#Wikipedia - notability of Mrs Laurie Helgoe

When popular knowledge gets debunked, it makes for notability. Mrs Helgoe debunked the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. It is used a lot even by those who should know better to classify human personality traits.

It is quite something when research shows how much popular methods are wrong. Instead of representing a 25-30% of the population, introverts make up 57% of the population. It means that Myer Briggs is off by 100%.

The critique of the article for Mrs Helgoe has it that it is an orphan; no articles link to it. Having read the article, it is more valid to find fault at the Myers Briggs article; it does state that the method is not valid but it more less glosses over that fact.

The problem with the Myers Briggs article is that it attempts to explain the method used, a method that is invalid.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - its sex ratio II

In April 2014 I blogged about the sex ration at Wikidata. At the time there were 1,332,383 "humans", 760,616 were male and 154,455 were female. Now in April 2016, the numbers are different: there are 3,135,792 humans, 2,442,444 are male and 466,748 are female.

The percentages were: 57% males, 12% females and 31% unknowns. This time they are 78% male, 15% female and 7% unknown.

Based on these Wikidata numbers, the gap between men and women has substantially increased. On the other hand, the number of humans that were not identified as male or female has substantially decreased.

This does not mean at all that the movement to chip at the gender gap is a bust. Far from it. Numbers only expose realities. What can easily be achieved in Wikidata is more focus on the females in any group. The subject I focus on is mental health and I concentrate on female psychiatrists or psychologists. I add statements for them and add where possible the data from categories to Wikidata. In this way they become better connected, more information becomes available. In this way the subject I care for gains quality and relevance and it is women who benefit most.

Numbers provide an indicator, when numbers are this big they should not have our focus. At best they move glacially. More relevant is to know if they as a group, gain more readers over time. These numbers reflect an increase in quality of articles and data. That is an approach that has potential.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #women in #psychiatry II

Paula Caplan - foto by Lesley Bohm

As diversity is important and as psychiatry has my focus, it is obvious what to do. I concentrate on Wikidata and among others I made several improvements to the item of Mrs Caplan. One thing was missing so I asked for a photo to be published under a free license.

Mrs Caplan was underwhelmed with Wikidata, yes I showed her "Reasonator" but the information is incomplete. She send me this photo and her resume and she informed me that the Wikipedia article about her is incorrect in places.

So the challenge is to improve her article, do justice to who she is and the relevance of her work in psychiatry. Evaluate it and seek a neutral point of view of what her science tells us in other articles as well.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - #women in #psychiatry

Women who make their mark in psychiatry are underreported. Currently Wikidata knows currently about 366 female psychiatrists. Many of them have been off the trodden path, many of them have expressed opinions that are very much in contrast with what is generally accepted at true.

I learned about one person, Mrs Paula Caplan because her books and publications were not accepted on a forum that is supposed to support people. Mrs Caplan is a decorated psychiatrist, a professor it is just that a corporate sponsor did not like what she had to say. One of the awards she received, the Christine Ladd-Franklin award she shared with another professor; Mrs Lisa Cosgrove. When you read her resume, it is not strange to find that she does not have a Wikipedia article. Her work addresses the problems and ethical dilemmas that arise in the mental health field (especially in psychiatry) when there are financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and researchers or professional organizations.

One way to chip at the gender gap in our Wikimedia world is by adding info about all the remarkable women of psychiatry in Wikipedia or Wikidata. When you read about all the missing people, it becomes obvious how much work there is to do justice to them and to their work.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - anti-psychiatry and Mrs Elizabeth Packard

The term "anti-psychiatry" is seen as derogatory. By being labeled as such, many arguments are dismissed. For this reason it is reasonable that the case of Mrs Packard is adorned with the template of "anti-psychiatry" after all she founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society and wrote several books to make her case.

Mrs Packard was committed to an asylum because a husband could have his wife committed without either a public hearing or her consent. She disagreed with him about religion and the couple also disagreed on child rearing, family finances, and the issue of slavery. In 1863, in part due to pressure from her children who wished her released, the doctors declared that she was incurable and discharged her.

