Apparently Jane Pratt Doesn't Actually Read Books; Does the Staff at New York Magazine?
yes yes, I'm a crank, but also this stuff is legitimately embarrassing
This is just a little headache of a post that most people will likely call an overreaction or similar. But it absolutely does point to a series of frustrations I have with this dying industry I’m in - its insiderism, its lack of rigor, and its addiction to lumpen anti-psychiatry. Feel free to skip if you choose. But…
The Strategist vertical at New York magazine has this recurring “Favorite Things” feature where various notable people talk about stuff they like, often beauty products or clothes, sometimes electronics, sometimes random tchotchkes. Today’s entry is from Jane Pratt, the magazine-world impresario who once ran Sassy and launched Jane and xoJane. Along with boxer shorts and body butter and a favorite podcast, Pratt recommends the book The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan, a former New York Post reporter probably best known for her illness memoir Brain on Fire. The book concerns the infamous Rosenhan experiments, a set of investigations supposedly run in the 1970s by Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan. Under his direction, Rosenhan and seven graduate students presented to psychiatrists with various symptoms, were committed to psychiatric hospitals, and were then unable to get out, despite the fact that none of them actually suffered from mental illnesses. These findings were written up and released to great fanfare, and the implications about psychiatry were quickly integrated into anti-psychiatry boilerplate. The Great Pretender documents an admirable journalistic inquiry into this story undertaken by Cahalan.
Here’s how Pratt summarizes the book:
One of the best nonfiction books I’ve found within the last couple years is called The Great Pretender, by Susannah Cahalan. It’s that whole era at Stanford where they were doing the Stanford prison experiment and all that crazy sociological stuff. This is about a guy from that era who — it’s just the most crazy thing — sent people who were not mentally ill to mental institutions. He got them to be accepted, then had them try to prove their sanity to get out, and they couldn’t.
Extraordinary! Remarkable! Genuinely, genuinely wild! Crazy, you might say. Crazy because the whole point of the Great Pretender is that the “experiments” never actually took place. That’s what the book is! It’s a debunking of the Rosenhan experiments, of the very narrative that Pratt summarizes. That’s not some esoteric reading of the book, it’s the black-letter subject matter of the book. As Cahalan and others have demonstrated, the Rosenhan “experiments” were a grand exercise in research fraud. It’s been convincingly demonstrated that, of the supposed seven graduate student researchers who went to the hospital, six almost certainly never even existed; they were invented by Rosenhan. Amusingly, the one research assistant who actually did take part publicly complained that Rosenhan had misrepresented his experience. So we’re left with nothing but Rosenhan’s testimony about his own experience, which is obviously not sufficient for rigorous research and completely lacking in credibility given his obvious dedication to advancing a particular narrative about psychiatry. Cahalan’s reporting in that book is valuable because it lends great credence to what had already been suspected for years, that Rosenhan was distorting or outright falsifying his research to advance a political critique of psychiatry. And it matters because knee-jerk skepticism towards psychiatry has consequences, bad ones.
The title The Great Pretender is a reference to Rosenhan! He was the one who was pretending! This isn’t some obscure fact about that book!
I mean, really. This isn’t a case of some 19-year-old incompetently summarizing a book they were assigned to read but didn’t in college. It’s an adult woman, an editor and writer, voluntarily participating in this feature and plugging a book she clearly cannot have read. Why she would do that, I really can’t imagine; surely there’s a book that she actually finished that she could recommend? Why do this? However you slice it, it’s embarrassing. Yes yes, I’m mean or uncouth or mansplaining or whatever, got it. I maintain that this is a pretty serious fail What I can’t quite figure out is how embarrassing this should be for New York. I get that this is a fairly frivolous feature in the magazine and that to a degree they’re at the mercy of the people they interview . But surely someone there could have done ten minutes of research here? … right?
I’ll be interested to see if this thing gets corrected. I’m guessing that it won’t be touched, and if it is, that the offending item will simply be removed with no public acknowledgement that it’s been changed. Why will it very likely go uncorrected or simply surreptitiously removed? Because
Fancy pants media is a culture intensely resistant to admitting to mistakes, even though there’s few industries where admitting mistakes is more important than journalism
Media is a kaffeeklatsch of insiders who hate to ever put each other on the spot and who generally work hard to avoid ever embarrassing other paid-up, in-the-know style people like Jane Pratt
Because American culture generally and American elite media specifically are deeply entranced by the kind of thoughtless and limited-information antipsychiatry attitudes that underlie Pratt’s misreading of the book.
Media Twitter doesn’t exist anymore, and likely nothing would come of my exasperation here if it did. But if my complaint was to be registered by the media as a social culture, I can bet you dollars to donuts that the person who would be treated as having made an embarrassing mistake would be me. Because as years of experience tell me, when you criticize influential people in that world, their peers will react negatively to you, no matter how uncomplicatedly correct your criticism might be, including in the realm of facts. Jane Pratt is very much In, in the media social-professional world, and I am very much Out, and for many people in the business that’s all that matters. Little details like getting the most basic point of a book correct - while in the act of recommending it! - don’t rate. Meanwhile, the knee-jerk anti-psychiatry of mainstream media remains powerful, unexamined, and terribly unhealthy. The New York Times, for its part, appears to be abandoning any pretense to objectivity in that domain, continuing to send anti-psychiatry activist Ellen Barry out as a neutral fact-finder, publishing yet another piece in their “psychiatric medication is bad, how about quinoa and mindfulness instead?” corpus just this past weekend. The worst bias is the bias no one recognizes as bias, and reflexive, incurious rejection of psychiatric medicine is one of the most pervasive in all of American media, and none of the major publications have the slightest interest in interrogating that bias.
Meanwhile, the fact that we have a profession of writing that’s full of writers who don’t read is just… endlessly depressing.