Psychiatry & Social Sciences on Shaky Foundations?
I’ve been pottering around with my day job. Reading some anthropology and ruminating about going back to university.
More of that in future posts.
For now I wanted to copy out some notes I’d made listening to Harvard psychologist Paula Caplan (deceased). She takes aim at mental health research but broadly i think her points apply to social sciences as a whole.
This is notes taken from a radio interview with clinical psychologist Paula Caplan in 2005. How can we be confident of much really? It's been known for anthropologists to completely misrepresent the societies they were studying.
1) Not very much is known about what helps people in distress (quite a big statement to throw out there – but there it is)
2) Psychiatric research is kind of 'blindered' . Psychiatric researchers often come from quite a narrow clinical or lab based perspective. In real life people don't behave as if in a laboratory.
3) It's fiendishly difficult to understand what is behind peoples emotions and behaviour (just generally speaking).
4) You need a control group (but this is unethical because you are potentially denying people treatment).
5) Real life is complicated
6) There are factors you cannot control for
7)Indeed so much you cannot control for
8) So much you cannot find out at all
9) Hard to get good research about people's emotional problems
10)Lays a shaky foundation for psychiatric diagnosis.