August 14, 2025 • 38 mins
Co-Host Dr. Craig B. Wiener (https://mountaintoppodcast.com/wiener) My first time guest, Dr. Craig B. Wiener is a licensed psychologist and best selling author on a variety of topics. Central to today's episode, much of Dr. Wiener's important work has snowballed since he first questioned the growing tendency to make behavioral problems medical disabilities...especially for boys. His groundbreaking work with ADHD shows that the behaviors included in the ADHD diagnosis can become frequent due to reinforcement. This "medicalization of the social" is a topic of interest for all of us as men, for sure...and for a variety of reasons, actually. What would Craig tell men who have been told there's something wrong with them by the medical field, when it might actually be a social thing? Could we simply need some self-work on our social skills. Or worse, could we have been told something is wrong with us when we're really just fine? What about when parents project medical diagnoses upon their kids? (e.g. Health Anxiety By Proxy or Munchausen Syndrome) How would Craig explain the rise in later-life diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder? And what about when people manipulate the medicalization of the social for their own apparent benefit, like "I’m on the spectrum, not a narcissist"? What happens when little boys act like, well...little boys, but are rushed to the principal's office or even to therapy for it? On the other hand, there's also a pattern where people seek help, then resist it and offload the blame onto others. Why would anyone want to stay locked into their pattern of failure? Check out the new Substack channel at https://mountaintoppodcast.com/substack
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
All right.
How's it going gentlemen.
Welcome to yet another episode of the big show, The Mountain Top Podcast.
As always, I am your host, Scot McKay You can find me on X on Truth Social on TikTok andon YouTube at Scot McKay.
And the big news is you can also find me on Substack now at Scot McKay.
Lots of good stuff there for you.
Articles you won't find anywhere else.
(00:21):
Just kind of prepare yourself because I let the fur fly there.
The stuff that I don't believe the masses can handle on my newsletter list.
Well,
I talk about it there.
So you, you'll know if you belong and if you can handle the truth, you'll love it.
That's at Scot McKay on Substack.
I'm also still on Instagram at real Scot McKay and also on Threads.
(00:44):
Although not, although I never use it at real Scot McKay and the website ismountaintoppodcast.com.
And if you're not on The Mountain Top Summit on Facebook, you should be, we're having agreat time talking about all sorts of things related to masculinity.
and getting better with women on Facebook.
So join us there.
My guest today is a first time guest.
He hails from Worcester, MA and he is a licensed psychologist.
(01:09):
He is the author of a new book called Backyard Politics a psychological understanding oftoday's political and social divide.
And since this is not particularly a show about politics, although I'm going to give youevery opportunity to get a copy of Craig's wonderful book.
Um,
We're going to talk about something completely different today.
(01:29):
We're going to talk about how many of us as men either have been diagnosed with somethingthat's better explained by something social or the opposite where, you know, really we've
got something going on and people have told us, well, just buck up and get through it orsomething.
And it's my belief that we as men are kind of susceptible.
(01:53):
to being told those sorts of things and basically going through our life as if it might bepossible that it's true or that it's definitely true.
Whereas my first time guest, Dr.
Craig T, Dr.
Craig B Wiener, excuse me, from Worcester, MA would have a different take on it.
So Craig, welcome to the show, man.
Glad to have you.
(02:13):
Thanks for having me.
uh
first of all, I know you were teased for your name when you were a kid, but actually, uh,all your name really means kind of like the Frankfurter is that you're, you're, you're,
uh, someone in your family lineage was probably from Vienna, Austria.
Yeah.
Right.
(02:34):
we were talking a little bit about, about this particular topic before we clicked record.
And I Googled you to find out more about your practice and what you were about as is mypractice with all my guests.
And there's a rather prominent OB/GYN in New Jersey named Craig B.
Weiner.
And you were saying that, you know, someone in your family is actually a urologist, whichis probably an even better fit.
(02:56):
Yeah, the real Dr.
Weiner.
Yeah, yeah, the Wiener doctor, Dr.
Wiener.
That's kind of like the Burgermeister Meisterburger from the Christmas show, right?
Yeah.
But anyway, enough about that.
We got that out of the way.
Talk to us about your passion for this particular topic.
I know it it all started with ADHD and maybe it does end there too, but tell us about umhow you got particularly involved with this topic and how it relates to these guys.
(03:28):
Yeah, so I did publish three books on ADHD, a parenting book to help parents and twoacademic books.
And when I first started out with psychology, I noticed how many boys were getting labeledin this way.
so it was concerning to me because I saw the behaviors as situational, as things thatthese kids would do under certain circumstances.
(03:55):
and it wasn't something that they were doing persistently like color blindness or someother bodily deficiency that could be a consistent delay.
was something that oh usually correlated a lot with trying to get the kid to do somethingthat somebody else was trying to get the kid to do and or an assigned activity and that
(04:22):
the activities that the youngster
initiated and enjoyed and had a history of doing it successfully, those behaviors neveroccurred.
So what they made it into a...
a diagnosis of performance rather than...
it's like the kid knows what to do that's right but they don't do it but it seemed to methat you could say that about so many different things.
(04:43):
uh Does an alcoholic know that drinking is bad or smoking cigarettes is bad or eating toomuch food is going to make you fat or...
everybody, everything's a diagnosis of performance.
uh
in that sense so the question for me was how do you account for when they're doing it andwhen they're not doing it?
are the situational variables?
(05:04):
And uh well they turn the thing into this neurological delay and uh so that people areleft with a sense that there's something inside of them that prevents them from
living in the world as everyone else would but for me I don't really know what that means.
They just had this new study, you know, um
(05:30):
They looked at a new study, reviewed all types of possible biomarkers for ADHD, includingthose from genetics, brain volume and connectivity, levels of various brain chemicals,
among others.
The researchers found that there are no biological differences that can be used todifferentiate people with ADHD diagnosis from those without it.
(05:52):
uh Clearly, if you keep doing the behaviors associated with ADHD,
you can have all kinds of life problems with health and accidents and lack of achievementsbut it doesn't mean that it's being caused by some other thing like uh some delay in your
body.
(06:12):
uh For people to know what this is all about, when they made this diagnosis they
they said there's people behaving in similar ways.
Let's see if we can list the different ways they behave and we'll take the ones that gotogether the most and we'll call those symptoms and we'll call this diagnosis ADHD.
(06:35):
So it became, if you do those behaviors, we call you ADHD, but then as soon as they have aname for it, then they say you have ADHD.
So how did it shift to a have versus a do?
See, that's the foot.
Okay.
it seems like a lot of the alleged diagnoses in the ever changing DSM.
(07:00):
You know, which is what the APA uses is kind of their Bible for the guys listening.
uh Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is what it stands for, which is all, you know,brainiac speak for, here's the kind of stuff we diagnose people with.
Here's the latest roster of mental illnesses potentially.
And it always changes because we learn more about the mind and, you know, I'm sure you'repurporting here that society has a lot to do with it.
(07:27):
It seems like, yes, there are a lot of them where you'll list like 12 symptoms.
And if you're exhibiting any five of them, maybe you're diagnosed, but then they'll comeback and say, well, we got to be very careful about diagnosing somebody as a narcissist or
a schizophrenic or bipolar one or two, because that takes years to figure out.
Yeah.
It seems like teachers and parents in particular will slap these diagnoses of like ADHD ornarcissism...you know, the "N word"?
