Better than A Kick in the Teeth: A Drop in the Bucket

A kick in the teeth kind of thing:

To be filed under duh:

[Christopher Lohse], a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

…Lohse's study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person's psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

The study began in part as an advocacy project "designed to register mentally ill voters and encourage them" to vote, while assessing "knowledge of current issues, government and politics." (emphasis mine.)

And while I took this very annoyingly personally, it does represent a story of data-mining with tiny study groups (in this case it was under 70 people studied.)   Reasoning better supplied by Sly Civilian:

Let’s just get this clear. This “study” is meaningless. 69 is not a sample size. “Severity” is a word that has one meaning in institutional mental health settings: “non-compliance.” And what political preferences these people had do not actually predict the mental health of people who happen to share those political preferences. That’s called a logical fallacy. So running an after-study data-mine correlation between what patients are judged by others to be most “severely” affected by psychosis and a joke of a straw poll, and then laughing at the “political” implications of the above…
It’s despicable.
It’s politically meaningless, scientifically dishonest, encourages the trivialization of voting rights for disability communities, and above all, uses mental illness as a freaking bat in an eternal game of whack-a-fundie.
Goddammit, have we collectively learned nothing?

So today (early) the inbox brought this.

A Drop in the Bucket:

This year, National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression$19 million to fund research on the causes, treatment, and prevention of severe mental illnesses.
The grants were awarded to 273 scientists to broaden and deepen the investigation of brain and behavior disorders and bring new insight to such illnesses as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, autism, eating disorders, and other adult and childhood disorders. The funds support research at universities and institutions in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Switzerland, ranging from the genetics of schizophrenia to new treatments for depression.

With such a wide range of issues to address, and so many different ways this money is doled out, I wonder: what will be done for advocacy and stigma-busting?  Who else is reading this press release?  And, very cynically, how could anyone possibly turn this into comedy?

Comments

[The CultureGhost]

If you ever need a quick and easy read for a few laughs, try Philip K. Dick's "Clans of The Alphane Moon." Set in the future when we've colonized space this one moon is home to all of Earth's mentally ill and they've grouped themselves according to disorder. It was written many years ago so Dick's understanding of mental illness is congruent with the times.