Second Thoughts

"If you don't understand half of your population, then you can't serve them well."

A conservative therapist is hard to find, and Dr. Roger Hall says that is not an accident. What happens when a psychologist does not share your presuppositions? In a word, yes, you are at risk. Not from an evil cabal. From good people in an echo chamber who do not know it.

Roger cites the journalist John Tierney, writing in The New York Times: in academic psychology departments about one in eight faculty would call themselves conservative, in social psychology it is closer to one in twenty, and some departments have none. The people training the next generation of therapists are ideologically uniform. The country votes close to 50-50.

Therapy's central rule is that you don't impose your values. Roger's answer: that's a value, and it is a falsehood. In any conversation the listener rewards some topics and not others, wittingly or unwittingly, and the client follows. A couple comes in and says we want to stay married. The therapist says I want to do what's best for each of you as individuals. That's a red flag.

Presuppositions are the heaviest lift in Roger's own coaching: the beliefs you carry without knowing you carry them. Start with the aphorisms your family says. He had to learn the Mennonite and Amish world in the Midwest and LDS theology in Salt Lake City, and a therapist in an echo chamber never goes looking.

His recommendation for the reader is Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Two messages to close: therapists, recognize that you are biased. And if you are looking for help, ask about worldview before you make the appointment. Politics is a marker. Religion is a marker.

What we cover:

• When your therapist does not share your presuppositions
• The therapy echo chamber
• Politics are downstream from culture
• One in eight academic psychologists is conservative, and one in twenty in social psychology
• We don't impose our values: why that is a value
• Marital therapy and the red flag
• Presuppositions and the aphorisms your family says
• The Mennonite, Amish and LDS examples
• The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
• How to ask a therapist about worldview

Chapters
0:00 One in eight is conservative
0:54 When your therapist does not share your presuppositions
2:15 The therapy echo chamber
3:16 Politics are downstream from culture
3:58 One in eight academic psychologists is conservative
4:54 Social psychology: one in twenty, and some departments zero
5:16 The people training tomorrow's therapists
5:28 The country is pretty close to 50-50
6:40 We don't impose our values. That's a value
7:29 How a therapist rewards a story without knowing it
8:30 Marital therapy: pro-divorce, neutral or anti-divorce?
9:39 We want to stay married: the red flag
10:33 Culturally competent
11:30 The Southern Baptist client
12:44 Presuppositions are the heaviest lift
13:28 Start with the aphorisms your family says
14:31 Learning the Mennonite and Amish world
15:44 How damaging can it be?
16:43 Salt Lake City and LDS theology
17:42 Harder to find a therapist who understands you
19:33 The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
20:44 Two messages: therapists, recognize your bias
21:34 Ask your therapist about their worldview
22:24 Next time: the eight most important questions

Second Thoughts, Episode 79.

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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Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
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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 therapists don't ever find out how things turn out."

Does therapy work? The honest answer is that most therapists never find out. The client graduates, quits or leaves, and nobody checks in eight years later to ask how things are going. Dr. Roger Hall gave up doing psychotherapy over 20 years ago, and he says it is a very rare occurrence to learn how a client's life really turned out.

The research has the same problem. A lot of what passes for evidence on psychotherapy is client satisfaction surveys. Do you like your therapist? Do you feel better? Liking someone and changing are two different things, and a client who feels connected rates the outcome higher than their behavior would suggest. Add the expert differential, a suffering client and a confident expert, and nobody in the room is set up to say the therapist was wrong.

Roger brings in Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game: you are taking advice from someone with no long-term connection to the outcome. Then the trap inside the session. The client says you're brilliant, you've changed my life, and the therapist starts to believe their own press clippings. Some clients take a flight into health, feel great for two weeks and collapse, because nothing built the habits to sustain the change.

Insurance pays for most of it and measures cost, not long-term change. Long-term outcome studies cost millions, which is why one of the few is the Harvard Grant Study. Roger's verdict: psychology is an infant science, and clinical psychology is at the state of alchemy relative to chemistry.

So what do you do? Write down your goals before you start, in behavior you can count. Five days out of seven I sleep eight hours. Five days out of seven I make my bed. You can measure that. You can't measure happy. Roger recommends the workbook Mind Over Mood by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky, and the PLISSIT model he learned from a sex therapy instructor: permission, limited information, specific suggestions, and only then intensive therapy.