(07:55):
It's another one that people just
glibly throw around whenever they feel like they want to just hammer somebody with itoften for expediency and uh That's kind of what you're noticing too here, right?
With ADHD, yeah, if the person's uh struggling to be confined in a situation, they'reuncomfortable, then they're squirming.
(08:19):
If they don't want to wait their turn, then they're unable to control themselves versusthere's lots of reasons why people don't want to wait their turn.
Or if they're overreacting to something, you could account for it.
Are they reinforced to overreact
for particular situations?
Do they overreact if a kid's complaining and screaming and then their girlfriend walks inthe room and they don't want to look weak?
(08:43):
Why did they stop so quickly then?
You mean they couldn't stop themselves before?
So if a policeman comes into the room and they're doing something wrong, they don'tcontinue doing the wrong, they freeze.
So these are behaviors that happen if the...
parent says no and they're screaming and they get the candy if they scream loud enoughthen they learn to scream when they're in a situation where candy is available.
(09:09):
None of this is saying it's not caused by parents because some kids are more difficult tosocialize than other kids.
If they're active, some kids are more persistent in wanting their way versus other kidsthat are more timid.
If a kid has health problems or learning problems or language delays or motor issues,there's a lot of accommodations a parent learns to do
(09:31):
and the kid learns to get uh reliant on having the expectations conform to them ratherthan having to meet the expectations.
One of the dangers about ADHD diagnosis is everybody starts to adjust
the standards to the kid, which is you get longer time, don't have to be punctual, youdon't have to meet time requirements.
(09:56):
And all this keeps the kid from learning to adjust to what's expected.
One of the problems with the diagnosis is that you start to believe you're unable to dothings rather than
in what ways might these particular actions and these situations continue to bereinforced.
again, no one's causing it.
(10:16):
It's the interaction of the kid with the surroundings and what the surroundings are doing,what the kid does in the actions of the surroundings.
So it's a very subtle problem, but you're not going to get it in a doctor's office with achecklist because no one's really looking at the subtleties of development.
How did this kid come to the world?
What were the early things?
Was the kid not eating early?
(10:37):
uh
Were they premature?
Did the parent worry about whether they're eating or not eating or they couldn't dosomething they didn't know what to expect so they learn to do extra things to accommodate
and then the kid learns those reliant and reliant behavior then they say well the kiddoesn't self-manage well
everybody's managing for them, reminding them all the time rather than helping the kidlearn to brush their teeth without the reminder, rather than put up a chart for them all
(11:02):
the time.
How do you get the kid to separate from the dependency on other people managing for them?
Those are the kinds of
of been put in a box and they said, all right, well, I'll stay here.
They told me I'm ADHD.
ADHD is as ADHD does.
So, you know, now I've got this license to ADHD my brain's out.
(11:23):
Yeah, so if I'm late and I forget your birthday and I don't remember this, it's ADHD.
But I don't forget that I have a meeting to do Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, or Idon't forget all the rules of that game.
I even look up on the manuals how to do the game.
I would never look up uh anything for a homework assignment.
(11:46):
Yeah, but if I'm interested in doing it, I'll do it right.
ah
We're psychology in all these medicalization.
Right.
So we're talking about the medicalization of the social here, which is not a new concept.
It's been talked about at least since the late seventies.
Authors like David Elkind wrote about, you know, kids being hurried as teenagers intoadulthood.
(12:11):
And then people saying, my goodness, well, they must be sick.
They must be ill cause they're not acting like teenagers when they were impressed upon toact more like adults into
you know, make adolescence shorter than ever.
And all of this is very complex as most things psychological are.
It's extremely fascinating.
Uh, one of the things you've touched on here is when people kind of get locked into thispattern of failure, that's allegedly caused by something medical.
(12:40):
and the expectation is there that they're going to mess this up because they can't helpthemselves.
And yet.
I think a lot of people feel as if, uh, well, there there's been this, this rise in peoplesaying, well, you know, you can accuse me of all sorts of things.
(13:00):
You can blame me for all sorts of things, but it's not me that did it.
It was the, it was the psychological diagnosis or something medical.
Therefore I can't help it.
Therefore deal with it.
So you have people who kind of
can manipulate this medicalization of the social for their own apparent benefit.
In other words, you you, you, you, um, you're accusing me of being a narcissist.
(13:24):
Well, I'm not a narcissist.
I'm, I'm, I'm on the spectrum.
I'm autistic or, know, you accuse me of being flaky or whatever, and not keeping mypromises.
Well, I'm ADHD and that's just what happens.
And so it could go that way or it can cut the opposite way such that,
you know, people are like, well, I'd really like to think I'm a normal person, but peoplekeep telling me I'm not.
(13:46):
I'm trying to do around here is, is, is live life and live my best life.
And people, people keep saying, well, you know, you're going to have limitations, youknow, parents and teachers meaning well.
Honey, you can't do that.
Or you can't go there or you're having trouble with women or making friends because ofsomething you can't control
(14:08):
which victimizes us.
And I know you can't stand the V word, victim, the way I can't.
So talk about that for a bit.
Yeah, they originally thought people would have this mourning reaction to being diagnosed,but people really, in some ways, they're looking for some reason why they're struggling,
(14:28):
and if somebody gives them a reason that is happening to them, it can be a relief, and ifyou also can get extra accommodations, then you can unwittingly reinforce.
the diagnosis because who wouldn't want some the standards to be made easier to meet.
Yeah, it's not my fault anymore either.
(14:51):
It's not your fault marketing.
Well the other danger too is if we assume that it's some permanent uh defect or delay, thetherapies are very different from what I try to do with somebody, which is uh if you
assume it's a permanent delay, then you tell parents, well you have to kind of managetheir frontal lobes for them because they have this...
(15:14):
inability to inhibit their impulses so therefore they need somebody to do more stringentmonitoring.
But then you know, you doom the kid to permanent reliance on somebody else's monitoringrather than uh take the therapy in another direction.
Let's help them learn how to do it more for themselves and not assume it's some delaythat's uh
(15:40):
genetic and they can't be ...somehow it's irreversible.
uh The fact that people have terrible outcomes, well, because the drugs work in some ways,but over time they don't work very well and they create other problems for people.
uh
I'd rather see if I can solve it without inducing a stimulant to jack up the dopaminesystem.
(16:05):
I'd rather, because that just gets people to be immersed and do things they would normallynot do.
They would achieve more with it.
So you're not distracted because you're more immersed, but it's not really solving it.
It's a stimulant.
Everybody would react that way.
So you're getting people who would typically not do the activity to be more willing to doit.
(16:27):
but it's not solving the problem of why are they objecting to doing the activity?
What isn't it about the activity that becomes uh aversive to them?
What's ADHD distractibility other than an avoidance behavior?
It's an avoidance of the situation.
They're distracted, huh?
talking about the medicalization here of this.
And you talked about how the drugs don't always work.
(16:50):
And there are indeed drugs involved with these diagnoses.
How much of this has to do with what's commonly known as "sick care" culture?
You know, the military, I'm sorry, the not military industrial complex, but the medicalindustrial complex, right?
Um, in this country, if we can put someone on drugs for the rest of their natural lives,that's very profitable.
(17:16):
Is that kind of underhanded shadiness going on here or do people mean well, or we've justgotten into that trap or fallen into that habit?
Yeah.
