Lauren Slater: Difference between revisions

Lauren Slater (born March 21, 1963) is an American psychologist and writer. She is the author of six books, including Welcome To My Country (1996), Prozac Diary (1998), and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2000). Her 2004 Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, a description of psychology experiments "narrated as stories," ^[1] has drawn both praise and criticism. It was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Kirsch award for science and technology writing, ^[2] and was named as a 2005 Bild Der Wissenschaft book of the year in Germany. ^[3] Criticism has focused on Slater's research methods for the book, and on the extent to which some of the experiences she describes may have been fictionalized.

Other awards Slater was won include the 1993 New Letters Literary Award in creative non-fiction, and the 1994 Missouri Review Award, and her work was included in The Best American Essays of 1994 and 1997. ^[4] She has contributed to The New York Times, Harper's, and Elle. ^[4]

The Village Voice has called her "the closest thing we have to a doyenne of psychiatric disorder." ^[5]

Slater is a freelance writer specializing in psychology, mental illness, and women's health. She graduated in 1985 from Brandeis University with a bachelor’s degree in British and American literature. ^[6] She earned a master's degree in psychology from Harvard University and a doctorate in psychology from Boston University. She was a clinical psychologist for 11 years before embarking on a full-time writing career. Slater was a 2002-03 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the fellowship, part of the Program on Science, Technology and Society in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, her area of study was neuropsychology, psychiatric care, medical technologies, and medical ethics. ^[7]

After the birth of her daughter, Slater wrote her memoir Love Works Like This, ^[8] to chronicle the agonizing decisions she made related to her psychiatric illness and her pregnancy. In a 2003 BBC Woman's Hour radio interview, ^[9] and a 2005 article in Child Magazine ^[10] Slater provides information on depression during pregnancy and the risks to the woman and her baby.

Nominated for a Los Angeles Times Kirsch award for science and technology writing, ^[2] and named as a 2005 Bild Der Wissenschaft book of the year in Germany, ^[11] Opening Skinner's Box has been described as "one of the first major books to bridge the gap between academic and popular psychology." ^[5]

It describes — in the form of stories, complete with characters, plot, and emotional insights — the 20 psychology experiments Slater regards as the most significant or interesting of the 20th century. These include B.F. Skinner's work on behaviorism; Stanley Milgram's demonstration of how ordinary people can be influenced to obey authority; David Rosenhan's 1972 experiment in which eight people feigned mental illness then gained admittance to psychiatric hospitals; Harry Harlow's experiments with monkeys and motherhood; and Bruce Alexander's Rat Park, where laboratory rats addicted to morphine turned the drug down when given a better life. ^[1]

The criticism has focused on Slater's research methods and writing style. The use of creative non-fiction and Slater's highly personalized narrative style are unusual in a book about science, and the work has garnered some hostile reactions, mostly from the psychiatric or clinical psychology community, some of whom have disputed quotations she has used, or have criticized her understanding of the studies she wrote about. ^[12]

Slater's attorney has responded to the criticism by accusing some psychiatrists and psychologists of having mounted a "vindictive effort" and "vendetta" against her, and of "sniping" at her on Amazon.com. ^[13]

David Corfield, a philosopher of mathematics writing in The Guardian, questions the veracity of the book's reported speech. He relates how, during Slater's discussion with Harvard University psychologist Jerome Kagan, she recalled how Kagan had suddenly dived under his desk to illustrate a point about free will. But Kagan told Corfield that he had done no such thing, and in fact had only suggested that he could do so if he wanted. ^[14]

In response to Corfield's criticism, Slater showed the New York Times an e-mail she received from Kagan, who was responding to a pre-publication fact-checking list she had sent him. Slater had written: "3. that, in demonstrating to me that people do, indeed, have free will, you jumped under your desk ...," and Kagan responded: "I was trying to demonstrate that when humans have a choice of actions, they can select an act that has never been rewarded in the past ..." ^[15]

Deborah Skinner Buzen, younger daughter of psychologist B.F. Skinner, has questioned the thoroughness of Slater's research. She has criticized Slater for repeating rumors that Skinner Buzen was abused by her father and became mentally ill as a result, and alleges that Slater failed to approach her for comment before publication. Skinner Buzen writes, also in The Guardian:

Slater's sensationalist book rehashes some of the old stuff, but offers some rumours that are entirely new to me. For my first two years, she reports, my father kept me in a cramped square cage that was equipped with bells and food trays, and arranged for experiments that delivered rewards and punishments. Then there's the story that after my father "let me out", I became psychotic. Well, I didn't. That I sued him in a court of law is also untrue. And, contrary to hearsay, I didn't shoot myself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. I have never even been to Billings, Montana. ^[16]

Another criticism concerned Slater's description of her reaction to the David Rosenhan study. Slater wrote that she had repeated Rosenhan's research — in which he trained students to pretend to be mentally ill to guage the reactions of psychiatric hospitals — by presenting at the emergency rooms of multiple hospitals with a single auditory hallucination to see whether she would be admitted as a psychiatric patient. She said that she was not admitted but was given prescriptions for antipsychotics and antidepressants.

This has been questioned by a number of psychiatrists and psychologists, including Robert Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. ^[13] Slater replied through her attorney that she considered her work to be an "anecdote, not systematic research, and certainly not a 'replication' of Rosenhan's study". ^[13] Slater's attorney accused Spitzer of being involved in a campaign to discredit Slater's work. ^[13]

• (2005) Blue Beyond Blue: Extraordinary Tales for Ordinary Dilemmas, W.W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0393059596
• (2004) Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0393050955
• (2003) Love Works Like This: Travels Through a Pregnant Year, Bloomsbury Publishing plc, ISBN 0747562172
• (2000) Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Random House (US), ISBN 0375501126 ^[17]
• (1998) Prozac Diary, Random House, ISBN 0679457216
• (1997) Welcome to My Country, Anchor, ISBN 0385487398

• (2002) "Dr. Daedalus" in The Best American Science Writing 2002 (anthology), HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0060936509 ^[18]
• (1997) "Black Swans" in The Best American Essays 1997 (anthology), Houghton Mifflin Company, ISBN 0395856957
• (1994) "Striptease" ^[19] in The Best American Essays 1994 (anthology), Houghton Mifflin Company, ISBN 0395692547

• "On Love," National Geographic, February 2006 (excerpt)
• "Who Holds The Clicker?", Mother Jones Magazine, Nov/Dec 2005
• "Cognitive Dissonance: The Work Of Leon Festinger," Die Welt, August 2005
• "The Life Of Katrina Dalton," The New York Times Magazine, January 2005
• "The Cruelest Cure: David Barlow and Anxiety Disorders," The New York Times Magazine, November 2004
• "Rosenhan’s Pseudopatient Experiment," The London Times, April 2004
• "Milgram’s Obedience Studies," The Guardian Magazine, April 2004
• "Living In An Age Of Anxiety," Self Magazine, April 2004
• "Parents help babies learn lessons of love", Deseret News (Salt Lake City), March 2003
• "The Value Of Repression," The New York Times Magazine, March 2003

• Rosenhan experiment
• Burrhus Frederic Skinner
• Rat Park
• Pit of despair
• Harry Harlow
• Milgram experiment