Chapters
0:00 Most therapists never find out how it turned out
1:09 Can a therapist ever be wrong?
1:28 How do you measure if therapy worked?
2:05 Satisfaction is not change
3:14 The expert differential
3:54 There is no feedback loop
5:16 Painting a picture you can't see
6:03 Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game
6:58 If this were your child, what would you do?
9:09 The sugar high inside the session
9:55 Believing their own press clippings
10:10 The flight into health
11:13 Palliative care: relief without a cure
12:58 Who pays for therapy?
14:15 Why therapists don't follow up
15:00 What a long-term outcome study costs
15:15 The Harvard Grant Study
16:41 What should you do? Write down your goals
17:25 Behavioral goals you can measure
18:47 Do therapists give each other feedback?
20:27 Therapists are like cats
21:26 Psychology is at the state of alchemy
22:35 Mind Over Mood
23:30 The PLISSIT model
25:24 Try the small steps before intensive therapy
26:44 Share this with a friend

Second Thoughts, Episode 78.

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

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
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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.

"Everybody's life is hard."

Character strengths, not a diagnosis. In 1999 Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, wrote a farewell address that said the future of psychology is not in psychopathology. The field had strayed from what got it into business in the first place, which is how to define human flourishing.

Seligman, Chris Peterson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Fredrickson built a competing classification. Not disorders. Virtues and strengths, six buckets, drawn from ancient religious and philosophical texts. The classical virtues, the medieval virtues, and the modern six line up. The Values in Action inventory measures where you stand. It is an imperfect instrument, it costs money, and it is worth taking. The survey lives at viacharacter.org.

His claim: legitimately, some people are suffering and need help. That is a small portion of the population. The larger portion would be better served by looking at their strengths than at their symptoms. If you focus on the one small symptom cluster of your life and not the rest, you are focused on the thing that trips you rather than the thing that helps you run.

Then the hard part. Nation's original question was you don't have a disorder, you have a hard life. Roger starts with the first line of Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled: life is hard. It just is. First world problems are still problems, and discounting them because worse problems exist somewhere else gets you nowhere. So assume life is difficult. Then what?

Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and logotherapy: growth comes through suffering, and if we believe we should have easy lives we will never grow. People who have had trauma have to work on it. But getting to zero is a pretty sucky goal. Once you are at zero, how do you give your gifts to the world? Unless there is a payoff for being a victim, and victimhood is the smaller prize.

The close is the Harvard Grant Study, the longest running longitudinal study of human beings. The men with the greatest life satisfaction were not the richest or the most famous. They had strong primary love relationships and meaningful work. To work and to love. If all you are focused on is your precious diagnosis, you will never be fruitful for the rest of the world.

This continues Episode 76: Is ADHD Overdiagnosed? You Are Not Your Diagnosis.

What we cover:

• Seligman's 1999 farewell address: the future of psychology is not psychopathology
• The competing classification: virtues and strengths instead of disorders
• The classical virtues, the medieval virtues, and the modern six
• The Values in Action inventory, and where to find it
• The small portion who need help, and the larger portion who need their strengths
• Overdiagnosis is a disservice to the people who really have the disorder
• The Road Less Traveled: life is hard, it just is
• First world problems are still problems
• Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl and logotherapy
• Getting to zero is a pretty sucky goal
• Unless there is a payoff for being a victim
• To work and to love: the Harvard Grant Study

Chapters
0:00 Everybody's life is hard
1:11 Seligman's 1999 farewell address
1:54 A competing classification: virtues and strengths
2:46 The classical virtues and the medieval virtues
3:39 Most people are better served by strengths than by diagnostics
4:02 The Values in Action inventory
5:29 Seligman, Fredrickson and Csikszentmihalyi: who to read
6:14 The thing that trips you versus the thing that helps you run
6:39 Overdiagnosis is a disservice to people who really have the disorder
7:08 Nobody looks at traffic that runs well
7:55 You don't have a disorder. You have a hard life
8:31 The Road Less Traveled: life is hard, it just is
9:02 First world problems are still problems
10:01 Just assume life is difficult. Then what?
10:19 Man's Search for Meaning
11:09 Logotherapy: growth comes through suffering
12:17 Getting to zero is a pretty sucky goal
13:44 Unless there is a payoff for being a victim
14:04 To work and to love
14:36 The Harvard Grant Study
15:34 What makes a good life
15:53 Share this with a friend

Second Thoughts, Episode 77.