Mrs Packard wrote several books about and founded the "Anti-Insane Asylum Society". In 1867, the State of Illinois passed a "Bill for the Protection of Personal Liberty" which guaranteed all people accused of insanity, including wives, had the right to a public hearing. She also saw similar laws passed in three other states.

When this is what anti-psychiatry is about, I do question the use of  "anti-psychiatry" as something negative.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Dorothea Dix

Mrs Dix is remembered on the "Great Americans Series". It is a series of stamps and it includes many women. They are definitive stamps meaning that they were part of the regular issue of a country's stamps, available for sale by the post office for an extended period of time and designed to serve the everyday postal needs of the country.

Arguably Mrs Dix is honoured in this way and recognising this in Wikidata is not obvious.

Mrs Dix is not called a psychiatrist. However her insight into the suffering of the "insane" and her work did contribute more to mental health than the many who used that title and only saw people and were of no real benefit to them.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - Peter Breggin, the power of an argument, a source

Mr Breggin is in / has been a rather controversial person in psychiatry. The point he makes is that the use of medicine is vastly overrated. He has been at pain to make this point, he has been court and brought to court over this opinion.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness took him to court because of a remark on Oprah:

"mental health clients should judge their clinicians in terms of their empathy and support; if they failed to show interest in them and tried to prescribe drugs during the first session, he advised such clients to seek assistance elsewhere."

This may be or may have been controversial, but it is certainly not controversial in the Netherlands. The notion that a psychiatrist should be empathic and supportive is essential for quality care that is to be given. The points Mr Breggin makes about psychiatric drugs are seen as mostly valid and, there is enough scientific evidence to support the notion that oversubscription is happening widely and, it has been sufficiently proven that NAMI was/is largely funded by pharmaceutical companies.

The point is that many sources exist that 'prove' a point. At what point can a point be accepted as valid or more precisely when is a point no longer acceptable in Wikipedia? We do agree that drapetomania has been a fabrication right?
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #diversity connecting relevant people

Mrs Nanette Gartrell is a great example when you want to explain about diversity. She is female, a psychiatrist and according to an old version of the DSM she is crazy ... nowadays, it is mostly accepted for people to be gay.

While enriching the information for Mrs Gartrell, much of the related information is not known in Wikidata. Mrs Garttrell won several awards, it makes sense to know the organisations that conferred them and other award winners are nice to have as well.

Mrs Garttell is especially relevant because of the research that she did. She researched the quality of the upbringing of children in a lesbian family. By and large they are happy families and kids grow up well. It is the kind of message that is important to hear.

As someone like Mrs Gartrell gets well linked in the fabric of Wikidata, chances are that she will be included in all kinds of queries. As she does, more people will learn of the current state of science and provide people with arguments to ponder.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - all notable #Psychiatrists - a query for big data

When you look at all the psychiatrists known to Wikidata, there are currently some 2992 psychiatrists known. When you think about psychiatry, the relevance is in the number of people who have to deal with it.

The tool used is one that does not get that much attention. It takes its time to complete but it gets whatever it is the query says. The tool does its job admirably for several years now. The one redeeming advantage is that it does what 'official query' does not offer. It can be used never mind the size of the results.

Some say that it is unrealistic to ask for this quality of service from 'official query' because "it has not been designed with this in mind". The friendliest thing to say is that this is a mistake. Official Query was supposed to replace WDQ and when it cannot by design, the design if wrong. A better argument would be that Wikidata is one of the biggest public facing resources on the Internet and people are actually using it; at this time it cannot cope. It takes money and lots of money to serve the whole world. Possibly. This approach however is an acceptable argument. It allows for seeking one or more solutions.

