April 29, 2007
What if you were sane, but presented yourself to a mental hospital with auditory hallucinations? Would the mental hospital be able to discern your underlying sanity? Not in 1972. Some claim not in 2004.
The Rosenbaum experiment led Robert Spitzer to introduce more quantifiable diagnostic system, theoretically to avoid such disasters recurring.
I learned about this craziness from episode 1 of the BBC documentary called "The Trap.", by the same fellow who did The Power of Nightmares. TPoN is badass documentary (mentioned previously on AE) that discusses the parallel rise of neoconservatism and wahhabism , among other topics. Fascinating stuff and easy to find online (yay BBC!).
(The Power of Nightmares). 100% of Alkaline Earthlings that have seen this series recommend it highly.
I am glad to hear your side of it, TWIT-B. I used to roll my eyes when a mutual friend of some of the AE'ers (fenigstein) would talk about how psychology was exactly as quantitative and exact as, say, physics or chemistry. Especially when one is discussing, say bullying behavior among rats (as another friend of mine is reported to be studying).
The problem is, as you point out, that it is an n-body problem, when n is a very, very large number (all the influences of environment and genetics, for instance). Physics has enormous trouble with 3-body problems, much less, say, billion-body problems. And I don't think a mean-field-of-the-environmental-factors approach (or a density-of-of-genetics-functional-theory approach) is quite going to beat such a large scale problem.
So until you beat the n-body problem analytically, I suppose you have work with statistics to make it more quantitive and have to use steadily improving tools-- MRI, etc. Luckily, a lot of clever people are working on it and most of society has a vested interest in your success ($$!).
an easy foil to your friend's argument would be to ask him to predict who will commit suicide. psychology is notoriously, and sadly, poor at this.
i miss my old physics classes where we could have gedanken experiments with "perfect" planes and spheres. i'm not sure what a perfect mouse bully would look like, but it's fun to think of your friend trying to define what one would be.
oi! as far as stats and tools to make it more quantitative, we have far better tools than MRI! neuropsych works towards hypothesized lesion/deficit/acute process by cognitive testing whereas MRI hypothesizes what cognition would look like given the observed scan.
those cognitive tests are getting quite good, and like good basic physics, it is doing so by isolating processes and studying them as individually as possible.
if you ever have a chance to observe a WADA test, don't even think about missing it.
All three parts of The Trap are available on google video (for play or download), as well as The Power of Nightmares and an earlier Adam Curtis docu The Century of Self. Or ask me for hi-res.
TWIT-B, I stumbled upon one more article that is of interest. This one is more about how some doctors (not just mental health doctors, but more broadly) are beholden to pharma companies and sometimes make very poor decisions because of it.
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awesome post with a lot to digest!
as to the diagnostic questions...
it's what i do for a living, so i s'pose i can speak somewhat informedly about it. "interviewing" relies on patient cooperation at some level, and an informed patient can answer questions in a manner that would be difficult to discern the truth. individual's presenting at psychiatric hospitals are often presenting after a very extended period of diminishing functioning further muddying the picture.
may sound bleak, but we are beginning to have some answers.
neuropsychological testing (purports to) quantifies numerous psychological and cognitive processes in a manner that allows for examination of characteristic patterns for different disease processes, psychiatric disorders, and neurological insults.
it's not a wide-spread discipline yet, but is becoming more so. it now requires board certification after a rather rigorous training program. i think it holds a lot of promise for bringing quantification/verification (scientific methodology) to a science that has long, appropriately, been considered a soft science.
psychology is a young science in many respects, but when you consider the n-body problem i'd say we're making rather impressive gains.
i'm biased =)
posted by TheWestIsTheBest at 06:15PM CST on April 30