While researching the history of psychology, I come across a lot of interesting information. Every month I share five pieces, podcasts or videos that you might find fascinating, too.

Last month we talked about Alan Turing, Carl Jung and the famous Robbers Cave Experiment.

This month we’ve got quite the array of topics and in various mediums, including a podcast and a few videos. You’ll learn about the first sport psychologist, the infamous Wolf Man, the history of treating depression, mental asylums and a recent film featuring psychology’s masterminds.

Even in today’s advanced world, there’s still much misunderstanding and stigma surrounding mental illness. Many of us are quick to dismiss people with mental illness as inferior or less than or wonder why they can’t just snap out of it.

Many of us also rarely believe that mental illness merits the same understanding and compassion as medical illnesses such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease.

Such stigma has devastating effects. It “prevents some people from accessing support and professional help and breeds shame and secrecy, which can significantly worsen a person’s condition as well as their prognosis — even to a point of being life-threatening, in the case of suicidal ideation,” according to Joyce Marter, LCPC, a psychotherapist and owner of Urban Balance, a multi-site counseling practice in the greater Chicago area.

That’s why it’s so important to talk about the facts. Below, experts share accurate information about mental illness.

Demonstrating that the folks who are revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) are listening to the scientific data, they have nixed two new proposed diagnoses — anxiety-depressive syndrome and attenuated psychosis syndrome. The changes were announced this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, the organization largely responsible for updating the reference manual used by health and mental health professionals to make diagnoses.

The critics were worried that these new diagnoses would label millions of Americans with a mental disorder — and offering them subsequent treatment — that today wouldn’t qualify for such diagnosis or treatment.

For instance, while anxiety mixed with depression is actually quite commonly seen in the wild of clinical practices, there is no specific diagnosis for this mixed mood state. The DSM-5 sought to correct this problem — that clinicians are treating millions for a problem the DSM says doesn’t technically exist. But critics worried the new criteria were too lax and might result in over-diagnosis.

The same was true for attenuated psychosis syndrome. The proposed diagnosis was an effort to get children and young adults into treatment sooner for experiencing weird thoughts or hallucinations. But people worried that it would lead to unnecessary treatment of kids for a potentially temporary problem.

Money may not buy you love. But in the 19th century, if you were well off, it could snag you a “home-away-from-home” private hospital. These rich-only places were a far cry from the overcrowded and filthy public asylums of the day, according to this article in March’s issue of Monitor on Psychology.

The terrible conditions of public asylums that prompted physicians to open their homes to wealthy psychiatric patients. Rich patients could expect tranquil, scenic environments and — for that time ­– state-of-the-art treatments. Boris Sidis was one of the physicians who established a private hospital.

Every month I share the most interesting articles I’ve come across while writing about the history of psychology.

This month, you’ll find everything from the birthplace of psychoanalysis in America — hint: it’s not New York City — to the founder of cognitive psychology to an entire series on mental illness and last rites.

Let’s get started…

Are placebos — sugar pills — just as effective as antidepressant medications in the treatment of mild and moderate depression? That’s what a 60 Minutes piece last night tried to find out.

In discussing her reaction to discovering that the placebo effect may be more powerful than we previously knew in antidepressant research, CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl says, “I walked away really confused.”

After viewing her piece, I walked away with the same reaction.

What’s an ordinary person supposed to gain from watching this segment, boiling down decades’ worth of antidepressant research and thousands of studies into less than 20 minutes? I’m not sure.

As I was sitting around catching up on some mental health news on Saturday, I inadvertently stumbled upon another manufactured news cycle about the DSM 5. Considering no new significant research findings were released in the past week on the DSM-5 revision efforts, I was a little surprised.

This latest fake news cycle started on Thursday, apparently with the release of a Reuters news story from Kate Kelland. Kelland notes the newest concern comes from “Liverpool University’s Institute of Psychology at a briefing in London about widespread concerns over the manual.” There’s no link to the briefing. And I’m not sure what a “briefing” is — a press conference? (And since when is a press conference a news item? It’s not really equivalent to a new research study, is it?)

Kelland fails to note that Europe and the U.K. don’t actually use the DSM to diagnose mental disorders — it’s a U.S. reference manual for mental disorders diagnosis. So while it’s nice that some Europeans are expressing concern about this reference text, their concern isn’t exactly much relevant. Context is everything, and Reuters failed to provide any useful context in that article.

Sadly, Reuters is a brand name. And once you write an article under that brand name, it cascades down an entire news cycle. Let’s follow it for fun!

