Gary Marcus - THE CRISIS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY THAT ISN’T

This article appeared in The New Yorker, written by neuroscientist Gary Marcus, author of Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (2008), one of the best books in recent years for an explanation of why our brains function - and dysfunction - as they do. He is also author of The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought (2004) and The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change) (2003).

Social psychology has had a rough week or two in the media, with articles in Nature and The New York Times Magazine profiling either fraud or statistically weak findings taken as fact. Marcus wants to make sure we know that the field is much stronger than these articles might have us believe.

THE CRISIS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY THAT ISN’T

POSTED BY GARY MARCUS
MAY 1, 2013

According to the headlines, social psychology has had a terrible year—and, at any rate, a bad week. The New York Times Magazine devoted nearly seven thousand words to Diederik Stapel, the Dutch researcher who committed fraud in at least fifty-four scientific papers, while Nature just published a report about another controversy, questioning whether some well-known “social-priming” results from the social psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis are replicable. Dijksterhuis famously found that thinking about a professor before taking an exam improves your performance, while thinking about a soccer ruffian makes you do worse. Although nobody doubts that Dijksterhuis ran the experiment that he says he did, it may be that his finding is either weak, or simply wrong—perhaps the peril of a field that relies too heavily on the notion that if something is statistically likely, it can be counted on.

Things aren’t quite as bad as they seem, though. Although Nature’s report was headlined “Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology,” it scarcely noted that there have been some replications of experiments modelled on Dijksterhuis’s phenomenon. His finding could still out turn to be right, if weaker than first thought. More broadly, social priming is just one thread in the very rich fabric of social psychology. The field will survive, even if social priming turns out to have been overrated or an unfortunate detour.

Even if this one particular line of work is under a shroud, it is important not to lose sight of the fact many of the old standbys from social psychology have been endlessly replicated, like the Milgram effect—the old study of obedience in which subjects turned up electrical shocks (or what they thought were electrical shocks) all the way to four hundred and fifty volts, apparently causing great pain to their subjects, simply because they’d been asked to do it. Milgram himself replicated the experiment numerous times, in many different populations, with groups of differing backgrounds. It is still robust (in hands of other researchers) nearly fifty years later. And even today, people are still extending that result; just last week I read about a study in which intrepid experimenters asked whether people might administer electric shocks to robots, under similar circumstances. (Answer: yes.)

More importantly, there is something positive that has come out of the crisis of replicability—something vitally important for all experimental sciences. For years, it was extremely difficult to publish a direct replication, or a failure to replicate an experiment, in a good journal. Throughout my career, and long before it, journals emphasized that new papers have to publish original results; I completely failed to replicate a particular study a few years ago, but at the time didn’t bother to submit it to a journal because I knew few people would be interested. Now, happily, the scientific culture has changed. Since I first mentioned these issues in late December, several leading researchers in psychology have announced major efforts to replicate previous work, and to change the incentives so that scientists can do the right thing without feeling like they are spending time doing something that might not be valued by tenure committees.

The Reproducibility Project, from the Center for Open Science is now underway, with its first white paper on the psychology and sociology of replication itself. Thanks to Daniel Simons and Bobbie Spellman, the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science is now accepting submissions for a new section of each issue devoted to replicability. The journal Social Psychology is planning a special issue on replications for important results in social psychology, and has already received forty proposals. Other journals in neuroscience and medicine are engaged in similar efforts: my N.Y.U. colleague Todd Gureckis just used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to replicate a wide range of basic results in cognitive psychology. And just last week, Uri Simonsohn released a paper on coping with the famous file-drawer problem, in which failed studies have historically been underreported.

It’s worth remembering, too, that social psychology isn’t the only field affected by these problems—medicine, for example, has been coping with the same concerns. But as Brian Nosek, of the Center for Open Science, wrote to me in an e-mail, psychologists are specially equipped to deal with these issues. “Psychology is at the forefront of wrestling with reproducibility by turning its research expertise on itself,” he said.

Whether or not social priming does prove real, and whether or not it turns out to be a large contributor to our mental lives—or only a trivial one that is easily overrun by other factors—all of psychology, and all of science, will be better off for the increased effort on replication. If, in the worst case, a decade’s studies turn out to be less important than we initially believed, it won’t be the end of the world. And if it accidentally leads to a culture of more careful science, on balance we all will have come out ahead.

Illustration by Nishant Choksi.

How 86 Journalists in 46 Countries Worked Together to Expose Tax Shelters of Politicians, Fundraisers. and Celebrities from Over 170 Countries

This is amazingly cool - I look forward to reading what this data mining reveals about the insane amount of money hidden in off-shore, untaxed accounts.

This excellent summary of the work that went into exposing this information comes from the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

Intercontinental collaboration: How 86 journalists in 46 countries can work on a single investigation

Over 2.5 million files analyzed by a global team of journalists reveal financial information about politicians, fundraisers. and celebrities from over 170 different countries.