Because what you seem to be saying is that there's a lot of drugs being handed out thatmaybe are not doing as much good as they should be doing
I think the presumption that most people feel like they're trying to do good and that thedoctors, the pediatricians and the doctors are trained in the medical model and they
(17:51):
believe the psychiatrist that also believe they're doing good to prevent people fromhaving problems and the drugs do sometimes remarkable things at first for people.
and then if you get people accustomed to them and you try to take them off the drugs youget a real problem so then they don't want to come off because then you're causing other
(18:12):
trouble and I think it's very difficult to understand the subtleties of what is going onwith the person that they're...
let's say you have a graduate student, a PhD
and they really want to get a PhD but they have a diagnosis of ADHD all their life andthey're on Adderall and they're not going come off Adderall because that would create a
(18:39):
big problem but they don't know why when the person when their mentor tells them they'resupposed to read all these articles that they're supposed to read and then they're getting
distracted even when they want to read the articles but they're getting distracted butwhen you
when you get into their life, their parents were forcing them to do their schoolwork andthey were doing everything they could to get out of their schoolwork and they learned to
(19:04):
do just enough to get by to get the grade.
They never really were stimulated to do it and to become great at it.
They were just doing it to get by.
So then you give them schoolwork and they're trained for 20 years to deal with anassignment as, let me just do as little as I can because somebody is telling me to do it.
How do you undo a lifetime?
(19:26):
It's just tricky.
And then to get them to understand how were they reinforced to go along with beingcontrolled and when do they not like being controlled and what's the aversion to the
assignment that's giving them so much trouble to complete it.
That takes a lot of work for a therapist to even get enough experience to even understandwhat questions to delve into.
(19:49):
Well, what happened to you as a kid?
When did this first start?
Well, when did you do that?
How did you feel?
What did they do about it when you did this?
That's deciphering a history of a person who's living in the world.
Well, you make it sound, you make it sound almost as if this diagnosis, slapping adiagnosis on a kid associated especially with a well-known buzzword like ADHD is just a
(20:13):
lazy, cheap way out when it's usually much more complex than that.
It's very, very uh tricky and intricate to do.
and the diagnostic system behaves as if you get the label everybody's got the same problemwhen there's a heterogeneity in the diagnosis.
(20:35):
One kid might be, wait and raise their hand but might not, but might do some other thingand another kid does some other thing and not that.
So we're treating them all like they're the same thing and it's a very different pattern.
Like uh I used to say with some of these kids diagnosed with ADHD are just goofy andgoofball and they're getting
(20:56):
attention like crazy and other ones are avoiding attention and they rather not drawattention themselves because they rather if people notice them they're going to make them
do something they want to do or they don't want to be exposed to so they're more then asadults they go from attention seeking to avoidance of responsibility so you get less and
less hyper and more and more avoidance behaviors.
(21:22):
So it's just a drift in terms of what happens all the time for most people or for many.
m
fraught to try to put an entire cohort of people into the same psychological diagnosisbox.
I've always known that anything related to psychology, psychiatry, um, is going to bereally difficult and problematic if you're trying to take a bunch of people and categorize
(21:52):
them all the same way because
just about everybody I've ever known who has been diagnosed with the same thing are stillvery different in their expression of it or how it acts out.
And that just makes everything psychological, all things psychiatric, just insanely moretangled up and difficult.
(22:13):
So you almost can't blame anybody, especially laymen like parents and teachers, or evencoaches like me, relative to, you know, people who are
PhDs like you in the psychiatry field and the mental health field for wanting to describethis somehow because it demands a description.
(22:34):
I mean, going back to what you said before, it starts feeling a little bit like themedical equivalent to lawfare in the legal world.
I mean, this seems like a crime, you know, a criminal they're looking to slap a crime ontorather than a crime looking for someone, you know, whodunnit...
I mean, who did this?
Who did this crime?
(22:54):
So we have a person and you don't like how they're acting.
How are we going to explain it?
How, what are we going to, what label are we going to put on it so that we can, you know,take some course of action?
Cause as long as we're standing around scratching our head, all we can really do is say,Johnny, stop that.
And he won't stop it.
But if we know, or we think we know something that's going on, well, then we can, we canact on it.
(23:16):
It really isn't unlike the idea of lawfare.
is it?
It's like medical fare.
Yeah, so I always say that in the natural sciences, all copper is the same copper, but anycategory in social sciences is heterogeneity.
Not all men are alike.
(23:37):
Not all ADHD labeled people are alike.
And the idea is that...
What are we gaining by the categorizations versus what are we losing in the categories?
So the trend has been to do group and get make categories and we're losing the individualsubtleties of each person and helping them that way.
(24:00):
That's why it used to be...
the drugs needed the categories, because you needed a category that matched up with thedrug.
the psychiatry, in medical, they needed categories to uh have particular treatments, theyprescribed, that work for most people with that category, and then they're learning people
(24:23):
have to get all these individual variations once they get into it.
But I don't really see any of the...
What do you do for ADHD?
uh What's the commonality?
Either they're intrusive, more intrusive than we want the kid to be, or more avoidant thanwe want the kid to be.
So anybody who's more, too intrusive or too avoidant is going to be, going to get thediagnosis.
(24:48):
And you have enough of those behaviors.
Well, like for example, in elementary school, and this came home to roost in our ownfamily.
My kid was an impetuous little boy.
He went to kindergarten and every teacher is female.
Everybody in the principal's office is female and he decided he was too smart for thisclass.
(25:10):
He wanted to lead.
He had a few ideas of his own.
He wanted to assert himself.
He had some aggression he wanted to get out playfully and
my goodness, every other day was a meeting with someone in the principal's office, theprincipal or an assistant principal who out one side of their mouth was like, he's a
troublemaker and he's not being compliant and he's not coloring within the lines.
(25:34):
And at the same time they would go, my God though.
He's just so cute.
just adore him.
And I was like, well, you know, w which is it?
You know, I mean, they had this emotional response to him because he's easy to like.
Cause he's a cute little boy.
And then they're trying to whoop out of him everything that's masculine, everything that,that is an earmark of how boys will be boys and not in an abusive way.
(25:58):
I mean, he's not punching people in the nose or starting fires or committing crimes.
He just, he just doesn't have a feminine side.
And that was basically his crime.
If you want to go back and use that analogy and
They were telling us to take him to psychiatrists and psychologists and try to figure outwhat's wrong when to this day, it doesn't really seem like there's anything wrong with the
(26:23):
kid.
He's become a great young man.
He's going to go to a great college.
He's very smart, which is his downfall.
I mean, his IQ is through the roof and he just, he can think through everything muchfaster than the normal population can, which, you know, leads to acceleration of life in
general, basically from his perspective.
So you have a lot of people and I see a lot of parents doing this.
(26:45):
Frankly, I, I, know several families, um, in real life and especially they act out onFacebook.
I don't know if "acting out" is a weaponized term, but it's what it looks like to me.
I mean, we have a HIPAA act for a reason.
You're supposed to keep your medical stuff to yourself.
It's supposed to be private.
I mean, and they're advertising almost on the daily that something is wrong with theirkid.
(27:10):
They've got this problem.
They've got this eating disorder.
They've been diagnosed with Tourette's at age eight.
And it's, and I mean, and I know these kids and they seem pretty much like kids, you know,normal run of the mill kids to me.
Um, I'm getting a tube installed.