One existing solution is the "Toolkit", when you can have your own datastore, you can throw as much hardware at it to get results. You can give the WMF targeted money to have more hardware for you and I or implement existing software that may do the trick. We could explore if federated technology as it exists for Wikipedia could make a difference. What cannot be done is hiding behind an arbitrary choice that was insufficient from the start because official query is to replace what we already have and not take away from it.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - Eric Kandel the relevance of his "occupation"

Mr Kandel won the Nobel prize among many other awards. His reputation is safe and it is why he is a good example to talk about what he is about and as importantly what he is not.

Wikipedia has it that he is a "neuropsychiatrist". Neuropsychiatry is a "branch of medicine that deals with mental disorders attributable to diseases of the nervous system". Given what Mr Kandel is known for, it makes sense to call him a "neurospsychologist" because neuropsychology "studies the structure and function of the brain as they relate to specific psychological processes and behaviors."

Mr Kandel may have studied psychoanalysis but the work he is celebrated for did not deal with people, so he did not deal with mental disorders; the Wikipedia text is quite clear about this. By considering Mr Kandel as a neuropsychiatrist, it is implied that his work has a practical application to mental health while at most his work helps explain how memory works.

The work of Mr Kandel is important but it is a fallacy to call it psychiatry when it so obviously is not. It is a fallacy because it takes away from what psychiatry is about.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Drapetomania is in other forms alive and well

A #scientist by the name of Samuel A. Cartwright wrote a paper defining a mental disorder called drapetomania. The suggested treatment was that "they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy. They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children to prevent and cure them from running away". The mental disorder described slaves that run away. Drapetomania is no longer believed to be a mental disorder.

In the twenty first century, professor Jonathan Metzl wrote a book called The Protest Psychosis, it describes how schizophrenia was used to define people who had notions about their civil rights. The book describes an era where the DSM-2 was the latest and greatest to define mental health.

It is all too easy to welcome the publication of Mr Metzl as an important work as has been done by leading psychological institutions. Both Mr Cartwright and the DSM-2 have already been shown to be obsolete.

What the aftermath of the DSM-2 and Mr Cartwright prove is that papers on psychiatry cannot be relied on because current approaches to psychiatry are equally problematic. A recent publication (in Dutch) provides many arguments. One of the more relevant arguments is that many of the current studies are not reproducible and what they describe are based on theoretical constructs that are not universally agreed upon.

The book argues that publications about subjects that are fashionable have a better chance of being published over publications that expose methodological weaknesses (Delespaul, Milo, Schalken, Boevink & Os, 2015 p31,32).

Given that there is enough literature to support this point of view, what does it mean for a Wikipedia where sources are a holy grail that is to be ingested without all too much salt? What sources can be relied on and why and how do we recognise official pot quackery?
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Michael Milo, a Dutch #psychiatrist

Together with several others Michael Milo authored a book about mental health. Adding humans to Wikidata is trivially easy, Mr Milo is relevant as an author of the book so that explains the initial notability.

Given that mental health is not well represented on any Wikipedia, it helps when Wikidata has at least some information. Asking Mr Milo was easy; he can be found on social media, So the source of the information on his profile came in the form of personal communication.

A picture paints a thousand words and Mr Milo promised to upload a photo to Commons. Once we have similar information about all the authors of the book, it becomes easier to write about them on Wikipedia. All the authors are notable in their own right. It just takes someone to write or improve their articles.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - #Recovery and #mental health

Recovery is not a method. According to Anthony it is a vision. Anthony describes the origin of recovery and it has not much to do with the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous like the Wikipedia article says.

Even when you know all these things, starting to make changes is a daunting prospect. The article does not invite you learn more about recovery, it lacks focus and trivia like a possible etymology detracts from the subject. It becomes too long to read.

However, changing a Wikipedia article is frightening. Even when information is manifestly wrong, there is all the baggage required before you can edit an article. When I wanted to "fix" an incorrect link, I wanted to preserve the fact that the link was not a red link. I removed the #redirect and it was "wrong". I wrote a minimal stub, I even included a source and it was "wrong". The article is destined for deletion so the problem is likely to remain. Apparently nobody cares, I informed about the issue on talk pages; it took me already too much ..

