Reply to comment

 I have to say, if there's one thing that makes me want to tear my hair out, it's "argumentum ad back-when-we-were-all-cave-men".  Dan was, of course, speaking to a conceptual point and invoked his ADHD example as a hypothetical, but it is as good a place as any to bring attention to what I see as a Ganges of garbage science flowing turbidly out of evo psych journals the world over.  Name a regressive gender norm or exploitative social order, and it is nearly guaranteed that an evo psych paper is out there claiming that the behavior is in our genes because female cave-men needed to spot the best berries.  That's why women love shopping!!

Ugh.  This returns us to the earlier discussion of science journalism.  With the exception of that particular vein of evolutionary psychology, which comes to the journalists pre-ruined, there is some really cringe-inducing reporting out there.  Ben Goldacre’s bad-science.net has some great examples, and I think that I can comment on factors which contribute to science reporting being so bad.

 In class, blame for the misunderstanding of depression research was laid tentatively at the feet of the researchers.  While it is true that scientists should take care to make their findings relatable, I’m not sure if any person can be expected to pre-empt the myriad ways in which a news article can go wrong.  As was mentioned, science reporters are under a lot of pressure to report in a way that will interest their readers.  The vast majority of research cannot accurately be framed in that way.  Statistical significance, correlation and causation, and evidentiary standards are lost not only on most journalists, but on the reading population as well. 

Contentious issues, from evolution to treatment of mental illness, pose a particular problem in the modern journalistic climate.  Not only is research on these issues more likely to be reported on, it is likely to be reported on in such a way as to maintain the media’s particular understanding of “objectivity”.  That is, we report live today with this fellow’s published research, which you can (snort, chuckle) read in detail if you have journal access and a half hour, and his opponent, a man we found wandering the streets in Duluth.  We leave it to the reader to decide who is most credible.  This problem is not restricted to scientific development, but I think that it is most frustrating here because the gap in credibility is so severe and the “controversial” issue is often something the scientific establishment accepted decades ago. 

When it comes to depression research, there is legitimate scientific controversy and less ideological noise than there is concerning, say, evolution.  Still, I think that people do have a reaction to it because of our perception of mental illness.  Mental illness conflicts with our worship of self-determination and individualism, because our use of those concepts is highly dualistic.  At the same time, however, we have a (largely justified) faith in medical intervention.  I think that these ideas create pressure to read great significance into any emerging research on the subject.

There is something else that offends me about this discussion.  Is it really fair to give credibility to subjective and cultural framing of illness one minute, and to push a yes-or-no decision on whether depression constitutes illness the next?  This is, perhaps, a limitation of the Socratic method as a pedagogical tool and a call for more direct lecture.  It is no fun to guess at an instructor’s agenda and leaves me in the position I mentioned last week, where I cannot feel comfortable attacking positions that I am not sure have actually been taken.