You may not be as familiar with Karl Kahlbaum as you are with Emil Kraepelin, one of the most pivotal psychiatrists of his time who developed the modern classification of mental disorders.

But Kahlbaum paved the way for Kraepelin’s renowned work and also made some remarkable contributions of his own. In fact, Kahlbaum’s ideas — along with his assistant Ewald Hecker — influenced Kraepelin’s two major concepts: manic depression and dementia praecox (what we today call schizophrenia).

According to Richard Noll, associate professor of psychology at DeSales University, in his book American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, “What he produced would eventually revolutionize psychiatry once Kraepelin applied Kahlbaum’s concepts in Heidelberg [where Kraepelin lived and worked].”

Like Kraepelin, Kahlbaum was a German psychiatrist. Born in 1828 in Eastern Germany, Kahlbaum studied medicine at several universities: Königsberg, Würzburg and Leipzig. (He passed away in 1899.) After receiving his medical degree, working at a psychiatric clinic and teaching classes at Königsberg University, Kahlbaum began working at a private psychiatric hospital. He bought the hospital in 1867 and renamed the facility after himself (it was named for the previous owner).

A friend of mine went on vacation for just a few days the other week out-of-state. She called me in a panic.

“I forgot my meds!”

“I wish I could help you out. Have you tried calling your doctor?”

“I did, and I got this weird message about needing to unblock my phone, press *87 for a callback. That was hours ago, and still no call back!”

Hmm, no callback after hours?

So I offered to call her doctor for her on a landline, got right through, and got a real phone number that she was then able to use with little trouble. However, she still had to leave a message for the physician on call, and is still sitting there, waiting patiently for a callback that may or may not come.

It got me to wondering… Shouldn’t there be a more reliable system in place for people who are taking everyday medications, but forget them when they go away? Or, inadvertantly run out of them and get them through mail-order?

“It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.”
~ Sir William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)

Most psychiatrists, and many patients, sense that psychiatry is in trouble these days. The reasons are complex, but boil down to a crisis of confidence: many in the general public — if they ever had faith in psychiatry — have begun to lose it.

Many psychiatrists who, like me, began their careers with hopeful idealism are now expressing pessimism or cynicism. Here, too, the reasons are complex, and have much to do with the sense that psychiatry has drifted away from its core values and central mission: the relief of human suffering and incapacity. Of course, the corrosive influence of “Big Pharma” and the gradual decline in the use of psychotherapy have contributed to this down-beat attitude.

And the highly-publicized dust-up over revision of psychiatry’s diagnostic classification — the DSM-5 (what the media love to call, “Psychiatry’s Bible”) — has certainly not filled psychiatrists with joy.

I constantly struggle with the backlash against the DSM 5 — the latest revision of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Every medical text is revised decade after decade with little significant argument.

But when it comes to mental disorders, apparently there’s a different standard for them — one that is neither equal nor fair when compared to their medical brethren.

The latest article on the controversy comes from Rob Waters writing his hyperbole earlier this week over at Salon.com (ridiculous sample: “As the task force producing it has posted drafts on its website, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction has exploded into a full-scale revolt by members of U.S. and British psychological and counseling organization.” [emphasis added]). Repeating many tired phrases like “bible of mental health” in reporting on this story, it’s not exactly clear there’s any objectiveness. Instead, it’s heavily slanted toward the opponents of the revision of the manual.

The proponents are led, ironically, by the former head of the last revision process, creating the DSM-IV, Allen Frances, who gleefully blogs about all the problems he sees in the DSM-5 revision process over at Psychology Today.

It gets even more ironic when you look at the criticisms leveled at the DSM-5 — criticisms that began a long time ago, in a revision we’re all familiar with called… yes, you guessed it, the DSM-IV.

In a small clinical study published a few weeks ago, researchers didn’t find much difference between the three treatment groups of depressed subjects they studied — a group that received antidepressant medications, a group that received a specific type of not-commonly-practiced psychodynamic psychotherapy, and a group that received a sugar pill.

But there were some serious issues with this study from the onset, issues that call into question not only the generalizability of the results, but also their validity. It’s a shame that Reuters, who picked up on the study just yesterday, glossed over the methodology problems of the study, and instead just repeated the results as a shiny new established fact.

And easily lost in the discussion is the best result of them all — 16 weeks was all that was needed for most people in the study (who completed it) to find improvement in the symptoms of their depression, no matter what the treatment.

Let’s see what went wrong, and what the study actually tells us…