An insider at the San Francisco psychiatrist association convention gives us a whiff of why they're called 'shrinks'

Remember the golden era of blogging, around 2005 or so, when blogging was really good? Back then, people who were experts, or else really, really, observant, blogged with photos and told us all about the world around them, observing the absurdities the media was missing. Think of the all-time greats, such as Zombietime, or Tim Blair, or well, you probably have some favorites. It's not there much anymore, but happily, there are still some instances of this kind of blogging greatness.

Via Thomas Lifson, found a good one from a blogger who is apparently a psychiatrist (update from Thomas Lifson: the blogger is Scott Alexander, a West Coast psychiatrist), who attended the American Psychiatric Association's convention in San Francisco. The Slate Star Codex blog has a post on this meeting of a quarter of the country's psychiatrists that's long and droll and extremely funny, loaded with pictures that implicitly explain to readers why 'psychiatrist' is often preceded by words such as 'bat-brained.' He outlines 10 observations about the field - from its absurd addiction to pharmaceutical ads and why that's going on - often, drugs are just repackaged with big markups to benefit Big Pharma. And the post goes into how woke the profession is - more interested in leftwingery than actual psychiatric topics in its panel discussions, even though there are some substantial topics of actual merit addressed, too. They just get plowed under out by the sheer quantity of woke topics such as "Working Clinically With Eco-Anxiety In The Age Of Climate Change: What Do We Know And What Can We Do?" and other barf drivel. He or she observes that these two things juxaposed together -- big commerce and Occupy-style lefty screeching - present a very weird picture, writing: I’m reminded of the idea of woke capital, the weird alliance between very rich businesses and progressive signaling. If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other. There are even some historical notes on how easily manipulated the psychiatric field is by politicized actors - he included a passage on the APA's 1918 warnings about "the Hun." And there's some great information about how psychiatrists all have a certain "look." This is observation at its finest. Read the whole thing here. Image credit: Slate Star Codex