Psychology Today blog - The Dark Side of Social Media Activism in Science, 2019, S. Camarata

Pinker is one of the evopsych/sceptic types, like Fiona Fox and Frank Furedi etc. I very much doubt he would be persuaded by evidence shown to him by pwme.

There are some battles worth fighting, and I don't think Pinker's attention is one of them.

 

Yes, perhaps I'm being too pessimistic and he'll pull a Mike Godwin. I doubt it, given the contempt he has for people who question his own work (he thinks they are anti-science trolls and he reminds me our favourite psychiatrists)... but you never know.

 

And the problem here is more terrifying than his lack of belief in ME and that the ME community are all trolls and we don't have any clue about our own illness.

He fancies himself a scientist. And his views and ideas that he shares publicly end up taking us straight down the path to the unbearable goopiness that is real anti-science.

If people of his public prominence keep spouting nonsense everyone else will follow his lead and real valid science will get drowned out.

One thing that the blog missed was that in the age of social media -- words last forever. So whatever opinion they put out there they can be held to account for it. There is not sly backtracking anymore. Something for them to ponder perhaps.

Edit to insert words 'in ME and' which clarified meaning.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1156231767180959744


https://twitter.com/user/status/1156197432335540225


https://twitter.com/user/status/1156141251634388993


https://twitter.com/user/status/1156141253236592641

 

Every now and then I step back and check that I am not being blinded by bias. When I thought about it I noticed a pattern with the attacks against us.

Our "side" feels that their theories are not supported by evidence and that their research is badly planned, badly executed and the findings exaggerated to support a prior belief. This has been consistent since the start. I remember the shock in the 80s when psychology began to be invoked by using a false description of the disease.

In contrast, they change what we are accused of. We were individual patients who pressured weak doctors into agreeing with us. Then we were like animal activists; organised terrorists who put researchers into fear of their lives and who were on special branch watch lists. Now we are the "dark side of social media" Where did the terror cells go?

 

Dismissed by a tribunal. To be clear, the starting point was: more dangerous than two war zones and have-my-mail-checked-for-bombs (winky face didn't actually say it, just implied it) because of "borderline psychopaths" (though that one was QMUL, but attorneys only argue from what their clients tell them so it's all the same).

A real journalist asking Sharpe or Wessely serious questions would be pretty awkward. If that ever happens. Especially as they are used to obsequious PR flaks stroking their egos and be handed awarded for farting academically.

Courts of justice have quite different burdens of evidence than the court of public opinion. I guess the next step would be to bring that up to a tribunal decision somehow, to make it clear that the activism is literally sick people begging for their lives. Even the PR "special report" is strictly limited to a handful of tweets that are actually factual so the previous narrative is mostly left hanging, though not retracted.

Now if only things like blatant admissions that the entire basis of the report is false would matter. If only. I wonder what the authors of the recent derivative pieces would think of this. Reuters and Kelland apparently are not bothered so I'm not expecting much.

 

Wondering about the 1,000+ patients seen by Sir Simon Wessely. Presumably more than one consultation each & a management plan.

What about a proposing a study of the impact of the treatment regime on such a consistently treated cohort: methods and results, subjective & objective?

Also cost/benefit analysis: (am I wrong to presumable was in private consultations?), so a Rolls Royce service from a leading expert.

(Edited to query initial assumption of private consultations).

 

I assume most of those aren't actual ME patients so not much could be concluded from it. The guy has his own personal definition, as they all do, and it has little to do with reality. Not sure any of them could tell an ME patient apart from a mild depression case.

It would certainly be interesting but he would never agree to have independent verification of his cases. For reasons, of course.

 

Her tweet is pathetic and ill informed, there isnt a single report of violence on a ME researcher. The "activists" in question are academics, scientists, statisticians and other doctors all critiquing potentially the worst paper in history and having to go to the extent of submitting FOIs to have data released that has showed time and time again that Sharpe and Wesselys claims of efficacy from their treatments are bogus.

Wesselys response makes no sense. Why is it depressing that, "its not about militant patients" and why didn't he have the decency to respond by directly correcting her nonsense with a logical sentence and whats the "it" in its not about......?

What is "it" about if "it" is not about militant patients?

 

He's just using old school 'divide and conquer' tactics by implying there is the majority of nice, reasonable patients who want his help verses a minority of unreasonable, highly vocal and contentious ones, hell bent on stopping him providing his benevolent service - thereby damaging the 'innocent' patient community.

Just because patients were polite in their consultations doesn't mean they were actually helped by his interventions. It's very difficult to directly challenge someone who is occupying a position of power. Especially when you think they are there to help you and don't realise how they are manipulating you until long after the event!

 

Anecdote from my dodgy memory but on an early ME forum one of the members was a biker and he said that SW was obviously afraid to meet with him to the point of diving into an empty room instead of passing in the corridor Maybe his patients love him because he only sees the ones that will!

 

A story published about him years ago, like early 2000's maybe, stated that he often received letters from ME patients who thanked him profusely for his important work and dearly want him to continue his research. He also claimed to receive such nasty letters from activists (are they also patients? doesn't specify) that he has his mail screened and was in contact with the police. Both are obviously fake but they create this illusion of good and bad patients, of a fake division in the patient community like you say.

I call bullshit on all counts. His work is of profound banality and insipid at best. He thinks way too highly of himself and just gets stunned by his own beliefs in his superior brilliance. No one would write him just to make sure he continues his important work on a topic he is clearly utterly confused about. This is as fake as his story about a colleague commenting to him that he's too smart to be a psychiatrist, that's way out of character. He created a mythology around himself and people ate it up.

 

MS has his say - gosh, really?
https://twitter.com/user/status/1156582636606894080

 

Haha! Yes, everything's just fine and dandy in the psychiatry/psychology research world. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

 

Yes, gosh, definitely. People keep dying because of you, you soulless hack.

He really seems to have no idea how ghoulish he sounds and just how much evidence for it he is laying out. I've held off on it but the guy clearly is a psychopath, entirely devoid of empathy. He can't tell the difference between a completely immoral position and whatever he thinks he's doing here. He has no ability to relate to other people as living, breathing human beings and even less concern for the millions of lives he ruined.

Gonna look really bad for a medical specialty that somehow found it worthy to name him the best of the best of their profession. I'm almost getting to the point where it seems valid to argue that psychiatry needs to cease to exist entirely if this is what they think is the best among them. How ironic that this whole project is about making psychiatry more prominent and frontline medicine. All it's doing is exposing how morally bankrupt and inept it all is.

 

Not even sure meltdown is the right word ... has their methodology ever really solidified?

 

Certainly not in clinical psychology.

I would think you can get good findings out of something like behavioral economics where outcomes are directly quantitative, and there can be lots of data points. Even then, though, I would think the real-world data is subject to so much contextual confounding that it is difficult to come to more than contingent findings, and the experiments are so contrived that it is hard to know what the data mean in the real world, even if the pattern of results is clear and replicable. Perhaps where the real-world and experimental data agree, you might start to feel like you have something good?

I'll have to pull out my copy of Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, as Kahneman and Tversky seem to be held up as the paragons of rock-solid psychology research. I wonder what their research looks like in light of the new understanding of methodological problems in psychology.

 

The methodology is something like this: