Monday, October 22, 2007

Lack of Insight


Anti-science fear mongers like the Treatment Advocacy Center advocate forced medication and confinement of people labeled as having mental illnesses based on the claim that people so labeled lack insight, however, this argument is specious for numerous reasons one of which is the notorious lack of insight of clinicians who assign psychiatric labels to humans:

"Clinicians, even well-trained ones, often have excess confidence in their own perceptions, are sometimes influenced by biases and agendas that they themselves do not fully appreciate, and are frequently resistant to the base rates of dangerousness for the populations they are evaluating."

Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes by Frederick Schauer