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

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
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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.

"We've made it advantageous to have a diagnosis."

Is ADHD overdiagnosed? Nation asks a plain question first: somebody walks in convinced they have ADHD. How do you find out whether they do? Roger's answer is the diagnostic triage.

There are two roads to a diagnosis. Psychometric testing, with the MMPI and the MCMI as the gold standards. Or the diagnostic interview, where each category has a list of criteria and you have to meet three of five, or six of nine. Then three more tests that some clinicians have stopped applying: it has to cause significant distress, it has to last, and it has to be unrelated to life events. If your mom dies, you have every symptom of depression. That is not depression. That is grief, and we know its course.

Then the buckets in the DSM: mood, thought, developmental (where ADHD sits), personality, eating, anxiety. The diagnostic language used to be contained within a profession. The internet democratized it. Read the manual and you are convinced you have everything in it.

Roger says overdiagnosis is a piece of the story without a doubt, and he names the incentive. Schools give extra time on a test to a kid with a diagnosis. Social media rewards a self diagnosis worn as a badge of honor. A friend's daughter reports that nobody at her high school is a jock or a theater kid any more. They are in the "I have this disorder" group. Victimhood pays, so you get more of it.

The negativity bias explains why it sells, and Tierney and Baumeister's The Power of Bad explains the bias. Then the therapist's side. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and a therapist's best tool is the diagnostic category. Behind it is a training problem: eight students a class in his program, thousands in two-year programs now. What do you call the person who graduated last in medical school? Doctor.

A mental health diagnosis is a cluster of about eight symptoms, and calling yourself mentally ill when you are not does a disservice to the people who really have the illness. You are not your trauma. You are not your diagnosis. There is far more to you than those narrow categories.

The conversation continues in Episode 77: Seligman's farewell address, character strengths, and why everybody's life is hard.

What we cover:

• Distress, duration, and unrelated to life events: the three tests that get skipped
• Grief looks exactly like depression and is not depression
• The DSM buckets, and where ADHD actually sits
• Why overdiagnosis is a piece of it without a doubt
• Diagnosis as a badge of honor: self diagnosis on TikTok
• Extra time on the test: how schools made a diagnosis advantageous
• The Power of Bad and the negativity bias
• If all you have is a hammer: the therapist whose best tool is the diagnosis
• Diploma mills, and what you call the last in the class
• You are not your trauma. You are not your diagnosis

Books shown: the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association) and The Power of Bad by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister.

Chapters
0:00 We've made it advantageous to have a diagnosis
1:26 How do you find out if you have ADHD? The diagnostic triage
2:12 The MMPI and the MCMI
3:49 It has to last, it has to distress you, and it has to be unrelated to life events
4:08 Grief looks exactly like depression. It is not depression
5:23 Normal problems in living
7:01 The DSM buckets: mood, thought, developmental, personality, eating, anxiety
8:24 The rise in ADHD diagnoses since the 90s
9:10 The DSM used to belong to a profession. Then came the internet
10:44 TikTok and the diagnosis as a badge of honor
11:56 We've made it advantageous to have a diagnosis
12:50 Rewarding victim status: the friend's daughter at school
14:16 If it bleeds, it leads: The Power of Bad and the negativity bias
16:04 If all you have is a hammer: the therapist's best tool is the diagnosis
17:15 Priests, incantations and the box of tissues
19:42 Eight students a class then, thousands in two-year programs now
20:26 Diploma mills, and what you call the last in the class
21:41 I am my diagnosis. No, you're not
22:24 You are not your trauma. You are not your diagnosis
22:54 Next week: Episode 77
23:13 Share this with a friend

Images: DSM-5 cover via Wikimedia Commons (public domain); The Power of Bad cover via Open Library.

Second Thoughts, Episode 76.

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

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
Instagram - @DoctorRogerHall
Linkedin - @Dr Roger Hall
Youtube - @DoctorRogerHall
Rumble - @SecondThoughts

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

"The wolves always know where the sheep are."

Roger has one rule for how to choose a therapist, and it starts with admitting that a wounded healer can be any of three very different people.

