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David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

spectator.co.uk

41–50 of 127 posts

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DSM is controversial because it's only scientific until political groups take interest. The trans community lobbied and bothered academics over the DSM's definition for Trans people until the academics threw up their hands and decided their funding wasn't good enough to justify having a spine and so the definition in the DSM was changed with a minimum of real science to justify it. That's psychology as a field in…

Framing the DSM-5's redefinition of gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria as academics "not having a spine" and not "real science" is a disgustingly transphobic opinion, whether you intend it to be or not. This isn't an empirical science. We shouldn't keep shitty and harmful labels on people who are deeply struggling with their identity.

I think it would be more productive to show how the author is incorrect instead of declaring his statement "a disgustingly transphobic opinion".

The DSM has always been political, though lately it's gotten worse. For the DSM-5, task force members were required to sign NDAs[1] Trans activists also tried (unsuccessfully) to get Dr. Kenneth Zucker & Dr. Ray Blanchard kicked off the task force.[2]

Due to the NDAs, we'll probably never know the full extent to which political pressure shaped the DSM-5.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/health/18psych.html?pagew...

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20081024203348/http://www.gaycit...

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems overly pessimistic to me, there are drugs that significantly improve patients wellbeing and do so consistently and repeatably, despite the fact that we don't have a complete understanding of the complete mechanism of action. If I do a study showing that handwashing in surgeons measurably reduces risk of infection, does the fact that I don't know about microbes make lacking in scientific rigor and remove it…

>> there are drugs that significantly improve patients wellbeing and do so consistently and repeatably, No, there are not. A given drug may work consistently for some people, while having no effect, or detrimental effects on other people with the same diagnosis.

Either you misunderstand or you're being disingenuous here.

"Consistently and repeatedly" does not mean "this works 100.0% of the time."

Would you deny that exercise fails to consistently and repeatably help people lose weight? Would you say that existing treatments for heart attack victims fail to consistently and repeatably help victims? Would you say umbrellas fail to consistently and repeatably stop rain from falling on your head?

None of these things work 100% of the time, but they are frequently successful.

Psychiatry is a field still in its infancy due to the difficulty of studying the mind. We should hold it accountable for its failings and work to make sure it improves. But, it has successes as well.

It's not the only game in town when it comes to mental health, for sure, but it's also compatible with a lot of other things that can have great benefits for mental health. Meditation, lifestyle changes, exercise, therapy, environment... none are incompatible with psychiatry, which is not perfect but can be a valuable tool in the toolbox.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#43
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the claimed response of the hospitals also sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Keep in mind, a major part of his paper was about how the pseudo-patients were admitted after describing extremely limited and mild symptoms. And a major part of the investigation was determining that, at least in one case, this is untrue; Rosenhan claimed to have extremely severe symptoms, including suicidal ideation. In other words,…

It's reasonable for people to find that sleazy and dishonest, it just seems somewhat...academic...to me. Because what else can be done except to say "ok, there are symptoms, now the symptoms went away, huh." If he was honest, it doesn't reflect that badly on the professionals because there's always going to be cases that fit the pattern. His distortion seems exactly like every pop-sci article today that is written fo…

> His distortion seems exactly like every pop-sci article today

The distinction is that pop-sci articles are just journalism. Most academics take pop-sci journalism in their field with a grain of salt at most, and usually a hard eye-roll.

Real scientific journal/conference articles are held to real standards. Exaggerating or misreporting results in a scientific article is basically malpractice. It's by far the worst (scientific) thing that a scientist can do.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community. Not saying you're wrong, but there's nothing in your comment that supports this claim, so can you elaborate?

> Additionally, Ray Blanchard, an academic who believes transgenderism is caused by "autogynephilia"/"autoandrophilia" (i.e. a sexual fetish caused by attraction to oneself as the desired gender), was a member of the committee who decided the DSM-V definition.

That is not evidence for the claim "So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community."

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#45

The fact is psychiatry today still lacks tests or any proof of its claims of "chemical imbalance", which remains unproven. No one had established a profile for what a "balanced brain chemistry"looks like, nor do they test for any brain chemistry imbalance. Diagnosis is still left to the subjective assessment of the practitioner before prescribing powerful psychotropics that DO change brain chemistry in unpredictable…

This seems overly pessimistic to me, there are drugs that significantly improve patients wellbeing and do so consistently and repeatably, despite the fact that we don't have a complete understanding of the complete mechanism of action. If I do a study showing that handwashing in surgeons measurably reduces risk of infection, does the fact that I don't know about microbes make lacking in scientific rigor and remove it…

There are, in cases, effective drugs. There's also a long history of failed or discredited treatments (chemical and otherwise), as well as theoretical models.

Mind: I'm not arguing that science doesn't make mistakes. Science is a mistake-making-and-correcting process. But there are certain fields of science, somewhat more so in the social than physical and biological sciences, in which a widely-adopted plausible theoretical understanding seems missing.

Science seems to move through stages, of observation and categorisation, to individual models of localised predictive (or descriptive) understanding, to a fundamental theoretical underpinning.

