| Abstract: | My book Pure types are rare: Myths and meanings of madness (see record 2007-08930-001) may have piqued some members of the mental health community; thus I was not entirely surprised by the caustic review that appeared in the January 1985 issue of Canadian Psychology, nor do I wish to engage the polemics or the personal asides therein. I am impelled, however, to respond to the allegation of "repeated failure of professional scholarship." The reviewer provides three substantive examples. In the first, he objects to the citation following my statement that post-mortem studies have failed to find neurological correlates of senile dementia, and implies that the study cited did find such correlates. Actually, the study was inadequate for the question inasmuch as statistics were not presented for senile dementia exclusive of other conditions, and normal controls were not used. The second maintains that I underestimated the significance of a concordance rate of 53% for the diagnosis of schizophrenia between two psychiatrists examining the same patient, and says it should actually be "somewhere beyond even the .00000001 level." My point, however, was that in vivo, where more than 50% of mental patients are diagnosed schizophrenic, a 53% concordance rate represents chance. Third, Professor Burd relates several sentences of mine to make it appear that I questioned the validity of the co-twin data on genetic factors in schizophrenia on the "curious grounds" that similar data have been obtained for a variety of behavioural and personality traits. I will comment on the statement "There are but a dozen references to articles in established professional journals." I did not attempt to deduce the criteria for "established," nor did I count journals, but I did ascertain that there were 112 citations in the text, comprising 80 separate sources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
