Sex, Drugs, and Conflicts of Interest

Why research methods needs more feminism

It’s been an Indian summer fall lately in Berlin, so I’m trying to go outside more again after falling back into my old, housecat ways. It helps me work better, I tell myself as a carrot to the Calvinist. A little perspective shift always helps. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about possible sources of bias, and what “conflict of interest” really means. One of the questions I’m always asking myself about my own work is how my personal experiences and assumptions color my thinking — how they might provide special insights and how they might also lead me astray — and how and to what extent I need to tell people where I’m coming from, so they can consider these questions themselves. Just as no one (even Julian Assange) would disclose all facts regardless of consequence, no one is required under the auspices of research ethics to tell the world their life story. At the same time, people who are relatively transparent about who they are may do better work and live more fulfilling lives than people who aren’t. For example, being closeted at work can seriously cost you and your employer. 

Philosophers like Helen Longino and Cordelia Fine suggest that science is better when it reflects real-world diversity including in sex, since our personal experiences shape how we see the world, and that affects how we think as scientists. One positive implication of this feminist philosophy of science is that, sometimes, insight comes from pain. We all know this from experience, starting with learning in infancy from physical pain — which shares neural wiring with psychosocial pain (being dissed hurts). Without this type of learning, we literally wouldn’t be walking around, to say nothing of avoiding touching hot stoves and poking tigers (except for those of us who still can’t help it). 

The pain-insight connection evokes Adrienne Rich: 

“Power”

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Feminist philosophy of science promises that our power, conversely, can come from the same source as our wounds. But the risks of paying pain too much mind are also readily apparent. It helps to learn from your mistakes, not to define yourself by them; it helps to learn from tragedy, neither avoiding nor focusing on it all the time. And if you give away too much of yourself in public, you may also give away the power to set the terms of the discourse about who you are and what you’re up to — as well as the mental protection of your own privacy. 

This is a problem in how we do science as human beings that’s not solvable, and that has big social and political implications. If I say where I’m coming from when I have special insight as a scientist from personal pain, it compounds information asymmetry in a world where the powerful may lack that insight because they haven’t felt that pain. They’re just as human as me when they do science, but I’m out there owning my shit and generally looking like a human being who can be criticized as such. Because it’s a vulnerable position, advisers often tell students and young professionals to not do this — although with disability rights, Me Too, and other movements, the norms have shifted somewhat. I don’t game out social interactions well (nerd problem), but intuit that it feels better to be honest (within limits), and let people make up their own minds. I hope I get the limits right.

Right now I’m working on an essay for another platform I love about methods problems in some evidence on the antidepressants-autism link. Placing myself as a person here may be a tangent or an unnecessary challenge. I’m a methodologist and these are methods problems that I come by from methods discussions. Good, clean fun. I have a toddler, but he wants nothing more than to talk to strangers and bring troubled people tissues; he’s the least autistic person I’ve ever met. Coffee and tea are my substances of choice, and according to PubMed, I’m back on anti-aging and contraceptive doses (who says addictions are unhealthy). 

But digging deeper, I do have a perspective here. My read of the lit on psychotropics from rabbit-holing in the evidence as a struggling grad student was that pharmaceutical drugs looked ineffective and dangerous, the evidence for their efficacy looked shoddy and propagandistic (as in selectively published, industry-funded trials), and I couldn’t afford to do that experiment on my brain (no other career options). Critics have long charged that these drugs are doing a lot of harm; Whitaker and Gøtzsche are among the most notable. 

By contrast, the evidence for lifestyle interventions, life changes, and psychedelics for treating common problems (like MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for depression) was already quite strong way back in the dark ages a decade ago. So I tried everything I could and then got stuck, because I wasn’t friends with any cool kids. Eventually I made some gambles that led to more harm. It’s great that organizations like MAPS have been working for decades to advance psychedelic science and policy reform, to bring breakthrough treatments in safe settings to people who can’t live without them, or live with a dysfunctional and brutal level of suffering. It’s important work.

At the same time, when you read a lot of it, psychedelic science starts to look like one small turn of the wheel after another to produce the next, tiny slice of normal science to make the paradigm eventually shift without disturbing the social order too much. We already know that psychedelics deactivate the default mode network (the brain’s usual thinking ruts) and don’t need to see more imaging studies showing this. We’ve known for 70 years that LSD appears to be a great treatment for alcoholism, but people might (gasp) get more open to experience and extroverted after doing this kind of drug (ban them).

Meanwhile, psychedelic science could be challenging other paradigms. The next post looks at one, and why it’s not being done. As often, my concern is that we could do a better job seeing what is not being shown and hearing what is not being said. In a negative sense, this is about looking for conflicts of interest. In a positive one, it’s about holding space as scientists for what people actually need and not what powerful social networks want us to do or produce. 

To jaundiced eyes, calling for more feminism in methods sounds like calling for more cowbell: It’s annoying and ruins the music.  

I hope the example will show what I mean: That the personal is political, and it’s always present, whether you say it or not. Saying that is the first step to fighting the information asymmetry that often keeps the ideological underpinnings of science hidden and thus harder to contest. 

As Socrates half-said, “First, know thyself — then, fuck the system.”