"That's not mental illness. That's evil."

Roger's boss said it over lunch, about Jeffrey Dahmer, and it ended the discussion. He has been thinking about it for thirty years since.

When someone shoots up a school, or walks into a mall with a knife, we reach for the same handful of words. Lunatic. Madman. Crazy. He was nuts. Every one of them points at mental illness, and nobody says that person is evil. Roger's argument is that the language did not drift there by accident. His own profession took the concept out.

Personality disorders used to be called character disorders. The name changed because character invokes a morality, and a morality implies a judgment. What is left is a vocabulary in which every terrible act has a diagnosis behind it and none of them has a person behind it. The people who pay for that are the ones who are genuinely ill. Roger worked with them for years, and by and large they are gentle, troubled souls. They do not want to hurt people. They just do not want to be hurt anymore.

What we cover:

• Why "lunatic" and "madman" are the words our culture reaches for after a tragedy, and what that costs people with schizophrenia
• Patsy, Roger's boss from the Texas Panhandle, and the sentence that ended a lunch
• Jordan Peterson's dark triad, and why Roger thinks a psychological label on evil behavior is still a way of not saying the word
• Axis 1 and Axis 2: the difference between something that has you and something that is you
• Why "people with schizophrenia" is a different sentence from "schizophrenics"
• Thomas Sowell's conflict of visions, and the utopian half of it: people are basically good, human beings are perfectible, and anyone who does harm was either uneducated or ill

Roger's line, and the reason this episode exists: "If you have a conception that evil is not part of the formula, then you're going to come up with a different explanation for behavior."

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
1:16 The question: are mentally ill people evil?
1:46 What has happened to our language
2:43 Gentle, troubled souls
3:29 Patsy, and the Texas Panhandle
4:14 Jeffrey Dahmer comes up over lunch
4:56 That is not mental illness. That is evil.
5:32 How psychology removed evil from its vocabulary
6:49 The DSM: you, and the thing that has you
7:45 Character disorder becomes personality disorder
9:57 What are you going to say about people?
10:41 Thomas Sowell, and a conflict of visions
11:41 The utopian vision: people are perfectible
13:06 Education, therapy, or paternal control
15:12 Next time on Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts, Episode 72.

Dr. Roger Hall is a Peak Performance Psychologist who helps leaders master their thinking and achieve greater power, freedom, clarity, and calm.

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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
🌐 Connect with Dr. Hall: Visit drrogerhall.com for resources and more.
🧭 Work with Roger: compassconsultation.com
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Opinions expressed are not therapy or constitute any professional relationship with anyone who watches or listens. For education and entertainment only.

Loneliness is more deadly than smoking, and the man whose research proved it died of lung cancer. Touch starvation is not a figure of speech: oxytocin, the chemical that bonds a mother to a newborn, is released by skin on skin contact, and a society that has stopped touching each other is running short of it.

This is Part 2 of the 23 July conversation. Part 1 was about ruling out the body before you diagnose the mind. This one is about the other half of the answer: community is not a nice extra on top of treatment, it is part of the treatment.

Roger opens with two smokers. Gary Berntson was a neuropsychologist, John Cacioppo was a social psychologist, and their fields barely overlapped. They went out behind Townsend Hall by the loading dock to smoke together, started comparing their work, and that smoke break became the foundation of social neuroscience. Cacioppo went on to write the book on loneliness. He died of lung cancer.

What we cover:

• Herd animals or pack animals, and which one we are
• Oxytocin, why birth and breastfeeding release the most of it, and what skin on skin is actually doing
• Photographs from 50 and 100 years ago: people leaning on each other, arms around each other, and when that stopped
• Why loneliness is more deadly than smoking, and the research behind that claim
• Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, and what happened to the leagues, the lodges and the clubs
• Entrainment: why singing, rowing and marching in time with other people bonds them, and why doing it alone does not
• Chicago O'Hare, a missed flight, and what fear smells like
• The study that swabbed fear sweat, put it under other people's noses in an fMRI, and watched their amygdalae light up
• The question Roger asks himself: who am I hanging around with?
• Why AI cannot touch you, and the two things it will never provide

Chapters
00:00 We humans need other humans
01:50 Is community part of the cure?
02:39 Herd animals or pack animals
05:03 Two smokers behind Townsend Hall
06:35 The hormones, and the one that connects us
07:33 Skin on skin
09:51 We stopped touching each other
13:44 Loneliness is more deadly than smoking
14:52 What happened to community: Bowling Alone
15:32 Entrainment, and why doing things in time together bonds people
19:42 Chicago O'Hare, and what fear smells like
21:55 They swabbed fear sweat
26:32 Who am I hanging around with?
28:18 AI cannot touch you

Second Thoughts, Episode 71.