By Caroline O’Donovan

On Thursday morning, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists— a project of the Center for Public Integrity — will begin releasing detailed reports on the workings of offshore tax havens. A little over a year ago, 260 gigabytes of data were leaked to ICIJ executive dIrector Gerard Ryle; they contained information about the finances of individuals in over 170 countries.

Ryle was a media executive in Australia at the time he received the data, says deputy director Marina Walker Guevara. “He came with the story under his arm.” Walker Guevara says the ICIJ was surprised Ryle wanted a job in their small office in Washington, but soon realized that it was only through their international scope and experience with cross border reporting that the Offshore Project could be executed. The result is a major international collaboration that has to be one of the largest in journalism history.

“It was a huge step. As reporters and journalists, the first thing you think is not ‘Let me see how I can share this with the world.’ You think: ‘How can I scoop everyone else?’ The thinking here was different.” Walker Guevara says the ICIJ seriously considered keeping the team to a core five or six members, but ultimately decided to go with the “most risky” approach when they realized the enormous scope of the project: Journalists from around the world were given lists of names to identify and, if they found interesting connections, were given access to Interdata, the secure, searchable, online database built by the ICIJ.

Just as the rise of information technology has allowed new competition for the attention of audiences, it’s also enabled traditional news organizations to partner in what can sometimes seem like dizzyingly complex relationships. The ICIJ says this is the largest collaborative journalism project they have ever organized, with the most comparable involving a team of 25 cross border journalists.

In the end, the Offshore Project brings together 86 journalists from 46 countries into an ongoing reporting collaboration. German and Canadian news outlets (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, and the CBC) will be among the first to report their findings this week, with The Washington Post beginning their report on April 7, just in time for Tax Day. Reporters from more than 30 other publications also contributed, including Le Monde, the BBC and The Guardian. (The ICIJ actually published some preliminary findings in conjunction with the U.K. publications as a teaser back in November.)

“The natural step wasn’t to sit in Washington and try to figure out who is this person and why this matters in Azerbaijan or Romania,” Walker Guevara said, “but to go to our members there — or a good reporter if we didn’t have a member — give them the names, invite them into the project, see if the name mattered, and involve them in the process.”

Defining names that matter was a learning experience for the leaders of the Offshore Project. Writes Duncan Campbell, an ICIJ founder and current data journalism manager:

ICIJ’s fundamental lesson from the Offshore Project data has been patience and perseverance. Many members started by feeding in lists of names of politicians, tycoons, suspected or convicted fraudsters and the like, hoping that bank accounts and scam plots would just pop out. It was a frustrating road to follow. The data was not like that.

The data was, in fact, very messy and unstructured. Between a bevy of spreadsheets, emails, PDFs without OCR, and pictures of passports, the ICIJ still hasn’t finished mining all the data from the raw files. Campbell details the complicated process of cleaning the data and sorting it into a searchable database. Using NUIX software licenses granted to the ICIJ for free, it took a British programmer two weeks to build a secure database that would allow all of the far-flung journalists not only to safely search and download the documents, but also to communicate with one another through an online forum.

“Once we went to these places and gathered these reporters, we needed to give them the tools to function as a team,” Walker Guevara said.

Even so, some were so overwhelmed by the amount of information available, and so unaccustomed to hunting for stories in a database, that the ICIJ ultimately hired a research manager to do searches for reporters and send them the documents via email. “We do have places like Pakistan where the reporters didn’t have much Internet access, so it was a hassle for him,” says Walker Guevara, adding that there were also security concerns. “We asked him to take precautions and all that, and he was nervous, so I understand.”

They also had to explain to each of the reporting teams that they weren’t simply on the lookout for politicians hiding money and people who had broken the law. “First, you try the name of your president. Then, your biggest politician, former presidents — everybody has to go through that,” Walker Guevara says. While a few headline names did eventually appear — Imelda Marcos, Robert Mugabe — she says some of the most surprising stories came from observing broader trends.

“Alongside many usual suspects, there were hundreds of thousands of regular people — doctors and dentists from the U.S.,” she says, “It made us understand a system that is a lot more used than what you think. It’s not just people breaking the law or politicians hiding money, but a lot of people who may feel insecure in their own countries. Or hiding money from their spouses. We’re actually writing some stories about divorce.”

In the 2 million records they accessed, ICIJ reporters began to get an understanding of the methods account holders use to avoid association with these accounts. Many use “nominee directors,” a process which Campbell says is similar to registering a car in the name of a stranger. But in their post about the Offshore Project, the ICIJ team acknowledges that, to a great extent, most of the money being channeled through offshore accounts and shell companies is actually not being used for illegal transactions. Defenders of the offshore banks say they “allow companies and individuals to diversify their investments, forge commercial alliances across national borders, and do business in entrepreneur-friendly zones that eschew the heavy rules and red tape of the onshore world.”

Walker Guevara says that, while that can be true, the “parallel set of rules” that governs the offshore world so disproportionately favor the elite, wealthy few as to be unethical. “Regulations, bureaucracy, and red tape are bothersome,” she says, “but that’s how democracy works.”