Nation opens with the phrase everybody repeats: hurt people hurt people. Roger does not like it. Some hurt people do hurt people, but most of them do not, and the phrase quietly hands back the responsibility of the ones who do. What it also erases is everybody who was harmed, who was traumatized, and who decided not to pass it on.

Then he narrows it to his own profession, and the answer is a taxonomy rather than a verdict. There are therapists who were wounded, worked through it, and came out wiser for it. There are therapists who are still wounded and have not finished, and they make a particular kind of mistake: they assume you have their problem, whatever it is. And there is a small subset who are predators, who chose this work for the access it gives them.

That is where the proverb lands. Where do children congregate? Schools. So schools are full of wonderful teachers, and they are also where a predator goes to be near children. The therapy room is the same shape. The wolves always know where the sheep are.

Roger takes the same idea through medicine. A surgeon who has had surgery is fine, and may be better for it. A surgeon with a tremor is not. The injury only matters when it touches the work. He also repeats a hypothesis he is careful to label a hypothesis, that a subset of orthopedic surgeons carry a little sadism, and he is quick to add that his own best friend from high school is an orthopedic surgeon and is nothing of the kind.

Then the practical half. What do you actually ask? Not "have you had trauma." Ask how people change. Listen for a hypothesis rather than a cure. Watch for the therapist who spends the hour on their own problems.

The rest is Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, and one story from it. A recently divorced woman needs a house painter. He arrives clean cut, in uniform, with a clipboard and a good price, and the dog goes crazy. Her friend says he seems nice and the price is good, are you going to use him? She says no. My dog didn't like him, and my dog's never wrong.

De Becker's point is that she trusted her dog over her own judgment, when the feeling was hers the whole time. Say no and you lose a low bid. Say yes and you might lose far more than that. Or, as Nassim Taleb puts it, you are picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

What we cover:

• Why "hurt people hurt people" gives the wrong people a pass
• The three kinds of wounded healer, and which one is dangerous
• The wolves always know where the sheep are, and why schools are the clearest example
• When an injury matters to the work and when it does not
• The orthopedic surgeon hypothesis, hedges included
• The question that actually screens a therapist: how do people change?
• Mass attracts mass, and the clients a therapist never sees
• Peak performance work against traditional therapy, and where the power differential is real
• Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, and the woman who trusted her dog
• Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller

Chapters
0:00 The wolves always know where the sheep are
1:26 "Hurt people hurt people" and why Roger won't use it
2:33 Born bad, and Bad To The Bone
3:16 The three kinds of wounded healer
4:46 Where do children congregate?
5:23 The same is true in the therapy profession
6:16 The surgeon who had surgery, and the surgeon with a tremor
8:27 The therapist who talks about their own problems
10:27 How do people change? The question that screens
11:32 A hypothesis, not a cure
12:47 Power, freedom, clarity and calm
16:11 Mass attracts mass
18:18 Orthopedic surgeons and a little sadism
20:03 Where the power differential is real
22:29 The Gift of Fear, and the dog that was never wrong
25:30 Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller
26:12 Choose somebody who doesn't give you the creeps

Images in this episode: via Pexels.

Second Thoughts, Episode 75.

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

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
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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.

"A neutered man is tame. He is easy to control. And he is of very little use."

That is Roger's answer to what healthy masculinity actually is, and he gets to it through a bull.

A woman in a court ordered parenting class told the room about her father's farm. He keeps cows, and he keeps one bull, and the bull is mean. Stay away from him. Her son asked the only question that mattered: then why does grandpa keep the bull?

She said she did not know.

That answer is the episode. You keep the bull because without him there are no calves. The thing that makes him dangerous is the same thing that makes him worth having, and you cannot take one out without taking the other with it. Geld him and you get an animal that is calm, obedient and useless.

Roger is not talking about cattle.

The essential quality of masculinity, in his account, is not looks and it is not strength. It is initiative: the willingness to start something and take a calculated risk on it. Testosterone comes with that, and so does aggression. Aristotle got there first, in a book he wrote as a letter to his own son. To be angry is easy. To be angry at the right person, at the right time, in the right amount, for the right reason: this is not easy.

Good men learn to discipline that drive. Bad men never do. A culture that cannot tell those two men apart ends up trying to remove the drive itself, and then wonders why the young men it raised are told their own nature is the disease.

