For example, folks who are seeking out therapy could have gotten even worse over time if they hadn't seen a therapist (There are other potential alternative explanations as well)
Still, we should take any possibility therapy is making people worse on average seriously
Oct 22, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
I really enjoyed this @RottenInDenmark piece, and I've been thinking about its applications to other "knowledge work" like science and science communication
It's much easier to seem savvy than do the work required to get actionable insights
When people say "it depends" they are often performing savviness - appearing practical, perceptive, and hyper-informed - rather than providing any real insight
Sloppy data science from > 10 years ago and a viral thread filled with mental health treatment misinformation this week: A horror story
🧵
More than 10 years ago, a landmark new theory about how human memory works dropped in a major scientific journal
The oversimplified jist: Having someone recall a scary memory makes it so you can more easily modify or even erase that memory during a limited period of time
Oct 7, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One trope coming out of the Big Tech & mental health discussions is the presumed weakness of self-reported well-being
Folks don't have perfect insight into what impacts their mental health
And how folks perceive their own well-being is more important than any "objective" metric
A close friend tells you they're having a hard time getting out of bed every day and feeling really down
They get a new Not-Theranos blood test that "detects depression" and test negative
Do you believe your friend or the blood test?
Oct 1, 2021 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
If you ever want to sound like an expert without paying attention, you only need two words in response to any question
"It depends"
A thread on why we should retire that two word answer 🧵
When people say "it depends" they often mean the effect of one variable depends on the level of at least one other variable
For example:
You: Does this program improve depression?
Me, Fancy Expert: Well, it depends, probably on how depressed people were before the program
Sep 30, 2021 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
Figuring out what causes what is SO HARD
And especially if you have a psych background, you might think we *need* an experiment to understand causes
While I love experiments, here's a thread of resources on why they're neither necessary nor sufficient to determine causes 🧵
This paper led by @MP_Grosz is a great start! It persuaded me that merely adjusting our language (eg saying "age is positively associated with happiness" instead of "happiness increases with age") isn't enough
If we prioritized improving patients' and trainees' lives clinical psych's structures would look entirely different
A part touched on but (understandably!) not emphasized in this piece: There's vanishingly little evidence our training improves clinical outcomes for patients
🧵
Multiple studies with thousands of patients (though only 23-39 supervisors each!) show that supervisors share less than 1% of the variance in patient outcome
And that's just correlation, the causal estimate could be much smaller
Where should folks turn if they want mental health support for depression *right now* and aren't in crisis?
Traditional talk therapy often has long waitlists
The therapy apps you've heard about promising quick access to treatment have lots of problems
What I recommend 🧵
Adults Part I
Program: Deprexis
Content: 10 self-guided, internet-based modules (most grounded in evidence-based approaches)
Cost: ~1-2 sessions of therapy ($280)
Evidence: Solid meta-analytic evidence across >10 RCTs journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
Link: orexo-store-2.mybigcommerce.com
May 19, 2021 • 14 tweets • 8 min read
Still responding to folks re: my transition to data science post! I'll get to everyone, promise!
Given the interest I thought people might want to know the (almost all free/low cost!) resources I used to train myself for a data science role
A (hopefully helpful) 🧵
R, Part I
My first real #rstats learning experience was using swirl. I loved that I could use it inside of R (rather than having to go back and forth between the resource and the RStudio console)
I just found out a paper we first submitted ~3 years ago was accepted! We used an N > 1,000 sample, open data/code, and robust methods
I'm proud of this paper, and it also helped radicalize me against a lot of the stories we tell ourselves about peer review
A 🧵
The many reviews we received were almost uniformly hostile, confused, non-constructive, or some combination
Sep 5, 2019 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Trying to balance:
- Having genuine empathy for people who are staring down the barrel of their life's work not replicating
- Not reinforcing power structures and practices that led to a world where those barrels are all too common
Hearing @minzlicht talk about this on the "Replication Crisis Gets Personal" @fourbeerspod episode brought home to me how lucky I am to be early in my career now as opposed to 20 or even 10 years ago
New preprint from @JSchleiderPhD & me: Emotion and anxiety mindsets share little unique variance with internalizing problems in adults once you account for hopelessness (Ns = 200, 430)
Open code & data + interpretations in this thread!
psyarxiv.com/qtrxs/
We used commonality analysis (CA), which allows us to directly examine how much predictive variance is unique & shared among predictors
This technique can help us identify important individual predictors even when they're highly correlated (A no-no in traditional linear models)
Dec 9, 2018 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Two other researchers and I just went from a partial draft of a Methods section to a full draft of Introduction, Methods, and Results in less than a day