Geology and biology are interesting cases, each being effectively ancient, but for which the establishment of the underlying theory lies largely within human memory.

In the case of biology, taxonomic classification, Darwin's theory of evolution based on variation, inheritence, and selection, Mendelian genetics, and finally the discovery of the structure and reading of DNA and RNA by Watson, Crick, and others (1950s) cast the final links in the chain. We're strengthening those, but the underlying model seems largely complete.

(I'd count concepts of dissipative systems as largely conformant with this model, though important additions.)

For geology, similarly, there was the notion of stratigraphy, which established an ordering but not a specific timescale for geology. Understanding of that didn't occur until the work of Rutherford, Soddy, Holmes, and Boltwood, largely in the first decade of the 20th century.

At the time, the leading scientific value for the age of the Earth was 20 millions of years, by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (reduced from an earlier estimate of 100 million years). Rutherford and Boltwood's initial measurements based on radioactive decay demonstrated a timescale of billions of years, subsequently refined to the present value of 4.6 billion +/- 1% in the 1950s.

That still didn't explain much geological activity, particularly vulcanology, earthquakes, uplifts, and subsidence (though sedimentation and erosion were well understood). That required the notion of plate tectonics and continental drift, formally adopted only in 1965-1967 (by various conferences / professional bodies).

Plate tectonics, driven by residual thermal heat of formation and radioactive decay in the Earth's core and mantle is now considered the theoretical underpinning of all of geology. It's formal adoption is 55 years old, for a study that's existed since the time of ancient Greece.

The social sciences -- sociology, psychology, political economy, and political science -- lack any such empirically demonstratable and falsifiable theoretcal underpinning. To a large extent they've resisted adopting one.

That last point isn't uncommon -- biology certainaly resisted evolution, and geology plate tectonic (see Naomi Oreske's works on this topic, themselves fascinating studies of the evolution of scientific theory: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao...).

And as with pre-genetic biology, pre-tectonic geology, pre-Newtonian physics, and pre-Mendeleevian chemistry, there are useful concepts, models, methods, and mathematical relations in these fields. But not a true unifying theoretic basis.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#46
Note that Rosenhan was a social psychologist. The list of faulty or outright fraudulent experiments done by psychologists grows ever longer. The entire field seems bankrupt to me. Part of the problem are perverse incentives. Get one positive and interesting result (which you can tailor to the zeitgeist for maximum impact) and you can live off books, TED talks and lectures for your whole life. Recent examples include power posing and confidence [1] (poor experiment) or changing political bias regarding gay rights [2] (outright fraud).

If psychology wants the status and rewards of being considered a legitimate science, it needs to make dramatic changes. In the meantime any initial result psychological research produces must be considered not just preliminary, but suspect.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_posing [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6239/1100.2

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, Ray Blanchard, an academic who believes transgenderism is caused by "autogynephilia"/"autoandrophilia" (i.e. a sexual fetish caused by attraction to oneself as the desired gender), was a member of the committee who decided the DSM-V definition.

That is not evidence for the claim "So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community."

If you understood who Ray Blanchard is you would understand that it is. Insofar as a negative can have supporting evidence.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still entirely possible that it happened as reported, but that the (properly) confidential records were destroyed/lost. Did you read the article? This isn't possible at all. > the distinguished psychologist Eleanor Maccoby, who was in charge of assessing Rosenhan’s tenure file, reported that she and others were deeply suspicious of him, and that they found it ‘impossible to know what he had really done, or if…

Not sure why you're being down voted. Maybe just tone with the 'hmmmmm' and such. Anyway, I agree that there appears to be ample evidence for this conclusion.

wasn't me who downvoted, but my guess is it's because of the guideline against commenting on whether someone read the article.

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not evidence for the claim "So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community."

If you understood who Ray Blanchard is you would understand that it is. Insofar as a negative can have supporting evidence.

[EDIT: do the people downvoting this care to explain why they disagree with it? Just because one person was involved is not evidence other people weren't scared off because of harassment. Nor is it evidence that there was no harassment. If you disagree, why?]

His role and behavior is independent of whether there was harassment of academics from people. He may have had that role and either one of these three options could possibly have happened: 1) no harassment of academics from people 2) some harassment 3) a lot of harassment.

To claim that Blanchard’s involvement is evidence that there was no harassment, you’d have to demonstrate that somehow that involvement is incompatible with 2) or 3).

Re: David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades

#50
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the claimed response of the hospitals also sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Keep in mind, a major part of his paper was about how the pseudo-patients were admitted after describing extremely limited and mild symptoms. And a major part of the investigation was determining that, at least in one case, this is untrue; Rosenhan claimed to have extremely severe symptoms, including suicidal ideation. In other words,…

throughout the article I was confused by the term "pseudo-patient". What does it mean in this context? Did Roseanhan claim to have a dr-patient relationship with them. Do they just mean alleged-patients or alleged study subjects?

It's the term he used for the subjects he claimed to have recruited (or for himself, in one case) who pretended to have symptoms to get admitted.

It's to make the point that he didn't recruit actual patients for the study, but (in his telling) perfectly sane people to pretend to be ill.

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