What we cover:

• Why the bull is mean, and why the farm keeps him anyway
• Initiative and calculated risk as the essential quality, not looks and not strength
• Aristotle on disciplined aggression, from the Nicomachean Ethics
• The young bull elephants that killed rhinos, and what changed when the old bulls arrived
• Leader against bully, and the test that separates them
• Why healthy masculinity is very often boring
• Money and fame as side effects of initiative, never the point
• Malignant masculinity, and the influencers selling it as the cure
• Why parents are the prototype for what a child expects a relationship to look like

Chapters
0:00 A neutered man is tame, easy to control, and of very little use
1:14 The bull on the farm
2:50 "Why does grandpa keep the bull?"
3:56 What an agrarian society knew and the suburbs forgot
5:03 Stallions and geldings
6:07 Initiative is the essential quality
6:42 Aristotle: to be angry is easy
8:11 When a boy's nature became the problem
8:36 Malignant masculinity, and the influencers selling it
10:59 The young bull elephants that gored rhinos
12:31 The father is the prototype
13:47 Two bulls in the field, and what the herd did
17:24 Money and fame are the side effects, not the point
21:50 A leader and a bully
23:01 Healthy masculinity is very often boring
25:21 The guy in the corner nursing his drink
27:32 Why we need old bull elephants

Images in this episode: elk in rut by ForestWander (CC BY-SA 3.0 US). US Army trucks, Korea 1952, 809th Anyang collection (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cancer cell, National Cancer Institute (public domain). Ivory stockpile, US Fish and Wildlife Service (public domain). Elk herd, National Park Service (public domain). Remaining images via Pexels.

Second Thoughts, Episode 74.

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

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
Instagram - @DoctorRogerHall
Linkedin - @Dr Roger Hall
Youtube - @DoctorRogerHall
Rumble - @SecondThoughts

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 Hitler's maid said about him. The psychology of evil is not the psychology of mental illness, and this is the episode that pulls them apart.

Rosa Mitterer went to work at the Berghof as a teenager and broke her silence in 2008, at ninety-one. Asked what he was like, she said he was charming, that he was only ever nice to her, and that he was a great boss to work for. She was telling the truth. Roger's point is that being nice and being evil are not opposites, and that the man who was kind to his staff and gentle with his dog is the same man.

So he draws the two by two every consultant draws. One axis is evil. One axis is mental illness. Four quadrants, and the one almost nobody talks about is the person who is evil and not ill at all. Those, Roger says, are the most frightening people he has met. The quadrant that suffers is the other one: people who are mentally ill and not evil, who get lumped in with the first group every time something terrible happens.

What we cover:

• Thomas Sowell's tragic vision: human beings are improvable but not perfectible, and there are no solutions, only trade offs
• Why the founders split power across three co-equal branches, and what that says about what they believed about people
• The French Revolution restarted the calendar at year zero and changed the hours in a day. The only thing of value that survived it was the metric system
• Rosa Mitterer, the Berghof, and a dog named Blondi
• Dignity and depravity: the same person, made in the image of God and capable of anything
• Children of alcoholics are four to seven times more likely to become alcoholic. Do the arithmetic against the base rate and the death sentence disappears

Roger's line, and the reason this episode exists: "I don't trust people who aren't really aware of their own fallibility."

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
1:09 The tragic vision: people are a mix
1:54 There are no solutions, only trade offs
2:40 Why the founders built three branches
3:59 The French Revolution started at year zero
5:21 The guillotine, and Rwanda in Paris
6:25 Aware of your own fallibility
6:54 Dignity and depravity
8:24 Four quadrants: evil and mentally ill
9:24 The most frightening people I have met
10:34 Hitler's maid: he was a nice man and a good boss
11:54 Who actually suffers from the confusion
12:55 Violent crime, and what the base rate says
14:39 Children of alcoholics, and the backwards correlation
16:24 Start with compassion

Second Thoughts, Episode 73.

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

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
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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.

"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.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
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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.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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
📧 Have a question? Submit it for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Follow me on socials:
X - @DoctorRogerHall
Facebook - Second Thoughts
Instagram - @DoctorRogerHall
Linkedin - @Dr Roger Hall
Youtube - @DoctorRogerHall
Rumble - @SecondThoughts

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