Perhaps the most interesting question surrounding the Offshore Project, however, is how do you get traditional shoe-leather journalists up to speed on an international story that involves intensive data crunching. Walker Guevara says it’s all about recognizing when the numbers cease to be interesting on their own and putting them in global context. Ultimately, while it’s rewarding to be able to trace dozens of shell companies to a man accused of stealing $5 billion from a Russian bank, someone has to be able to connect the dots.

“This is not a data story. It was based on a huge amount of data, but once you have the name and you look at your documents, you can’t just sit there and write a story,” says Walker Guevara. “That’s why we needed reporters on the ground. We needed people checking courthouse records. We needed people going and talking to experts in the field.”

All of the stories that result from the Offshore Project — some of which could take up to a year to be published — will live on a central project page at ICIJ.org. The team is also considering creating a web app that will allow users to explore some (though probably not all) of the data. In terms of the unique tools they built, Walker Guevara says most are easily replicable by anyone using NUIX or dtSearch software, but they won’t be open sourced. Other lessons from the project, like the inherent vulnerability of PGP encryption and “other complex cryptographic systems popular with computer hackers,” will endure.

“I think one of the most fascinating things about the project was that you couldn’t isolate yourself. It was a big temptation — the data was very addictive,” Walker Guevara says. “But the story worked because there was a whole other level of traditional reporting that was going and checking public records, going and seeing — going places.”

Photo by Aaron Shumaker used under a Creative Commons license.

Mark Schwartz, Clinical Co-Director of Castlewood Treatment Center, Accused of Implanting False Memories of Satanic Abuse

I was sad to hear about this story - Mark Schwartz is not to be confused with Richard Schwartz (I mistakenly thought they were brothers), founder of the Internal Family System Therapy model of parts work. Mark is clinical co-director at Castlewood Treatment Center, where Richard Schwartz also works on occasion.

Mark has been accused of implanting false memories of satanic abuse in a former patient with the intent of collecting more money from insurance. If these allegations are true, it's a sad commentary on putting money above the well-being of the clients.

As many commentators on this story have suggested, the eating-disordered clients seen at Castlewood are particularly vulnerable to manipulation through hypnosis - getting them into a hypnotic state is easier due to the ease with which they already dissociate.

It's also important to know that only Schwartz is being accused here, although Castlewood is of course named in the lawsuit. Richard Schwartz and the IFS model are not implicated in the allegations.

Here is a version of the story from MSNBC (via the AP) - it has received a lot of attention, including several UK papers.

Woman: Psychologist implanted horrific memories

By JIM SALTER

updated 12/2/2011 7:54:41 PM ET

ST. LOUIS — The memories that came flooding back were so horrific that Lisa Nasseff says she tried to kill herself: She had been raped several times, had multiple personalities and took part in satanic rituals involving unthinkable acts. She says she only got better when she realized they weren't real.

Nasseff, 31, is suing a suburban St. Louis treatment center where she spent 15 months being treated for anorexia, claiming one of its psychologists implanted the false memories during hypnosis sessions in order to keep her there long-term and run up a bill that eventually reached $650,000. The claims seem unbelievable, but her lawyer, Kenneth Vuylsteke, says other patients have come forward to say they, too, were brainwashed and are considering suing.

"This is an incredible nightmare," Vuylsteke said.

Castlewood Treatment Center's director, Nancy Albus, and the psychologist, Mark Schwartz, deny the allegations. Albus pledged to vigorously fight the lawsuit, which was filed Nov. 21 in St. Louis County and seeks the repayment of medical expenses and punitive damages. As in repressed memory cases, which typically involve allegations of abuse that occurred during childhood, the outcome will likely hinge on the testimony of experts with starkly different views on how memory works.

Nasseff, who lives in St. Paul, Minn., stayed at Castlewood from July 2007 through March 2008 and returned for seven months in 2009. She was struggling with anorexia and as a resident of Minnesota, which requires insurers to cover long-term eating disorders, she could afford to stay at the center, which sits on a high bluff in the suburb of Ballwin overlooking a park and meandering river. Most states, including Missouri, don't require such coverage.

In her lawsuit, Nasseff claims Schwartz used hypnotic therapy on her while she was being treated with psychotropic drugs, and her lawyer says Schwartz gave her books about satanic worship to further reinforce the false memories. She says she was led to believe she was involved in a satanic cult whose rituals included eating babies, that she had been sexually abused and raped multiple times, and that she had exhibited 20 different personalities.

Vuylsteke said the trauma was too much to bear, and that Nasseff tried to get hold of drugs to kill herself during her stay.

"Can you imagine how you would feel if you thought you had participated in all these horrible things?" Vuylsteke asked.

Eventually, Nasseff learned from other women treated at Castlewood that they, too, had been convinced through therapy that they were involved in satanic cults, Vuylsteke said. And, he said, those women were also from Minnesota, allowing insurance to pay for their treatment.

"It seems like quite a coincidence that all of this cult activity was in Minnesota," he said.

Nasseff returned to Minnesota, where she works part-time in public relations and has her eating disorder in check, her lawyer said.

In her lawsuit, she claims Schwartz warned her in October 2010 to return to Missouri for additional treatment or she would die from her disorder. She says he left a phone message this October warning that if she sued, all of her memories of satanic rituals and abuse would be revealed.

