LETTERS
Mindsweeper The roster of failed suicide-prediction tests that Will Stephenson explores in his essay [“The Undiscovered Country,” Miscellany, August] reminded me of a time in the mid-Fifties when an eager nursing student suggested I take an attitude test. I was a teenager who didn’t believe in the order of things and who tended to hold negative opinions—conditions that prompted psychological evaluation. The test was straightforward: draw a stick figure family of three. I drew the stick figure child between the two parents. Each parent held the child by the hand. The psychologist who analyzed my drawing was astonished. What I produced wasn’t what she had expected. And even then I knew what she expected from me: an image of alienation, perhaps even child abandonment; some evidence of trauma that could have explained my…