(27:31):
Uh, we're going and doing more tests and it just seems like someone
must've poked a voodoo doll with, you know, against this poor family because they're justbeing afflicted by everything.
But meanwhile, you know, next time I see them, everybody looks healthy and happy andthey're bouncing around like nothing happened.
What happens when we as men grow up having been in a family like that, where, I mean, youcan call it Munchausen Syndrome or I think the new buzzword that kind of offloads the
(27:58):
blame from a medical perspective...
I have it written down here, right, is Health Anxiety By Proxy.
In other words, I'm always worried, you know, almost to the point of, of, um, of apsychosis in its own right, you know, at least a neurosis, um, that something's wrong with
me and I'm dying of something.
(28:19):
Well, they project that onto their kids.
Like, Oh my God, my perfect little child.
I don't want them to be sick, but they, they had a rash yesterday.
So my goodness, we need to go to the hospital.
Or
they didn't eat their dinner last night.
My goodness, do they have an eating disorder.
And again, it's like, uh, we're looking for a problem.
We're looking for a diagnosis.
And a lot of these guys listening to this show have grown up in that environment.
(28:43):
And then we become adults and, and we've been trained to perpetually think something'swrong with us.
How do we unwire that bird's nest or, you know, is that even the wrong question to ask?
Well, oh one thing is there's been less fathers involved with child rearing because of thedivorce rates and single motherhood and...
(29:06):
uh And then males are also being conditioned not to be toxic and therefore they're backingoff on buck up and oh learn to do it whether you struggle or not.
everybody's, uh and the more we learn about all the problems in the environment that wecan protect, we become a safety conscious society.
(29:27):
So then you're reinforcing the safetyism much more than the old days where you kind of hadto.
uh
confront a difficult world and work through it.
Now we have enough affluence that you make things more comfortable.
And so there's a whole shift to making sure the child's comfortable, making sure that, andyou have fewer children so everybody can be focused on more for their health and safety.
(29:57):
uh
That's so true, man.
Only children are just hovered over.
The helicopter parent thing is, is that struggle is real.
And then by the time you've had your sixth or seventh child, they're basically just feralin the wild running barefoot and you don't even care.
They'll come home when they're ready, you know, kind of free range by then it's the sameparents.
(30:21):
They've just, it's not their first rodeo anymore.
Yeah.
It's very true that pattern
I have uh one last question before we go ahead and wrap up because I know you have aclient coming up, which is important.
There's been a rise lately.
mean, maybe this is anecdotal on my part, but I sure see it a lot.
(30:42):
Uh, didn't used to of people announcing to the whole world at age 35 or 50.
My goodness.
I've been autistic my entire life, or I've had Asperger's my entire life morespecifically.
And I now just, just now got diagnosed with it.
Somehow they've gone their entire life.
Uh, somehow
(31:03):
thinking they were normal, but now that there's some place in their social life, they'renot thriving.
Maybe if I slap a diagnosis on it, it'll explain everything.
And I don't know if it's because Elon Musk is the richest guy in the world and it'sworking well for him to be Asperger's and it's made it cool or something, but it just
(31:25):
seems like there's a rise of people not only receiving
later in life diagnoses of being on the spectrum.
And I'm assuming ADHD could fall right in line with that too.
Matter of fact, I've seen examples.
Yeah.
What's up with that?
Where are we going with that?
Well, you know, because we're talking about people who have mental deficiency and theydon't make sense of social relationships because they're mentally limited.
(31:57):
And then you have people with this uh sense about...
uh
How do you account for their failure to understand another person's perspective or thesubtleties of interactions with others?
It's the same problem you've got with other diagnoses.
There could be numerous reasons.
If they spend a lot of time by themselves on a computer, they're not learning interactionswith other people.
(32:22):
If they're raised not to discern another person's perspective and point of view or workout...
uh
how to get affinity or compromise with people.
They're not learning the skills that go with understanding human behaviors.
I just saw a study that said if kid's less than three and they're spending four hours orsomething on a screen, they're getting these diagnoses of uh autism because they're not
(32:52):
learning to interact.
with people, their screen behavior is different from in vivo behavior.
the idea is that, think again, we're not really making sense of all the differentindividual cases and how could we account for the individual's whatever lack we think they
have.
(33:12):
If Elon Musk spent all his time figuring out how to orchestrate
uh...
his form of seeing how a company should work and how to do it on the screen and ifeverybody just did what he said yeah it would probably work out fine but meanwhile he's
not really learning the skills that would go with how do you compromise in the governmentto make people agree to something you're not you're not going to...
(33:37):
You get this with small business owners too.
They become tyrants in their pizza place.
Everybody's supposed to be doing exactly what they say.
They're not paying attention to anything.
They just fire people and hire somebody else.
So they're not really learning to do other behaviors.
again, I think we kind of have the same problem with all these diagnoses.
(34:00):
Yeah, I think it's really fascinating and I really appreciate you coming on the showtoday, Craig and, and, and laying this out for these guys in ways they can understand.
It's given us a lot to think about.
I'm, know, the frustrating part is I'm not sure there are real, pat answers we could throwdown for these guys, but at least, you know, I'm sure a bunch of guys out here have
(34:23):
thought, well, you know, maybe there isn't something wrong with me, or maybe I do need togo see a psychiatrist or a psychologist.
And figure out what's going on here so I can, I can get the help I need...
one way or the other, but we definitely don't want to let someone else label us, you know,off hand and live our lives that way simply because someone said so.
(34:43):
So I think this is an important discussion.
I'm so glad we had it.
his name is Dr.
Craig B.
Wiener and he is a licensed psychologist based in Worcester, Mass.
When you go to mountaintoppodcast.com/amazon gentlemen, you'll see.
At the top of my Amazon influencer queue, which is just a douchey way of saying I have adedicated storefront on Amazon.
(35:05):
You'll see, um, his book.
Called Backyard Politics (35:08):
a psychological understanding of today's political and social divide.
also has a couple of books on ADHD, which we'll put up there as well.
And if you're listening to this show or watching this show, um, within a couple, a fewdays of its release, it'll be right there at the top for you.
Also, when you go to mountaintoppodcast
.com/weiner...
why not w i e n e r You'll go to Dr.
(35:34):
Craig B.
Weiner's website.
What are they gonna see when they get there?
What are they gonna find?
You'll see the four books that I put out, three on ADHD and then this last book.
And then I have some videos on ADHD.
I did a series so they can watch some videos on what I think about ADHD in more detail.
And so, there's some other podcasts I've done so they can always listen in to that aswell.
(35:59):
Cool, very cool, very cool.
All that's there for you and more guys at mountaintoppodcast.com/weiner W-I-E-N-E-R.
Craig, thank you so much again for being on the show.
I appreciate you, man.
Oh, thanks for having me.
I enjoyed talking with you.
Yeah, man.
Hope you...hope to have you back.
And gentlemen, if you have not been to mountaintoppodcast.com lately, be sure to visit ourthree wonderful sponsors, Jocko Willink's company, Origin in Maine, The Keyport and the
(36:26):
guys at Hero Soap.
Always great ways to man up and you're down with a discount 10 % off when you use thecoupon code mountain10 Right now, I want to talk to you guys about Substack.
Substack is my happy place guys.
Um, man.
If you are sick of juvenile social media, um, TikTok, Instagram, and you want somethingmore buttoned up and have an intelligent conversation for once, hopefully I'm contributing
(36:54):
to that.
