Two days ago, a lawfirm filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against 6 commercial publishers (incl Elsevier & Wiley) in the federal district court in New York.

They allege a 3-part scheme on part of publishers. 🧵

lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/acad… First, an agreement to fix the price of reviewing at 0$ which coerces scholars into providing their labor for nothing.

Second, publishers agreed not to compete with each other by barring researchers to submit manuscripts in multiple jouranls simultaneously.

The FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD treatment. This came as a surprise to noone, given that the FDA advisory panel voted 2:9 on efficacy & 1:10 on safety recently.
FDA followed the evidence. If you are angry, direct that at Lykos that carried our low quality trials.

https://twitter.com/lucyfarnik/status/1822391308356325649

Here a recent @scifri episode on the numerous problems of the Lykos/MAPS studies specifically from the perspective of 1) lived experience, 2) psychotherapy, and 3) clinical trial design.

sciencefriday.com/segments/fda-r…

So in 2007, physicists wrote a paper that made the headlines: according to their calculations, human coin flips aren’t 50/50 - more like 51/49.

Why is that, and did students in Amsterdam really flip 350,000 coins to find out?

🧵 Diaconis et al 2007 showed that coins tend to land with the same side up that the coin started with ().
They were also able to adjust coin flipping machines flip to 100/0, “proving coin flip physics aren’t random”. info.phys.unm.edu/~caves/courses…

After careful consideration, the FDA advisory comission voted today 9:2 that MDMA has *not* been shown to be effective for treating PTSD, given massive concerns around validity threats in this literature. They also voted 10:1 that MDMA has *not* shown to be safe.

https://twitter.com/fdaadcomms/status/1798104612635070611

📄Many mentioned reasons overlap with those we summarized recently in our review paper:


📺 I also summarize them for a lay audience in this YouTube video:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20…

1/8 New tutorial preprint led by @b_siepe in which we present different descriptive statistics & data visualization techniques with the goal to better understand EMA item functioning.

Preprint:

Brief overview thread 🧵: osf.io/preprints/psya…


2/8 EMA data collection is increasing exponentially, but there are many challenges:

🔎 data are complex
🔎 psychometric properties of EMA items often not investigated
🔎 most scales are neither standardized nor validated beyond face validity

So .. how *valid* are our data?

1/22 Our new paper led by @ashleylwatts (w @ashlgreene & @wesbonifay) is now published; I view it as the first critical evaluation of the statistical and theoretical p-factor & resulting literature. Here a brief overview of the core arguments in the paper. We start by clearly differentiating the theoretical p-factor (from here on: P, thought to describe and perhaps cause variation in all forms of psychopathology) from the statistical 'general factor of psychopathology' (from here on: GFP, usually derived via latent variable models)

1/8 We published several big picture papers on how to best conceptualize, classify and understand mental health problems / psychopathology recently, so here's a very brief overview in case you missed some of them.

I will link to all full text PDFs at the end. 2/8 A discussion paper providing numerous perspectives on mental health classification — based on a super interesting panel discussion with lots of different perspectives at a conference!

1/ The special issue @MiriForbes, @uma_phd & I put together on future of #MentalHealth research is out!

We feature papers on the importance of studying fine-grained clinical elements: 1 editorial, 6 empirical papers, and 2 commentaries.

Brief 🧵 of all papers with URLs. 2/ Our editorial introduces the topic of fine-grained clinical elements and proposes pluralistic, multimethod, & multisystem approaches as way forward. It also features results of a survey in which we asked the author teams about their perspectives.

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2024-…

1/12 New paper on psychedelics as treatments for mental health problems!

We discuss 10 challenges which limit conclusions that can be drawn about safety/efficacy of psychedelic therapy.

We share checklist for journalists, policymakers & others to assess study quality.

🧵 2/ There is massive hype around psychedelics as treatment for MH problems, w many positive findings in the lit. This goes together w increase in pubs, pharma investments, patents, & shifts in political/legislative landscapes. In US alone, ≥500 ketamine clinics have emerged.

Before approving psychedelics as medicines, Australia commissioned an independent scientific report into risks & benefits.
They then approved *against* the report's advice.
Now, the chief scientist speaks out in a remarkable editorial; brief summary 🧵.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00… 2020: Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) maintained psychedelics as Prohibited Substances (Schedule 9), rejecting a lobby-proposal by the Mind Medicine Australia (MMA).

