt people to get what they want.

Is that person mentally ill or not? And there are take on it is basically that if the way that they treat other people is interfering with some of their goals or needs again, regardless of whether they recognize it or not. Then we can say that, yes, they do have psychopathology, they do have cybernetic dysfunction, but in the very rare case where they are actually meeting all of their own values and needs while causing other people to suffer,

they're not mentally ill. But that's a question for you know, for the law, probably, like we need to use other societal mechanisms, and we often do that of course, right, because we often say, well, you're not mentally ill, but I'm sending you to jail because you did things that are causing other people to suffer. So totally, Yeah, diagnosing mental illness is not the only way to deal with

people who cause suffering. Yeah, and their own personal goals might be being met at the expense of society, and I think your theory needs to take that to account as well. Yeah, well, I'm you know, And the way that it does that is to say that some things are a matter for for for the law, right, for legal enforcement or societal enforcement in some other way, and not for the mental health profession. Yeah, you know, which is not unless their risk. You can still report, there's

still certain rules. Yeah, you read my mind. I was just going to think about risk, right, because you know, like our theory, I think also lends itself to thinking about ways to intervene for people who have risky personality profiles without you know, stigmatizing them by saying they have a mental disorder, but saying like, with that particular profile that you have, you are at serious risk for things going badly down the road, right, And so maybe we

want to intervene in certain ways, like you know, young, like if you have kids, for example, who show what are called callous and unemotional traits, which are essentially the antecedents to psychopathy, right to having this kind of total callous disregard for other people and fearlessness and meanness and disinhibition. If you see kids who have those traits, you might want to figure out if there's something that you can do to steer them in a way that will not

lead to to something that might later be called psychopathy. Right. But there's also a cause that psychologos have that if you're a risk of hurting like children or killing yourself. You know, I'm also thinking about those which your theory is not going to change that some of the basic fundamental principles there, right, because I mean, you know, people who are at risk of hurting themselves generally, you know,

want generally want to live. Like yeah, I mean it's it becomes tricky when you get into questions like around suicide, right because I you know, I mean, I guess one of the things that our theory would uh I would say it was possible, was that there you could that you could make a case for uh a justified allowing of of of of people ending their own lives, right, like with terminal illness. Some countries already had this. I think that if when it's done right, it is it

is very enlightened. Right if you're saying I'm going to I'm going to be suffering, I'm going to be you know, dead in five years from this terminal illness. I want to end my own life. I don't think that you should be considered to have a mental illness, right. I think that there are there are circumstances under which that might be reasonable and uh and not a sign of

that and mental health. Well, but in most circumstances, when people are suicidal, it's a symptom of a lot of things going wrong for them, and they're and that they're not able to, you know, get what they want or need in life. And so you know, then it clearly is indicative of psychopathology from our perspective, I hear you, I should have not even brought the suicide one because

that that's the one you used double clicked on. But I'm thing harmed to others, you know, criteria like pedophiles, who might you know, are at risk of acting on it, you know, their urges or other things like that. Yeah, yeah, right, And so I think that's a clear case where somebody is putting themselves at risk. You know, so pretty much nobody wants to go to jail, right If you're going to jail, like, that's probably gonna thwart a lot of your your goals, the things you value, what you want

in life. And you know, so sometimes let's say somebody makes a mistake, does something illegal, goes to jail. They might be able they can avoid mental illness potentially by temporarily adjusting their goals, trying to adapt to their situation. You know, when they get out of jail, they might go back to pursuing some of the former values. Hopefully they've also maybe changed some of their goals to avoid getting that kind of trouble again. You know, So we

can think about that process of adaptation. But when you've got somebody who is at risk of destroying their own lives, not to mention the lives of others, like somebody with pedophilic tendencies, for example, then certainly there could be a good reason to intervene, right, And so you know, that's a situation where you've got both the mental health issues coming up with somebody who's characteristics are putting them at risk, and you've got legal issues where their characteristics are putting

other people at risk. Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right. Well, something I really like about your theory though, is that it even just recognizes fundamentally that different people have different goals. I mean, even that's a revolutionary reframe. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and I guess we try to strike a balance between the fact that there are some goals that are pretty universal to human beings. Right, this is like the whole idea of basic needs, right, I don't need to tell

you about basic needs. Yeah, but yeah, so we recogn but then even there, like we put more emphasis on the possibility for those to vary than some theorists would right, like, for example, you know, the need for relatedness or connection or belonging or whatever you want to call it. You know, maybe there's somebody who's a hermit who's been living in the woods for twenty years. Do you ever read that story about it's like the last hermit, this guy who

lived in Maine in the woods. No, that's a really fascinating story. I'll send it to you. But you know, so there are real people like this who are happier without human contact and who seem to have you know, minuscule amounts of what is supposedly this universal human need

for affiliation. And to us, you know, that doesn't mean that they are defective or mentally ill or disordered or whatever, because it might be that they just have a really unusual personality profile and if they can figure out a way to live that satisfies their other goals, you know, then they can be healthy. More power to them. But most people obviously have more of a need for affiliation