Visit me and anybody else you can find who floats your boat on Substack.
Mountaintoppodcast.com front slash Substack is where you'll find all of my goodies.
Um, I let, I let it fly guys.
I tell you exactly what I think.
There's some humor there.
I did a piece
on going RVing with my wife that brought a lot of laughs and there's, there's all kinds ofvariety there.
(37:20):
Check me out on Substack at Scot McKay or just simply go to mountaintoppodcast.com frontslash Substack.
Gentlemen, it's always a pleasure to talk to you.
And until we talk to you again real soon, this is Scot McKay from X and Y communicationsin San Antonio, Texas.
Be good out there.
All right.
How's it going gentlemen.
Welcome to yet another episode of the big show, The Mountain Top Podcast.
As always, I am your host, Scot McKay You can find me on X on Truth Social on TikTok andon YouTube at Scot McKay.
And the big news is you can also find me on Substack now at Scot McKay.
Lots of good stuff there for you.
Articles you won't find anywhere else.
(00:21):
Just kind of prepare yourself because I let the fur fly there.
The stuff that I don't believe the masses can handle on my newsletter list.
Well,
I talk about it there.
So you, you'll know if you belong and if you can handle the truth, you'll love it.
That's at Scot McKay on Substack.
I'm also still on Instagram at real Scot McKay and also on Threads.
(00:44):
Although not, although I never use it at real Scot McKay and the website ismountaintoppodcast.com.
And if you're not on The Mountain Top Summit on Facebook, you should be, we're having agreat time talking about all sorts of things related to masculinity.
and getting better with women on Facebook.
So join us there.
My guest today is a first time guest.
He hails from Worcester, MA and he is a licensed psychologist.
(01:09):
He is the author of a new book called Backyard Politics a psychological understanding oftoday's political and social divide.
And since this is not particularly a show about politics, although I'm going to give youevery opportunity to get a copy of Craig's wonderful book.
Um,
We're going to talk about something completely different today.
(01:29):
We're going to talk about how many of us as men either have been diagnosed with somethingthat's better explained by something social or the opposite where, you know, really we've
got something going on and people have told us, well, just buck up and get through it orsomething.
And it's my belief that we as men are kind of susceptible.
(01:53):
to being told those sorts of things and basically going through our life as if it might bepossible that it's true or that it's definitely true.
Whereas my first time guest, Dr.
Craig T, Dr.
Craig B Wiener, excuse me, from Worcester, MA would have a different take on it.
So Craig, welcome to the show, man.
Glad to have you.
(02:13):
Thanks for having me.
uh
first of all, I know you were teased for your name when you were a kid, but actually, uh,all your name really means kind of like the Frankfurter is that you're, you're, you're,
uh, someone in your family lineage was probably from Vienna, Austria.
Yeah.
Right.
(02:34):
we were talking a little bit about, about this particular topic before we clicked record.
And I Googled you to find out more about your practice and what you were about as is mypractice with all my guests.
And there's a rather prominent OB/GYN in New Jersey named Craig B.
Weiner.
And you were saying that, you know, someone in your family is actually a urologist, whichis probably an even better fit.
(02:56):
Yeah, the real Dr.
Weiner.
Yeah, yeah, the Wiener doctor, Dr.
Wiener.
That's kind of like the Burgermeister Meisterburger from the Christmas show, right?
Yeah.
But anyway, enough about that.
We got that out of the way.
Talk to us about your passion for this particular topic.
I know it it all started with ADHD and maybe it does end there too, but tell us about umhow you got particularly involved with this topic and how it relates to these guys.
(03:28):
Yeah, so I did publish three books on ADHD, a parenting book to help parents and twoacademic books.
And when I first started out with psychology, I noticed how many boys were getting labeledin this way.
so it was concerning to me because I saw the behaviors as situational, as things thatthese kids would do under certain circumstances.
(03:55):
and it wasn't something that they were doing persistently like color blindness or someother bodily deficiency that could be a consistent delay.
was something that oh usually correlated a lot with trying to get the kid to do somethingthat somebody else was trying to get the kid to do and or an assigned activity and that
(04:22):
the activities that the youngster
initiated and enjoyed and had a history of doing it successfully, those behaviors neveroccurred.
So what they made it into a...
a diagnosis of performance rather than...
it's like the kid knows what to do that's right but they don't do it but it seemed to methat you could say that about so many different things.
(04:43):
uh Does an alcoholic know that drinking is bad or smoking cigarettes is bad or eating toomuch food is going to make you fat or...
everybody, everything's a diagnosis of performance.
uh
in that sense so the question for me was how do you account for when they're doing it andwhen they're not doing it?
are the situational variables?
(05:04):
And uh well they turn the thing into this neurological delay and uh so that people areleft with a sense that there's something inside of them that prevents them from
living in the world as everyone else would but for me I don't really know what that means.
They just had this new study, you know, um
(05:30):
They looked at a new study, reviewed all types of possible biomarkers for ADHD, includingthose from genetics, brain volume and connectivity, levels of various brain chemicals,
among others.
The researchers found that there are no biological differences that can be used todifferentiate people with ADHD diagnosis from those without it.
(05:52):
uh Clearly, if you keep doing the behaviors associated with ADHD,
you can have all kinds of life problems with health and accidents and lack of achievementsbut it doesn't mean that it's being caused by some other thing like uh some delay in your
body.
(06:12):
uh For people to know what this is all about, when they made this diagnosis they
they said there's people behaving in similar ways.
Let's see if we can list the different ways they behave and we'll take the ones that gotogether the most and we'll call those symptoms and we'll call this diagnosis ADHD.
(06:35):
So it became, if you do those behaviors, we call you ADHD, but then as soon as they have aname for it, then they say you have ADHD.
So how did it shift to a have versus a do?
See, that's the foot.
Okay.
it seems like a lot of the alleged diagnoses in the ever changing DSM.
(07:00):
You know, which is what the APA uses is kind of their Bible for the guys listening.
uh Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is what it stands for, which is all, you know,brainiac speak for, here's the kind of stuff we diagnose people with.
Here's the latest roster of mental illnesses potentially.
And it always changes because we learn more about the mind and, you know, I'm sure you'repurporting here that society has a lot to do with it.
(07:27):
It seems like, yes, there are a lot of them where you'll list like 12 symptoms.
And if you're exhibiting any five of them, maybe you're diagnosed, but then they'll comeback and say, well, we got to be very careful about diagnosing somebody as a narcissist or
a schizophrenic or bipolar one or two, because that takes years to figure out.
Yeah.
It seems like teachers and parents in particular will slap these diagnoses of like ADHD ornarcissism...you know, the "N word"?
(07:55):
It's another one that people just
glibly throw around whenever they feel like they want to just hammer somebody with itoften for expediency and uh That's kind of what you're noticing too here, right?
With ADHD, yeah, if the person's uh struggling to be confined in a situation, they'reuncomfortable, then they're squirming.
(08:19):
If they don't want to wait their turn, then they're unable to control themselves versusthere's lots of reasons why people don't want to wait their turn.
Or if they're overreacting to something, you could account for it.
Are they reinforced to overreact
for particular situations?
Do they overreact if a kid's complaining and screaming and then their girlfriend walks inthe room and they don't want to look weak?
(08:43):
Why did they stop so quickly then?
