Literature and Medicine II

Works Cited

Buzan, Deborah Skinner.  “I Was Not a Lab Rat.” The Guardian 12 March 2004: 7.

Couser, G. Thomas. “Disability as Metaphor: What’s Wrong with Lying.” Prose Studies 27.1-2 (2005): 141-54.

Donnelly, William J. “The Language of Medical Case Histories.” Annals of Internal Medicine 127.11 ( December 1997): 1045-48.

Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.

Ingram, Richard. “Life Plagiarizing Illness: Lauren Slater’s Lying.” Nasty. September 2001. http://www.nasty.cx/archives/000398.php.

Lee, Felicia R. “Psychologist Is Assailed for Jumbling Facts.” New York Times 15 April 2004: 9.

Lilienfeld, Scott O., Robert L. Spitzer, and Michael B. Miller. “A Response to a Nonresponse to Criticisms of a Nonstudy: One Humorous and One Serious Rejoinder to Slater.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 193.11 (November 2005): 745-46.

Miller, Laura. “The Last Word: Unpacking Skinner’s Box.” New York Times 2 May 2004. Section 7; Page 31. 15 July 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/books/the-last-word-unpacking-skinner-s-box.html

---.“A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction: The Man Who Conned Oprah.” The Smoking Gun. 8 January 2006. 10 April 2006. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

Prendergast, Catherine. “On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability.” Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 45-60.

Price, Margaret. “’Her Pronouns Wax and Wane’: Psychosocial Disability, Autobiography, and Counter-Diagnosis.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 3.1 (2009): 11-33.

Rosenhan, D. L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179.4070 (19 Jan. 1973): 250-58.

Slater, Lauren. “Dr. Daedalus: A Radical Plastic Surgeon Wants to Give You Wings.” Harpers 303.1814 (July 2001): 57-67.

---. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. New York: Penguin, 2001.

---. Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 2004.

---. Prozac Diary. 1998. New York: Penguin, 1999.

---. “Reply to Spitzer and Colleagues.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 193.11 (November 2005): 743-44.

---. Welcome to My Country: A Therapist’s Memoir of Madness. New York: Anchor Books, 1997.

Spitzer, Robert L. “More on Pseudoscience in Science and the Case for Psychiatric Diagnosis.” Archives of General Psychiatry 33 (April 1976): 459-70.

---. “On Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of Rosenhan’s ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places.’” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 84.5 (1975): 442-52.

Spitzer, Robert L., Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Michael B. Miller. “Rosenhan Revisited: The Scientific Credibility of Lauren Slater’s Pseudopatient Diagnosis Study.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 193.11 (November 2005): 734-39.

 

Zimmerman, Mark. “Pseudopatient or Pseudoscience: A Reviewer’s Perspective.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 193.11 (November 2005): 740-42.

Notes

• 1) Frey’s “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, a recovery narrative about his drug and alcohol addiction, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, much increasing the book’s already phenomenal sales. However, as reported by The Smoking Gun.com, parts of Frey’s memoir were only loosely based on the truth, much embellished, or at worst, invented. For example, Frey spent only a few hours in jail, not the three months that he writes about so extensively (“A Million Little Lies”). Oprah eventually dropped her endorsement of the book, and in response to accusations of fraudulently marketing fiction as memoir, Frey’s publisher, Random House, eventually offered purchasers refunds.
• 2) The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the official American Psychiatric Association reference manual, listing all mental disorders and the criteria by which these disorders are diagnosed; it is the diagnostic bible of psychiatry.
• 3) Spitzer, “On Pseudoscience in Science” and “More on Pseudoscience in Science.”
• 4) Slater’s status as a former psychiatric patient adds another layer that might undermine her authority to speak. As Catherine Prendergast writes, “to be disabled mentally is to be disabled rhetorically” (57), and Slater herself acknowledges that as a former mental patient she would not qualify as a pseudopatient under Rosenhan’s original criteria. Slater’s rhetorical position is never explicitly pathologized in this dispute, however.
• 5) For a description of reviewers’ attempts to track down the fictional Professor Hayward Krieger, see Richard Ingram’s “Life Plagiarizing Illness: Lauren Slater’s Lying.”