than that, and so it is important. Like if I was thinking about this clinically, I would say, well, you want to check in on the things that people have, uh, you know, most people have or have a need for, like connection to other people and sense of autonomy and sense of competence or capability or you know, esteem or you know, you could use anything on Maslow's list or

your updated version of mass Laws list. Yeah. I mean, if you do ever write more on a specific uh you know, collaboration of the interventions that are implied by your theory, I would like to please consult me, because I think we can. We can, we can bring in a lot of humanistic psychology and and the kind of things I've been thinking about in terms of how the goal of self actualization and actually not forgetting the transcendence

is a need among many humans as well, you know. Right, So, so yeah, we should keep talking, I guess, is what all I'm saying there. Yeah, so let's just end with just a couple more of the implications for intervention. You know, I can even read quotes from you. You say, because our theory defines no, because you say it so well here, Because our theory defines psychopathology in terms of failure of

characteristic adaptations. Behavioral and talk therapies most act direct act most directly on the problem, and biological interventions are effective only in as much as the changes they make to cybernetic mechanisms subsequently allow people to develop and maintain effective characteristic adaptations. In fact, but once we unpacked what that means, I think that's a really good suggestion for clinical psychologists

who want to apply your theory. Yeah. Right. So one of the things that we are is skeptical about the amount that pharmaceuticals are used to try to help people with mental health problems. And you know, to be clear, we think that there's always going to be a place for pharmaceuticals for some types of problem. You know, controlling

mania for example. You know, people use lithium to do that with a fair amount of success for many people, you know, those there are things where there the system, some of these basic mechanisms of the system may be so extreme that if you don't intervene directly on them with drugs, that may be really hard for the person to make contained stability and to be able to pursue their goals effectively in life. But for many problems, I think we should be paying more attention to what we

can do with behavioral interventions, talk based interventions. You know, things like CBT, DBT A c T, all the all the acron or abbreviations CBD, CBD. Well that's a drug intervention, my friend. Yeah. Which, again, I have no opposition to CBD oil or any other drug. But I think that when we are talking about what people need, we often intervene with drugs. That it's sort of like driving a nail with a sledgehammer, right. We we use these drugs

that have extremely dramatic consequences on brain function. They're not targeted, they're generally developed through trial and error. They work for some people, but not for many people. The success rates on them are you know, only marginally better than place

ebos for a lot of commonly prescribed drugs. So I think that if we focused more on figuring out how to basically help people to reshape their own habits fundamentally right there, the ways that they think about the world, the ways that they act, the strategies that they use to manage some of their own idiosyncrasies and unusual qualities

without pathologizing them, without stigmatizing them. You know, I just think that I think we could be doing a lot better job of helping people, And I think we could be you know, it's funny I say this because a lot of my own research is neuroscience oriented, right, I'm very interested in the brain systems that are involved in different personality traits and risks for different kinds of mental illness.

But at the same time, I think that we should actually be spending a lot more money in research on interventions that are not based on drugs and on biological mechanisms, because I think that there's this sort of generally the biological mechanisms are what are the real problem, Right, there's a brain disease. But I don't think that's right at all.

I think that the brain, whatever the patterns of brain function, they're just creating risks for people, and that the real disease, if you will, is that people can't figure out what are the right things to be pursuing in life and the right ways to pursue them and the right ways

to understand their existence. That was beautiful. Yeah, you know, this makes a lot of sense what you're saying, because the things at the particular methods that psychologists can use for helping people to change those goals and interpretations of the world and tourn the strategies to be resilient and to reach those goals are more efficient changed by behavior or talk therapies then by biological interventions. Right, yeah, so that really explains it. I want to end our chat

today with a quote of yours. You say, Ultimately, psychopathology can be overcome only by helping people to set aside characteristic maladaptations that prevent them from pursuing their goals effectively, and to adopt new adaptations that become persistent elements of their personalities or habits as you said, right, or we're new habits. You can sell this up as like, you know, figure out how to get rid of your bad habits and develop better correct, that's what we would say in

layman lay person language. But but but I want to ender this note because I think that it's a really exciting new area that you're going into with your work. You know, you've done such great work on understanding the neuroscience of personality, understanding biological substrates of behavior, cognition, and personality.

But to move more in this direction of trying to actually impact the day to day work that psychologists, you know, practitioners and psychiatrists are doing informed by real psychological theory. I think is quite revolutionary. So I just want to thank you Colin for coming on my podcast today and for unpacking all the complexities, because it is a very complex theory, for unpack them with our audience. Yeah, well, I hope, I hope the unpacking was comprehensible. I assume

you'll put up some links. You can probably link to some of the papers if people want to read more. Yeah, I know, it's been it's been fun and it's fun to talk about these things. Thanks you as special for sure. Thanks Colin. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the

Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad freaks experience, you can join us at patreon dot com slash psych Podcast. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.