Dr. Roger Hall is a Peak Performance Psychologist who helps leaders master their thinking and achieve greater power, freedom, clarity, and calm.

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Second Thoughts with Dr. Roger Hall!
If you enjoyed today's insights, don't forget to subscribe for more content on leadership, productivity, and personal growth. Share this episode with friends, colleagues, or anyone who could benefit from these powerful strategies.

🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
🌐 Connect with Dr. Hall: Visit drrogerhall.com for resources and more.
🧭 Work with Roger: compassconsultation.com
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Opinions expressed are not therapy or constitute any professional relationship with anyone who watches or listens. For education and entertainment only.

Low energy. Weight gain. Lethargy. Low mood. That is the symptom list for depression. It is also the symptom list for an underactive thyroid, and a blood test tells you which one you are looking at.

This episode is about the rule Rich Russell taught him: check the biology before you go to the psychology. Roger is a business psychologist, not a physician, and he is careful about that line throughout. What he is arguing is narrower and harder to dismiss. His own field is about a hundred years old. Physics has had a thousand. Chemistry has had seven or eight hundred. A discipline that young should be slower to hand out a label and quicker to rule out the body first.

What we cover:

• Why hypothyroidism produces the exact presentation clinicians call depression, and why a TSH panel comes before a diagnosis
• Chris Palmer, the research psychiatrist at Harvard whose book Brain Energy treats serious mental illness as a metabolic problem
• The Mad Hatter was real. Hatters treated felt with mercury, and a high proportion of them went mad
• Dale Bredesen on chronic inflammation, and why the plaques and tangles in Alzheimer's may be the brain's protective response rather than the disease
• Why some researchers have started calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes
• The gut and the brain: how what you feed the bacteria in your gut is communicated up the vagus nerve

Roger's line, and the reason this episode exists: "We have been around maybe a hundred years. Some humility would really be good."

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
1:35 Introduction
2:26 Rich Russell's rule: check the biology first
9:20 Psychology is an infant science
9:49 Hypothyroidism looks exactly like depression
18:04 Chris Palmer, Harvard, and Brain Energy
19:31 Mercury, and why the Mad Hatter was real
21:29 Dale Bredesen on inflammation and the brain
24:07 Insulin, and calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes

Second Thoughts, Episode 70.

Dr. Roger Hall is a Peak Performance Psychologist who helps leaders master their thinking and achieve greater power, freedom, clarity, and calm.

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Second Thoughts with Dr. Roger Hall!
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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
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Opinions expressed are not therapy or constitute any professional relationship with anyone who watches or listens. For education and entertainment only.

"He was a nice man and a good boss." That is what a German housemaid said about Hitler, and it is the sentence that made Dr. Roger Hall stop treating nice as a virtue. This episode takes apart unconditional positive regard, the idea Carl Rogers built modern therapy on. Rogers wanted to say love, but in the 1950s love sounded too soft, so he reached for a clinical phrase instead. What got left out was the part that does the work. Real love confronts. Roger explains why insight alone never changed anybody, why a therapist who refuses to evaluate you is failing at the job you are paying for, and why sociopaths score beautifully on unconditional positive regard. He also puts his daughter in a headlock to brush her teeth, which turns out to be the clearest picture of love in the whole episode. 💡 What You Can Learn from This Episode: 🔹Where unconditional positive regard came from, and the word Carl Rogers was reaching for when he invented it 🔹Why insight is neither necessary nor sufficient for a person to change 🔹The difference between judging, which is weighing the pros and cons, and being judgmental, which is thinking you are the better person 🔹Why nice and loving are two different things, and why only one of them will confront you 🔹How sociopaths and con artists can be excellent at surface empathy with no conscience behind it 🔹Why hypocrisy can only be charged against someone who already holds a moral code 🔹What brushing a small child's teeth teaches you about doing the loving thing instead of the easy one 🔹Why value free counseling is itself a value, and what that costs the client If you have ever softened the truth to keep the peace, as a parent, a manager, a friend or a spouse, this one is about what that choice costs.

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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
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We're taught that healing starts with understanding, that if we can just uncover why we are the way we are, everything will click into place. Dr. Roger Hall says that's only half true, and chasing insight alone can actually keep people stuck.

