It is definitely in patients’ and Scott’s interest to maintain anonymity.
There is a tradition in therapy going back to Freud that the therapist should be a blank slate to the patient(there’s a technical term for this which I can’t recall..)
I agree that SSC being separate from his psychiatry is pretty important. I like SSC, and at the same time I would find it difficult to go to therapy knowing Scott is behind SSC. It would cause me to fixate on obsessional traits in myself, knowing that he is predisposed to the same thing.
That's not a very solid foundation. Pretty much everything from Freud has since been reconsidered.
My experience with therapists is that I want a certain connection, and I've been rather unsatisfied with most I've seen (though my sample size is only 4). It's not optimal to have to keep rolling the dice to try and find someone I'm comfortable opening up to, and of course both the situation where I'd need to find a new therapist and the US healthcare system (& attitude to mental health) do not make it any easier.
Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on the debates around the validity and usefulness of the DSM? Do they think overdiagnosis and/or underdiagnosis are problems? (It is possible to believe both are a problem simultaneously – I have heard some professionals express the opinion that ASD is overdiagnosed in males yet simultaneously underdiagnosed in females.) Are antidepressants overprescribed? Do antipsychotics cause brain atrophy?
For most professionals, however, it is quite hard to work this out, at least without asking them in person. (For a minority, who are involved in research/etc, one can look at their publications.)
So I'd actually encourage more mental health professionals to blog (or otherwise engage with the public) with their opinions on their field of professional expertise.
(SSC mostly isn't doing that, since Scott mostly comments on general topics, and only posts something on his profession every now and again. I often find what Scott has to say on general topics interesting, but I doubt I'd find what J. Random Psychiatrist or J. Random Psychologist has to say on general topics anywhere near as interesting.)
> Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on the debates around the validity and usefulness of the DSM?
That's... risky. There are accreditation boards and professional orgs for a reason, and if they're pushing questionable science or standards they still control what the requirements are.
Debating it behind closed doors with your peers is one thing, but it's another to air dirty laundry to the public. A professional puts out their doubts about [X] to the general public and then it gets picked up by cranks, "official doctor says [X] is bullshit, and that alternative [Y] might hold promise." And then people start buying healing crystals or Jordan Peterson or something.
Has that actually happened to anyone? I can think of a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who have made contributions to the public debates relevant to their profession, and I've never heard of anyone being formally disciplined for expressing doubt about the science behind the DSM-5, or expressing concern about underdiagnosis/overdiagnosis, underprescribing/overprescribing, etc. (See for example CEP-UK [1] and the Critical Psychiatry Network [2] – many of the opinions of their members are rather unpopular with their peers, yet their members are still allowed to practice.)
If some crank misuses a professional's comments to justify their crank views, that's not the professional's fault, and I've never heard of a professional being disciplined for that.
I am 100% for respecting Scott's wish for anonymity and in general there seems to be a strong norm of not giving to much personal information to patients in the psychiatrist and therapist communities.
But Scott doesn't exactly try to be a blank slate to patients, given that he mentions details like his time in Japan and his "struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder" in his public profile as a psychiatrist, which seems to be aimed at patients (there's a big button for booking an appointment).
Of course, there is a difference between making a few superficial details like this available to your patients or millions of words of your essays.
On the other hand, perhaps his patients should be aware about the fact that their psychiatrist is divulging what they probably thought of as their private information to the entire internet.
I disagree. I feel like that's up for the patient to decide. If I am going to tell my deepest secrets to someone I'd rather there not even be the faintest idea that details would be written about, even in very general ways.
I specifically had to sign a consent form before starting therapy, with exactly how my data would be handled and what could or could not be done with it. I think that is SOP in the field.
In the US, afaik, there is no such requirement, and publishing anonymized stories in pyschiatric journals is common practice, without any sort of consent.
Surely there is a difference between a professional journal with standards and peer review, and a public blog with a comments section that frequently features Steven Pinker and discussions about racial effects on IQ.
Sorry, I got my online Steves confused and meant Steve Sailer, not Pinker. For one, there aren't any professional journals for which Steve Sailer's ideas about race, IQ or the Holocaust would meet their standards. Second, doctors often get consent for case studies on their patients, and only give pertinent details like sex, age, or complicating medical conditions if absolutely necessary. Case studies are meant for professionals to peruse in an effort to better advance the field they practice in.
A personal blog where a psychiatrist divulges his patients' sexualities and relationship issues to pontificate about polyamorism with his laymen blog readers, including Steve Sailer, is not the same thing as a case study in a professional journal.
I agree that they are not the same. But I don't really understand why it is different in a way that changes its moral character. Steve Sailer can read psychiatry journals if he wants to. As long as the stories are well anonymized, I don't really see much difference.
There is a tradition in therapy going back to Freud that the therapist should be a blank slate to the patient(there’s a technical term for this which I can’t recall..)