Clinicians Digest Mar/Apr 2008 - Page 2


Further safeguards included prescreening participants for psychological vulnerabilities to stress and trauma. This excluded about 30 percent of Burger's potential subjects. Those remaining were screened again with written instruments and interviews by clinicians instructed to be overcautious in deciding whom to approve. Nearly 40 percent of the remaining group was also excluded. Subjects who passed both screenings were told at least three more times that they could withdraw from the study at any point. Immediately after the experiment, they were carefully debriefed.

The outcome: Burger documented obedience rates only slightly lower than those of the original experiment. Milgram found that the 150-volt mark was the point of no return for 79 percent of the participants—once they passed that mark, they continued up to 450 volts. Therefore, Burger believes that most of his participants would have "administered" stronger shocks if the study had continued.

Now that Burger has put the ethical dilemma of replicating Milgram's experiment to rest, he hopes others will pick up on the long dormant and disturbing research. It appears that Stanley Milgram was right: whether it's Abu Ghraib, a Yale University lab, or some situation in next week's headlines, when authority figures give direction and permission to do abhorrent things, people are likely to comply.

Depression and Biology

The antidepressant marketing blitz that's sold millions of people on an overly simplistic connection between depression and low serotonin levels has obscured the fact that many psychiatrists have a much more complex view of depression's biological causes and cures. A dramatic first-person article by Marlene Belfort in the October 30 New York Times helps alert therapists and the public that a malfunctioning thyroid, which regulates several hormones and neurotransmitters, can sometimes make therapy and antidepressants as useless as an umbrella in a hurricane.

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