The authors of an article on the website of Scientific American Mind are entitled to their opinion on whether or not children can get bipolar disorder. They are not entitled to dress up their opinion as reporting.
The article, by Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz, is headlined "Do Kids Get Bipolar Disorder?" That promises a broad examination of the topic. But that's not what we get.
The authors begin their story with a boy with behavior problems. But he's a fabrication. The story begins: "Imagine an eight-year old boy whom we will call Eric..." Imagination is a beautiful thing, but we should be wary of imagining characters in nonfiction. (Although it's a lot easier than finding real kids.)
They then recite statistics showing that the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children has risen sharply in recent years. This can mean one of two things: Many children are being overdiagnosed. Or many children were underdiagnosed in the past and are now being found.
Lilienfeld and Arkowitz have made up their minds: "In this column, we discuss controversies regarding the overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder...," they write. (Italics mine.) The headline was a tease. They were not intent upon exploring the question of whether kids get bipolar disorder. They already had their answer: Overdiagnosis.
It's a fair opinion, and they make a reasonable argument to support it. But a better headline would have been: "Too Many Kids Are Being Diagnosed With Bipolar Disorder." And the imaginary boy did nothing to help them make their case.
Comments
Michael,
I don't understand the distinction you're making between reporters and experts. Being a psychologist does not excuse one from writing clearly, doing reporting, or using real examples to make a point. Experts have as much obligation to be accurate as anyone else, don't you think?
If the piece had clearly been labeled as an expert commentary with a point of view, I would still object to using invented characters to make a point. One would hope that editors of professional journals would feel the same way about articles that appear in their pages.
Thanks Paul. Indeed, I do work at SciAm; the editors who produce Mind are friends and colleagues. I personally have nothing to do with Mind, however, which is just as well considering my meager knowledge of neuroscience.
It's unfortunate the online version of the column wasn't sufficiently advertised as an expert-written piece. I'm sure you were not the only reader who assumed it was hard news upon diving in.
Yet by your own account you realized it was expert-authored when you finished the story. And yet you go on to accuse the authors of, in essence, being lazy journalists for not finding a real eight-year-old-boy--even though you knew they were academic psychologists? I find the criticism ungenerous, at best.
Michael,
I'm assuming you're the Michael Moyer who is an editor at Scientific American; please correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks for responding.
Yes, the authors are identified as psychologists online, but it's at the end of the piece, on the second part of the article on a separate web page. Indeed, their identification runs twice--an error feeding the info to the web, I'm guessing. That does not change my view of the piece; whether written by scientists or reporters, it still served up a bait-and-switch, as you put it.
And, yes, the subhed is there--"the problem has not gone away." But I read that as supporting the headline--that the problem of overdiagnosis has not gone away.
And, yes, when I finished the piece, it was clear to me it was an expert-authored piece; but I was well into it before that became clear.
Further, I neglected to mention that there was a second apparent error in translation to the web. The piece refers to a "box on opposite page."
All of this is unfortunate, because they do have something interesting to say about DSM-5. But the message was lost in the packaging, I think.
Your criticism seems to be that of a bait-and-switch: the headline led you to expect a straight-ahead news piece, but instead you encountered an opinion piece. Let me provide a little more context. The piece appears in the "Facts and Fictions in Mental Health" column in the July/August issue of Mind. The authors are clearly identified as psychology professors, not reporters, with photos of their smiling mugs right up next to the headline and subhead. That subhead? "Psychiatrists may be pinning this label on too many children, but the problem has not gone away," which isn't all too different from your suggested headline. In short, it should be clear to any reader that the story is an expert-authored magazine column, not a journalist-authored hard news piece.
(You could argue that all this contextual information gets lost in the online version, but that's not the case: the column heading, the subhead, and the author bios appear just as they do in the print magazine. The headshots, sadly, do not.)