Friday, September 25, 2015

Quote of the day – from wise sage to caring ruler

“Repositioning American Ps[y]chiatric Association from wise sage to caring ruler, we changed everything from messaging to their logo to support the new brand persona.”
- Porter Novelli, “American Psychiatric Association: Rebranding to move the field forward.” (Yes, the period is in their title. I have no idea why. These are people who use phrases like “their own branding that did not ladder up to a central visual or verbal tone.”)



Philip Hickey has the story. (Reading his quote from Paul Summergrad’s address at the most recent APA meeting almost makes me feel sorry for them. They so desperately want to believe that discoveries validating their bogus diagnoses and magically justifying their decades of false claims and scientific fakery are right around the corner - “That we have not yet achieved interventions based on these insights or diagnostic tests is not because we will not achieve them, but because of the complexity of what we are studying.” Indeed, in his latest piece doubling down on the bizarre and patently untrue contention that psychiatry never propounded the chemical-imbalance idea, Ronald Pies actually drags out another of these perpetually “intriguing,” “promising” notions. After chemical imbalances, brain-circuit disturbances, stress hormones, telomeres,…we now have the “immune inflammatory metabolic model.” Whitaker and Cosgrove are right: their faith is too strong and too closely bound to their personal, professional, and material interests for challenges to take root within the field. Meanwhile, they cause a lot of harm.)

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