Retrospect & Prospect: A Post-Progressive Developmental Psychopathology

Part 1

Note: Below is the first half of an invited manuscript I have submitted for peer review as part of a special issue related to the inaugural Heterodox Social Science Conference at the University of Buckingham in June. I am publishing it as a ‘preprint’ here in two installments for two reasons: (1) I believe that the readership of the Mailer newsletter will find the essay of interest despite its more academic prose as it covers in more granular detail topics I have written about across the lifespan of this newsletter; and (2) I intentionally want to maximize the amount of eyeballs who are able to access my thoughts herein as I believe a full public recognition of how ideologically corrupted, and frankly anti-science, the Social Sciences have become is important to generate public support for peri-academics like myself to correct the ideological corruption in the fields we were trained in. This is especially the case in those social sciences that investigate the causes, correlates, and consequences of human behavioral and mental health, like developmental psychopathology.

Earlier, I posted my presentation at the conference. You can find that talk here. As described on the Centre for Heterodox Social Science website, the conference’s intellectual aims were twofold: a) to institutionalize the study of woke, arguably a dominant high-cultural ideology of our episteme; and b) to research omitted topics and perspectives, rebalancing social scientific knowledge. The conference brought together academics, journalist, and other intellectuals united by a shared view that the Social Sciences had become subverted by progressive leftist ideology that threatened the integrity of the Social Sciences in the Academy.

In the second half of the essay, which I will post fairly soon, I outline the specifics of what exactly a post-progressive developmental evolutionary psychopathology will entail.

“Progressive dogmas have increasingly structured the social sciences, with an obsessive focus on group-based inequalities and a narrow set of hypotheses permitted to explain them. Other research questions, such as the biological roots of behaviour, together with hypotheses that differ from the progressive orthodoxy of systemic bias, such as those invoking culture, history, demographics, and geography, have been marginalized and sometimes censored or punished. The resulting chilling effect has produced blind spots and distortions in knowledge and damaged the truth-seeking mission of the university. We call for a new social science to fill in the blanks and correct distortions, rendering a more accurate account of our social world. This does not require that every conceivable question be researched, only that those questions that are researched be treated with scientific objectivity and openness to multiple hypotheses.”

—The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science: Heterodox Social Science

Although the methodology associated with the field was being used in psychiatric epidemiology and other fields (Rutter, 1988), it wasn’t until 1984, with the publication of an editorial in the journal Child Development “The Emergence of Developmental Psychopathology” (Cicchetti, 1984), and the establishment of an academic journal entitled by the same name in January 1989 (Cicchetti, 1989), in which the field of developmental psychopathology was ‘officially’ introduced as a distinct subspeciality of study in academic psychiatry and psychology. Cicchetti defined the field of developmental psychopathology as “committed to the application of developmental principles to the study of high risk and deviant populations. Inherent within this framework is a focus on the importance of applying our knowledge of normal development to the study of atypical populations and, likewise, recognition of the value in examining abnormality in order to enhance our understanding of normal development.” (Cicchetti, 1984, italics added).

Subsequent papers on the maturation of the field (Cicchetti & Toth, 2009; Sroufe, 2013) chronicled a healthy scientific development of the discipline. This healthy development was defined by a marked research generativity into the social and biological determinants, as well as their associations with one another, of developmental adaptation (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and social adjustment) across the life course. Seminal, classic papers in the field that greatly informed our understanding of developmental adaptation across the life span included Moffitt’s seminal paper outlining a developmental taxonomy of antisocial behavior (Moffitt, 1993) and Boyce et al.’s theory of biological sensitivity to context (Boyce & Ellis, 2005; Ellis et al., 2005) outlining an evolutionary-developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity.

This otherwise healthy development of the discipline of developmental psychopathology was abruptly interrupted when the discipline was corrupted by a tsunami of Woke social justice ideology that swept across all of the Social and Medical Sciences, and especially research in clinical and developmental psychopathology, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2020 (see Berwick, 2020). While the saturation of research in developmental psychopathology with social justice ideology was quite immediately conspicuous to researchers who were commendably not used to injecting political activism in their work (at least to this author), it is perhaps not surprising that this ideological subversion and co-option of the field by social justice ideology occurred so rapidly during the period of national protest, social upheaval, and racial justice activism following George Floyd’s death given the biopsychosocial foundation of developmental psychopathology; A key tenant of the field as outlined in 1984 was “viewing behavior within a social context and, as such, recognizing the transactional nature of interactions” (Cicchetti, 1984).