You mean they couldn't stop themselves before?
So if a policeman comes into the room and they're doing something wrong, they don'tcontinue doing the wrong, they freeze.
So these are behaviors that happen if the...
parent says no and they're screaming and they get the candy if they scream loud enoughthen they learn to scream when they're in a situation where candy is available.
(09:09):
None of this is saying it's not caused by parents because some kids are more difficult tosocialize than other kids.
If they're active, some kids are more persistent in wanting their way versus other kidsthat are more timid.
If a kid has health problems or learning problems or language delays or motor issues,there's a lot of accommodations a parent learns to do
(09:31):
and the kid learns to get uh reliant on having the expectations conform to them ratherthan having to meet the expectations.
One of the dangers about ADHD diagnosis is everybody starts to adjust
the standards to the kid, which is you get longer time, don't have to be punctual, youdon't have to meet time requirements.
(09:56):
And all this keeps the kid from learning to adjust to what's expected.
One of the problems with the diagnosis is that you start to believe you're unable to dothings rather than
in what ways might these particular actions and these situations continue to bereinforced.
again, no one's causing it.
(10:16):
It's the interaction of the kid with the surroundings and what the surroundings are doing,what the kid does in the actions of the surroundings.
So it's a very subtle problem, but you're not going to get it in a doctor's office with achecklist because no one's really looking at the subtleties of development.
How did this kid come to the world?
What were the early things?
Was the kid not eating early?
(10:37):
uh
Were they premature?
Did the parent worry about whether they're eating or not eating or they couldn't dosomething they didn't know what to expect so they learn to do extra things to accommodate
and then the kid learns those reliant and reliant behavior then they say well the kiddoesn't self-manage well
everybody's managing for them, reminding them all the time rather than helping the kidlearn to brush their teeth without the reminder, rather than put up a chart for them all
(11:02):
the time.
How do you get the kid to separate from the dependency on other people managing for them?
Those are the kinds of
of been put in a box and they said, all right, well, I'll stay here.
They told me I'm ADHD.
ADHD is as ADHD does.
So, you know, now I've got this license to ADHD my brain's out.
(11:23):
Yeah, so if I'm late and I forget your birthday and I don't remember this, it's ADHD.
But I don't forget that I have a meeting to do Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, or Idon't forget all the rules of that game.
I even look up on the manuals how to do the game.
I would never look up uh anything for a homework assignment.
(11:46):
Yeah, but if I'm interested in doing it, I'll do it right.
ah
We're psychology in all these medicalization.
Right.
So we're talking about the medicalization of the social here, which is not a new concept.
It's been talked about at least since the late seventies.
Authors like David Elkind wrote about, you know, kids being hurried as teenagers intoadulthood.
(12:11):
And then people saying, my goodness, well, they must be sick.
They must be ill cause they're not acting like teenagers when they were impressed upon toact more like adults into
you know, make adolescence shorter than ever.
And all of this is very complex as most things psychological are.
It's extremely fascinating.
Uh, one of the things you've touched on here is when people kind of get locked into thispattern of failure, that's allegedly caused by something medical.
(12:40):
and the expectation is there that they're going to mess this up because they can't helpthemselves.
And yet.
I think a lot of people feel as if, uh, well, there there's been this, this rise in peoplesaying, well, you know, you can accuse me of all sorts of things.
(13:00):
You can blame me for all sorts of things, but it's not me that did it.
It was the, it was the psychological diagnosis or something medical.
Therefore I can't help it.
Therefore deal with it.
So you have people who kind of
can manipulate this medicalization of the social for their own apparent benefit.
In other words, you you, you, you, um, you're accusing me of being a narcissist.
(13:24):
Well, I'm not a narcissist.
I'm, I'm, I'm on the spectrum.
I'm autistic or, know, you accuse me of being flaky or whatever, and not keeping mypromises.
Well, I'm ADHD and that's just what happens.
And so it could go that way or it can cut the opposite way such that,
you know, people are like, well, I'd really like to think I'm a normal person, but peoplekeep telling me I'm not.
(13:46):
I'm trying to do around here is, is, is live life and live my best life.
And people, people keep saying, well, you know, you're going to have limitations, youknow, parents and teachers meaning well.
Honey, you can't do that.
Or you can't go there or you're having trouble with women or making friends because ofsomething you can't control
(14:08):
which victimizes us.
And I know you can't stand the V word, victim, the way I can't.
So talk about that for a bit.
Yeah, they originally thought people would have this mourning reaction to being diagnosed,but people really, in some ways, they're looking for some reason why they're struggling,
(14:28):
and if somebody gives them a reason that is happening to them, it can be a relief, and ifyou also can get extra accommodations, then you can unwittingly reinforce.
the diagnosis because who wouldn't want some the standards to be made easier to meet.
Yeah, it's not my fault anymore either.
(14:51):
It's not your fault marketing.
Well the other danger too is if we assume that it's some permanent uh defect or delay, thetherapies are very different from what I try to do with somebody, which is uh if you
assume it's a permanent delay, then you tell parents, well you have to kind of managetheir frontal lobes for them because they have this...
(15:14):
inability to inhibit their impulses so therefore they need somebody to do more stringentmonitoring.
But then you know, you doom the kid to permanent reliance on somebody else's monitoringrather than uh take the therapy in another direction.
Let's help them learn how to do it more for themselves and not assume it's some delaythat's uh
(15:40):
genetic and they can't be ...somehow it's irreversible.
uh The fact that people have terrible outcomes, well, because the drugs work in some ways,but over time they don't work very well and they create other problems for people.
uh
I'd rather see if I can solve it without inducing a stimulant to jack up the dopaminesystem.
(16:05):
I'd rather, because that just gets people to be immersed and do things they would normallynot do.
They would achieve more with it.
So you're not distracted because you're more immersed, but it's not really solving it.
It's a stimulant.
Everybody would react that way.
So you're getting people who would typically not do the activity to be more willing to doit.
(16:27):
but it's not solving the problem of why are they objecting to doing the activity?
What isn't it about the activity that becomes uh aversive to them?
What's ADHD distractibility other than an avoidance behavior?
It's an avoidance of the situation.
They're distracted, huh?
talking about the medicalization here of this.
And you talked about how the drugs don't always work.
(16:50):
And there are indeed drugs involved with these diagnoses.
How much of this has to do with what's commonly known as "sick care" culture?
You know, the military, I'm sorry, the not military industrial complex, but the medicalindustrial complex, right?
Um, in this country, if we can put someone on drugs for the rest of their natural lives,that's very profitable.
(17:16):
Is that kind of underhanded shadiness going on here or do people mean well, or we've justgotten into that trap or fallen into that habit?
Yeah.
Because what you seem to be saying is that there's a lot of drugs being handed out thatmaybe are not doing as much good as they should be doing
I think the presumption that most people feel like they're trying to do good and that thedoctors, the pediatricians and the doctors are trained in the medical model and they
(17:51):
believe the psychiatrist that also believe they're doing good to prevent people fromhaving problems and the drugs do sometimes remarkable things at first for people.
and then if you get people accustomed to them and you try to take them off the drugs youget a real problem so then they don't want to come off because then you're causing other
(18:12):
trouble and I think it's very difficult to understand the subtleties of what is going onwith the person that they're...
let's say you have a graduate student, a PhD
and they really want to get a PhD but they have a diagnosis of ADHD all their life andthey're on Adderall and they're not going come off Adderall because that would create a
(18:39):
big problem but they don't know why when the person when their mentor tells them they'resupposed to read all these articles that they're supposed to read and then they're getting
distracted even when they want to read the articles but they're getting distracted butwhen you
when you get into their life, their parents were forcing them to do their schoolwork andthey were doing everything they could to get out of their schoolwork and they learned to
(19:04):
do just enough to get by to get the grade.