Schwartz, reached by phone at the center, where he is its clinical co-director, denied any wrongdoing but declined to discuss the case further because he hadn't hired a lawyer yet. He previously told ABCNews.com that he never hypnotized Nasseff, that they had never discussed satanic cults and that she never told him she had committed criminal acts.

Albus didn't respond to requests for comment, but she told Courthouse News Service that Castlewood "strongly believes that all of these claims are without merit and we intend to defend these claims vigorously."

Some experts, including University of California, Irvine, professor Elizabeth Loftus, question the validity of repressed memory cases, which became more commonplace in the 1990s.

"Where is the proof you can be raped in satanic rituals and have absolutely no awareness of it, then reliably recover those memories later?" she asked.

However, neither Loftus nor Jim Hopper, a clinical instructor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, would speculate about whether Schwartz may have implanted false memories. Both agreed people can have memories of events that didn't really happen and that the power of suggestion can play a role in producing false memories.

Loftus cited several medical malpractice cases won over memories that proved to be false. Hopper said he believes memory is complex.

"Something that happened years ago can be encoded in the brain in various ways, and various combinations of those memory representations may be retrieved, or not, in various ways, for various reasons, at any particular time," he said.

Since this story originally aired, other women have come forward to support the original claims or add new ones to the situation now facing Schwartz and Castlewood.

From St. Louis Today:

Other women come forward in Castlewood center complaint

BY BLYTHE BERNHARD • bbernhard@post-dispatch.com > 314-340-8129 | Posted: Saturday, December 10, 2011 

In the lush hills overlooking Castlewood State Park, a secluded clinic attracts people from across the country who have tried and failed to overcome an eating disorder.

Pictures of Castlewood Treatment Center in west St. Louis County show a homelike sanctuary where residents practice yoga, sit around a fireplace and sleep under down comforters.

That idyllic image was shattered last month when a Minnesota woman filed suit against Castlewood and its director, psychologist Mark Schwartz, alleging she was brainwashed into believing she had multiple personalities and was implanted with false memories of sexual abuse and satanic cult activity while under hypnosis during her 15-month stay at the center for anorexia. Other women have since come forward to support the woman's claims and to report similar experiences.

"They definitely pushed the idea that I had been abused as a child on me," said Dara Vanek, 28, of Philadelphia, who stayed at Castlewood for several months in 2007 and 2008. "To all of a sudden have this huge amount of doubt about what happened in my childhood was incredibly damaging and shaming for me."

In her malpractice lawsuit against Castlewood, Lisa Nasseff, 31, also alleges that Schwartz wanted to keep her at the treatment center because she had insurance that would pay her medical bills that totaled $650,000.

The lawsuit against Castlewood came as a relief, Vanek and other women say.

"I feel like it validates that I'm not crazy, that it's something else that was going on," she said. "Satanic ritual abuse was talked about a lot in group therapy. It's kind of ironic (because) Castlewood itself almost seemed at times like a cult. It was implied that you could not recover unless you dedicated your life to Castlewood."

A LAST RESORT FOR SOME
Castlewood is a last resort for patients looking for healing after spending years of their lives in other medical facilities, according to a statement from executive director Nancy Albus.

Its treatment "is marked by compassion, respect and empowerment," according to Albus.

Albus said more than 1,000 clients have been treated at Castlewood since it opened more than 10 years ago. A second, castlelike facility opened recently nearby, and the two homes are licensed for 26 residents as well as outpatient services.

The sprawling Castlewood campus includes a swimming pool, hot tub, dance studio, art room and gym, according to state records. Residential stays cost $1,100 a day over an average of two to four months, and are sometimes covered by insurance, according to Castlewood's website. The facility doesn't accept Medicare or Medicaid patients, so it doesn't receive any government funding.

The private equity firm Trinity Hunt Partners of Dallas, funded by the Hunt family that owns the Kansas City Chiefs, bought majority control of Castlewood in 2008, expanded it in 2010 and announced plans to open similar facilities in other cities. The purchase was part of the firm's $25 million move into behavioral health care.

Former Castlewood patients said their days were spent making collages and writing in journals that they would share in individual and group therapy sessions. On the weekends, residents go on outings to movies, the Butterfly House and the zoo. Therapists supervise clients at meal times, and take them to restaurants and grocery stores to talk about healthy eating habits.

The Missouri Department of Mental Health licenses the facility and found only minor record-keeping deficiencies in its most recent inspection last summer. In their interviews with state inspectors, three Castlewood clients said they felt respected by staff, and another said the program saved her life.

Castlewood also meets the standards set by the Commission on the Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities, which conducts regular site visits and interviews with patients and staff.

A Florissant woman who asked only to be identified as Laura because she is still seeing a therapist from Castlewood said her inpatient experience in 2003 and 2004 was positive and that her therapy sessions never included discussions of cult activity or childhood sexual abuse.

"If I didn't go there I wouldn't be here," said Laura, 34. "Castlewood is a good place to go if you're very sick."