Research published in the field of developmental psychopathology rapidly became disproportionately focused on attributing individual psychopathology and mental health outcomes as stemming from a “sick society.” Social determinants were foregrounded as causal influences while biological and genetic influences were either ignored or not examined (more so the latter), rendering the results dubious, and the interpretation of the findings clearly social justice political statements, rather than sound empirical interpretations. Indeed, in a 2020 paper published in Women & Therapy, Buchanan and Wiklund note “Clinical science must begin to embrace the richness and nuance involved in centering social justice, intersectionality, and diversity and creating space for these topics to exist within scholars, clients, clinical work, therapy, and research” (Buchanan & Wiklund, 2020). This clear ideological capture in developmental and clinical psychopathology is still present. A symposium panel at the 2025 annual conference for the Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP) entitled "Bringing to Light the Societal Influence on the Development and Worsening of Psychopathology” (2025 SRP Annual Meeting, 2025) for which key words included “racism” and “stigma.”

Papers in once-reputable journals focused on research in developmental and clinical psychopathology have included papers with titles including “Systemic White Supremacy: U.S. State Policy, Policing, Discrimination, and Suicidality Across Race and Sexual Identity” (English et al., 2024), “The Next Generation of Clinical-Psychological Science: Moving Toward Anti-Racism” (Rodriguez-Seijas et al., 2024), and “Personality Disorders Research and Social Decontextualization: What It Means to Be a Minoritized Human” (Rodriguez-Seijas et al., 2023) all of which both clearly communicate an social activist orientation while simultaneously belying the methodological shortcoming that (i.e., the omission of biological and/or genetic determinants) that render their findings and interpretations concerning social influences on “minoritized humans” (i.e., minority groups) severely limited at best, invalid at worst. Indeed, McNally (McNally, 2024) published a critique of the Rodriguez-Seijas et al. (2024) paper mentioned above which chronicled the epistemological poverty and lack of empirical support for the claims made in the paper.

Moreover, the concept of “normality” (and thus abnormality) began to be directly framed in a pejorative light both from a statistical standpoint, with Scientific American referring to the “so-called” statistical normal distribution that assumes “there are default humans” and the existence of “white empiricism” in their screed against the famous sociobiologist E. O. Wilson (McLemore, 2021), and from a conceptual standpoint, with papers in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science (JPACS, formerly known as the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, but renamed as it was felt the former masthead was too stigmatizing), calling for the abandonment of the concept of normality in psychiatric nosology and mental health altogether (Mason, 2025). When one considers the totality of this rapid incursion of Woke ideological scholarship in developmental and evolutionary psychopathology, it is not difficult to appreciate the perilous and oppressive intellectual environment such ideological activism instantiates.

This Woke push in psychopathology and clinical science to abandon the concept of “normality” and move to entire dimensional systems of nosology ostensibly without some form of clinical (i.e., diagnostic) cut-points is grounded in the notion that the concept of ‘normality’ functions as a “sorting mechanism” (Mason, 2025) that oppresses minorities and those that deviate from the norm. There is, then, an obvious twisted irony in the fact that the statistical normal distribution is at the heart of frequentist statistics which are the stock-and-trade of developmental and evolutional psychopathology research and has allowed us to uncover countless insights into the nature, course, presentation, and treatment of psychopathology and mental illness.

Additional papers in JPACS have also called for abandonment of long understood construct nomenclature in the research literature, such as the “Dark Triad” which refers to the personality trait constellation of elevated levels of narcissism, Machiavellism, and psychopathy, because it is too “stigmatizing” (Chester et al., 2025). Indeed, what any reasonable person should be able to glean from all of these developments is that the very foundation on which the field of developmental psychopathology was established—the study of normality and deviations from abnormality—is being eroded. The sensible question this leads one to ask is: if there is no normality, then what becomes of a field the very foundation of which is predicated on the [essential] existence of a quantitative description of normality? It speaks to an almost self-evident absurdity of the present moment that scientists in the field of psychopathology writ large have to pose such a question to themselves. But philosophical psychiatry in the time of Woke progressive ideology (e.g., the notion that the statistical normal distribution is an oppressive injustice from bigoted scientists) lends to rabbit holes that one has to descend at the expense of practical sanity.

