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The Daily Beast, the financial crisis and madness
October 6, 2008
I turned eagerly to Tina Brown’s newly-launched news aggregation site The Daily Beast this morning and was impressed by its look and feel. Ms Brown made her name as a magazine editor, notably at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and her online venture shows off her expertise.
As to content, well, we shall have to see. The Beast has some original articles and blogs but relies heavily on linking to articles elsewhere. Sometimes I get the feeling that journalism will end up as endless links to other things and no-one writing anything.
One thing that struck me is that The Beast seems to have a keen interest in psychology and the financial crisis. It has two articles this morning, one from a psychologist (billed wrongly as a psychiatrist) on treating Wall Street patients and another on whether anti-depressants helped to cause the mortgage crisis.
Both articles are intriguing but, if you will forgive the word, mad.
The first, by Dr Stephen Josephson, a psychologist who seems to have a second career as an artist, is a frank account of how he treats Wall Street patients who are depressed. He clearly has a bracing style:
Many of my patients have lost tens of millions in recent weeks, and some are suicidal. But the macho marine mentality that pervades Wall Street makes my work difficult. With these guys, none of the usual therapy tactics—like empathy, hand holding, and talking about their controlling moms—has any effect. The only thing they respond to? Bullying. As tough guys, they want to be slapped out of their depression by a guy who’s as tough as they are. Cursing is essential.
Hmm. Remind me not to book an appointment with Dr Josephson.
The second article, by Adam Hanft, even more oddly argues that anti-depressants may have caused the financial crisis because people who took them became so relaxed about risk-taking that they borrowed money recklessly.
This is the sort of half-baked theory that sounds good at a party after a couple of drinks but collapses as soon as one thinks about it soberly. Mr Hanft appears to be confusing anti-depressants with amphetamines (and depression with bipolar disorder).
On the other hand, both articles are the sort of thing you might talk about to friends, and thus create “buzz” - the commodity for which Ms Brown is most famous. She has clearly not lost her touch.
