४ नोव्हेंबर, २०१९

"He saw real problems in society: The country was warehousing very sick people in horror houses pretending to be hospitals..."

"... our diagnostic systems were flawed and psychiatrists in many ways had too much power — and very little substance. He saw how psychiatric labels degraded people and how doctors see patients through the prism of their mental illness. All of this was true. In many ways, it is still true. But the problem is that scientific research needs to be sound. We cannot build progress on a rotten foundation. In disregarding Lando’s data and inventing other facts, Rosenhan missed an opportunity to create something three-dimensional, something a bit messier but more honest. Instead, he helped perpetuate a dangerous half-truth. And today, what we have is a mental-health crisis of epic proportions. Over 100,000 people with serious mental illnesses live on the streets, while we are chronically short of safe housing and hospital beds for the sickest among us...."

From "Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar" by Susannah Cahalan, who has a new book, "The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness," about Stanford psychology and law professor David Rosenhan. The study had volunteers lying about hearing voices and getting themselves committed to mental hospitals so they could observe the place from the inside. One of the volunteers, Harry Lando, described the hospital as "a benign environment" where "agitated" people would "fairly quickly... tend to calm down." Rosenhan, we're told, dropped Lando's data from the study.

४४ टिप्पण्या:

Levi Starks म्हणाले...

Scientists don’t lie.
They’re our new priest class.
They have no bias.
You must trust them.

TML म्हणाले...

I just read this this morning! Terrible.

Birkel म्हणाले...

It is a belief in one's own goodness that allow these sorts of terrible things.
Too many professors believe in their own goodness.

Darrell म्हणाले...

In or out.
Make up your minds.

CJinPA म्हणाले...

Wonder what a serious discussion of bringing back state hospitals and orphanages would sound like once the hysterics stopped.

Michael K म्हणाले...

The Deinstitutionalization movement gave us the homeless problem.

Governors saw this as a state budget issue, including Reagan. The attempt to provide outpatient treatment was always a sham.

The political left and libertarians bought this "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" theory and it has wrecked our cities. Next comes the emptying of the prisons movement.

The video of the black crazy guy shoving the young woman into the train in NYC is the future of cities.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest didn't help. Neither did The Snake Pit (1948).

Big Mike म्हणाले...

The country was warehousing very sick people in horror houses. Now we let them freeze to death on street corners and in dark alleys every winter. We are seven years too late to find out whether David Rosenham ever regretted what he had accomplished, but it's worth noting that not every progressive accomplishment actually equates to progress.

brylun म्हणाले...

"where" not "were" agitated people...

Dad29 म्हणाले...

Gee. A committed Lefty lying like a rug.

Shocking.

gilbar म्हणाले...

Rosenhan, we're told, dropped Lando's data from the study.

We choose truth over facts: Jo Biden

AZ Bob म्हणाले...

Did the NY Times pass on running this story? It doesn't fit the narrative.

Carol म्हणाले...

I don't see how hospitals where people are conveniently "put away" could fail to be awful over time. It's just the nature of the beast No one really wants to be there, esp the shrinks.

Family has to check in, visit constantly and not take the doctor's word on everything. Like a regular hospital. If they don't the Pt is really at their mercy.

Oh, and those regular inspections were a charade.

Carol म्हणाले...

Oh, and I did read the article, yesterday when it was going around the net.

It's just that mental hospitals are going to be hit and miss. Mostly miss out here in the hinterlands.

JPS म्हणाले...

Levi Starks, 9:01:

You've reminded me of my favorite line from John Keegan's Intelligence in War:

"Scientists can be as prejudiced as theologians, particularly so if their pet theories are contested."

Fernandinande म्हणाले...

One good thing about science and rational knowledge is that, unlike revealed knowledge, you don't have to trust or believe anybody. If anything, it's just the opposite: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

TML म्हणाले...

Atlas Obscura today: "Exploring Why Old Mental Hospitals Are So Scary"

gilbar म्हणाले...

you know, maybe we aren't giving our leftist leaders enough credit. Maybe it's a plan?