Thought experiment: what happens if all researchers make all PDFs of their work, in 'fancy' journal format, available on their website? I'm genuinely curious what you think would happen.
Will Elsevier sue the ~8 million scientists out there? Also, brief reminder that you can do so without having to fear negative consequences if you're in the Netherlands, who passed a law in 2015 to just ... make it so :)

openaccess.nl/en/in-the-neth…

New paper on skip-out questions in #depression diagnosis.
In many clinical interviews for depression, we query for core symptoms sad mood & anhedonia. If neither are present, we "skip" the other 7 symptoms (eg sleep, appetite) bc 1 of the core symptoms is required for diagnosis🧵 This is a practice to save time, but begs the question: are there people with many so-called "secondary" depression symptoms who do not have the core symptoms? This is what our new paper in JPCS led by the wonderful @orla_mcbride is about.

1/4 If you read one #depression #biomarker paper this year, read this one by Nils & the gang. They looked at a large sample of depressed and healthy participants, investigating numerous features (neuro, genetics, etc) in 2.4 million #MachineLearing models.

https://twitter.com/NilsRWinter/status/1633458191643312128

2/4 I'm not surprised by the results: depression is not a unitary, biological disease entity. It is a label that was historically developed for clinical utility: it is a heuristic superimposed on a complex landscape of mental health problems people experience.

1/5 This review by Gonthier (2022) tackles a crucial topic: are non-verbal intelligence tests culture fair? This is important because you often see the reasoning "ethnicity/race 1 has lower IQ than ethnicity/race 2, & it must be genetic because non-verbal tests are culture fair". 2/5 This takes ugly extremes such as that there is "some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ" (Rushton & Jensen 2005) etc. So the review here really matters to address threats to such conclusions and can set the record straight.

Excited about @AnnaWysocki3 's talk on "Statistical Control Requires Causal Justification"

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… Highly recommended if you always wanted to know what colliders are or do—and if you ever "added x and y as covariates" to e.g. a linear regression because that is "what your field does".

1/8 Valentin, I'll respond with a quote RT because then I can write a proper thread here (rather than having to add 1 tweet at a time in my response).

So my "record" is the 2017 paper on 52 symptoms of depression, which was rejected 8 times.

https://twitter.com/VFlaudias/status/1594271707522531331

2/ This is in my part my 'fault' bc I kept submitting it to applied journals, but I really didn't want this paper in a "journal specialized on measurement" (quote from 6 rejection letters): I wanted to reach clinicians & applied researchers.

1/ So @UniLeiden has now "lost" a second Prof in a short period of time. In my reading of the news, he is no longer allowed on uni premises due to ‘extremely undesirable behaviour’, but keeps salary & title.
What did he do? See screenshot below from uni executive board. 2/ The other Prof we "lost" 3 yrs ago had committed fraud, tampered w data & grant applications, taken blood samples w/o ethics approval, fabricated experiments, removed participants, dropped & added authors (and was then hired by TU Dresden for .. I don't know exactly for what).

Lots of new followers in the last few weeks, so here's a short thread introducing you to some of the work we conducted since 2020.
Broadly speaking, our work tackles how to best 1⃣understand,2⃣measure, and3⃣model mental health problems.

🧵 1/

Pillar 1: 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴.

Don Robinaugh has led fanastic work on this topic. Our first recent paper I recommend is conceptual work on the importance of having clear theories.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

This thread has turned into neat lists of
(1) things that can go wrong with Qualtrics surveys (and how to circumvent that), and
(2) tricks of statistically interrogating data for anomalities that may cause unexpected findings.

Thx to all for contributing!

https://twitter.com/EikoFried/status/1583016873137881088

(in our case, the zero correlation was due to a Qualtrics export error that was language specific—it was present in only half the sample, and not in the other, leading to group-level data that looked fine overall and behaved appropriately, but didn't correlate w other measures)

🚨New paper alert🚨
"Studying Mental Health Problems as systems, not syndromes"
is now published #OpenAccess in Current Directions.

I'll summarize the paper briefly here. ⬇️

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09… In the paper, I describe 2 barriers to progress that our field has not sufficiently grappled with.
Barrier (1): diagnostic literalism, i.e. mistaking mental health (MH) problems a person has with the diagnosis a person receives.

In short: MH problems ≠ diagnoses.

Aaand another one on mental pain:

ebmh.bmj.com/content/early/… And I guess technically this should also count 😇
(the journal insisted ...)

nature.com/articles/s4415…