Brain scans? We don’t need no stinking brain scans!
At least Jerry Mungadze doesn’t. Crayons and markers on a map of the brain tells him all he needs to know about personality and sexuality.
Last week, I posted about Mungadze’s appearance on the Joni Show telling Joni, Joe Dallas and David Kyle Foster that the brains of his patients go straight as the result of his approach. I wondered at the time how he could support that claim with brain assessment. It turns out that he fully filled in the audience of Foster’s Pure Passion on his methods. Hint: He doesn’t demonstrate how to read MRI results. The full version can be viewed on You Tube here and here. For a brief excerpt of part two, see below:
Note that patients color in a map of the brain and Mungadze reads the map like a projective test. Apparently, pink relates to femininity, red to anger/aggression, and so on. He says he can tell gay people apart from straights; and when they revert to heterosexuality, he can tell by how they color between the lines.
Who needs brain scans when you have crayons?
Mungadze’s is best known for his work in trauma and dissociative identity disorder (DID). His most famous patient is football star Herschel Walker, who wrote a book citing Mungadze’s help to overcome DID. Mungadze wrote the forward.
As for the theory of the brain revealing itself via colors chosen by patients, I know of nothing to support it. Projective tests in general are not reliable and this one in particular looks like a method invented by Mungadze without reference to research or validation.
The offer from Michael Bailey to send patients for real brain scans still stands. They can even bring crayons.
Category: psychology
Ex-gay Therapist Says He Changes Gay Brains; Michael Bailey Says Prove It
Recently, on the Joni Show, ex-gay therapist Jerry Mungadze said his therapy helps rewire the brains of gay clients. Listen (see RWW for transcript):
If you want the full context, go to this segment on the Joni Show and hear the rest.
Mungadze did not say how he accomplished this or how he tested it. His website mentions neurotherapy but we are not given many specifics.
Being aware that Michael Bailey at Northwestern University has challenged ex-gay therapists to send clients to his lab for brain scans to assess change in sexual arousal patterns. I asked him if he was open to issuing the same challenge to Mungadze. As I expected he agreed enthusiastically. Essentially, the challenge requires that Mungadze send a client to his lab before and after therapy to see if sexual arousal patterns have changed. Mungadze can invite the press or any other observers if he wants to. Bailey and I have discussed this for several years and made these offers to others. Thus far, no one has taken him up on the offer. I wonder if Mungadze will.
The Sovereign Grace Ministries Scandal
I have only recently learned about the lawsuit alleging wide-spread child abuse at Sovereign Grace Ministries, a neo-Calvinist denomination based in MD. Check here for local coverage of the lawsuit, much of which was dismissed earlier this month.
I don’t know what to make of this yet, as I am still reading about it. However, the story is pitting some evangelical heavy weights against each other.
Christianity Today is covering this scandal and notes that Al Mohler, Mark Dever, Justin Taylor, and Ligon Duncan have come to the defense of SGM founder C.J. Mahaney. On the other side, supporting those who allege abuse, are Rachel Held Evans, Scot McKnight and Liberty University professor Boz Tchividjian.
For summaries of the situation, the following sites seem to have good coverage.
Rachel Held Evans
SGM Survivors
Internet Monk (Update)
Wartburg Watch
World Magazine
Christianity Today
Given the seriousness of the allegations and the notoriety of the those who are taking sides, this set of events could be the foundation of a major disruption in the evangelical world.
Does the APA consider hebephilia to be normal?
That question is being asked by Ray Blanchard in a letter to the editor (read entire letter here) of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Blanchard is the former chair of the Paraphilias Subworkgroup of the APA’s DSM V Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Workgroup. DSM stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The new 5th edition is slated to be released any day now and has attracted much controversy for a variety of reasons.
Generally, there is no more controversial area of the DSM than the section on sexual disorders. Blanchard’s subworkgroup recommended including reference to hebephilia in the section on paraphilias in the new edition. Hebephilia is defined as primary sexual interest in children who are in early puberty (i.e., at Tanner Stages 2 and 3, often corresponding to development between ages 11 and 14). Blanchard begins his letter by noting that “on December 1, 2012, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced that its Board of Trustees (BOT) had voted to reject the changes to the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder proposed by the Paraphilias Subworkgroup for DSM-5 and to retain the diagnostic criteria published in DSM-IV-TR [i.e., a sexual preference for prepubertal, i.e., Tanner Stage 1, children, nowadays about age 10 or younger].”
Blanchard believes the proposed change would have allowed more precise diagnosis and research of people who have sexual preferences for early pubescent children but not younger, pre-pubescent children or adults. However, for reasons that are not clear, the APA Board of Trustees did not accept the recommended changes.
The fact that the APA did not make this change raises questions. Blanchard asks if the APA wants to discourage research on hebephilia. Furthermore, Blanchard wonders if the current DSM allows for hebephilia to be diagnosed under the category “other specified paraphilic disorder.” In other words, can clinicians and researchers use the “other” category to give label to individuals with hebephilia. Ultimately, according to Blanchard, the answers to these questions may provide insight into the APA’s stance on normal sexual preferences. He writes
It remains to be seen how the BOT [board of trustees] will respond to these questions when they start to arise in real-life settings, which they will. It seems to me that there are only two possibilities. If the BOT denies that it meant to assert that the sexual preference for children in early puberty is normal, then it has to allow the diagnosis of ‘other specified paraphilic disorder (hebephilia).’ If the BOT, or someone officially speaking on behalf of the BOT or the whole APA, states or testifies that the BOT intended to prohibit the diagnosis of ‘other specified paraphilic disorder (hebephilia),’ then that is tantamount to stating that the APA’s official position is that the sexual preference for early pubertal children is normal.
Elsewhere in his letter, Blanchard states that sexual preference for early pubertal children doesn’t “square with the average layperson’s concept of sexual normalcy and probably does not square with the average clinician’s either.” I agree and believe Blanchard raises some important issues which I hope the APA will address.
Note: On May 16, I asked the APA PR dept for comment on Blanchard’s letter. No response as of today (May 17). I will post anything I get.
#2123B
If you recognize the title of this post, you are probably following the dust up promoted by Glenn Beck over Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi (e.g., here and for another perspective here).
In short, Beck believes the Obama administration is covering up Alharbi’s culpability for recruiting the Boston bombers. Independent sources including Fox News have investigated the situation and found nothing any different than what the government is reporting – Alharbi was at first thought to be involved in the bombing but was actually in the wrong place at the wrong time and was wounded by the bombing.
I don’t know enough about the way Homeland Security handles security threats to comment fully on this matter, but I have been following it as an illustration of belief perseverance. Once a person gets an idea fixed in mind, even the disconfirmation of the original evidence cannot shake it. New reasons are sought and secured to make the original proposition (there’s a cover-up, I tell ya!) seem plausible.
I might add to this post as new information comes up. I think this interview from The Blaze yesterday is intriguing because it actually seems to undermine Beck’s chronology of events.