They never really were stimulated to do it and to become great at it.
They were just doing it to get by.
So then you give them schoolwork and they're trained for 20 years to deal with anassignment as, let me just do as little as I can because somebody is telling me to do it.
How do you undo a lifetime?
(19:26):
It's just tricky.
And then to get them to understand how were they reinforced to go along with beingcontrolled and when do they not like being controlled and what's the aversion to the
assignment that's giving them so much trouble to complete it.
That takes a lot of work for a therapist to even get enough experience to even understandwhat questions to delve into.
(19:49):
Well, what happened to you as a kid?
When did this first start?
Well, when did you do that?
How did you feel?
What did they do about it when you did this?
That's deciphering a history of a person who's living in the world.
Well, you make it sound, you make it sound almost as if this diagnosis, slapping adiagnosis on a kid associated especially with a well-known buzzword like ADHD is just a
(20:13):
lazy, cheap way out when it's usually much more complex than that.
It's very, very uh tricky and intricate to do.
and the diagnostic system behaves as if you get the label everybody's got the same problemwhen there's a heterogeneity in the diagnosis.
(20:35):
One kid might be, wait and raise their hand but might not, but might do some other thingand another kid does some other thing and not that.
So we're treating them all like they're the same thing and it's a very different pattern.
Like uh I used to say with some of these kids diagnosed with ADHD are just goofy andgoofball and they're getting
(20:56):
attention like crazy and other ones are avoiding attention and they rather not drawattention themselves because they rather if people notice them they're going to make them
do something they want to do or they don't want to be exposed to so they're more then asadults they go from attention seeking to avoidance of responsibility so you get less and
less hyper and more and more avoidance behaviors.
(21:22):
So it's just a drift in terms of what happens all the time for most people or for many.
m
fraught to try to put an entire cohort of people into the same psychological diagnosisbox.
I've always known that anything related to psychology, psychiatry, um, is going to bereally difficult and problematic if you're trying to take a bunch of people and categorize
(21:52):
them all the same way because
just about everybody I've ever known who has been diagnosed with the same thing are stillvery different in their expression of it or how it acts out.
And that just makes everything psychological, all things psychiatric, just insanely moretangled up and difficult.
(22:13):
So you almost can't blame anybody, especially laymen like parents and teachers, or evencoaches like me, relative to, you know, people who are
PhDs like you in the psychiatry field and the mental health field for wanting to describethis somehow because it demands a description.
(22:34):
I mean, going back to what you said before, it starts feeling a little bit like themedical equivalent to lawfare in the legal world.
I mean, this seems like a crime, you know, a criminal they're looking to slap a crime ontorather than a crime looking for someone, you know, whodunnit...
I mean, who did this?
Who did this crime?
(22:54):
So we have a person and you don't like how they're acting.
How are we going to explain it?
How, what are we going to, what label are we going to put on it so that we can, you know,take some course of action?
Cause as long as we're standing around scratching our head, all we can really do is say,Johnny, stop that.
And he won't stop it.
But if we know, or we think we know something that's going on, well, then we can, we canact on it.
(23:16):
It really isn't unlike the idea of lawfare.
is it?
It's like medical fare.
Yeah, so I always say that in the natural sciences, all copper is the same copper, but anycategory in social sciences is heterogeneity.
Not all men are alike.
(23:37):
Not all ADHD labeled people are alike.
And the idea is that...
What are we gaining by the categorizations versus what are we losing in the categories?
So the trend has been to do group and get make categories and we're losing the individualsubtleties of each person and helping them that way.
(24:00):
That's why it used to be...
the drugs needed the categories, because you needed a category that matched up with thedrug.
the psychiatry, in medical, they needed categories to uh have particular treatments, theyprescribed, that work for most people with that category, and then they're learning people
(24:23):
have to get all these individual variations once they get into it.
But I don't really see any of the...
What do you do for ADHD?
uh What's the commonality?
Either they're intrusive, more intrusive than we want the kid to be, or more avoidant thanwe want the kid to be.
So anybody who's more, too intrusive or too avoidant is going to be, going to get thediagnosis.
(24:48):
And you have enough of those behaviors.
Well, like for example, in elementary school, and this came home to roost in our ownfamily.
My kid was an impetuous little boy.
He went to kindergarten and every teacher is female.
Everybody in the principal's office is female and he decided he was too smart for thisclass.
(25:10):
He wanted to lead.
He had a few ideas of his own.
He wanted to assert himself.
He had some aggression he wanted to get out playfully and
my goodness, every other day was a meeting with someone in the principal's office, theprincipal or an assistant principal who out one side of their mouth was like, he's a
troublemaker and he's not being compliant and he's not coloring within the lines.
(25:34):
And at the same time they would go, my God though.
He's just so cute.
just adore him.
And I was like, well, you know, w which is it?
You know, I mean, they had this emotional response to him because he's easy to like.
Cause he's a cute little boy.
And then they're trying to whoop out of him everything that's masculine, everything that,that is an earmark of how boys will be boys and not in an abusive way.
(25:58):
I mean, he's not punching people in the nose or starting fires or committing crimes.
He just, he just doesn't have a feminine side.
And that was basically his crime.
If you want to go back and use that analogy and
They were telling us to take him to psychiatrists and psychologists and try to figure outwhat's wrong when to this day, it doesn't really seem like there's anything wrong with the
(26:23):
kid.
He's become a great young man.
He's going to go to a great college.
He's very smart, which is his downfall.
I mean, his IQ is through the roof and he just, he can think through everything muchfaster than the normal population can, which, you know, leads to acceleration of life in
general, basically from his perspective.
So you have a lot of people and I see a lot of parents doing this.
(26:45):
Frankly, I, I, know several families, um, in real life and especially they act out onFacebook.
I don't know if "acting out" is a weaponized term, but it's what it looks like to me.
I mean, we have a HIPAA act for a reason.
You're supposed to keep your medical stuff to yourself.
It's supposed to be private.
I mean, and they're advertising almost on the daily that something is wrong with theirkid.
(27:10):
They've got this problem.
They've got this eating disorder.
They've been diagnosed with Tourette's at age eight.
And it's, and I mean, and I know these kids and they seem pretty much like kids, you know,normal run of the mill kids to me.
Um, I'm getting a tube installed.
(27:31):
Uh, we're going and doing more tests and it just seems like someone
must've poked a voodoo doll with, you know, against this poor family because they're justbeing afflicted by everything.
But meanwhile, you know, next time I see them, everybody looks healthy and happy andthey're bouncing around like nothing happened.
What happens when we as men grow up having been in a family like that, where, I mean, youcan call it Munchausen Syndrome or I think the new buzzword that kind of offloads the
(27:58):
blame from a medical perspective...
I have it written down here, right, is Health Anxiety By Proxy.
In other words, I'm always worried, you know, almost to the point of, of, um, of apsychosis in its own right, you know, at least a neurosis, um, that something's wrong with
me and I'm dying of something.
