Ashley Miller

SkepTech was glorious! (Summary incoming this evening). The anonymity panel was just plain fun, Stephanie gave an amazing talk about psychometrics, and I was happy to be around such enthusiastic, brilliant people.

Also, after one week of interning, I’ve mostly figured out how blogging fits in; expect one or more smallish posts each day during the week. I don’t have time to fully develop and publish post by a reasonable time on weekday evenings, so those will be for weekends.

Until then, links!

Ozy on medicalizing mental variation. Go read all of it.

Heina on fauxminism.

Fauxminism is the curious phenomenon where people think that featuring, talking about, or even just being a woman is an inherently feminist act and thus renders the person and/or act(s) in question irreproachably progressive with regards to matters of gender. What makes someone a fauxminist is not any particular action or choice that they make or take, but their dogged insistence that anything they do must be feminist because they are a woman or have involved a woman without taking into account how those actions affect the lives of other women. They tend to say things like ”Criticizing another woman? Jeez, that isn’t very feminist of you” and “Support all ladies no matter what they do (even if that’s hindering other ladies)!” in response to feminist critiques of anything even marginally involving a woman.

Navigating masculinity as a black transman.

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How was your weekend? Did you make it to any of the many conferences? Write anything good? Self-promote below!

I’m back! And all of you who dropped off hugs on my last post are wonderful. It’s things like this that keep me convinced that everyone clamoring about how Teh Interwebs is ruining everything are entirely off base. I’ve got some posts planned and in the works, but for now, links and a brief rant! (Also, I’m still soliciting questions for a post on therapy–be sure to comment below).

Miri writes about exercise. I’m, unfortunately, not quite at the point she is in terms of attitude. But I’d like to be.

As an aside, I’d like to recommend an app/program called Fitocracy for low pressure exercising. Designed by two computer geeks (their own description!), it uses game mechanics (levels, quests, points) to track your exercise. I like it because the goal is doing a variety of activities, not losing weight. You can’t enter calories, which keeps me from getting obsessive, and you’re rewarded for doing a range of activities and building stamina, not for pounds lost. 

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

As many of my female peers are doing at the moment, I’m reading a book by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg called Lean In. The first chapter asks: What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

My answer? I’d write this blog.

How not to be a dick to your anorexic friend. (My one qualm about this article is that it treats anorexia/starvation behaviors as only something thin people have. Otherwise it’s quite good.)

Well-intended remarks about how I look prettier with “some meat on my bones,” or even about how “healthy” I look, get twisted through my f’d up brain-synapses into a command to start restricting again. Yeah, I hate this too. Anorexia is like a cat-piss stain on my sofa of awesome-ness. (My original analogy involved weeds in a flower garden, but aren’t you glad I went this route instead?)

If you want to comment about my progress, mention that I seem to be flourishing, or tell me I seem to be returning to a person who is in love with the world vs. caught up in a battle with myself.

Confused about the Adria Richards kerfuffle? Ask an ethicist. Dr. Free-Ride has a fabulous examination of all points.

Recognize that the response that you expect will automatically follow from politely asking someone to stop engaging in a particular behavior may not be the response other people have gotten when they have tried the approach you take as obviously one that would work.

Recognize that, especially if you’re a man, you may not know the lived history women are using to update their Bayesian priors. Maybe also recognize, following up on #2 above, that you may not know that lived history on account of having told women who might otherwise have shared it with you that they were wrong to feel the way they told you they felt about particular situations, or that they couldn’t possibly feel that way because you never felt that way in analogous situations. In other words, you may have gappy information because of how your past behavior has influenced how the women you know update their priors about you.

Religious Trauma Syndrome–Is it real?
I am…unconvinced. Not unconvinced that there are mental health problems and suffering associated with leaving particularly harmful sects, but that this is a useful or accurate label.

Firstly, despite calling it “religious”, the article seems to only be specific to Christianity. This is cool if you’re talking about Christianity only, but then please don’t call it “religious” when you mean a specific kind of religion. If there’s research to suggest that this happens across religions in the most fundamental wings of each, isn’t it more likely the result of fundamentalist belief, rather than belief itself?

Jumping off of that, isn’t it far more likely that it’s more about a set of behaviors (external loci of control, infallibility of those in power, etc) that we already know cause mental health problems? Is it useful in any way to create a separate category of response to trauma, rather than just noting the ways in which this is a permutation of PTSD (and relatedly, acute stress disorder*)?

I’m not saying that specific branches and behaviors within religion can be bad (and sometimes very bad) for mental health, but it seems incredibly political to be naming a syndrome this way–and that’s a very bad habit.

Commenters! Please help me by posting your questions about therapy, mental illness, and/or psychology below.