Accepted for publication in the Journal of Mind and Behavior. https://umaine.edu/jmb/ ________________________________________________________________________ In this critical notice, I review and critique ‘Psychiatric Casualties’ (2021) by Mark C. Russell and Charles Figley. In so doing, I analyze a natural experiment from WWII, which has previously only been misinterpreted. The natural experiment leads me to conclude that predisposition results in some individuals being far more likely than others to develop war stress disorders such as PTSD. This point puts me in disagreement with Russell and Figley, though I endorse the general message of their book: that the military has failed in its responsibility to properly care for psychiatric casualties, and that there are steps which could be taken to improve the situation.

Accepted for publication in the Journal of Mind and Behavior. https://umaine.edu/jmb/ ________________________________________________________________________ Is human free will compatible with the natural laws of the universe? To ‘compatibilists’ who see free actions as emanating from the wants and reasons of human agents, free will looks perfectly plausible. However, ‘incompatibilists’ claim to see the more ultimate sources of human action. The wants and reasons of agents are said to be caused by physical processes which are themselves mere natural results of the previous state of the world and the natural laws which govern it. This paper argues that the incompatibilists make a mistake in appealing to such non-agent sources of human action. They fail to realize that free will may exist at one scale, but not at the scales where they look. When free will is considered from the correctly scaled perspective, it does seem compatible with determinism and natural laws.

Anxiety is understood ethologically. That is, as a preparatory state to evade predators or other dangers in the environment. Animal models of prey avoiding predation are taken as analogous to human anxiety. But if that is the case, then the neurological and affective state of the predator should also have a human analog, since humans are predators too. This postulated neurological and affective state in humans would be the opposite of anxiety, yet it could be mistaken for anxiety and thus be misdiagnosed. This paper will suggest a name for that opposite of anxiety, then analytically examine some ways in which it manifests and interacts with contemporary society.

Personal control requires both an agentic self and a responsive environment. This paper proposes two pathways to low perceived control: perception of overpowering external forces, and lack of an agentic sense of self. Using nationally representative data (CPES; N = 4,904), identity disturbance served as a proxy for absent agentic self, and a hardship index served as a proxy for external constraint. Identity disturbance nearly eliminated high mastery, while hardship did not, and identity disturbance attenuated the established mastery–psychopathology link. These findings also expose a fatal flaw in the Lachman and Weaver Sense of Control Scale: its two-factor structure reflects item-wording polarity, not substantively distinct dimensions.

Descartes believed that there was a logical path from doubting the existence of the body to affirming mind-body dualism. In the 20th and 21st centuries, a critique of Cartesian reasoning first made by Arnauld in 1641 has been revived and widely accepted. Several writers including Paul Churchland and Gary Hatfield make the case that the argument for dualism commits the masked man fallacy; that the Cartesian argument relies on mere ignorance of the body to reach its conclusion. In this paper, I show that the argument from Cartesian doubt to mind-body dualism does not depend on mere ignorance. It depends on reliable knowledge about what can and can not be known. Descartes’ method of doubt leads to the conclusion that the body can never under any circumstance be known as the mind is known. The argument for dualism rests on that knowledge, not on ignorance. This paper reveals a viable Cartesian argument for mind-body dualism and explicates the missteps of Descartes’ contemporaneous and present-day critics.