ANXIETY-
Mindfulness Should Not Be Taught in School? Really?
It must be combined with skills for feeling psychologically safe.

KEY POINTS-
Teaching mindfulness in schools has been shown to be ineffective and can increase symptoms.
Mindfulness breaks up mental rigidity, allowing emotions to be experienced.
People must also learn tools to tolerate mental discomfort.
Mindfulness-based interventions should not be discarded but used as part of a comprehensive approach.

Mental rigidity is akin to suppressing thoughts in that you allow yourself only certain sets and types of thoughts and emotions. Your emotional/mental bandwidth is limited, and it is difficult to respond appropriately to social cues and signals from others. You may behave in a manner that hurts and damages others. Mental inflexibility (rigidity) is a trait that is common to many mental health diagnoses.1

A large prospective study done in the UK tracked mindfulness-based teaching to over 8,000 students and compared it to usual practices. The mean age of students was 12 years. The study reported that there was no significant benefit and actually caused more problems among many students with prior mental health issues. The researchers recommended that non-specific mindfulness interventions not be implemented in the school system.2

Mental Rigidity
A 2023 paper extensively summarizing the literature on mental rigidity pointed out that the trait is characterized by automaticity and inflexibility and is centered around concepts of self. Patterns of thinking that may have been useful in the past remain fixed and often not relevant to the current situation. Rigidity can wreak havoc on relationships, quality of life, and ability to adapt to life’s challenges.1

Self is defined by dynamic interactions between various regions of the brain,. Lack of mental flexibility shows up on functional MRI brain scans as disruptions in connectivity between these areas.

Re-establishing flexibility seems to be important in the treatment of many health disorders, including major depression, complex psychological trauma, and substance use/addiction disorders. Mindfulness practices (MBIs) have been shown to lessen mental rigidity both clinically and on imaging studies.1

Increasing Mental Pain
The recommendation regarding mindfulness in schools overlooks an important fact— the conditions under which it is ineffective and can exacerbate mental symptoms. Part of the answer lies in looking at why rigidity exists in the first place.

One reason is that humans don't/can’t tolerate mental/emotional pain. Rigidity is one way of limiting exposure. to pain. As rigidity is broken up with mindfulness, what happens? You’ll feel even more emotional pain, which is often intolerable.3 It isn’t surprising that mindfulness increases symptoms in students with prior mental health diagnoses. People must also learn to feel safe in order to move forward. You would never cross a street unless you first felt it was safe to do so.

Used and tested alone as an approach to be implemented in the school system, mindfulness can’t work. What is also needed is teaching students how to also calm their threat physiology (flight or fight body chemistry) in order to feel safe.

Breaking up rigidity alone opens up the dam of suppressed thoughts and emotions, and it is predictable that those who are already struggling would experience a worsening of symptoms. For those without mental health issues, mindfulness alone won’t help one way or the other without further strategies to improve quality of life.

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are effective in increasing the dynamic interactions and connectivity between regions of the brain that define self. The term is the “pattern theory of self," and mental flexibility is increased.3

Define Where MBI’s Fit
Chronic disease is complex and isolated interventions are usually ineffective. However, they should not be discarded, because they can fit into a larger treatment plan. MBIs may be an excellent entry point for many people suffering from major depression, complex trauma, and addiction/substance abuse. However, opening up the flood gates without showing them a way to feel safe is problematic. MBIs favorably alter the brain activity underlying these problems. Instead of discarding MBIs, we should be asking, “what are additional effective treatments?”

Learning to tolerate mental pain is at the core of addressing mental health.

PSYCHOPATHY-
What Gender Does—and Doesn't—Tell Us About Psychopathy.
Female psychopaths may be more complex than most research suggests.
Reviewed by Devon Frye

KEY POINTS-
Female psychopaths are widely seen as different from their male counterparts.
The social conditioning hypothesis argues that female psychopaths are neurotic, hypersexual, and driven in part by a need for social acceptance.
But in reality, gender norms don't fully capture how psychopathic individuals might behave.
Researchers who study female psychopaths may not factor in the influence of their own biases and social conditioning.
Liz Lemon, Tina Fey’s character in the TV show "30 Rock," poses a question that’s plagued feminists for decades: Why aren’t there more female serial killers? Today we have an answer. They’re on our movie screens.

This two-part series will look at the construct of the “female psychopath.” In part 1, I dissect the concept of the “female psychopath” to question whether gender is a helpful lens to consider the different ways psychopathic tendencies present. In part 2, I'll explore ten films with female psychopaths from the past five years and detail how they help us better grasp the true heart of psychopathy: predation without dissociation.