In posing this question, it is instructive to understand how such internally incoherent positions are laundered by the prevailing Woke scholars in psychopathology and clinical science. Academics, especially research academics, in psychology and psychiatry understand that mental health conditions (i.e., mental health “disorders”) are continuous, dimensional constructs. That is, unlike biological medical conditions where you typically are afflicted with a disease entity (e.g., cancer cells), mental health conditions are not inherently categorical in nature. That is, one does not possess something in the sense of an essence or a disease entity (i.e., a ‘taxon’), but rather mental health conditions are empirically defined by a natural continuous distribution or spectrum on which individuals possess more or less mental illness levels (see Haslam et al., 2020, for a detailed discussion on this issue); they are not ‘natural kinds’.

Given a particular set of criteria (e.g., as reflected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association, 2022), or a particular level of a mental health syndrome as measured by checklists, questionnaires, etc., an individual is said to have a mental health condition (i.e., be diagnosed with that condition; reflecting a ‘case’ in epidemiological nomenclature). Indeed, a key tenant of developmental psychopathology is that the approach does not assume an a priori assumption about continuity or discontinuity between normality and abnormality (Rutter, 1988), but rather, through the use of its empirical methods, seeks to directly address this grey area of what best defines ‘caseness’.

Thus, it is true in a quantitative formal sense that save for biological sex (although note the construct of gender, discussed below), one cannot 'carve nature at its joints' with respect to mental health conditions. However, radical anti-psychiatry activists and scholars then launder this empirical truth as evidence that 'categorical' systems (e.g., the DSM for mental illnesses) are always social-political constructions and therefore need abolished--that is, "liberated from" these hegemonic power structures embodied in such nosological systems as the DSM. This is why Woke researchers in the field of developmental psychopathology routinely invoke and advocate for the 'dimensional approach' to studying and communicating about psychopathology. It liberates them from having to speak in categorical terms of abnormality. Indeed, gender activists and Woke scholars within the field of developmental psychopathology have also deployed this same strategy with biological sex by conflating biological sex and the social construct of ‘gender identity’.

While there is no doubt that I am aware of amongst scholars in developmental psychopathology that categorical systems can be improved, modified, etc., it nonetheless remains true that categorical heuristics (e.g., mental health diagnoses) are essential for a stable and civilized society. Categories that allow for efficient and necessary practical decision-making structure and stabilize a society. Without them, society would not be able to develop social health policy and mental and physical health guidelines that are necessary for civic functionality (e.g., for individuals to receive treatment, insurance claims, institutionalization for the mentally ill etc.). Moreover, the dimensional reality of mental health does not obviate the practical, quantitative descriptive reality of ‘statistical normality’ which the field is predicated upon either explicitly (research in the frequentist tradition of statistics) or implicitly (e.g., ‘Queer Theory’ [Riggs & Treharne, 2017] assumes a ‘cis’ [i.e., a population-level recognized normality] which must be reacted against and deconstructed).

For example, a course in the Department of Education at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University entitled “Queering Education” was described on a now-deleted departmental webpage in the following manner: “In many ways, the course is about the ‘hidden curriculum’ of heteronormativity and cisnormativity, or the subtle practices in schools that privilege heterosexual, gendered identities and ways of being” (Queering Education | Harvard Kennedy School, 2025). Thus, 'Queer Theory' as deployed in developmental psychopathology serves as a conceptual lens from which to avoid the practice of eventuating in categorical diagnostic entities that demarcate mental illness—indeed, to cast such practices as inherently ‘oppressive’ or otherwise malevolent. More broadly, the injection of this sort of Woke ideology into the fields of developmental and evolutionary psychopathology led to intellectual corruption of these fields and, in the case of gender identity and transgender issues, to become scientifically incoherent, with harmful consequences (e.g., see Dyer, 2024).

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Part 1 References.

