Tyler Black, MD Profile picture
Feb 2, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read Read on X
More ghoulish suicide shenanigans from #UrgencyOfNormal

Watch the switch - they couldn't lose the word suicide! V1 talks about "other mental health impacts," on top of the INCORRECT suicide line.

/1
New version: Now that suicides not useful, just remove it!

It just disappears. That's awful & unscientific.

It should keep the topic, but more accurately:
"Fortunately, there were no significant increases in child suicides in 2020."

Hiding it is unscientific & biased.

/2
However, they definitely have to scare parents, teachers, and educators with the word "suicide", because they are ghoulish about suicide.

So they BORROW "suicide attempts" from secondary slides (not important enough before) put it back in the summary slide.

/3
Weird! They *didn't* just edit their slides to remove the inaccurate data. They moved a non-summary entry to the summary entry.

/4
I will state it plainly. If suicides were important when the outcome was SIGNIFICANT, they are just as important when INSIGNIFICANT.

What they did is misleading, and bad science.

Do not trust science communicators that do this.

/5
I sent the authors a JAMA article (1.5 million Ontario youth, suicide attempts + overdose presentations in the first 15 months of pandemic were LOWER; Ray et al), and other articles.

Honest scientists would include them in their slides.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…

/6
The JAMA article is a complete counterfactual with:
* newer data
* a jurisdiction that had significant school closures
* a focus on 14-17 year-olds

It showed a 26% reduction in hospital presentations.

/7
I wish they would STOP WEAPONIZING CHILD SUICIDE.

They don't care about suicide statistics. They use child suicide to scare parents, and it reinforces the moral panic.

It pushes their agenda to open schools no matter what the science says.

/8
I would like schools to be open **when it's safe** based on all the science. You can't ignore some data to make that decision or argument.

School closures may be necessary due to a new variant (see OG-->delta-->omicron), or even a new pandemic.

/fin

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More from @tylerblack32

Jul 2
Since Trump took office:

* Elon net worth is $980B (+$500B)
* Donald Trump's family ~$10B, up about $7B
* Top 15 billionaires: up 33%

And USAID was cut 6 billion, resulting in hundreds of thousands of or the poorest people needlessly dying and suffering.

/1
Since Trump was elected:

* $5-700M on white house renovations
* $132B for the war in Iran
* $930M for the refurbishment of the "gifted Qatari jet"
* $102M for Trump's golf trips every weekend (at his properties, which profit)
* $40M for a military parade

/2
Since Trump was elected:

* $500B in lost IRS revenue
* $135B in benefits obligations and costs due to DOGE retirements

/3
Read 4 tweets
May 13
OK @joannamoncrieff ,lets do this.

POINT BY POINT
🔽🔽

/2 Image
Point 1: "Disease-targeting" is an invented criterion

1a. You demand drugs show "disease-targeting effects" or be presumed harmful. This is never necessary. The actual claim: reliable symptom change across replicated RCTs.

/2
Point 1: "Disease-targeting" is an invented criterion

1b. Cardiology doesn't know the molecular lesion driving most post-MI mortality benefit from beta-blockers. We use them anyway because they work. "No known mechanism, therefore presume harm" would gut most of medicine.

/3
Read 14 tweets
May 5
RFK is no better at psychiatric medications than he is about vaccines.

RFK's "overmedicalization crisis" thread is a master class in using true-ish numbers to imply a false conclusion. Let's go through it. 🧵

/1
The core trick: he treats prescription prevalence as self-evidently bad. But high rates only signal a problem if the meds don't work, are given to people who don't need them, or cause net harm. He establishes none of this. He just gestures at numbers.

/2
The same rhetorical structure would indict insulin prescribing, or asthma inhalers. Prevalence is not pathology. The question is whether treatment matches need — and whether the alternative (untreated illness) is better or worse.

/3
Read 20 tweets
May 4
Disabled people should not live in poverty.

It makes no sense the way we treat our people with disabilities in Canada. Canada has the full apparatus to implement adjusted payments, yet we typically support disabled people WELL under the poverty line.

/1 Image
Canada has an official poverty line: the Market Basket Measure. It's regionally calibrated, methodologically sound, and updated by StatCan.



A single person on BC PWD receives ~$18.4k/year. The Vancouver MBM is ~$29k.

/2www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.…
That's not a rounding error. It's a structural choice.

PWD recipients in Vancouver sit at roughly 47% of the poverty line and below the Deep Income Poverty threshold (75% of MBM), which is the level StatCan uses to flag the worst material deprivation in the country.

/3
Read 10 tweets
May 2
Quick thread: "How do SSRI's work" 🧵

I've had a few patients ask me how SSRI's work.

To be clear, my first answer is "well we know they are supposed to block serotonin reuptake, but it's not that simple and we don't really know."

But, if you want the best 2026 science...

/1Image
For a few particularly science-interested patients, I walk them through what we currently have for the 'best evidence' even though we're still not sure.

This is the "best story" I can tell about SSRI's right now.

(nb, this is NOT locked in, this is MY best synthesis)

/2
1) SSRIs BLOCK the Serotonin Transporter
The protein that pulls serotonin back into the neuron after its released is blocked. Serotonin lingers longer in the synapse, the gap where neurons signal each other.

This is very well established, & how SSRIs were designed.

/3Image
Read 15 tweets
May 2
The Ihben story is making the rounds. "Judge forced 18 vaccines, child got autism." It's being treated as a smoking gun. It is not a smoking gun. It is barely a story.

/1
Sourcing: one father, one advocacy org (CHD), one GiveSendGo. Records sealed. No filings. No named physicians. Every outlet repeating it cites the same Defender article. This is a closed loop, not corroboration.

/2
"18 vaccines in one day" is not a thing. That number counts antigens as doses to make the headline scream. Real catch-up schedules don't work this way and you can verify that in five minutes on the CDC site.

/3
Read 10 tweets

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