Funding a weird new psychiatric publishing project
Psych Crisis ventures into experimental fundraising methods with impact certificates
A while back Psych Crisis applied for an ACX grant for a project aimed at developing the scientific paradigm within research psychiatry with an online journal. The project was then listed on the ACX impact certificates market on Manifund (an experimental philanthropic funding process for separating ‘do I think this project will succeed?’ from ‘do I want this specific good thing to happen in the world?’).1
It was then featured by the Manifund team in their newsletter, then by a handful of individuals including Toby Shorin on twitter, all while everyone involved kept insistently reminding their audiences that it was unlikely that any of the major Effective Altruism-flavoured funders would touch it. We ended up blowing past our minimum threshold and raising a bit over $5K to start the journal.
The official Manifund project listing is here; the deadline for fundraising there using impact certificates is officially closed but if you’d like to contribute to this project in particular via ordinary donation methods you can donate via our Paypal, add in the comments that you’d like to contribute to the ‘psychiatric paradigm journal’ in particular, and it will be directed to that project. We have some exciting editors and ideas for the journal lined up.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share here what we’d like to do with this project.
The plan is to start an online editorial journal focusing on paradigm development in psychiatry and psychology.
We’d like to nurture a virtual space for rigorous thinking, exploration, and synthesis aimed at trying to improve the state of the shared paradigm in psychiatric and psychological research. It will be less formal than a peer-reviewed journal but more formal than a group blog–a curated, edited quarterly online publication, aimed at cultivating a thriving scene around the quality and integrity of the shared psychiatric/psychological paradigm.
Why?
Practitioners and clients in the fields of psychiatry and psychology find the output of the psych research community to be inadequate for helping them better do their work or solve their problems.
I think this won’t get better until the research paradigm in psychiatry improves, because the current paradigms (including the DSM, RDoC, and default experimental research methods) are not useful enough to practitioners. I think that if the researchers who are already interested in improving the research paradigm have a named, established space with support from editors to refine their ideas and engage in dialogue with each other in terms that are clearly -about- the philosophy, the metascience, the process, the assumptions–then this improvement process will go faster than it would otherwise.
This paradigmatic progress is, as far as I can tell, a necessary component of improving modern psychiatric crisis care (the aim of our organisation).
Questions we’d like to ask (and keep asking):
Foundations:
What are the basic ‘things’ in the default paradigm(s) in psychiatry, and what potentially-important stuff cannot be included in the ‘set of real things’?
What are the hidden assumptions that frame how researchers hunt for causal mechanisms (e.g. in NIMH-funded research) in psychiatry and psychology, and what are their limitations?
What questions would practitioners in history using [e.g. theologians, shamanic practitioners] find easy to answer that modern scientific researchers find difficult or impossible to answer or investigate?
A comparison of the major benefits and limitations of different science-adjacent methods of developing knowledge.
What is the relationship between the scientific establishment and the practitioner community (from multiple angles), and what are the limitations and opportunities?
What theoretical assumptions are behind the implicit relationship between neuroscience research, psychiatric and psychological research, and psychiatric and psychological practice, and what are the limitations and opportunities?
What is generalisability and why are we trying to get it? Can we do without it?
What does rigour look like in related knowledge domains outside of psychiatric science? How can we compare rigour across multiple domains?
New Ideas:
What is a mental disorder?
How do we know if someone’s mental disorder is ‘healed’?
Who should pay for mental health treatment, and why?
How might we incorporate [interactions within systems, nebulosity of categories, idiographic phenomena etc] into a rigorous scientific method for psychiatry and psychology?
Proposals for incorporating the subjectivity of researchers into the design of scientific methods for investigating psychiatric/psychological phenomena
How might we account for power dynamics within the practice of psychology and psychiatry?
As always, if there’s someone you think would like to hear about our project, please share this post with them!
My knowledge of the mechanism of impact certificates is very basic and comes almost entirely from the way Scott Alexander explained it in the original grant application; feel free to correct me in the comments if you think I have mischaracterised how they work!