NIMH Gets a Rebuke for Its News Reporting

By John M Grohol PsyD
November 9, 2007

If you ever need a good laugh, make sure you add CL Psych’s Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look blog to your feeds. Every week, without fail, this academic makes mince-meat of everyday clinical psychology and psychiatry reporting, research, and more. He keeps me on my toes and makes me want to do everything we can do here to try and not fall into the kinds of traps he regularly journals about.

I hope the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health is also reading his blog, because he calls them out for what he views as their poor reporting on the SSRI/suicide issue in September:

Enter NIMH: In a story datelined September 19, 2007, Jules Asher wrote a story for the NIMH website. As of today, it is still available. It mentions that

” …based on mathematical models using previous years’ data, the authors predicted an 18 percent increase in youth suicides between 2003 and 2005.”

And, as mentioned above, this prediction turned out to be incorrect. Youth suicide rates in 2005 showed little change from 2004.

Health news writers often don’t have the background and take the time to dig into data and results as CL Psych (and occasionally we here) do. Does that excuse their behavior? No, not at all — they should take the time to do the story right, or make corrections to the story after the fact when made aware of such problems in their reporting.

(Unlike the NIMH, we’re happy to admit when we got something wrong and we’ll correct a story we’ve got wrong. Let us know when you find an error on our site and we’ll correct it.)

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.