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I don’t really know where it started, this thing I’ve occasionally gotten into about certain words. I sometimes get hung up on why a word means what it means. When I think I’ve got the answer, invariably, I can’t confirm my great discovery in an online dictionary. It always has some old non-english version with no explanation. In that way, it’s kind of an unsatisfying hobby.
One such word was reckless. It seemed like it ought to be [w]reckfull, because reckless behavior really means behaving unsafely, so it ought to lead to having lots of wrecks. My resolution of this difficult conundrum was that a reckless person was someone who acted as if they had never had a wreck, so they hadn’t learned by experience to be careful. I thought that was pretty clever, but the dictionary said:
[before 900; Middle English rekles, Old English recceleas, c. German ruchlos].
See what I mean? One time, I got pretty close. I got stuck on the derivation of ruthless. I decided it meant lacking the qualities of Ruth [in the Bible]. I felt silly, like everyone alive already knew that. When I looked it up, it didn’t say that. But then I looked up ruth, and it said [right under Babe Ruth]:
Ruth [rooth]: In the Bible, a Moabite widow who left home with her mother-in-law and went to Bethlehem, where she later married Boaz.
But then below the proper nouns, it said:
ruth [rooth]
So maybe Ruth was named for the qualities and grew into them. Who knows? Whatever the truth, I claim credit for the accuracy of my definition.
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I was writing a comment on the Doshi et al article about RIAT, and one of those word things happened for the first time in a long time. It was with the word academic. What I was trying to talk about was our academic journals and why publishing clinical trial reports without access to the full raw data shouldn’t fly. I had said that the thing that made a journal academic was that the articles were peer reviewed both before being published, and afterwards. I was claiming that without the raw data, there could never be genuine peer review, so such studies shouldn’t really have been published in academic journals in the first place. It was an AllTrials kind of argument [an argument I’d already made awkwardly in “a bold remedy”…].
I’d never really thought about the word academic before, but all of a sudden, the literal meaning occurred to me. If you look into some set of facts and conclude that you’ve figured out something about them, it’s just an opinion. But if you lay out your opinion in an article that you present to the whole academy for scrutiny and debate, it becomes academic. But that’s only true if the members of the academy can see all of the same facts that you saw. What we are calling data transparency is an integral part of the definition of the word. Academic means expanding [and exposing] the vision of individual scholars to that of the academy of scholars as a whole. So a journal with embargoed primary data is not an academic journal. It’s something else – something that doesn’t belong in the library at the academy.
Is this semantics? just some other piece of common knowledge that I’m catching onto as a late bloomer? After all, scientific papers have always been published without the stacks of data notebooks [and later computer print outs] that sit behind most scholarly articles. But it really was different in the past. If you wanted to see somebody’s primary data, you could. I did that in the late 1960s in another incarnation, traveling to a distant lab to look at their data and taking my notebooks for review. I was a lowly fellow and they were the established scholars, but they treated me like a peer, seemed glad to see me, and together we figured out why we got different results. I can’t imagine this business of data-as-private-property in those days. It seems a recent creation of this industry-funded-industry-executed clinical trial era.
I recalled another one of those word things from the past. I was watching a youtube video of a BBC Panorama program about Paxil Study 329. They interviewed Dr. Mina Dulcan, the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry who had accepted the study over the objections of the peer reviewers. She first talked about the Journal’s classy ranking [@13:57]. Then, when asked if she had any regrets about publishing it [@14:58], she said, "Oh I don’t have any regrets about publishing at all. It generated all sorts of useful discussion, which is the purpose of a scholarly journal." I really balked at the word "scholarly." I didn’t linger then, but it sounded effete at the time. It felt embarrassing. Thinking about it now, the discussion it generated wasn’t "scholarly" at all – as in a debate among scholars. It was more like IRS Auditors discussing how to sleuth out hidden off-shore accounts. A scholarly discussion is about interpretation and meaning, not about access to the basic observations.
