Misleading articles

I always immediately become skeptical when someone begins a sentence with the words “studies have shown”. A lot of those studies were intended to support an agenda, and they are so artificial that they have little relevance to the real world.

Uh…yeah lots of articles are full of holes. Cheese articles. Full of holes. Most articles fall into this category.

But most research that actually educates scientists is peer reviewed and not available for free to the public. I have read an obscene amount of research which is not just handed out to lay people. It’s because it’s beyond lay people, you have to be in the psychology deal to have a clue as to what it is even talking about.

There are ways research is improved- peer reviewed proposals of methods, removal of funding that clouds the results, probing of research questions- stuff I have been through.

I think some people get online news “articles” confused with scholarly journal articles- a grave mistake. It’s innocent, but it’s very wrong. It’s not acceptable to say that huffington post or a trending Facebook article is true. It’s only “possibly true” if it is in a scholarly journal. Even then, it’s just possibly true. Repeated experiments are what is considered “pretty much true, truer than anything else”.

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So true. Like, that study about the link between taking antidepressants during pregnancy and increased risk of autism ( I posted it in News section) later got a lot of critics for making a conclusions that could affect future mothers in the way it was with those '80s ‘studies’ claiming a link between vaccines and autism which had a global consequences.

Right- one study is not enough to prove something- there need to be repeats to make sure it is true

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To be fair huffpo articles on mental heath are often expressing a POV rather than arguing absolute truths . Many news articles on mental health are reporting on scholarly research. Some do a better job than others in doing so . We have to ask ourselves do we want a public/the mentally ill/their carers better educated on mental health, or do we go down the route of assuming only psychiatrists and psychologists are worthy of having such knowledge?
To go down such a route to my mind would be counter productive to improving mental health care.
Knowledge, be it to do with mental health or anything else, should not be the sole property of a so called,often self labelled, “intellectual elite” .

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Well I agree. That’s why my research is easy to read.