The “Female” Psychopath
A glance at contemporary research on female psychopathy brings up a few themes. There are those hoping to determine if Hare’s psychopathy checklist can adequately screen for differences in gender (Vital et al, 2002). Others ask if the Rorschach test might give trace clues as to a woman’s psychopathic tendencies (Smith et al, 2021). Still more rely on brain scans and the medical model to determine what’s unique about female psychopaths’ physiology (Harenski et al, 2014).

What’s certain for most researchers is that the female psychopath is a different beast than her male counterpoint. She’s eager for social acceptance, displays more neurotic tendencies, has unstable emotions, is more prone to social and relational forms of manipulation, and uses her sexuality rather than brute force to coerce her victims.

These mainstream studies on female psychopathy use cultural norms to explain the different presentations in male and female psychopaths. Young girls are socialized to be kind, polite, and internalizing, we’re told, while young boys are socialized for aggression and acting out. It’s therefore a given that female psychopaths are more eager for social acceptance and sexual manipulation than male psychopaths, given the impact of social conditioning.

While these well-worn tropes about the differences between men and women are tempting to believe, they may have the unintentional effect of simplifying a much more complex situation. As a cultural studies researcher, I can see the value of these “social construction” arguments. I’ve spent a career studying the insidious ways culture can influence developing brains, hearts, and minds. The impact of social conditioning cannot be overstated.

And yet.
How certain can we be that it’s the psychopathic individual—and not the researchers studying them—that are in fact the ones most impacted by social conditioning?

Epistemology: How Do We Know What We Know?
I approach this question as an epistemologist might. Epistemology is the philosophy of asking, “How do we know what we know?”

When reading research articles about female psychopathy, I take this epistemological approach seriously: How do researchers know what they know about women, about psychopathy, and about the explanatory power of their chosen research methodologies?

To help answer these questions, I consider a researcher’s “positionality,” as well as my own. Positionality is a concept developed by feminist scientists and philosophers, like Donna Haraway, who claim that a scientist’s position in society—their race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc.—influences how they come to know the world (Haraway, 1988). When researchers don’t consider their own socialization, assumptions, and biases, the knowledge they produce tends to maintain social hierarchies and unequal power dynamics the researcher inherited from her cultural upbringing.

Let’s think of a hypothetical researcher socialized as white and male who has spent a significant amount of time training to interview inmates thought to be somewhere on the psychopathic spectrum. His research would indicate what behavioral and emotional traits to pay attention to when talking to men vs. women (in this hypothetical situation, considerations for race, sexuality, or nonbinary/transgender identities aren’t in play). He may rely on his binary understanding of gender given both his training and the fact he was raised and socialized in the U.S. as a white male.

This hypothetical researcher may underestimate the effects of what I might call his cultural countertransference and projection when interviewing women. That is, if this male researcher expects a female interviewee to behave in a hyper-sexualized, validation-seeking manner, it’s possible, and even likely, that a true psychopath will sense this and play into those assumptions as a tool of manipulation.

Or more troubling, if this same researcher doesn’t find a woman behaving in a sexualized or internalizing way, he may miss the signs that the person in front of him is in fact psychopathic. In short, his positionality, education, upbringing, and diagnostic tools produce blind spots through no fault of his own.

That’s why I think we can’t rely on the social conditioning hypothesis alone to explain how a female psychopath might behave. And I think Liz Lemon might agree with me when I argue that the term “female psychopath” is like Bic's "For Her" pens: a head-scratching category that misses the point that pens are pens, regardless of the hand that uses them.

Film and Psychopathy
Filmmakers, unhindered by the constraints of a research psychologist, are able to provide many more accurate, diverse, and compelling examples of psychopaths who happen to be women, though this is a relatively recent trend.

In their comprehensive overview of psychopaths on film, Samuel J. Leistedt M.D., Ph.D., and Paul Linkowski M.D., Ph.D., have only this to say about female psychopaths on movie screens: “As in reality, film female psychopaths are rare (and not well known and studied), and when used, they often serve as scheming manipulators whose main weapons are sexual” (Leistedt and Linkowski, 2013). I’m happy to report that in the ten years since their analysis, female psychopaths of all stripes are starting to have their day at the movies.

The films I'll introduce in par 2 explore how gender intersects with other identities, like race, ability, sexuality, nationality, political affiliation, and religion, to complicate any easy distinction between male and female psychopathy. Many times when research psychologists discuss women, there's little by way of an intersectional analysis—that is, an analysis of how gender is also influenced by a person's race, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and other markers of identity that mediate behavior.

Many of these psychopathic characters wouldn’t fit within the models provided by contemporary research into “female” psychopaths. These characters therefore offer valuable lessons about the ways cultural norms can obscure reality rather than describe it.