Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
May 12th, 2012 at 10:30AM
… a steaming tureen of tricyclics – now there’s a good alliterative image, UD.
How about a Prozac pot pie for a side dish, along with Abilify in aspic and Seroquel sauce?
May 12th, 2012 at 10:59AM
adam: Yummy!
May 12th, 2012 at 11:03AM
What I’ve never understood about this common focus at UD, is why psychiatry and mental health is singled out. This pattern of diagnosing (and treating) every “disorder” is characteristic of all American medicine, and the negative impacts of it are far greater in physical health than in mental health.
May 12th, 2012 at 11:39AM
By the time of the next edition of the Diagnostic Manual, the majority of Americans will be diagnosed with a disorder of some kind– so it will be appropriate to define a new (treatable!) disorder of ‘normality’, a condition endured by the few individuals who got missed the first time around.
May 12th, 2012 at 1:15PM
GTWMA: I guess the reason I say little about it is the same reason one reads little about it in the larger culture: It’s a much more complicated subject. We can agree that high blood pressure is over-diagnosed and over-treated in this country, and that certain medical devices are implanted in bodies that don’t need them. (Indeed this blog has posted a lot about orthopedic scandals.) We can certainly talk all day about dangerous weight-reduction surgeries and some plastic surgeries. But is it really true to say that physical health is more imperiled by over-diagnosing and treating than mental? The lack of any biomarkers for mental offers an absolutely open field to medical practice and the pharmaceutical industry.
May 12th, 2012 at 4:56PM
An important difference between psychiatry and the rest of medicine is the issue of CONTROL. The American Psychiatric Association imposed a top-down style of revisions in diagnostic criteria. The guiding principles were pragmatism, palatability, and payoff. Clinical science took a back seat, but it was used as a veneer. In other branches of medicine the process is bottom-up and is driven by emerging evidence as new information is gained, understood, and synthesized. A second difference is that the periodic DSM revisions aim immodestly to cover the psychiatric waterfront whereas the process occurs one disorder at a time in general medicine: When new criteria for the diagnosis of diabetes are decided, nobody feels compelled at the same time to tweak the criteria for, say, osteoporosis. A third difference is that no other professional medical organization has so assiduously profited from this activity – to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
At least in earlier days the process for DSM-III and DSM-IV was reasonably transparent. The architects of DSM-5, however, give a sham appearance of transparency. They have acted vindictively towards critics; they have threatened legal action to protect their trademark through contrived SLAPP notices; they shut down at least one website that provided commentary; and, in my experience, constructive suggestions simply disappear into a black hole, never to receive a collegial response.
Who needs these people or their work product?
May 12th, 2012 at 5:10PM
Who needs these people or their work product?
Eli Lilly, JNJ, GSK, Forest, Pfizer, Upjohn, AstraZeneca, Novartis, and others…
May 12th, 2012 at 6:03PM
Let me just supplement Dr Carroll’s penetrating comment by pointing out that the disease-designers at DSM believe that they, too, are evidence-driven — and the studies that the Task Force bats around are legion. The problem is that all this data is being poured into corrupted vessels. Let’s say you have tons of data on the diagnosis “hysteria,” or the diagnosis “moonbeams.” The data, though ample, would be meaningless. Similarly, the main concepts of DSM, such as “major depression,” are meaningless artifacts, and gathering information on age at onset, response to treatment etc would be like lumping measles and tuberculosis together and then gathering data on that entity. DSM will never right itself in these seas of artifact. It needs to be scrapped, but, of course, won’t be.
May 13th, 2012 at 7:39AM
Old saying: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
And if the American Barber’s Association puts out a diagnostic guide of “signs that you need a haircut right now,” one shouldn’t be surprised if it skews a little to the “yes, you sure do!” side.
May 14th, 2012 at 10:22PM
Is there a lot of over-treatment in physical health?
Damn straight!
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/16/us-overtreatment-idUSTRE81F0UF20120216
While there is, no doubt, the opportunity for better evidence in physical health, there is rampant conflicts of interest that create misleading evidence, contribute to huge costs and threaten health.
“A study published in the October 2011 issue of the British Medical Journal showed that almost half of doctors involved in setting clinical guidelines in the United States and Canada for diabetes and cholesterol between 2000 and 2010 had conflicts of interest.”
And, yes, UD, when errors and hospital acquired infections, are causing tens of thousands of deaths, when 2 percent of all cancers in the US are attributed to overuse of CT scans, when overuse of antibiotics is responsible for runaway resistant strains that cause death and injury, overtreatment in physical health, I think any objective observer would say, is at least as big, if not a much bigger, threat to health.