Wednesday Quote of the Week: The Queen from “My Bipolar Life”

Wednesday April 5, 2006:

Something has been bothering me since yesterday. I went in with hubby when he saw his psychiatrist. He felt like maybe I could give her more insight into his behavior.

Anyway, I mentioned my diagnosis to her, and she said that she didn't believe I was bipolar. She said I was too well spoken and clear headed.

This makes me so mad. It's hard enough finding out about and then accepting your diagnoses. But hearing things like "you're too well spoken/intelligent/successful/etc. to be mentally ill" is just plain insulting.

My Bipolar Life

Obviously, that DNC Speech was a Cry for Help

Yesterday, Richard Morin's column for the Washington Post reported on research being done in the University of Texas at Austin on linguistic patterns that indicate personality. From the Washington Post article:

Researchers… collected transcripts of 271 televised interviews, news conferences, town hall meetings and candidate debates conducted in 2004. The speech samples — more than 400,000 words in all — were run through a computer text-analysis program. The team included lead author Richard B. Slatcher, a doctoral candidate in psychology, and professor James W. Pennebaker.

The key to their study is previous research that has identified subtle but distinctive linguistic patterns and words that, for example, differentiate the way men and women talk.

Specifically, they rated each candidate's use of language along six dimensions: cognitive complexity (marked by sophisticated sentence structure and word choice); femininity (use of words and speech patterns favored by women); depression (use of words that are markers for depression or known "indicators of suicidality"); age (preference for words favored by young or old people); presidentiality (speech patterns and frequently occurring words favored by presidents since FDR in their speeches); and honesty (based on analyses of samples of truthful and deceptive language).

The most interesting part of their conclusions (for me) was that "Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) seemed the most depressed or suicidal," which may partially explain his loss.

I tried to find out some more specifics about the study but Google and Richard Slatcher's site didn't yield much. I may have to actually go out and buy a copy of the Journal of Research in Personality.

[via the always wonderful Wonkette]