Currently; people, from all over the world, are doing Everything they can to move here
Maybe; if we, through radical reform of our laws, can turn america into a LIVING HELL...
No one will want to move here. Maybe THAT'S THEIR PLAN?

Currently, there are jobs jobs jobs
Democrat economic programs seem Designed to take care of that
Currently, our cities are still wonderful(er). At least compared to where they came from
Democrat mental health policies seem Designed to take care of that
Currently, there really isn't that much crime (not like Bogota, anyway)
Democrat legal reforms seem Designed to take care of that

See?
Give our Democrat Leaders the credit they deserve!
America is Going to HELL? it's not a Flaw.... It's a Feature!

Sebastian म्हणाले...

Are there any progs who are not "great pretenders"? Who?

SF म्हणाले...

I didn't read the article when I saw it over the weekend, because when I saw the headline involving a Stanford professor and lying, I just assumed it was another article about what a fraud the Stanford Prison Experiment was. Holy crap, what was going on in Stanford in the early seventies?!?

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

Here is the hard fact- no one not closely related to you will ever really give a shit about you if you are dependent on them. This is why psychiatric hospitals, prisons, orphanages, etc. are awful places for their residents. The same applies to all government housing, too, and all government programs. You and yours are on your own, buttercup, like you always were.

narciso म्हणाले...

so they created a problem, based on a made up crisis, why doesn't that sound familiar,

Bob Boyd म्हणाले...

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

That's what the experts tell us anyway.

Quaestor म्हणाले...

Rosenhan altered the deal.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

People in institutional settings do not do what the institution says they are doing. That's true of every institution, and in everyday life.

Erving Goffman studied asylums and came up with that result, but he meant it as a study of society in general, not an indictment of mental institutions.

It can't be any other way.

Professional lady म्हणाले...

Read a book about the mental health hospital in our county. It was written by a man whose aunt was committed there in the 1940s. It was a huge family secret because "insanity" was such a stigma back then. It's been closed for a quite a while. As a lawyer, it was interesting to learn how easy (too easy) it was to get someone committed back then. That being said, the description of life in the facility and the treatment the patients received was pretty caring and humane for the most part. I'm pretty sure I had some relatives that received some treatment there too back in the day. I see so many mentally ill on the street and I can't help but think they would have been better off taken to that facility.

Francisco D म्हणाले...

I worked in a Chicago psychiatric "halfway house" 40 years ago. The residents were long term schizophrenic state psychiatric hospital patients. Gov. Jim Thompson shut down these hospitals for budgetary reasons.

The halfway houses were hotel SROs converted into dormitories and run by nursing home administrators. They were well connected to Springfield politicians and the national SEIU. It was very typical Illinois cronyism.

The administrators let illiterate Nurses Aids (all SEIU members) run the show. Mental Health counselors (like me) tended to be early in their psych or social work careers and well intentioned. Most of us lasted less than a year and went on to better places. We were mostly frustrated at the lack of "treatment." Looking back, I realize that there is no treatment for long term schizophrenics who had been doped up on anti-psychotics for decades.

However, in my nine months there I never saw a patient abused or deliberately neglected. They had private rooms and three square meals. Their lives seemed sad, but a lot better than living on the streets.

Seeing Red म्हणाले...

Ronald Reagan gets the blame for something those “who care” wNted.

Bay Area Guy म्हणाले...

Will definitely read the book. I do recall many California liberals yapping that Reagan let out all the mental patients!

Qwinn म्हणाले...

Standard leftist tactic: Create a problem, then present themselves as the only solution. They rely on this tactic as much as on projection, and in fact, one usually requires the other.

Jerry म्हणाले...

"Holy crap, what was going on in Stanford in the early seventies?!?"

Good drugs, SF. Good drugs...

And a feeling that they were doing GOOD, no matter how much they had to falsify the data, because being 'humane' was so much more important.

