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Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
21–23 of 23 posts
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rubbish. The papers analyzed here are reporting the outcomes of randomized controlled trials. Political motivations, opinions, and interpretations have nothing to do with any of these papers' results. A fair number of HN commentators have this bizarre caricature of psychology as someone lying on the couch, chattering about feelings while a tweed-jacketed man scribbles away. However, it hasn't been 1920 for a long tim…
Have you ever talked to people in the social sciences ? There very much is political motivations, opinions and interpretations. And don't forget careers. Many people have built decade-long careers on being the go-to person (or even department, it can be a dozen careers) for specific treatments. Look up what EMDR is, for a particularly ludicrous example, and read the career of Francine Shapiro. Note that she had decad…
Of course.
I'm not sure that's the sort of politics the original comment had in mind, and I'm certain that these things are not exclusive to the social sciences. I've heard that parts of CERN can be very political, and I've personally seen two adult men nearly come to blows over the synaptic organization of visual cortex. Internal politics, differences of opinion, and interpretation are parts of every human endeavor.
EMDR sounds goofy, but there may actually be something there. When Francine Shapiro died last month, the New York Times ran an article about her and her work, which for which they interviewed Richard McNally, who was one of EMDR's fiercest critics in the 1990s and 2000s; at the time, he called it "merely one of the many therapeutic fuzz-balls that litter the landscape of psychology today." In this article, he says “I’ve changed my mind,” Dr. McNally said in a phone interview. “I’m willing to do that based on new evidence. It looks like there’s something going on there; the representation of the trauma seems to be reconsolidated in a way that doesn’t distress people as much when later recalled.” From here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/science/francine-shapiro-... I'm not a clinical psychologist and I don't know a ton about EMDR, but I do know a fair bit about eye movements. As part of my dissertation, I recorded neural activity from monkeys making eye movements. We found changes in the activity of single cells and neural oscillations (LFPs) just before the eye movements started, a finding that has been replicated many times and in many brain areas. It's not immediately obvious to me whether these effects can be harnessed to treat PTSD, but there's at least a shred of a mechanism there.
That brings me to my main point: psychology is a huge field, and contains people studying perception, learning, language acquisition, and more. That work is overwhelmingly experimental and data-driven. Clinical psychology is a small part of it–and it's also probably the hardest part. I'd agree that it and psychiatry haven't had the same success that (say) orthopedics or even oncology have had. Some of the practitioners, especially the ones that get a lot of public attention, are certainly overconfident. That doesn't make the field a fraud though.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever talked to people in the social sciences ? There very much is political motivations, opinions and interpretations. And don't forget careers. Many people have built decade-long careers on being the go-to person (or even department, it can be a dozen careers) for specific treatments. Look up what EMDR is, for a particularly ludicrous example, and read the career of Francine Shapiro. Note that she had decad…
Of course. I'm not sure that's the sort of politics the original comment had in mind, and I'm certain that these things are not exclusive to the social sciences. I've heard that parts of CERN can be very political, and I've personally seen two adult men nearly come to blows over the synaptic organization of visual cortex. Internal politics, differences of opinion, and interpretation are parts of every human endeavor.…
> That doesn't make the field a fraud though.
No it doesn't. What does make the field fraud is the Rosenhan experiment, and related experiments, which proved empirically:
1) psychiatrists cannot identify mental illness
2) psychiatrists cannot identify absence of mental illness
And we're not talking 1% false positives or false negatives. We're talking 100% false positives, and ~17% false negatives were observed. That is not reasonable. It's not even that it was up to chance, that they didn't know, as that would obviously result in 50% figures. 100% (and anything over 50%) can only be explained by psychiatrists purposefully, willfully misdiagnosing patients. But it gets worse.
3) ALL psychiatrists tested used drugs on these patients that were misdiagnosed. Every last one.
4) Despite learning the truth, 100% were unwilling to change their opinion and instead used physical violence, and the threat of more physical violence against their patients to extract compliance.
This is not just damning. This is consistent, 100% fraud. Nothing else can explain these figures. Needless to say, the experiment has been repeated, verified through different means, even in popular culture and TV shows. Every time the results were equally damning.
These experiments took place in 1887, 1968, 1973, 1988, and 2008. Similar studies exist for youth protection and mental health diagnosis. There has been no improvement over time.
And many studies claim that diagnoses always follow the space available in mental health programmes, whether inpatient or outpatient, in a way that no other medical discipline has ever seen. Many papers point out that it is supply of care, not demand, that determines the amount of mental disorders in the population.
Furthermore, every real illness has systematically been removed from psychiatry into normal medicine. Not one have they been able to hold on to. Examples: epilepsy, narcolepsy, aneurysms, hysteria, herpes, many forms of intoxication and drug use, various forms of hormone imbalances (and quite a few diseases causing them), TONS of disorders that cause pain, ...
There are still "unsolved" real diseases that are treated in psychiatry, only because there is no treatment for them, well known ones are Parkinson and Dementia, Low IQ, Down syndrome and others. Again there are many types of intoxication that fall under this umbrella, which includes abuse of psychiatric medication itself, sometimes by psychiatrists or other psychiatric personnel.
Other psychiatric illnesses turned out to be racism or social biases of psychiatrists and nothing more, like homosexuality, prostitution (still often done, today), feminism and even then we're ignoring "Aktion T4" and a lot more such efforts.
It is not very well known, but the battle in the US for acceptance of homosexuality and to a lesser extent feminism focused on removal of psychiatry from the lives of people.
There are many reasons the field is fraudulent and people working in it know that it is.