In this episode of Second Thoughts, Dr. Hall unpacks why insight is neither necessary nor sufficient for change, why so much of modern therapy focuses on finding a single traumatic "cause" instead of looking at the whole picture, and why the story we tell ourselves after a hard event matters more than the event itself.

He also shares a compelling research finding on childhood abuse survivors, revealing that recovery had less to do with the severity of what happened and more to do with two specific things that happened next.

💡 What You Can Learn from This Episode:
🔹Why insight doesn't automatically lead to change and what does
🔹The difference between everyday adversity and clinical trauma
🔹What "unitary cause theory" is and why it oversimplifies your life story
🔹The research on abuse survivors who avoided long-term trauma, and the two protective factors involved
🔹Why obsessing over painful memories can erase the thousands of good moments in your life
🔹Practical ways to reframe your own narrative, with or without a therapist

 Whether you're in therapy, considering it, or just trying to make sense of your own past, this conversation offers a refreshingly honest perspective on what actually creates lasting change. 

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Second Thoughts with Dr. Roger Hall!
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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
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🧭 Work with Roger: compassconsultation.com
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Opinions expressed are not therapy or constitute any professional relationship with anyone who watches or listens. For education and entertainment only.

What's the real difference between being angry and being hostile? According to Dr. Roger Hall, the answer matters more than you think — and getting it wrong can quietly damage relationships, therapy outcomes, and how people see themselves.

In this episode, Dr. Hall unpacks the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to explain our own mistakes as situational ("I dropped the ball because I was hurt") while explaining other people's mistakes as character flaws ("he dropped it because he's a loser"). He shows how this same bias shows up when someone gets labeled "hostile" instead of simply "angry" — turning a normal, passing emotion into a permanent character judgment.

The conversation covers why this labeling is more than just semantics. Being told you're hostile — rather than that you're currently angry — can trap people in a self-fulfilling cycle: the accusation provokes more anger, which then gets used as evidence that the original label was correct. Dr. Hall traces this pattern across other emotions too, including how sadness becomes "depression," embarrassment becomes "shame," and fear becomes "anxiety" once they're treated as fixed traits rather than temporary states.

Dr. Hall also pushes back on the idea that anger is always a problem to manage away. Drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that anger can be a legitimate, even admirable, response — the emotion behind stepping in to protect someone being harmed, for example — when it's directed at the right target, in the right way, for the right reasons.

💡 What You Can Learn from This Episode:

🔹The difference between a transient emotion and a stable character trait
🔹How the fundamental attribution error shapes the way we judge ourselves vs. others
🔹Why labeling someone "hostile" can become a self-fulfilling prophecy
🔹The legal distinction between malfeasance and misfeasance, and how it applies to mistakes in mental health care
🔹Why anger can serve a healthy, protective purpose — not just a destructive one
🔹How the same relabeling trap applies to sadness, embarrassment, fear, and happiness

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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
🌐 Connect with Dr. Hall: Visit drrogerhall.com for resources and more.
🧭 Work with Roger: compassconsultation.com
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

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Opinions expressed are not therapy or constitute any professional relationship with anyone who watches or listens. For education and entertainment only.

Have you ever left a single therapy session with a label that changed how you see yourself, permanently? On this episode of Second Thoughts, Dr. Roger Hall explains why one offhand diagnosis can take root and spread through your identity like a dandelion in a lawn, nearly impossible to remove once it's there.

Dr. Hall pulls back the curtain on the DSM (the diagnostic manual used across the mental health field), the financial incentives that quietly push clinicians toward over-diagnosing, and why turning to Google or AI chatbots for self-diagnosis can trap you in a story about yourself that simply isn't true.

💡 What You Can Learn from This Episode:

🔹Why studying "abnormal psychology" makes almost everyone start diagnosing themselves and why professionals warn students about it on day one
🔹How insurance reimbursement structures create a hidden incentive for therapists to hand out diagnostic labels
🔹The psychology behind why a diagnosis "sticks" the moment you hear it, thanks to confirmation bias and the availability heuristic
🔹The difference between internal and external locus of control and how a label can quietly rob you of your sense of agency
🔹Why a diagnosis should be a tentative clinical hypothesis, not a life sentence
🔹What genetics and epigenetics actually tell us about how much of your future is really "written"
🔹How to evaluate any diagnosis against your own real-life experience instead of accepting it at face value
🔹What to look for and watch out for when choosing a therapist or counselor

Whether you've been given a diagnosis yourself or you're just curious how much of your self-concept is shaped by labels, this episode will change the way you think about mental health, identity, and the possibility of change.

