Disability, mental health, and scientific rigor

Anti-psychotic use soars in U.S. and U.K.

What is more interesting to me, and much more fundamental, is the very low level of scientific rigor that is involved, typically, with the diagnoses of conditions that are the bases for these prescriptions.

That will be the subject of my master's thesis. It is the practical legwork for Stephen Jay Gould's brilliant book on the subject, generally, The Mismeasure of Man.

People are constantly looking for biological, immutable, unchangeable bases for social phenomena. That is the subject of that book. And my work can more squarely explain the phenomena, I think, and why people turn to such diagnoses when they are frustrated with issues in the social world that they do not understand well enough or do not want to take responsibility for.

And we have much to understand and take responsibility for.