John Grohol says Bremner isn't banned from commenting, but lashes out again

John M Grohol PsyD at 6:22 am on July 16th, 2009

From the comment section at Psych Central in this post that caused quite a stir--"Bremner's False Claims about Postpartum Depression:

"Bremner has not been blocked from commenting here; in fact, I was surprised both by his lack of response here and then his claim that his comment never appeared. His comment is not in our spam filters or awaiting moderation, so I can only assume it was a technical issue. (I like that Bremner calls me a “large entity” in his dig against losing his comment, instead of simply emailing or twittering me about the lost comment! There’s nothing I could’ve done other than to suggest to save a copy in case it happens in the future, or see if I could post it for him…) Folks, comments getting lost on a blog are nothing new and it happens to me at least once a week. But I guess when you’ve been blogging for a decade, you take it for granted everyone already knows this. I apologize for Bremner’s trouble in posting a comment (apparently his brother had no such trouble doing so).

Apparently Bremner has never bothered reading my blog either, so he has no idea who he’s talking about when he puts in the “pro-pharma” camp.

I can only say that after you get through his continuing discussion about his book, one is left with Bremner again backpedaling on the data — which is what I’ve been arguing all along.
First, Bremner says that only if you had a previous episode of depression or anxiety are you at higher risk for PPD.

I pointed out that that was patently false and gave him specific studies, one of which found at least 6 additional risk factors (which he has ignored).

Second, Bremner focused on arguing about one study. Fine, but then he again mis-spoke about the data, saying that abuse wasn’t a risk factor unless you were abused when you pregnant. To show he again wasn’t being entirely forthcoming about the data, I had to post the PDF of the article so others could see that in an analysis of the 8 abuse studies, only a few of them talked about abuse during pregnancy. What about the others?

Now Bremner says:

"The studies of childhood abuse didn’t show an association for the most part after controlling for depressive symptomatology."

How can you control for depressive symptomatology when asking about abuse? Most women were assessed postpartum with a single time point questionnaire and depression measure after giving birth. What’s there to control at that point? I’d love to hear a clarification from Bremner about what he means by this comment. "

--John Grohol, CEO of Psych Central
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Doug Bremner's blog, Before You Take that Pill is worth taking time to read, there are many more topics than censorship there, discussing the DSM-V, trauma and more, always with a good dash of appreciated humor.