We notice continuing discussions in social media about “emotional intelligence”, although with few successful attempts to actually nail it down.
It used to simply be called “maturity.” Attempts by psychiatry and psychology to dissect it make it more complicated and subject to argument about what it really is. We thought we’d like to weigh in on the discussion, and relate it to psychiatric fraud and abuse.
Some definitions:
[These are not all the possible definitions, but are useful ones.]
Emotional: Relating to a state of feelings or sensations created or experienced by an individual or a body; the physical, mental and spiritual state of an individual manifested as a gradient scale of an individual’s state of being.
[From Latin emov?re to remove, displace, from e– + mov?re to move.]
Intelligence: The ability to perceive, pose and resolve problems; the ability to recognize differences, similarities and identities, and evaluate relative importances.
[From Latin intellegere, to understand.]
Maturity: Relating to a condition of full growth or development; behaving in a sensible way; well-balanced in personality and emotional behavior.
[From Latin maturus, ripe.]
We take the term “Emotional Intelligence” to mean the ability to use one’s emotions intelligently and appropriately in different situations.
Some psychiatrists and psychologists relate emotional intelligence to mental health disorders. Witness the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which describes numerous fraudulent diagnoses for which they can prescribe any number of harmful, mind-altering psychiatric drugs. [The purpose of which is to be able to bill insurance for counseling or drugs for any of these diagnoses.] Here are some of those absurd DSM diagnoses:
— Adjustment disorder, With mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct
— High expressed emotion level within family
— Borderline intellectual functioning
— Intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder)
— Disinhibited social engagement disorder
This over-complication of an essentially simple concept leads to endless speculation, the wasted funds for hundreds of research papers, and no end of descriptions about its components and what to do about it.
There is one very simple way to learn to be more emotionally intelligent — by learning to identify the emotions one is feeling as well as understanding them. You won’t learn this, however, from a psychiatrist.