The ends justified the means. And that the means are only now being found out, decades later proves that you can fool some of the people all of the time... or at least for 40 years.

Caligula म्हणाले...

"our diagnostic systems were flawed and psychiatrists in many ways had too much power — and very little substance." But now, psychiatry is a real science.

Except that real sciences admit their limitations, and psychiatry continues to over-promise and under-deliver. And so psychiatry babbles on about "chemical imbalances" and how drugs can fix these, and we're supposed to ignore that these these assertions rests on scientific foundations no more solid than the Freudian and post-Freudian dogmas of bygone days (and which were finally, and with much difficulty, largely been repudiated as unscientific).

Meanwhile, the old state mental hospitals for all their faults at least provided asylum for those unable to care for themselves outside their walls.

Of course, the old state hospitals aren't about to come back as the states don't wish to spend the money and figure the federal gov't has stepped up to take this burden off of them. Even though the everyday reality is that the old, flawed institutions were mostly replaced with ... nothing.

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

Frontal lobotomy is still the "Cure" of choice in psychiatry ,but they shifted over to using the better disguised methods of Electro-shock and Thorazine in place of the handy dandy ice picks through the eye socket method.

AZ Bob म्हणाले...

I do recall many California liberals yapping that Reagan let out all the mental patients!

The Lanterman–Petris–Short Act was sponsored by two Democrats and one Republican. The LPS Act arose from a push for patients' rights. Susannah Cahalan recognized this in her NY Post article. Gov. Reagan may have been happy to sign the bill because it would cut spending but the impetus was to eliminate inappropriate and indefinite involuntary commitments.

The fall out from this change put a lot of marginally competent people out on the street. Unfortunately the vast majority of people with severe mental health issues prefer to live on the streets rather than an institutional home where they must take psychotropic medication and are prohibited from consuming alcohol or street drugs.

StephenFearby म्हणाले...

Susannah Cahalan:

'...I stumbled across Rosenhan and his study six years ago while on a book tour for my memoir “Brain on Fire,” which chronicled my experiences with a dangerous misdiagnosis, when doctors believed that my autoimmune disorder was a serious mental illness."

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Inflammation (and oxidative stress in the brain) or mental illness?

Obviously, the inflammation and oxidative stress:

Front. Psychiatry, 20 March 2019
Autoimmune Diseases and Psychotic Disorders

"The association between immunological processes and mental disorders was observed by doctors centuries before the immune system was discovered. Psychosis arising either with the occurrence or disappearance of acute fever has been described by many scientists from Hippocrates around 400 BC to Kraepelin around 1900. In the 1930s it was first hypothesized by Hermann Lehmann-Facius that schizophrenia was the product of an autoimmune reaction with antibodies attacking brain tissue (1). In the 1950s and 1960s it was noticed that celiac disease seemed to occur more often within those suffering from schizophrenia than in the general population (2), and conversely, that schizophrenia occurred less frequently within patients with rheumatoid arthritis (3, 4). Additionally, autoantibodies cross-reacting with brain antigens were found in patients with schizophrenia back in the 1960s (5, 6), and interest in anti-neuronal antibodies in psychotic disorders has increased during the last couple of decades, with an increasing number of reports on previously unknown antibodies with brain reactivity in patients suffering from psychosis (7–9).

The amount of evidence supporting the notion of a link between immunological processes and psychotic disorders has increased. Elevated levels of inflammatory markers have been found both in the blood (10, 11) and CSF (12–14) of patients with psychosis, with even higher levels in patients in first episode psychosis or acute relapse. Furthermore, some have found association between higher levels of inflammation in childhood and adolescence and increased risk of psychotic disorders (15, 16), elevated inflammatory biomarkers has been associated with lack of treatment response (17), and anti-inflammatory treatment has been found to have especially beneficial effect in an inflamed subgroup of patients (18–21). Moreover, it has been suggested that schizophrenia could be an autoimmune disease, based on similarities such as the remitting-relapsing phenotype of the illness, as well as the above-mentioned immunological processes (22)..."

