Psychology

A new study in Psychiatry Research has concluded that psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders. The study involved a detailed analysis of five key chapters of the latest edition of the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition: DSM-5, on 'schizophrenia', 'bipolar disorder', 'depressive disorders', 'anxiety disorders' and 'trauma-related disorders'. Diagnostic manuals such as the DSM were created to provide a common diagnostic language for mental health professionals and attempt to provide a…

If you go to Facebook or Twitter, you may find a few scientists or doctors pushing supplements or organic food as cure-alls, maybe even a New York University journalist or two, but for the most part the social media strategy for those companies, and most mainstream companies as well, is an intern auto-scheduling content and executives soliciting attention of individual influencers, who are placed under the vaguely sexist umbrella term "mommy bloggers." It must work, advertising is a trillion dollar a year industry. Except it doesn't, beyond the sense that if you push enough expensive messages…

Symptoms of physician burnout appear to be associated with greater bias toward black people in this study of nearly 3,400 second-year resident physicians in the United States who identified as nonblack. However, since this is simply an observational study it cannot determine if the suggested association between symptoms of burnout and bias toward black people is causal and the magnitude of the observed association was small to medium. Only data from resident physicians who self-identified as belonging to a racial group other than black (n = 3392) were included in the analyses because of…

A new paper has statistically linked depression and anxiety during pregnancy (and link preterm births due to those) to the radius of natural gas hydraulic fracturing wells in Pennsylvania. Should you be worried? The short answer is "no", this is not a very good paper. Just like "only in mice" has become a common complaint of biologists, chemists, and toxicologists about provocative claims designed to get media attention, "it's just correlation" is invoked nearly as often by the science community. There are even websites like Spurious Correlations which tweak the US National Institute of…

Compensatory strategies for kids with autism spectrum disorders, an adaptive process whereby new behaviors are generated in order to avoid negative outcomes, do have positive outcomes, like increased social integration, but can result in a barrier to diagnosis. Autism spectrum disorder today is characterized by social communication impairments and by repetitive and restricted behaviors. There is limited understanding of why some autistic people appear neurotypical in their behaviors, despite having autism-related cognitive difficulties or differences. Some adjustment techniques involve "…

There is a belief that white police officers are trigger happy when it comes to minority crime suspects but analysis of shootings in the comprehensive database of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) shows that is not true. Instead, the strongest factor in predicting the race of a person fatally shot by a police officer were violent crime rates where the shooting took place.  Higher incidents of racially skewed shooting occurs when there is higher incidence of a demographic committing violent crimes. In counties where white individuals committed more violent crime, a person fatally…

There is no substitute for medication; not food, not meditation, not music, not supplements, not anything, except in instances where the issue is not medical. And for some, anxiety is a non-specific symptom for a disease they don't have, it is just concern about an event, and in those instances something like music may work as well as medication, finds a study using music before an anesthesia procedure. A peripheral nerve block procedure is a type of regional anesthesia - done in the preoperative area under ultrasound guidance - that blocks sensations of pain from a specific area of the body…

Population level metrics such as Body Mass Index (BMI) or statistical correlation using epidemiology don't do much to inform individual experience, and psychology faces the same issue. Surveys can tell us whatever surveys can tell us about what a particular group of people taking surveys think, but there is a reason that no polling group does well with Congressional districts that are contentious. It simply doesn't work. As we learned when we first believed the anti-vaccine problem was a fringe religious issue, what people claim on surveys is not their behavior.(1) That is why there is…

Implicit bias, a flawed heuristic designed to show you that you are prejudiced even if you don't feel or behave that way (that is what makes it implicit) is now being used to undermine confidence in health care.  In this case the authors conclude that health care professionals are implicitly biased against women in health care, associating men more with career and family, and surgeons also associated men more with surgery. Their evidence; other implicit bias association claims, which is actual explicit bias. The data was literally taken from the Gender-Career Implicit Association Test…

The underlying central metaphor of the new Marvel film "Spider-Man: Far From Home" is that news shouldn't be trusted. Many agree, but whether or not people label it "fake" seems to be based on how different their own bias is. If you are a Republican and regard CNN is biased, having a conservative voice on their network does not make the outlet seem less biased, it makes the participant seem less credible, even if they believe the individual is honest.  It can seem a little maddening until we recognize that people do not make either/or decisions, on most issues there could be three or…