(28:19):
Well, they project that onto their kids.
Like, Oh my God, my perfect little child.
I don't want them to be sick, but they, they had a rash yesterday.
So my goodness, we need to go to the hospital.
Or
they didn't eat their dinner last night.
My goodness, do they have an eating disorder.
And again, it's like, uh, we're looking for a problem.
We're looking for a diagnosis.
And a lot of these guys listening to this show have grown up in that environment.
(28:43):
And then we become adults and, and we've been trained to perpetually think something'swrong with us.
How do we unwire that bird's nest or, you know, is that even the wrong question to ask?
Well, oh one thing is there's been less fathers involved with child rearing because of thedivorce rates and single motherhood and...
(29:06):
uh And then males are also being conditioned not to be toxic and therefore they're backingoff on buck up and oh learn to do it whether you struggle or not.
everybody's, uh and the more we learn about all the problems in the environment that wecan protect, we become a safety conscious society.
(29:27):
So then you're reinforcing the safetyism much more than the old days where you kind of hadto.
uh
confront a difficult world and work through it.
Now we have enough affluence that you make things more comfortable.
And so there's a whole shift to making sure the child's comfortable, making sure that, andyou have fewer children so everybody can be focused on more for their health and safety.
(29:57):
uh
That's so true, man.
Only children are just hovered over.
The helicopter parent thing is, is that struggle is real.
And then by the time you've had your sixth or seventh child, they're basically just feralin the wild running barefoot and you don't even care.
They'll come home when they're ready, you know, kind of free range by then it's the sameparents.
(30:21):
They've just, it's not their first rodeo anymore.
Yeah.
It's very true that pattern
I have uh one last question before we go ahead and wrap up because I know you have aclient coming up, which is important.
There's been a rise lately.
mean, maybe this is anecdotal on my part, but I sure see it a lot.
(30:42):
Uh, didn't used to of people announcing to the whole world at age 35 or 50.
My goodness.
I've been autistic my entire life, or I've had Asperger's my entire life morespecifically.
And I now just, just now got diagnosed with it.
Somehow they've gone their entire life.
Uh, somehow
(31:03):
thinking they were normal, but now that there's some place in their social life, they'renot thriving.
Maybe if I slap a diagnosis on it, it'll explain everything.
And I don't know if it's because Elon Musk is the richest guy in the world and it'sworking well for him to be Asperger's and it's made it cool or something, but it just
(31:25):
seems like there's a rise of people not only receiving
later in life diagnoses of being on the spectrum.
And I'm assuming ADHD could fall right in line with that too.
Matter of fact, I've seen examples.
Yeah.
What's up with that?
Where are we going with that?
Well, you know, because we're talking about people who have mental deficiency and theydon't make sense of social relationships because they're mentally limited.
(31:57):
And then you have people with this uh sense about...
uh
How do you account for their failure to understand another person's perspective or thesubtleties of interactions with others?
It's the same problem you've got with other diagnoses.
There could be numerous reasons.
If they spend a lot of time by themselves on a computer, they're not learning interactionswith other people.
(32:22):
If they're raised not to discern another person's perspective and point of view or workout...
uh
how to get affinity or compromise with people.
They're not learning the skills that go with understanding human behaviors.
I just saw a study that said if kid's less than three and they're spending four hours orsomething on a screen, they're getting these diagnoses of uh autism because they're not
(32:52):
learning to interact.
with people, their screen behavior is different from in vivo behavior.
the idea is that, think again, we're not really making sense of all the differentindividual cases and how could we account for the individual's whatever lack we think they
have.
(33:12):
If Elon Musk spent all his time figuring out how to orchestrate
uh...
his form of seeing how a company should work and how to do it on the screen and ifeverybody just did what he said yeah it would probably work out fine but meanwhile he's
not really learning the skills that would go with how do you compromise in the governmentto make people agree to something you're not you're not going to...
(33:37):
You get this with small business owners too.
They become tyrants in their pizza place.
Everybody's supposed to be doing exactly what they say.
They're not paying attention to anything.
They just fire people and hire somebody else.
So they're not really learning to do other behaviors.
again, I think we kind of have the same problem with all these diagnoses.
(34:00):
Yeah, I think it's really fascinating and I really appreciate you coming on the showtoday, Craig and, and, and laying this out for these guys in ways they can understand.
It's given us a lot to think about.
I'm, know, the frustrating part is I'm not sure there are real, pat answers we could throwdown for these guys, but at least, you know, I'm sure a bunch of guys out here have
(34:23):
thought, well, you know, maybe there isn't something wrong with me, or maybe I do need togo see a psychiatrist or a psychologist.
And figure out what's going on here so I can, I can get the help I need...
one way or the other, but we definitely don't want to let someone else label us, you know,off hand and live our lives that way simply because someone said so.
(34:43):
So I think this is an important discussion.
I'm so glad we had it.
his name is Dr.
Craig B.
Wiener and he is a licensed psychologist based in Worcester, Mass.
When you go to mountaintoppodcast.com/amazon gentlemen, you'll see.
At the top of my Amazon influencer queue, which is just a douchey way of saying I have adedicated storefront on Amazon.
(35:05):
You'll see, um, his book.
Called Backyard Politics (35:08):
a psychological understanding of today's political and social divide.
also has a couple of books on ADHD, which we'll put up there as well.
And if you're listening to this show or watching this show, um, within a couple, a fewdays of its release, it'll be right there at the top for you.
Also, when you go to mountaintoppodcast
.com/weiner...
why not w i e n e r You'll go to Dr.
(35:34):
Craig B.
Weiner's website.
What are they gonna see when they get there?
What are they gonna find?
You'll see the four books that I put out, three on ADHD and then this last book.
And then I have some videos on ADHD.
I did a series so they can watch some videos on what I think about ADHD in more detail.
And so, there's some other podcasts I've done so they can always listen in to that aswell.
(35:59):
Cool, very cool, very cool.
All that's there for you and more guys at mountaintoppodcast.com/weiner W-I-E-N-E-R.
Craig, thank you so much again for being on the show.
I appreciate you, man.
Oh, thanks for having me.
I enjoyed talking with you.
Yeah, man.
Hope you...hope to have you back.
And gentlemen, if you have not been to mountaintoppodcast.com lately, be sure to visit ourthree wonderful sponsors, Jocko Willink's company, Origin in Maine, The Keyport and the
(36:26):
guys at Hero Soap.
Always great ways to man up and you're down with a discount 10 % off when you use thecoupon code mountain10 Right now, I want to talk to you guys about Substack.
Substack is my happy place guys.
Um, man.
If you are sick of juvenile social media, um, TikTok, Instagram, and you want somethingmore buttoned up and have an intelligent conversation for once, hopefully I'm contributing
(36:54):
to that.
Visit me and anybody else you can find who floats your boat on Substack.
Mountaintoppodcast.com front slash Substack is where you'll find all of my goodies.
Um, I let, I let it fly guys.
I tell you exactly what I think.
There's some humor there.
I did a piece
on going RVing with my wife that brought a lot of laughs and there's, there's all kinds ofvariety there.
(37:20):
Check me out on Substack at Scot McKay or just simply go to mountaintoppodcast.com frontslash Substack.
Gentlemen, it's always a pleasure to talk to you.
And until we talk to you again real soon, this is Scot McKay from X and Y communicationsin San Antonio, Texas.
Be good out there.
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