Schwartz declined an interview through his attorney. Albus said in her statement that Schwartz is internationally respected in the field of eating disorders.

Former patients of Schwartz, 60, said he is down-to-earth with a magnetic but mysterious personality. He looks like "an old hippie" with long hair, as one patient described him, and another said he has fertility statues and dead bugs behind glass hung in his office.

Schwartz is licensed as a psychologist in Missouri and has no discipline record with the state. He holds a doctorate in science degree from Johns Hopkins University and is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at St. Louis University, according to his résumé.

A spokeswoman for SLU said Schwartz gave a presentation at the medical school years ago but does not teach or supervise students.

THE TREATMENT
The main treatment strategy at Castlewood is called internal family systems. The technique is based on the theory that "the eating disorder actually protects (people) from re-experiencing or thinking about difficult things from their pasts," according to Castlewood's website.

Clients are encouraged to think of themselves as having many "parts" or emotions. Through therapy, they focus on improving the destructive parts of themselves, such as the perfectionist part, that can prevent them from fully enjoying life, as explained on the site.

Several local mental health practitioners said internal family systems therapy has not been rigorously studied for its effectiveness.

Therapists practicing the technique must take extra care with patients with eating disorders, who can be particularly vulnerable to having their memories and personalities twisted, in part because they are malnourished, experts said.

Some residents of Castlewood are so ill that they require feeding tubes, while others are so weak that they use wheelchairs, former patients said.

"People who are suggestible in certain ways can take a suggestion from a therapist and begin to split themselves into parts that they then name, and they will begin to think of themselves as having multiple personalities," said Dr. Lynne Moritz of the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. "The issue is you don't want to encourage that in susceptible people."

Instead of encouraging a client to think about parts, "you want to integrate the whole person who has many different ways of thinking and feeling all at the same time," Moritz said.

Today, experts believe cases of multiple personality disorder are rare, if not nonexistent.
"I've never had a case of multiple personality in 40 years of practice," Moritz said.

REPRESSED MEMORIES
The mental health care field took a hit to its reputation in the 1990s after a rash of cases involving patients who reported memories of childhood sexual abuse that they had previously repressed. In many of the cases, the memories were found to be suggested by a therapist, and the concept of repressed memories grew more controversial.

Schwartz has written that the controversy over memory should not scare therapists away from asking about a client's past, especially because a history of sexual abuse is common in people with eating disorders. The psychologist was affiliated with Dr. William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson, famed local sex researchers of the 1960s and 1970s, and he operated a sex therapy clinic in their name before opening Castlewood.

"Certainly, eating disorders therapists have every reason to suspect the presence of sexual trauma in their patients," Schwartz wrote in the introduction to his 1996 book "Sexual Abuse and Eating Disorders."

"Individuals who actually believe that memories are created by therapists are, for their own reasons, motivated to not know and not see the extent to which abuse actually exists in our culture," Schwartz wrote. "If the statistics are accurate, then our friends and neighbors are having incestuous relationships with their daughters and sons, and by ignoring it, so are we."

Meagan McKay of Vermont said she was at Castlewood at the same time as Lisa Nasseff, the woman who is suing the center.

McKay recalled that when Nasseff left Castlewood, Schwartz told the other residents that she had returned to her cult.

That's when McKay realized something wasn't right.

She started questioning all the times she saw women shaking and screaming, saying they were having flashbacks of abuse. She wondered now about the woman who drew monkeys to represent her multiple personalities. And she thought back to all the times she heard someone say they would die if they left Castlewood.

"I was there for about seven months altogether and saw an awful lot of people who were brainwashed," she said. "I started saying things to people like, 'I think the only cult anybody's ever been in is the one we're in right now."

 

Debbie Nathan - A Girl Not Named Sybil

There is a very good article in the New York Times this morning about the case of Sybil, the world's first well-known and "documented" case of multiple personality disorder - now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID). The problem is, as has been known for many years now, the case was not exactly as it was presented. It may have been little more than an impressionable client being compliant with a psychiatrist who was intent on finding what she was looking for in her patient.

Wikipedia offers this: Multiple Personality Controversies: Links to many articles about the real Sybil, Shirley Mason - for those who would like to see other perspectives.

The reality is that we are all multiple in many ways, but that these "parts" are generally mild and not completely shut off from awareness - with a little work we can learn to see our parts act out when they are triggered. But this is a whole other than DID - in DID the dissociation is so extreme that people may have whole separate lives, and be known to other people only as that "alter." In fact, some people with DID have been known to be vision impaired in one alter and 20/20 in their real self. Likewise, there have been anecdotal reports of different eye colors in different alters.

However, there are currently fewer than 100 verified cases of DID known in the literature. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was an explosion in this diagnosis, but nearly 90% of the diagnoses were made by a handful of therapists - a fact that makes the diagnosis questionable whenever it comes up.

Debbie Nathan is the author of new book about the Sybil case, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, to be released on October 18, 2011.

