Stuart Ritchie, science journalist, articles on science fraud and open science

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Science is bad at measuring depression, and it is ruining attempts to understand it

Stuart Richie

"If you break your leg, you can get an X-ray. You can see the exact place where the bone is broken – we know exactly what’s causing you the problem.

That’s not just the case for “physical” symptoms: if you suddenly have problems with, say, your ability to express words, we can often do a brain scan and find the exact place in your brain where you might’ve had a stroke or another kind of brain damage."

https://inews.co.uk/news/science-ba..._source=Twitter&utm_medium#Echobox=1678992483

Edit: quoted study discussion here: https://www.s4me.info/threads/a-sys...er-across-modalities-2023-winter-el-al.32389/
 
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The real problem isn't being unable to actually assess it, it's not actually caring that they can't. Whereas when it comes to us they dismiss everything because there is no test, depression and anxiety are probably the most overdiagnosed things in all of medicine. Without a test. Without even a process for it. All on the lie of "chemical imbalance" pushing various drugs whose function no one understands. A lie that's gotten completely out of control and can't be stopped without massive embarrassment.

It's the double standards that are ruining everything. The explicit algorithm that is perfectly OK with pseudoscience being applied to what they believe to be pseudoillnesses. And pseudoillness really is how most physicians see depression. All the BPS talk about mood disorders has infected everything.

For all the flak we are given about "stigmatizing" mental illness, no one has ever done more harm to mental health than the medical profession's double standards and obsession with everything psychosomatic, insisting that someone's symptoms must be depression, or anxiety, or stress, or trauma, or whatever is in their pocket right now.

Medicine has the widest range of quality in outcomes, it goes from borderline miraculous magic to the absolute bottom pits of not giving a damn. It covers the whole span, from complete success to complete disaster, seemingly unable to tell the difference for the most part. Completely abnormal for an expert profession and this is why they are failing here.

Very little research in depression has any chance of success because the patients are too heterogeneous, I'd even say they are far more diverse than the ME population, although when CFS is applied it's back to willy-nilly.

(This article is paywalled but can be read with the Reader feature in some browsers. I used Chrome.)
 
rvallee said:
depression and anxiety are probably the most overdiagnosed things in all of medicine.
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Those are the easy solutions to difficult problems. Write a prescription for antidepressants, and that means that the problem is solved. Of course, the problem isn't solved, but the medical industry has agreed that it is an acceptable solution, despite evidence to the contrary. No doctor wants to admit that they can't solve a problem, so they support the easy answer.

The double standard definitely is a problem. We can't expect the doctors to fix this problem, since the easy solution benefits them. Healthy people don't understand that there's a problem. Sick people are too sick to make the effort to fight the establishment. So, who's going to fix it?
 
rvallee said:
For all the flak we are given about "stigmatizing" mental illness, no one has ever done more harm to mental health than the medical profession's double standards and obsession with everything psychosomatic, insisting that someone's symptoms must be depression, or anxiety, or stress, or trauma, or whatever is in their pocket right now.
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Absolutely. Many people now recognize that mental health problems are serious and can be debilitating. People with mental conditions aren't blamed for their own suffering.

But the psychosomatic model says people only think they're sick because they focus on their symptoms or worry too much. This trivializes both mental and physical health problems, neither of which benefit from ignoring or pushing through symptoms. If you call an illness psychosomatic, you deny the suffers both the dignity of physical disability and the lesser (yet still appreciable) dignity our society affords mental disability.

Psychosomatics also inherently gaslights people. It's not gaslighting to acknowledge some has a serious mental condition if they say "I'm so depressed I can't get out of bed" or "I'm afraid to leave the house due to anxiety," but if you tell a person their PEM is health anxiety, you're stripping them of their dignity. It's gaslighting to assume someone experiences these emotions without feeling them at all. BPS supporters claim PwME are objecting to being told they have a mental illness, but we're only objecting to being wrongly told so.