I remember the days when it was welcomed to be brave.

The coverage of mental health is sub standard. My question is how to improve this. The question why it needs improvement is easy and obvious. The prevalence of mental health is such that high quality information is extremely relevant. When people are to recover, they have to rely largely on their own resources, their own ability, their own sense of self.

Working on Wikipedia articles is not my cup of tea. Working towards an editathon on the subject is. It will still have the same amount of stress but it will not be my stress. It will be real Wikipedians and people knowledgeable on the subject who will together make a difference.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - a 20% error rate

The one thing that makes Wikipedia strong are its wiki links. When they work they are great.. when they work they are.

The article on the Spearman Medal is a case in point. This medal is conferred by the British Psychological Society to psychologists. There were 19 links and two were wrong. One link was to a soccer and one to a football player. The award is conferred since 1965 so there ought to be quite a number of red links

With two sportsmen attributed to winning the Spearman Medal there was an error rate of 20%. With all the red links it is easy to be more informative using Wikidata. With such statistics it is obvious to make the argument that replacing links with links through Wikidata will enhance quality in the English Wikipedia.

This is unlikely to happen. Wikipedians seem to be more concerned in finding fault elsewhere than considering the quality of their own project. Particularly when "outsiders" point them to the error in their ways. It is psychology in action. 
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - William Anthony, PhD

Mr Anthony defined recovery and his definition is quoted on Wikipedia:

"Recovery is a deeply personal, unique process of changing one’s attitudes, values, feelings, goals, skills and/or roles. It is a way of living a satisfying, hopeful, and contributing life even with limitations caused by the illness. Recovery involves the development of new meaning and purpose in one’s life as one grows beyond the catastrophic effects of mental illness."

Recovery in psychiatry is proven effective. Mr Anthony does not have an article in any Wikipedia and, that can easily be understood as being part of the stigma that the subject holds.

In constructing a Wikidata item for Mr Anthony, there is the website on the Centre of Psychiatric Rehabilitation, it is part of Boston University. It has a page on Mr Anthony and it is definitely a source. Many publications and awards are listed and as you may expect many of those awards have no articles either.

In order to honour Mr Anthony, the awards had to be added. Several of the organisations that conferred the award had to be added as a consequence. That is where the page on Mr Anthony becomes a problem. A single reference to an award is not that great. But what to do if it is hard to find on the Internet?
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - Wilma Boevink and the #stigma of #psychiatry

A subject like psychiatry is all too often ignored, neglected and not a topic people spend equal effort on. When people rely on Wikipedia as a primary source for information it is vital that they find concepts like recovery. It is what gives them hope. It is what tells them that even when they suffer from psychiatric ailments there is hope. They can learn to manage their situation, they can become more integrated, achieve the goals they strive for.

Mrs Boevink is a leading light in the Netherlands. She has been pivotal in a movement that empowers people to pick up their lives and make the most of it. She is a published author, published often and published with many others. A person as notable deserves an article in Wikipedia but for now, Wikidata will do.

When people talk about quality, it is easily abstract. Mrs Boevink was instrumental in the development of the HEE method. It has been proven as an effective intervention of aiding people in their process of recovery. This "intervention" has no link yet in Wikidata and, I have no clue how to indicate that it has been certified as such.

By including information like this, it is easy to learn about recovery, about HEE, about Mrs Boevink and, it enables people to inform themselves. Insurance companies make it really hard to fund the people best positioned to provide HEE. They manipulate information by informing the public just so. Such manipulations become hard when Wikipedia provides its NPOV about this topic.

Both Wikipedia and Wikidata are works in progress. They do improve their quality and it does not take a genius to understand how Wikipedias in a language are manipulated. It takes some sober reflection to understand that an existing lack of information enables manipulation as easily. Subjects that are associated with discrimination, stigmatisation are exactly where people are vulnerable and where basic, encyclopaedic information is really needed.
Thanks,
      GerardM