Daniel Barron
Author of Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry
About the Author
Daniel Barron will become Medical Director of the Interventional Pain Psychiatry Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital, joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School. He completed medical school and residencey at Yale University, holds a PhD in human brain imaging form the University of Texas, show more and is currently a fellow at the University of Wasington. He is a regular contributor at Scientific American and hosts Science et al., a Podcast produced by the Yale School of Medicine. show less
Works by Daniel Barron
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Daniel Barron uses his brilliance, quickness of mind, and being in the profession to remind us that Big Data is already in use in psychiatry. He paints a very convincing and devastating picture of today's outdated psychiatric practices that he says will be greatly aided by more Big Data. More he suggests when a monopolist, such as Google, finds a way to make big money. However, Barron is not convincing enough that the profession itself can be saved from its serious flaws. Also, hurting his show more argument and presentation is an overbearing attitude, lack of mature judgment, blind spots, and feeling that one is being talked down to. One is left uncomfortable.
Quotes: (page 34) “People have enormous (some might say misplaced) trust in Google. It is almost as if people treat Google like a close friend or trusted relative, an Uncle Google that they can ask their most private questions without fear of reprisal or judgment---someone with whom they can pursue ideas and expect accurate advice.
If the study of pregnant women is any indication, people trust Google more than they do their own doctor. Trust is especially relevant to mental health because if people don't trust me, I can't get the information I need to make a sound clinical decision.”
(page 47) “And so my job is complex. I need to detect pathology while permitting variability and, to do this, I need data. Psychiatrists have historically performed poorly at this enterprise.
Psychiatry is an exercise in diversity, in parsing healthy variability from disease. To fully embrace variability. I need tools to measure and quantify and account for variability, to trace whether what I'm observing is part of a healthy baseline or is indeed a symptom of disease.”
(page 104) “And yet, following in the footsteps of the Framingham Heart Study, the hope of the Big Data approach is that by pairing the intuitions of clinicians with the carefully calibrated results from digital devices and sensors, we can make sense of a massive amount of data and prune hundreds (if not thousands or millions) of data points down to a handful of the most clinically useful. The hope is to more clearly define the clinical problem in psychiatric diseases so clinicians can better identify and treat those problems. As in the case of hypertension, cholesterol, and smoking, it is only after the problem was clearly defined---that is, only after these three risk factors were associated with the significant morbidity of heart disease---that treatments targeting each of these risks were developed and made available to patients. In fact, it was only by measuring the blood pressure of thousands and thousands of people that our concept of hypertension was clearly defined.” show less
Quotes: (page 34) “People have enormous (some might say misplaced) trust in Google. It is almost as if people treat Google like a close friend or trusted relative, an Uncle Google that they can ask their most private questions without fear of reprisal or judgment---someone with whom they can pursue ideas and expect accurate advice.
If the study of pregnant women is any indication, people trust Google more than they do their own doctor. Trust is especially relevant to mental health because if people don't trust me, I can't get the information I need to make a sound clinical decision.”
(page 47) “And so my job is complex. I need to detect pathology while permitting variability and, to do this, I need data. Psychiatrists have historically performed poorly at this enterprise.
Psychiatry is an exercise in diversity, in parsing healthy variability from disease. To fully embrace variability. I need tools to measure and quantify and account for variability, to trace whether what I'm observing is part of a healthy baseline or is indeed a symptom of disease.”
(page 104) “And yet, following in the footsteps of the Framingham Heart Study, the hope of the Big Data approach is that by pairing the intuitions of clinicians with the carefully calibrated results from digital devices and sensors, we can make sense of a massive amount of data and prune hundreds (if not thousands or millions) of data points down to a handful of the most clinically useful. The hope is to more clearly define the clinical problem in psychiatric diseases so clinicians can better identify and treat those problems. As in the case of hypertension, cholesterol, and smoking, it is only after the problem was clearly defined---that is, only after these three risk factors were associated with the significant morbidity of heart disease---that treatments targeting each of these risks were developed and made available to patients. In fact, it was only by measuring the blood pressure of thousands and thousands of people that our concept of hypertension was clearly defined.” show less
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