The is the linchpin of psychosomatic medicine: BPS supporters say emotional distress causes or mediates illness in a way that patients cannot feel and science cannot detect. This is intellectually wrong because there's no evidence of it, and morally wrong because it stigmatizes disables people, kills them, or consigns them to fates worse than death, like enduring a horrendous illness without social, medical, or financial support.
 
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Covid vaccines are not linked to excess deaths, despite what the anti-vaxxers believe

"Now there’s a new meme in the anti-vaccine world, and it has to do with excess deaths. Bridgen and others have noticed that the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) is still reporting the number of “excess deaths” – and that, even well after the pandemic, that number is still surprisingly high.

Excess deaths for a given week, at least as defined by the ONS, are the numbers of deaths that are above the average for that same week in the previous five years. For example, April 2020, being the beginning of the first big pandemic wave, had huge numbers of these excess deaths – more than 43,000 in a month (indeed, because it was so unusual, the ONS leaves 2020 out when calculating excess deaths for subsequent years).

The latest numbers for England and Wales show that, despite the pandemic being largely over, the latter half of 2022 into the beginning of 2023 saw a great many excess deaths – in a few cases more than 1,500 in a week, though generally closer to 1,000 per week on average."
 
CRG said:
Covid vaccines are not linked to excess deaths, despite what the anti-vaxxers believe

"Now there’s a new meme in the anti-vaccine world, and it has to do with excess deaths. Bridgen and others have noticed that the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) is still reporting the number of “excess deaths” – and that, even well after the pandemic, that number is still surprisingly high.

Excess deaths for a given week, at least as defined by the ONS, are the numbers of deaths that are above the average for that same week in the previous five years. For example, April 2020, being the beginning of the first big pandemic wave, had huge numbers of these excess deaths – more than 43,000 in a month (indeed, because it was so unusual, the ONS leaves 2020 out when calculating excess deaths for subsequent years).

The latest numbers for England and Wales show that, despite the pandemic being largely over, the latter half of 2022 into the beginning of 2023 saw a great many excess deaths – in a few cases more than 1,500 in a week, though generally closer to 1,000 per week on average."
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But the denial of excess deaths, and disability, puts the blame on them anyway. All of it. It's very popular to blame LC issues on vaccines, and the excess deaths, and all the, let's go with respected, issues like strokes and things that have validated diagnoses. Which is sometimes true, but it's forbidden to research it so it keeps going.

It's the denial that fuels this. As long as those happen and are denied, they will be blamed entirely on the vaccines. This may be the largest expansion of antivaccine sentiment since The Lancet and Richard Horton kickstarted the whole thing.

Again, the blame is mostly in one place. Denial fuels conspiracies. And lots of suffering, but that's a different issue. The playbook of pandemics says to always tell the truth or this is what you get. So I guess this is what they want because almost no one tells the truth about it anymore.
 
i News

How to see through the AI hype to the actual life-changing scientific advances

A new antibiotic discovery shows the promise, but also the limitations, of AI

There’s been a lot of AI doom and gloom of late. The newest generation of Large Language Models – OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and many others – have advanced so quickly that many knowledgeable experts are worried that they could eventually get out of control and do serious harm.

So much so that experts, including the heads of OpenAI and Google Deepmind warned this week that artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity.

But last week came a big media splash that pushed the conversation in the opposite direction. “New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI”, said the BBC. “Scientists use AI to discover new antibiotic to treat deadly superbug”, said The Guardian. And so on, across dozens of news outlets with flashy, exciting headlines.

It was hard not to link these up with all the discussions about ChatGPT and the rest: it seemed as if the new advances in computing have already ushered in an age of AI drug discovery, where we can use super-advanced technology to guide our medical research in amazing new directions to save lives.

And it’ll all be so easy! The news stories about the new study noted that it took just an-hour-and-a-half for the AI to discover this powerful new drug.

But let’s take a deep breath. The new study did indeed use AI, and it did indeed discover a new antibiotic. But the general excitement about AI has, in my view, led to some over-hyping of this new discovery. Let’s try to put the whole thing in the proper context.

More at: https://inews.co.uk/news/ai-hype-life-changing-advances-2374933
 
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