Psychiatrist- Busted Myths with Data
Believing that the common way of treating a mental health issue could be improved, would take courage to try to implement change. Her mentor taught her that the best way to persuade change was to use data, not merely new suggestions.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
PC’s father worked for a clothing company. Her mother was active in the movement for women to obtain the right to vote, something that PC would later cite as an inspiration for her own career helping others, especially women, deal with a problem specific to women.
CHILDHOOD INTERESTS
As a little girl, PC observed her mother caring about women in the world outside their home. PC adopted her mother’s desire to help others.
EDUCATION
PC was a dedicated student through her elementary, middle and high school years, earning enrollment at a nationally well-regarded university, where she studied pre-med. Following college graduation, PC enrolled in medical school, where she so impressed the faculty with her dedication to learning and to utilizing sound judgment in diagnosing medical problems, that she was invited to join the medical school faculty as her first job following medical school graduation.
MEDICAL SCHOOL CLASS CREATES AN IDEA FOR DIFFERENT TREATMENT
Early in her time as a medical student, the budding physician PC watched a psychiatrist analyze a patient with clinical depression. The doctor, a female who had herself been analyzed by both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, asked the patient to explain his dreams. (Editor – At the time, the Freud and Jung were widely respected ‘Giants’ within the world of psychiatry, for their theories of psychiatric analysis and treatment focused on analyzing patient dreams as the starting point for their analysis and treatment plans.)
When that day’s medical school class with an actual patient was nearly completed, the professor / doctor did something that Freud would never have done: she prescribed electroshock therapy for the depressed patient. This was an astonishing revelation for PC: the old methods of psychiatry, steeped in Freudian theory, had their limits so PC began to realize that better psychological treatments were needed.
PC came to believe that a new approach was necessary, beyond those following Freudian / Jung based analysis’s reliance on talk therapy, but instead, what was needed was a scientific approach based not on philosophy and speculation but in empirical research and data – leading to objective conclusions, based on statistically observable data, supporting reproducible results.
PC’s mentor at the university, impressed upon all his students the commandment: “Data Shall Be Your God.” PC applied that commandment to the study of mental illness, believing that like any other illness, it could be properly diagnosed and treated.
MEDICAL CAREER COMMENCES
While a member of a university’s medical school faculty, PC along with her mentor and another colleague, published “Manic Depressive Illness,” one of the first books to study manic depression through a rigorous, outcome-based approach.
PC and her co-authors found that manic depression was most likely hereditary, that it affected men and women differently and that it had a high morbidity (death) rate – that is, many patients, left untreated, died by suicide. The “untreated” part is important because PC went on to become one of the leading voices for destigmatizing depression and suicide in America.
PC decided it would be her mission to translate the latest research on mental illness for a broad audience at a time when issues like mania and suicide were still shrouded in mystery and myth. As a professor at a university, and later as the medical director of a foundation involved in suicide prevention, PC worked tirelessly to show the public what medical researchers already knew: that suicide almost always resulted from an underlying mental illness.
USING SCIENTIFIC DATA TO BUST MYTHS
Instead of relying on patients’ recollections of their dreams while asleep, PC and her psychiatric colleagues researched mental health issues by studying multiple patients and collecting data to understand if PC’s findings could be reproduced with different patients.
PC reveled in the role of MythBuster. Her first focus was suicides, using data to dispute the conventional wisdom (‘myth’) that suicides peak around holidays. Not so, PC told reporters, audiences, and congressional hearings. On the contrary, April and May see the highest numbers of suicides.
The next myth busted was that most suicide victims were women. On the contrary, data proved that while women attempt suicide twice as often as men, the men are four times as successful.
A third myth among psychiatrists and the public was that the manic outbursts of energy resulting from bipolar disorder, were a seedbed for great art and ideas. On the contrary, PC’s data driven studies failed to support that romanticized notion.
A fourth myth involved bereavement and grief as depressive episodes. On the contrary, the data demonstrated that while bereavement and grief can trigger major depression, periods of grief, even lasting a year, were not in themselves, depressive episodes.
Finally, PC’s data showed that grief, far from progressing along a predictable, neatly described, five-stage process, was personal and idiosyncratic – an insight that changed the way doctors and the public understand how people deal with loss.
PC was very publicly vocal about suicide among Native Americans and members of the military and veterans, whose rates for suicide spiked after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. She urged insurance companies to improve mental health coverage.
CAREER SATISFACTION
“PC was a very careful empirical researcher at a time when empirical research did not hold much sway,” noted a fellow psychiatrist at a different medical school.
“Before PC, people talked about suicide like it was this mystical, horrifying behavior,” said a colleague.” PC’s work destigmatized depression and because of that, so many people owe their lives to her.”
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This career story is based on an obituary written by Clay Risen, published within The New York Times on 10/8/21.
