Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Tired Of Reading About Lauren Slater Yet?

Michael Miller, an epidemiologist at Minnesota, is a lot more succinct than I am. He's also obviously got better access than I do, because he's got a bunch of scans of Slater-related letters. Here at last (warning: PDF) is a pointed scientific evaluation of Slater's so-called replication of the Rosenhan study, in the form of a very polite letter to Slater signed by ten psychologists and psychiatrists.

They pull out a detail I missed: she claims that, in nine emergency room visits, she was prescribed a total of 25 antipsychotics and 60 anti-depressants. Really? Each ER gave her more than six different antidepressant prescriptions? I want to know where these ERs are, because around here people usually seem to get by with just one or two antidepressants. The folks who wrote the letter want to know where these ERs are, too, but apparently Slater isn't telling.

The best thing Miller's got is Lauren Slater's letter back to Robert Spitzer (PDF again). I have no idea what to make of this:
At root none of the statements you believe you didn't make are any kind of misrepresentation of you, even the statement about Rosenhan and his illness, given that your ire towards him and his "study," is quite well known.
I'm trying not to read that as, "it doesn't matter if you actually said it, because everyone knows you were probably thinking it" - but it's hard to know how else that sentence was supposed to be interpreted.

Okay, I'm going to try to stop blogging about Lauren Slater now, lest you all think I've developed some kind of unhealthy obsession. I leave you with this series of posts from another Slater-obsessed person, who actually had Slater herself show up in his comments section. I suppose I can only dream.