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00131/full

Safe and effective anti-inflammatory interventions is another matter.

Among the fasting acting ones are anti-inflammatory near-infrared LED devices. For example, the Vielight:

Mil Med. 2019 Mar 22.
Improvements in Gulf War Illness Symptoms After Near-Infrared Transcranial and Intranasal Photobiomodulation: Two Case Reports.
Chao LL

Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases, San Francisco VA Medical Center

"At least one-fourth of US veterans who served in the 1990-1991 Gulf War (GW) are affected by the chronic symptomatic illness known as Gulf War illness (GWI). This report describes the first documentation of improved GWI symptoms in two GW veterans following 12 weeks of PBM treatments..."

"...This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US."

https://preview.tinyurl.com/y2nt26tq

Except that "in the public domain in the US" doesn't mean Oxford gives you the full text of the article for free instead of just the abstract. You have to ask them for it.

Francisco D म्हणाले...

I do recall many California liberals yapping that Reagan let out all the mental patients

Two important points:

1. The deinstitutionalization movement started in the 1970's.

2. It was a state-run process not a federal one.

In Illinois, It was Jim Thompson (RINO Gov.) who started closing the state psychiatric hospitals with the approval of the Democrat machine. Reagan may also have initiated that process while Governor of CA, but it was with bipartisan approval. Pols saw it as freeing up money, finding opportunity for graft, and being "humanitarian" towards the severely mentally ill.

Michael K म्हणाले...

Frontal lobotomy is still the "Cure" of choice in psychiatry ,but they shifted over to using the better disguised methods of Electro-shock and Thorazine in place of the handy dandy ice picks through the eye socket method.

Nonsense. Please don't spread this nonsense.

Michael K म्हणाले...

I don't see how hospitals where people are conveniently "put away" could fail to be awful over time. It's just the nature of the beast No one really wants to be there, esp the shrinks.

Have you ever been in one ? When I spent time in the VA, patients were constantly afraid that they would be put out in the street when they knew they could not cope. The hospital was a refuge.

ken in tx म्हणाले...

I was a Psychiatric Aide in a state hospital in the late 60s. I would say the book and later, movie, "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest" was more influential than this fake scientific study in shutting down our mental hospital system. There was also an influential Parade magazine article. I saw some abuses in the hospital where I worked, but by and large, the patients were better off then than they are now, living under bridges.

BTW, Reagan had nothing to do with closing the mental hospitals in my part of the country. It was federal judges.

h म्हणाले...

There was an undeniable cultural movement that was not explicitly and intentionally in favor of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, but which strongly supported that outcome. The cultural movement was based on the idea that most (almost all?) people in mental institutions were there not because they were actually mentally ill, but because they resisted the pressure to conform with social norms. They were "rebels". One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest was in my experience the apex of this cultural movement, but it is by no means the only example. Those of us who reached voting age in the 1970s needed no convincing that the humane, just approach was to release inmates of mental institutions.

The point I made in the last paragraph did not require a "scientific basis," and we young voters may not have required a scientifiic basis for our opinions. But if we had been challenged, we would undoubtedly have pointed to "scientific" evidence like the famous article by this Stanford Professor.

Ace Sullivan म्हणाले...

There is no homelessness in America. Temporary homelessness, certainly, but we get those families off the street or out of their car quickly. It's a mental health/substance abuse problem... Those folks don't want to go indoors. That's why Nurse Ratchet need to lock them up,...

brylun म्हणाले...

Willowbrook State School made Geraldo Rivera famous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School

Kirk Parker म्हणाले...

Steven Fearby,

"Except that 'in the public domain in the US' doesn't mean Oxford gives you the full text of the article for free instead of just the abstract. You have to ask them for it."

OK, but "public domain" means that if some civic-minded person--say, you--obtains a copy, they can do anything they want with it, including posting the full text in a publicly-accessible place.


Kirk Parker म्हणाले...

Big Mike,

"but it's worth noting that hardly any progressive accomplishment actually equates to progress."

FIFY.