“She’s somewhat neurotic,” he confides, “but she is bright, organized and conscientious–the type who’d get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu.” He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old “couldn’t see the big picture.” That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT. —Hara Estroff Marano —A Nation of Wimps (Psychology Today)
This is the kind of article that many of my students will mistake for a scholarly research paper.
Here’s a very interesting quotation, but since this is an article for a general audience, it does not refer to any evidence to back up its shocking claims.
American parents today expect their children to be perfect–the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can’t get the children to prove it on their own, they’ll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are.
Of course I’m not challenging the veracity of this article, I’m just noting that it’s not written for the convenience of a researcher, because the sources aren’t cited. Journalists are professional communicators whose readers are generally willing to trust the authority of the journalist; a scientific paper is written for an audience of peer scientists, so the author has to back up every claim.
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Ron and Evan -- both of you underscore my point, that an article published in a popular magazine does not fulfill the same function as a peer-reviewed article. A magazine sells copies if its articles are controversial. If they've pushed Evan's buttons, for example, then the circulation manager is happy.
Ron, I only see students citing Psychology Today when they are writing freshman composition papers, which usually means only their first term of college. Occasionally a sophomore or junior who's taking a lit survey course will slip in a non-academic article about depression or something like that, as background for a paper that argues author so-and-so or character so-and-so suffered from depression.
I gather that your profs made it clear to you and your fellow students that Psychology Today is not an authoratative source. But for students who do their academic research with FindArticles.com or regular mainstream Google, prying them away them from the popular magazines is not easy!
If this article is trying to convince the general public that mental disorders don't exist and parents "turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are," it's not working.
We have psychiatrists and psychologists for a reason besides filling jobs. We have research institutes such as the APA who have libraries worth of research proving that mental illnesses are a reality and this speculative article can't even come up with one piece of evidence to back up its claims.
It would be nice to think that all people have healthy minds, but that is not true. Anyone who has experienced, or known someone who has experienced, such conditions could understand what I mean. I know how destructive these disorders are first-hand, and when I look back, I would not go back to where I was psychologically for anything.
I would love to see anyone with any given psychological condition sit to a strictly timed test and be able to complete it in the given time. I could barely finish my AP Language and Composition test with double the time. I hate to rant on comments, but this issue hits too close to home.
The psych profs and students no longer make jokes about Psychology Today?