If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a rating and review, and share it with a friend who needs to hear it. Got a topic you'd like us to cover? Leave it in the comments or reach out. We're always looking for what's next.

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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
🌐 Connect with Dr. Hall: Visit drrogerhall.com for resources and more.
🧭 Work with Roger: compassconsultation.com
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

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Opinions expressed are not therapy or constitute any professional relationship with anyone who watches or listens. For education and entertainment only.

Most people don't think to interview their therapist, they just show up and hope for the best. In this episode, Dr. Roger Hall explains why that approach can backfire, and walks through the three questions he asks every prospective client before starting work together. 

💡 What You Can Learn from This Episode:

🔹Why "what's the straw that broke the camel's back" is the first question to ask yourself before seeking help
🔹How the "magic pixie dust" question clarifies your real goal for therapy
🔹Why the fit between client and counselor matters more than theoretical training
🔹What's causing the current oversupply of counselors and therapists
🔹Why fully-online counseling and psychology programs raise concerns
🔹How to know when it's time to find a new therapist

This episode is a practical guide for anyone currently in therapy, considering it, or supporting a friend or family member who is. 

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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
🌐 Connect with Dr. Hall: Visit drrogerhall.com for resources and more.
🧭 Work with Roger: compassconsultation.com
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Ever tried to find a therapist or coach and had no idea where to even start? You're not alone most people can't tell you the difference between a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a counselor, and a coach, and picking the wrong one can waste your time, your money, and your emotional energy.

In this episode, Dr. Roger Hall breaks down the entire "helping professions" landscape, psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and the largely unregulated world of life coaching and explains what each one is actually trained to do (and what they're not).

Then Roger shares the single most important question you should ask anyone before you let them into your head: "How do people change?" He walks through the brain science behind it, hindbrain, midbrain, forebrain and explains why cognitive-based approaches are the most reliable way to shift your thoughts, emotions, and behavior. He also explains why vague, feel-good answers like "embrace your shame and release it to the universe" are a red flag, not a treatment plan.

💡 What You Can Learn from This Episode:

🔹The real difference between a psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, social worker, and coach and which one actually fits your situation
🔹Why "counseling" used to mean what "coaching" means today, and how that shift confuses everyone
🔹How to tell if you need remediation (getting back to baseline) or enhancement (leveling up an already-good life)
🔹The one question that reveals whether someone actually knows how to help people change
🔹The basic brain science behind why changing your thinking is the most reliable path to changing how you feel and act
🔹Why a helper's values matter just as much as their credentials

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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
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What if the very thing meant to heal you is what's making you worse? In this episode of Second Thoughts, Dr. Roger Hall introduces one of the most important and least discussed concepts in psychology: iatrogenics, when the cure causes the disease.

Dr. Hall walks through the recovered memory crisis of the 1980s and 90s, when therapists across the country convinced clients they had repressed traumatic memories that never actually happened. Some of those clients' testimony sent innocent people to prison, only for later evidence to prove the memories were false. He explains the disturbing research showing just how easily memories can be implanted through leading questions, repeated rehearsal, and a trusting relationship with an authority figure and why your memory functions more like a copy of a copy than a video recording.

💡 What You Can Learn from This Episode:

🔹What iatrogenics means and why it's one of the most important concepts in psychology
🔹How the recovered memory crisis of the 1980s and 90s led therapists to unintentionally implant false memories in their clients
🔹Why some of those false memories sent innocent people to prison
🔹How human memory actually works — more like a copy of a copy than a video recording
🔹The real research showing how easily memories can be manipulated through leading questions and repetition
🔹Why eyewitness testimony is considered "the best bad evidence" in a court of law
🔹How diagnostic fads like satanic ritual abuse and dissociative identity disorder rose and fell in prevalence
🔹Whether social contagion or therapist bias might explain these diagnostic trends
🔹How to be a careful, informed consumer of mental health care
🔹Why questioning bad therapy practices doesn't mean dismissing real trauma or real survivors

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Second Thoughts with Dr. Roger Hall!
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🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
🌐 Connect with Dr. Hall: Visit drrogerhall.com for resources and more.
🧭 Work with Roger: compassconsultation.com
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

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Opinions expressed are not therapy or constitute any professional relationship with anyone who watches or listens. For education and entertainment only.