A Girl Not Named Sybil

By DEBBIE NATHAN
Published: October 14, 2011

“What about Mama?” the psychiatrist asks her patient. “What’s Mama been doing to you, dear? . . . I know she gave you the enemas. And I know she filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldn’t breathe. . . . What else did she do to you? It’s all right to talk about it now. . . . ”

The Mankato Free Press/Associated Press

An undated photo of Shirley Mason, best known by the pseudonym Sybil Dorsett, given to her by Flora Schreiber in the book “Sybil.”

Related

• Tapes Raise New Doubts About ‘Sybil’ Personalities

• Book Review: Creating Hysteria — Women and Multiple Personality Disorder

Enlarge This Image

Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times

“Sybil,” published in 1973, would go on to sell more than six million copies.

“My mommy,” the patient says.

“Yes.”

“My mommy said that I was a bad little girl, and . . . she slapped me . . . with her knuckles. . . .”

“Mommy isn’t going to ever hurt you again,” the psychiatrist says at the close of the session. “Do you want to know something, Sweetie? I’m stronger than Mother.”

The transcript of this conversation is stored at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City, among the papers of Flora Schreiber, author of “Sybil,” the blockbuster book about a woman with 16 personalities. “Sybil” was published in 1973; within four years it had sold more than six million copies in the United States and hundreds of thousands abroad. A television adaptation broadcast in 1976 was seen by a fifth of all Americans. But Sybil’s story was not just gripping reading; it was instrumental in creating a new psychiatric diagnosis: multiple-personality disorder, or M.P.D., known today as dissociative-identity disorder.

Schreiber collaborated on the book with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist who asks, “What about Mama?” — and with Wilbur’s patient, whose name Schreiber changed to Sybil Dorsett. Schreiber worked from records of Sybil’s therapy, including thousands of pages of patient diaries and transcripts of tape-recorded therapy sessions. Before she died in the late 1980s, Schreiber stipulated that the material be archived at a library. For a decade after Schreiber’s death, Sybil’s identity remained unknown. To protect her privacy, librarians sealed her records. In 1998, two researchers discovered that her real name was Shirley Mason. In trying to track her down, they learned that she was dead, and the librarians at John Jay decided to unseal the Schreiber papers.

The same year that her identity was revealed, Robert Rieber, a psychologist at John Jay, presented a paper at the American Psychological Association in which he accused Mason’s doctor of a “fraudulent construction of a multiple personality,” based on tape-recordings that Schreiber had given him. “It is clear from Wilbur’s own words that she was not exploring the truth but rather planting the truth as she wanted it to be,” Rieber wrote.

It wasn’t the first indication that there might be problems with Mason’s diagnosis. As far back as 1994, Herbert Spiegel, an acclaimed psychiatrist and hypnotherapist, began telling reporters that he occasionally treated Shirley Mason when her regular psychiatrist went out of town. During those sessions, Spiegel recalled, Mason asked him if he wanted her to switch to other personalities. When he questioned her about where she got that idea, she told him that her regular doctor wanted her to exhibit alter selves.

And yet, in the popular imagination, Sybil and her fractured self remained powerfully tied to the idea of M.P.D. and the childhood traumas it was said to stem from. “Mamma was a bad mamma,” Wilbur declares in the transcripts. “I can help you remember.” But countless other records suggest that the outrages Sybil recalled never happened. If Sybil wasn’t really remembering, then what exactly was Wilbur helping her to do?

Read the whole interesting article.

Andrew Wakefield and the "MMR Vaccine Causes Autism" Deception

The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on the post-disgrace life of Andrew Wakefield, the titular head of the anti-vaccine crowd who has lost his license to practice medicine and been cast as an unethical scientist as a result of his fraudulent study. He was even forced to drop his libel suit against Channel 4 in England because, well, they told the truth (which meant he also had to pay their costs).

P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens shared the link on his Facebook page and it created an animated debate between two people who represent the opposing views in the autism debate.

One view, best represented by Jenny McCarthy, is the "science is all lies" and "we can't trust the medical establishment" perspective. She now claims to have cured Even (her son) of autism through diet, an approach saner people have been arguing for decades.

The other view is that "science is the only answer" and "medicine is the only way to discover answers" perspective, best represented by the scientific community who largely dismissed Wakefield's "proof" from day one.

I'm not sure why I weighed in on the discussion, but I did - and it seems to me this is simply one manifestation of how ignorance about science (in general) and the inability to use discernment (in particular) are causing all kinds of problems in our culture. I think this is as true for scientists sometimes as it is for the general populace.

Here is some of the article from the NYT magazine:

The Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru

By SUSAN DOMINUS

Published: April 20, 2011

As people streamed into Graceview Baptist Church in Tomball, Tex., early one Saturday morning in January, two armed guards stood prominently just inside the doorway of the sanctuary. Their eyes scanned the room and returned with some frequency to a man sitting near the aisle, whom they had been hired to protect.

The man, Andrew Wakefield, dressed in a blazer and jeans and peering through reading glasses, had a mild professorial air. He tapped at a laptop as the room filled with people who came to hear him speak; he looked both industrious and remote. Broad-shouldered and fair at 54, he still has the presence of the person he once was: a conventional winner, the captain of his medical school’s rugby team, the head boy at the private school he attended in England. Wakefield was a high-profile but controversial figure in gastroenterology research at the Royal Free Hospital in London when, in 1998, he upended his career path — and more significant, the best-laid plans of public-health officials — by announcing at a press conference that he had concerns about the safety of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (M.M.R.) and its relationship to the onset of autism.

