I really dislike "brain health" when talking about emotional/mental health problems. It attributes problems often due to stressors & external events, stigma, discrimination, & adverse healthcare/political systems to an individual/their brain.
If stressors are severe enough (e.g. repeated & very severe trauma), most people, no matter their "brain health", will develop emotional/mental health problems. Health is a lot more than your brain.
There are mechanisms in the brain (like in other parts of the body) that can make folks more vulnerable to certain types of problems. But that doesn't justify the term brain health.
That's like referring to the ability to steer your car as "tire health" bc certain features & predispositions of tires can make cars more vulnerable to steering problems. Tires are indeed necessary for steering, but there are many other potential causes for steering problems.
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Here's a simple thought experiment showing that if psychopathology were categorical, it would still show up as dimensional using current taxometric methods. 🧵
Taxometric analyses happen at the between subjects (group) level, usually using one measurement point.
You usually get distributions on the left side (often with skew), not distributions on the right side—again, at the population level.
But psychopathology is not a between-subjects process, it's a within-subjects process.
So let's now simulate within-subjects data for 100 people who all have depression, as a categorical, not dimensional process. I'll show you processes for 6 people.
Just finished a short talk on transparency horror stories. It was a fun event, but some of the things I've seen over the years have been quite disturbing.
I'll share 2 egregious examples here about editorial decisions & reviews. 🧵
A paper by a student of mine was reviewed in a prominent journal. The anonymous reviews were ok but not great, the editor rejected the paper for confidential reasons.
Really odd that there can be confidential scientific reasons not to publish a paper that authors cannot address.
I followed up with editor, who said they can't help me.
I tweeted about it, & decided that mb this is the 1 in a million scenario, mb there's a good reason, I just can't think of it.
2 days later someone wrote me a DM: they had had exactly the same experience w journal & editor.
2/7 In our own work, we've written about this in detail, too. CF our 2017 challenges paper with @angecramer in which we have a dedicated section on the topic; our 2017 review paper that lists this challenge; and my 2021 Psych Inquiry paper features inference gap as core topic.
3/7 I also briefly went back to the very first workshop I taught 2016, which (like all future ones) had a dedicated section on this problem. So from where I'm standing, the field isn't "finally recognizing" this issue; it's well known, & folks have struggled & grappled with it.
Just finished my keynote at @conference_2021 on "Mental health: studying systems instead of syndromes". You can find slides & new preprint here: osf.io/bm6r5/. Really enjoyed making a completely new presentation from scratch.
🧵
The first barrier to progress I talk about is diagnostic literalism and its consequences: while many of us don't believe in MDD or schizophrenia as "natural disease units" in the world, case-control research in our field is often carried out in that way.
I discuss some historical evidence on how arbitrary many of the categories and thresholds we have today in DSM-5 were, and that DSM-5 may look quite different today if minor things had gone differently.
This means diagnostic categories are not natural kinds.
Dutch universities are making a move to abandon the impact factor in recognition and reward considerations. A group of 170 Dutch academics posted a critical response to this initiative. I summarize why these responses fail to convince me. 🧵
First, for context, here the initiative by @UniUtrecht we are talking about: changing rewards and recognitions. Other universities have similar initiatives.
Here the rebuttal by 171 academics in the Netherlands, most of whom appear to be full professors. It's in NL, but google translate works well for Dutch websites.