2025 SRP Annual Meeting. (2025). https://srp.societyconference.com/conf/#sessions/conf10005

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

Berwick, D. M. (2020). The moral determinants of health. Jama, 324(3), 225–226.

Boyce, W. T., & Ellis, B. J. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: I. An evolutionary–developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 271–301.

Buchanan, N. T., & Wiklund, L. O. (2020). Why Clinical Science Must Change or Die: Integrating Intersectionality and Social Justice. Women & Therapy, 43(3–4), 309–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/02703149.2020.1729470

Chester, D. S., Lynam, D. R., & Miller, J. D. (2025). It is past time to abandon the term “dark” as a descriptor of antagonistic traits. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-29451-001

Cicchetti, D. (1984). The emergence of developmental psychopathology. Child Development, 55(1), 1–7.

Cicchetti, D. (1989). Developmental psychopathology: Some thoughts on its evolution. Development and Psychopathology, 1(1), 1–4.

Cicchetti, D., & Toth, S. L. (2009). The past achievements and future promises of developmental psychopathology: The coming of age of a discipline. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50(1–2), 16–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01979.x

Dyer, C. (2024). Guidelines on gender related treatment flouted standards and overlooked poor evidence, finds Cass review. British Medical Journal Publishing Group. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q820

Ellis, B. J., Essex, M. J., & Boyce, W. T. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: II. Empirical explorations of an evolutionary–developmental theory. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 303–328.

English, D., Oshin, L. A., Lopez, F. G., Smith, J. C., Busby, D. R., & Anestis, M. D. (2024). Systemic White supremacy: US state policy, policing, discrimination, and suicidality across race and sexual identity. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, 133(4), 321.

Fang, H., Hui, Q., Lynch, J., Honerlaw, J., Assimes, T. L., Huang, J., Vujkovic, M., Damrauer, S. M., Pyarajan, S., & Gaziano, J. M. (2019). Harmonizing genetic ancestry and self-identified race/ethnicity in genome-wide association studies. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 105(4), 763–772.

Haslam, N., McGrath, M. J., Viechtbauer, W., & Kuppens, P. (2020). Dimensions over categories: A meta-analysis of taxometric research. Psychological Medicine, 50(9), 1418–1432.

Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2021). Genetic ancestry and social race are nearly interchangeable. OpenPsych. https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.12.22

Kurzban, R., & Leary, M. R. (2001). Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion. Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 187.

Mason, P. H. (2025). The death of normality: Commentary on Fernandes, Gomes, and Morgado (2025). https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-40113-001

McLemore, M. R. (2021, December 29). The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/

McNally, R. J. (2024). Is Clinical Psychological Science Infected by Racism and White Supremacy? Controversial Ideas, 4(2), 0–0.

Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100(4), 674–701.

Nagar, S. D., Conley, A. B., & Jordan, I. K. (2020). Population structure and pharmacogenomic risk stratification in the United States. BMC Biology, 18(1), 140. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00875-4

Queering Education | Harvard Kennedy School. (2025, May 12). https://web.archive.org/web/20250512093238/https://www.hks.harvard.edu/courses/queering-education

Riggs, D. W., & Treharne, G. J. (2017). Queer theory. In The Palgrave handbook of critical social psychology (pp. 101–121). Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51018-1_6

Rodriguez-Seijas, C., McClendon, J., Wendt, D. C., Novacek, D. M., Ebalu, T., Hallion, L. S., Hassan, N. Y., Huson, K., Spielmans, G. I., Folk, J. B., Khazem, L. R., Neblett, E. W., Cunningham, T. J., Hampton-Anderson, J., Steinman, S. A., Hamilton, J. L., & Mekawi, Y. (2024). The Next Generation of Clinical-Psychological Science: Moving Toward Anti-Racism. Clinical Psychological Science, 12(3), 526–546. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026231156545

Rodriguez-Seijas, C., Rogers, B. G., & Asadi, S. (2023). Personality disorders research and social decontextualization: What it means to be a minoritized human. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 14(1), 29.

Rutter, M. (1988). Epidemiological approaches to developmental psychopathology. Archives of General Psychiatry, 45(5), 486–495.

Sroufe, L. A. (2013). The promise of developmental psychopathology: Past and present. Development and Psychopathology, 25(4pt2), 1215–1224.

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