Although Wakefield did not claim to have proved that the M.M.R. vaccine (typically given to children at 12 to 15 months) caused autism, his concerns, not his caveats, ricocheted around the world. His belief, based on a paper he wrote about 12 children, is that the three vaccines, given together, can alter a child’s immune system, allowing the measles virus in the vaccine to infiltrate the intestines; certain proteins, escaping from the intestines, could then reach and harm neurons in the brain. Few theories have drawn so much attention and, in turn, so much refutation: a 2003 paper in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, which reviewed a dozen epidemiological studies, concluded that there was no evidence of an association between autism and M.M.R., and studies in peer-reviewed journals since have come to the same conclusion. In Britain, the General Medical Council revoked Wakefield’s medical license after a lengthy hearing, citing numerous ethical violations that tainted his work, like failing to disclose financing from lawyers who were mounting a case against vaccine manufacturers. The Lancet, which published the original Wakefield paper, retracted it. In a series that ran early this year, The British Medical Journal concluded that the research was not just unethically financed but also “fraudulent” (that timelines were misrepresented, for example, to suggest direct culpability of the vaccine).

Andrew Wakefield has become one of the most reviled doctors of his generation, blamed directly and indirectly, depending on the accuser, for irresponsibly starting a panic with tragic repercussions: vaccination rates so low that childhood diseases once all but eradicated here — whooping cough and measles, among them — have re-emerged, endangering young lives.

You can read the article for yourself - it's actually pretty fair.

The following is my comment from this FB discussion - I try to ground my views in the facts, as well as some science that is often not recognized as part of the debate. I have expanded my thoughts a bit here, since this is an easier format to write in than the FB comments box, and I have included links to relevant articles.

* * * *

The facts of the case speak for themselves:

• When Wakefield was arguing that the MMR vaccine caused autism, he was marketing his own measles vaccine on which he held a patent - he had a monetary interest in this "research" - he is as guilty of greed and avarice as are the Big Pharma companies.
• His "research" was funded in part by lawyers who were mounting a case against vaccine manufacturers and needed some "science" for their case (he was one of many doctors paid to support their case). Wakefield received £435,643 in fees, plus £3,910 expenses, dating to two years before his Lancet article.
• He hand picked the children in the study - only 12 of them (eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the vaccine). He argued that their autism was caused by the vaccine. This is equivalent to me finding 8 kids with autism who happened to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and arguing that eating a PB&J sandwich causes autism. There was no actual evidence.
• He changed the timeline on the histories of some of the children - several had been taken to physicians about developmental delays BEFORE they received the MMR vaccine. He said in his paer that all 12 children were normal before the vaccine, but five had documented pre-existing developmental concerns. Only one child had an onset of symptoms following the vaccine.
• His own lab was unable to replicate the study results linking MMR to the gut problems: "The results do not support previous data implicating persistent measles virus infection with the aetiology of IBD or autistic enteropathy."

I hate big pharma as much as the next person (and I totally distrusted their flu hysteria last year), but I really HATE greed masquerading as a science and seeing gullible people who do not understand science being sucked in by a weasel. Wakefield is a weasel who will never back down as long as he is making millions from the anti-vaccine crowd in the U.S.

People seem to lack discernment (as well as knowledge) around issues like these.

For example, it's entirely possible that some kids with autism do also have an intestinal disorder (we know the gut contains many of the same neurotransmitters as the brain - and that bacteria in the gut can influence brain function). It's entirely possible he was on to something with his gut hypothesis, but he went the wrong direction and has refused to change direction.

There has never been any evidence that the MMR vaccine is involved in gut disease. Even his own lab could not replicate the results linking the measles vaccine to "autistic enteropathy." At this point, most scientists feel the MMR vaccine is the only thing we can rule out as a cause of autism - Wakefield's original paper spurred tons of research, none of which confirmed or replicated his results.

It's also alarming that Wakefield's supporters fail to consider the incredible lack of ethical integrity he exhibited with that paper and his defense of it. It's one thing to generate research that is disproved - that happens to a lot of great scientists and it's why the scientific method relies on replication of results, so that an anomalous finding can be checked and rechecked.

