Login to Change.org
Create an Account
Eric Bohlman
Recent Activity
-
Eric commented on the article |You need to keep in mind that DADT has disproportionately affected women (the percentage of DADT discharges involving women significantly exceeds the percentage of women in the military), and that in several cases threats to accuse a woman of lesbianism have been used as a form of sexual harassment. A lot of straight females would view DADT as a weapon that could be pointed at them.
-
Eric commented on the article |Sweden's a sport as well as a country now? :)
-
Eric commented on the article |A couple points:
1) The overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse is, and always has been, committed by authority figures in the child's life; the second biggest category is trusted non-authority adults like relatives or family friends. Despite the fact that almost everybody who hasn't studied the subject thinks of sexual abuse in terms of "stranger danger", strangers account for (and have always accounted for) less than 7% of CSA.
2) The overwhelming majority of offenders had no prior convictions at the time of the offense. Thus, screening is of very limited value and can lead to a false sense of security if overemphasized (it has to be done, but it shouldn't be seen as the primary method of defense). The solutions are structural: avoid creating situations where abuse is possible (remember, for example, the CSA is always extremely secretive; while there were high-profile convictions of mass sexual abuse in broad daylight in daycare centers in the 1980s, most of them involved less real evidence than the Salem witch trials).
3) Addressing Erin's point, the belief that those who are sexually abused will almost inevitably go on to sexually abuse others unless they get therapy (which mainly consists of repeatedly re-experiencing the event) is one of the most common myths of pop psychology. All studies done have shown that it isn't true (and it shouldn't be surprising; if it were true, how would you account for the fact that the overwhelming majority of victims are female whereas the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male?).
It is true that physical abusers are more likely than the general population to have been physically abused themselves, but it is not true that people who have been physically abused are especially likely to become physical abusers (the logic error here is really an arithmetic one, confusing two fractions with the same numerator but different denominators).
4) Institutional settings are always going to pose a higher risk for undiscovered abuse than non-institutional settings (note, though, that the majority of abuse is always going to take place in the home simply because that's where most kids spend most of their time).
5) Addressing Cheryl, another myth is that there are definitive behavioral signs that a child has been sexually abused. In fact, there's no definable psychological syndrome associated with having been abused. Therapists who are sure there is are generally comitting a logic error called affirming the consequent; in order to state that a particular symptom is a sign of sexual abuse, it's not enough to demonstrate that it's common in abused kids; you also have to show that it's rare in non-abused kids (think of those "are your teenagers on drugs" PSAs; most of those "signs" are ordinary adolescent behaviors).
-
Eric commented on the article |Would everybody who's still saying that a vaccinated/unvaccinated study could be easily done please read Prometheus' post referenced by Ken? Most of the study "designs" being proposed here would really amount to comparison of the health status of unvaccinated upper-middle-class white suburban kids vs. vaccinated working-and-lower-class black and brown inner-city kids. The unvaccinated kids would come off better in such a study, and certainly the (meaningless) raw results would get far more press coverage than the adjusted-for-confounders results. It would be like a study finding that children of working mothers commit more crimes than children of stay-at-home mothers, where those who actually read the paper find out that the WM group had an average age of 16 wherease the SAHM group had an average age of 3. Teenagers commit more (p<.001) crimes than toddlers: film at 11 (in the vaccine study, I imagine the finding that unvaccinated boys are less likely to get pregnant than vaccinated girls would get at least some mention).
-
Eric commented on the article |It always amazes me when people complain that there are different standards to determine whether an individual is covered by the ADA for employment-discrimination purposes and whether an individual is eligible to receive disability income. It's trivially easy for me, a TAB person, to figure that it would be completely nonsensical to use the same criteria, since that would mean both providing welfare benefits to people who can work and requiring employers to hire people who can't do the job. Of course logic doesn't enter into it; what's really going on is an emotional aversion to paying taxes and to having to live in a world that includes people you haven't specifically chosen to invite into it.
-
Eric commented on the article |I have to agree with Ken that what Lee's child is experiencing looks an awful lot like a typical placebo response (which is due not merely to expectancy effects, but also due to the normal ups and downs of autism and of development in general). Classically, everything you try will seem to work for a while and then stop.
My understanding is that marijuana can sometimes aggravate anxiety disorders, particularly those involving panic attacks, so I'd be quite careful.
-
Eric commented on the article |More often's the case that, you try one thing, it works at first, it works for awhile, it seems to be working----your child has a terrible awful day---you feel like you're back to square one.</blockquote>
This is almost a classical illustration of placebo effect (which is somewhat sloppy terminology, because it also includes effects like regression to the mean; the kid has his ups and downs, you're more likely to try an intervention during a down period, and a down period is likely to be followed by an up period, so it looks like the intervention did something even if it really didn't). This is very commonly seen with "alternative" treatments, but it also happens with "conventional" treatments, especially in a field like pediatric psychiatry that isn't very well-developed.
Impact
0 Actions
0 Recruits