Join us Today, Tuesday, September 11th at 1pm ET for a Live Chat with Dr. Martha Stout, Author of "The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior And How We Can Reclaim Our Courage"
If you can’t make the live event, leave a question or comment on this article.
In The Myth of Sanity, Dr. Martha Martha Stout analyzed how we cope with personal trauma. In her national bestseller The Sociopath Next Door, she showed how us to avoid suffering psychological damage at the hands of others. Now, in THE PARANOIA SWITCH: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior-And How We Can Reclaim Our Courage (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Dr. Stout offers a groundbreaking clinical, neuropsychological, and practical examination of what terror and fear politics have done to our minds, and to the very biology of our brains.
Dr. Stout addresses our insecurities and our longing for protection. Using clear examples of local and global terrorism, Stout guides readers toward seeing their so-called monsters as real, multifaceted human beings, as she warns us to look out for “Fear Brokers”-people who capitalize on our fears of the catastrophic so that they can become (or remain) powerful. Anxiety, like an infectious disease, is highly contagious. The Ku Klux Klan, the Japanese Internment Camps, McCarthy's witch hunts, and ethnic profiling were all born out of a blinding fear of the unknown.
For those interested in learning more about how our thinking is shaped by fear, THE PARANOIA SWITCH does more than point out our problems, it provides readers with the necessary steps to flip our individual and collective “fear switch” back to the off position.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A clinical psychologist in private practice and bestselling author, Dr. Stout served as a Psychology Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for twenty-six years (1978-2004). Â Â During her time at Harvard Dr. Stout also worked at Massachusetts General Hospital, Psychiatry Consolidated and McLean Hospital. In addition to her time at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Stout has taught at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Wellesley College, The New School for Social Research, and the National Institute of Mental Health. Her previous book, The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless versus the Rest of Us (Random House, 2005) was a National Bestseller and won a Books for a Better Life Award in February of 2006. She currently lives and works in Massachusetts.
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Tips For During the Chat:To jump into the discussion, all you need to do is type your question in the comment box below (if you're not already a member you will need to join Gather in order to post a question). To see others’ questions and my responses in real time, simply hit the refresh button on your browser. You will need to refresh your page continuously to see each new comment.
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Click Here to read an Excerpt from "The Paranoia Switch"
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Comments: 28
Isn't this what the terrorist mentallity feeds on and tries to manipulate us with? It sometimes seems that the more we see and hear things and dwell on them, the less we allow our common sense to rule. We end up thinking with our feelings and forget to use our brains to process what is real and what is perception. The media gets a lot of the blame for charging stories and adding interpretations to facts.
Dr. Stout, I have only read the short excerpt from The Paranoia Switch" and I am looking forward to the read. I am not able to be online for this discussion, but will read it later in the week. Thanks for joining us at Gather.
I appreciate the deeply insightful way you have negotiated the difficult and hazardous intellectual obstacle course surrounding 9/11 to present a clear and comprehensive overview of necessary and neglected truths.
I was particularly struck by the way you help us to focus in on what is certainly the central issue (page 13, bottom):
"… wrestling with our fear, and with those who would profit from our fear … is the crucial struggle, the one that will more fundamentally affect our future and our children's."
By comparing the trauma of individuals to the trauma of 9/11, your experience in treating individual trauma victims gives us a handle on a national/global treatment for 9/11(and future sociopathic, "fear-broker" induced traumas), and a hope for a way out of this labyrinth of fear. Thank you.
Will you be having an in-depth group discussion on your book here or on some other venue after today?
Craig S
9/11 has changed forever our perception of safety within our country. I have 2 sons, one 9 years old and the other 14. Both of them, to a certain extent remember 9/11. My oldest vividly remembers how he felt at school after he learned of the attacks and how frightened the children were. How do I help my boys learn from 9/11 and yet not frighten them needlessly OR tell them "everything is OK" when I myself suffer panic attacks at the remembrance of that day? How do parents deal with the aftermath when we ourselves were so deeply affected? thank you for this opportunity to ask you this question....your book is definitely on my list of "to purchase" books!
I have added this book to my list of books that I need to pick up at the library. I am in hopes that it will help me deal with my problems. Is is necessary to take meds or just see a theapist? Currenly I am on meds and seeing a therapist. I marked ALL but three of the questions that you posted with "yes" That really concerned me in a big way.
It looks like you already have a couple of questions above to get you started.
First of all, I'm glad you were able to pull yourself away from issues surrounding someone's conscienceless behavior. Staying away is the best thing you can do, for yourself and for everyone.