However, it's a whole other thing to manipulate the research to provide the results you are looking for - and to have a financial interest in those results. Not to mention the use of unwarranted invasive procedures:

including colonoscopies, colon biopsies and lumbar punctures ("spinal taps") on his research subjects without the approval of his department's ethics board and contrary to the children's clinical interests (BBC News, 2007)

Two of the commentators on FB seem to me to be arguing form the extremes of each perspective, but science, while not the answer to everything, is more reliable than general distrust of science, especially when we are dealing with physiological systems - so Science Guy (SG), in my opinion, is on more solid ground, although I am more skeptical in general than he is

To me, Anti-Vaccine Girl (AVG) is offering the type of argument that wants "intelligent design" to be taught as an equal theory to evolution. She distrusts science and medicine so she attaches to anything that confirms her distrust. But the scientific method works incredibly well, even if she does not believe in it. As proof, she drives a car, uses electronic devices, does not have polio, and so on, including having food in cupboards that does not rot - all of which resulted from the scientific method

Where I see the current science heading is toward the kind of systems model SG advocates. For example, we are learning more about how nutrition impacts brain function (if your kid has ADHD, s/he should eat only whole natural foods, get plenty of omega-3 fats, and consume little to no sugar, including fruit sugar/juices, only whole fruit such as berries). We are also learning that the enteric nervous system (the gut) is highly integrated in brain function - all of this points to the mind = brain/body, not just the brain.

It saddens me to so little understanding of science in those who could most benefit from it (parents of autistic children) - and so little discernment when people become emotionally involved in a cause.

* * * *

There are a lot more perspectives to the autism issue than just these - we would also need to be looking at:

• Environmental toxins such as xenoestrogens
• Epigenetic influences from the mother and father before the pregnancy, and from the mom during pregnancy
• More research into nutritional status
• Some follow-up on the connection (if any) between the function of the enteric nervous system and autism
  
• Likely over-diagnosis of the disorder in recent years because parents pressure doctors into explaining why their kid is not gifted
  
• Lack of complete understanding of developmental processes and pacing even in healthy kids (some kids grow out of being autistic)
  
• The subjective experience of the autistic child might offer a huge insight
• What role does Big Pharma play in promoting autism as a disorder for which they hope to have a drug - lots of autistic kids are already drugged with antipsychotics to keep them docile
  

The list could go on for days - the point is that we need to take an integrative (or integral) approach to this very complex problem.

Tags: autism, fraud, medicine, alternative medicine, research, Psychology, Andrew Wakefield, MMR, Vaccine, Autism spectrum, Deception, New York Times, Magazine, autistic enteropathy, gut, intestinal disorders, measles vaccine, falsified data, The Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru, Susan Dominus, Jenny McCarthy

In Arizona, Your Vote Probably Doesn't Matter

I've never been in favor of electronic voting and vote counting - as we saw in 2000 and 2004 (especially in Ohio), the machines are easily hacked, er, prone to unexplained errors, and the outcome shifted. And it's no small issue that the machines are manufactured by companies that give millions of dollars to the GOP and its candidates. Moreover, they have refused to release the code so that correct tabulations can be verified.

Check this out for more info:

Votergate takes us on a fact-finding mission across the US revealing stunning evidence of defects and outright fraud in electronic voting. Engaging interviews with whistleblowers and courageous Americans, including members of Congress and top elections officials, reveal critical information which the mass media has given very little coverage. Watch this powerful 30-minute documentary available free on Google Video.

In Arizona, however, it seems they don't want to leave it up to the manufacturer to ensure the desired outcome, so they do it themselves. This comes from Truthout - I'm just posting a few sections, but it's worth reading the whole article.

Republican Obstructionism
Jim March, an election technology expert who has advised AUDIT AZ and worked with vote count activist groups across the USA, observed a spurious series of unconnected network cables and the lack of independent, outside observation of vote count central tabulation computers. This is a scenario primed for central computer misdeeds, is clearly against Arizona law and when informed, county officials merely shrugged and threatened him with expulsion.

In March’s affidavit (date error on page 3 but it was from 23 August) he was watching mail-in ballot vote counting in heavily Republican controlled, Maricopa County and witnessed: “…a laptop connected to the central tabulator computer, a cross-connection can be made allowing the sharing of the cellular Internet connection to other computers the laptop is connected to over Ethernet – including but not limited to the central tabulator station. This would provide a way of connecting the central tabulator to the Internet at the discretion of whoever was operating the laptop.”

March goes on to further assert: “I explained that what I was seeing was a connection between the central tabulator (also known as an “Election Management System” or “EMS”) and the general internet, and that per my understanding of AZ law via statute and the Secretary of State’s current edition of the state-standard election processing manual (May 2010), this cross-connection is illegal. He shrugged. I asked him to look and see what was happening; he refused saying he “couldn’t get involved”.

The implication is Republican controlled vote counting in Maricopa County can be hacked right there at the main tabulation source.

Democratic Cannibalism
This extraordinary e-mail exchange (edited for length) between the Pima County Democratic Party Chairman Jeffrey Rogers and two election transparency activists (AUDIT AZ co-founder John Brakey and attorney Bill Risner) is where by coming out for transparency, Rogers says they are sabotaging the election for the Democratic candidate . . . .

Good to see the Dems rolling over and playing dead . . . again. Nothing changes.

For the best coverage of electronic voting (and its fraud) check out Black Box Voting.

This really is a huge issue in a country that prides itself (wrongly, but that's another issue) on its democratic process. With no paper records and no accountability, we the people have no voice in our government.

Tags: Politics, technology, voting, fraud, Truthout, Arizona, voter fraud, Black Box Voting, Votergate, electronic voting, Audit AZ, Maricopa County, Pima County