Having lived among a lot of academic scholars in my life [the kind that wear multicolored robes at graduation], I think I’ve always glazed over when the talk turns to lofty academic matters like tenure, authorship, plagiarism, academic rank, promotion, scholarship, etc. – those things that preoccupy the inhabitants of ivory towers. I recant! Having witnessed the corruption and deterioration in academic psychiatry in the last quarter century, I take it all back. I now see that the cumbersome ways of academia proper are there for a solid reason. This would never have happened in a department of philosophy or of comparative literature where the traditions and rules of the academy are debated at almost every faculty meeting. Free access to information is a sacrosanct element of academic freedom and scholarship. Mea Culpa!
Here we can observe:
A hoard of barbric academians and others of the unvetted masses attempting to assail the great propietary wall of pharma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:De_Neuville_-_The_Huns_at_the_Battle_of_Chalons.jpg
In preporation for the bombardment, a trebuchet being loaded with the logic of academic freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet
Monty Python visuals aside. There are ways that our system works that should be universal to the unwashed (unvetted) masses. There would be unintended consequences to the RIAT act. Things that directly affect our social contract in the Lockian tradition.
Some secrets should remain behind academic walls but not those that pretain to social control. Those secrets should be realeased very slowly.
Pardon the length, but this is about “words”.
There is a significant difference between scholarship and marketing (“scholarship”). It’s enormous and of profound consequence on a global scale for our entire species.
The word “theory” in the U.S. is a puddle of muddled muck in the public mind, and among some academics as well. The fact that after 12 years of public education most people think they’re being discerning when they dismiss scientific consensus on global warming as being “just a theory,” is evidence that there is something horribly wrong with pedagogy in our society that begins at the top— and it’s an academic problem that is not “just academic.”
Like the rosy stories children are taught about the Pilgrims compared to the factual accounts one learns in colleges, the real education is behind pay walls or ivied walls. The majority of people who didn’t go to college are so invested in the myth of the noble Pilgrim that the facts may appear to them to be alien and subversive. Now too much of the public is invested in the myth of the “biological causes of mental illness and need for life-long drugs.”
Those who do not have academic training in vetting and have no idea of what constitutes scholarship, who do not understand that even genuine scholars can disagree, do not have the skills needed to educate themselves— especially not on the internet. Some people are natural autodidacts that can learn to learn about things, but most people aren’t.
How can a person who is so scientifically illiterate give informed consent? It is the duty of the academy to teach patients/clients the meanings of their information.
Our school systems are not providing educations that give most people the tools they need to think or to form questions effectively in the 21st Century. Inter-disciplinary programs are gaining ground, but the entrenchment of stultified Western “schools” are inadequate, and the circling of department wagons to maintain the status quo— the Western canons— and defending their intellectual territory wastes valuable time and energy in a world that is besieged on all sides by existential threats. Our academies, like the structure of our government (in the U.S.) which hasn’t changed in forty years; are essentially maladapted, and in some cases, maladjusted. The requirements for degrees do not reflect the needs of our society.
This open-source movement may cut the Gordian knot that binds the sciences to industries, making so many of them unscientific in the process. Safe to say we are all cheering them on and looking forward to good effects. I think this new generation of scientific researchers is moving in the right direction and doing so with a very fair and diplomatic process.
Leaders in psychiatric research need to be tempered by the self-examination and struggle that liberal arts require; otherwise, they are simply grease monkeys with MRIs, mind altering drugs, and a file full of checklists.
I wrote an “Open Letter” to graduating psychiatric residents at my site earlier tonight, and will be curious if any do read it. Frankly, as the letter reads, it is nothing less than either a scam or just an outright manipulation for programs to train current residents with the way psychiatry is so outrageously mismanaged, abused, or mislead by these alleged KOLs and academicians who run the programs.
How people can enroll in psychiatry these past 10 years and expect to practice in a manner that is appropriate and respected by all who interact with the psychiatrist, well, I hope I am wrong that these medical school graduates are not trying to engage in agendas that are less that appropriate but just naive and misguided.
Yeah, well I hope that more responsible minds are dealing with the NSA fiasco too, but that is less likely that world peace and ending world hunger.
Be safe, be well, and be right and firm in your boundaries, eh?