As for the rest-- You're absolutely right. Terrorism can actually be DEFINED as aggressive, usually violent acts that have, as their most important goal, the invasion of the minds of the survivors. And just after 9/11//01, research discovered a correlation between anxiety and the amount of television a person watched. And we must not overlook the ways we have been retraumatized-- for six years-- by politicians who have chosen to use our fear and paranoia to consolidate their authoritarian power.
There's a reasonably good book on the mentality of terrorists called Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, by Walter Reich. This book comes out of the Woodrow Wilson Center (so keep in mind its political origins).
Just like we're not, terrorists are not all the same. I suspect that some are plain-vanilla sociopaths. But others are ideologues, and some simply desperate. Keep in mind, also, that despite what you hear all the time in the media, the main motivation of terrorism in not hatred and envy. Its main motivation is a desire to communicate something, to have an effect, by planting something in the minds of the survivors, something (fear) that they hope will remain our minds.
Thank you so much for your kind words. Yes, I really do believe that what we do about our fear is more important than the specific steps we take to deal with terrorism. And, it should be noted, the idea that we can ever "kill or capture all the terrorists" is completely inaccurate. Terrorism has been with us for many thousands of years; it is not new, and, sadly, it is not ever going to be completely gone, and so we need to find some way to handle our fear, rather than to spend all our energies on a task that is impossible in the first place.
Thanks for asking about other venues. I'll be speaking and signing books at the Harvard Bookstore (not the Coop-- rather, it's the Harvard Bookstore) this Friday, 9/14, at 3 pm. C-SPAN will be covering the event. Would be great to have all of you there!
I look forward to reading your article. I think we can all remember exactly where we were, what we were doing, how we felt, and so forth, that morning. All of that has been, in a manner of speaking, burned into our minds. I was at my computer doing some writing, when the Associated Press put up a headline on the Web (just a headline-- no story) that said, "Plane crashes into World Trade Center." I remember clearly that I thought to myself-- Wow, someday this kind of thing is going to happen and it will be a terrorist attack. Then, of course, came the additional headline, "Second plane crashes into the World Trade Center," and I knew... I guess we all did.
It is important to tell each other our stories. Words and communication are extremely important. They keep us from being automatons run by silent, unconscious fears, and they help us turn off the paranoia switch. Also, they make us less vulnerable to fear-brokering opportunists.
I understand your dilemma very well. My daughter was nine in 2001. Children-- most especially the younger ones-- learn about all the emotions from their adult caregivers, and anxiety is no different. It's okay, in fact it's good, to talk with your children about the topic of anxiety in general-- what it feels like, why it happens, what a panic attack is, and so forth. Labels help us all. You can certainly say that your panic is something in your mind, and not something that has to do with how much danger you logically think surrounds you and your family. You can tell your kids the truth-- the adults are trying to make the country safer, and where it concerns you and them personally, the probability that you or a family member will be injured by a terrorist is tiny-- smaller than the likelihood that you'd be hit by a piece of space debris. You can tell them that 9/11 made people very sad and frightened, but that we've gotten better since then, and that there will always be ways that they, too, will be able to deal with the anxieties in their own lives. Have faith in them, that they will be able to cope, now and in the future. That's the very best way to teach them to have faith in themselves.
Thanks for asking that. The expression "paranoia switch" has a double meaning. First of all, it refers to the changes in behavior and culture that followed 9/11. And secondly, it refers to the "paranoia switch" that was installed in our very brains on that day.
Traumatic memories are recorded in the brain differently from the way regular memories are stored. Regular memories-- for example, "I visited the Cascade Mountains with my cousin Fred," are integrated and whole, and stored in the "higher" parts of our brain. For this reason, we can use words to describe these memories, talk about them with other people, and add to them later on with more updated information about mountains and cousin Fred. Traumatic memories, in contrast, never get to the higher parts of the brain. They become "trapped" at the level of the limbic system (the"emotional part" of the brain), and consist of little isolated shards of sensation and image that pop up at odd times and cause us to behave anxiously when there is no longer any reason to be anxious (like the combat veteran who falls to the pavement when he hears a car backfire). Worst of all, a paranoia switch is nonconscious and silent; usually we don't know it's there, nor do we understand how vulnerable it makes us to manipulation.
Thank you to all the Gather members who participated. Until next time!
I've enjoyed this very much. Good-bye for now.
Martha Stout
I assume this is what your book touches on, in part.
I certainly hope so. I have been awaiting a watershed moment, a sea change in psychiatry for years, nearing decades, by now.
My article is due February 6th, 2008.
Thank you kindly,
Cait
Only advice I can give right now is best effective way to have more readers/viewers is when you send out a mailing about your piece, please have a clickable link. It makes things easier. Sorry, just trying to be helpful. :o)