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> Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on t

> Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on the debates around the validity and usefulness of the DSM? That's... risky. There are accreditation boards and professional orgs for a reason, and if they're pushing questionable science or standards they still control what the requirements are. Debating it behind closed doors with your peers is one thing, but it's another to air dirty laundry to the public. A professional puts out their doubts about [X] to the general public and then it gets picked up by cranks, "official doctor says [X] is bullshit, and that alternative [Y] might hold promise." And then people start buying healing crystals or Jordan Peterson or something.

skissane 6y ago
Has that actually happened to anyone? I can think of a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who have made contributions to the public debates relevant to their profession, and I've never heard of anyone being formally disciplined for expressing doubt about the science behind the DSM-5, or expressing concern about underdiagnosis/overdiagnosis, underprescribing/overprescribing, etc. (See for example CEP-UK [1] and the Critical Psychiatry Network [2] – many of the opinions of their members are rather unpopular with their peers, yet their members are still allowed to practice.) If some crank misuses a professional's comments to justify their crank views, that's not the professional's fault, and I've never heard of a professional being disciplined for that. [1] http://cepuk.org http://cepuk.org [2] https://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk https://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk