[A version of this article previously appeared in TheJournal.ie] In the 1930s, US President Calvin Coolidge made the following observation on the annual yuletide festivities: “Christmas is not a time nor a season,” he said, “but a state of mind.” This year, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a radical rethink of our […]
An invited, non-peer-reviewed guest editorial in the BMJ has claimed that behavioural interventions for “complex conditions” (such as ME or CFS) should not be judged using the customary criteria — and that the relevant studies should not be evaluated as though they were proper randomised controlled trials — because, among […]
From the Archives [A while back, I wrote this piece about academic exaggeration for The Psychologist magazine. See what you make of it…] Not another article about the crisis in psychology, you might complain. Déjà vu all over again? You thought we reached peak crisis some time ago, didn’t you? […]
Event announcement:– Next week I will be speaking at a virtual seminar organised by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties to mark World Human Rights Day, December 10 (from midday, Dublin time). I’ll be part of a panel discussing the challenges of balancing emergency public-health guidelines with human rights. How […]
If you have ten minutes to spare, here is an audio recording from my remarks at last week’s annual conference of the Psychological Society of Ireland: I was speaking on a panel on the psychological impact of COVID-19. The panel itself arose from a PSI policy statement issued in August, […]
The newly released draft NICE guidelines for the management of “myalgic encephalomyelitis (or encephalopathy)/chronic fatigue syndrome” continue to cause a stir. And rightly so. The new guidelines not only repudiate a heretofore favoured treatment approach for a particular illness, they also threaten to discredit an entire (albeit quirky) branch of […]
