Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11267

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Baillie DWH, Salter M
Before and after pictures: A time honoured way of oversimplifying complex problems
BMJ 2007 Jul 7; 335:(7609):8
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7609/8

Abstract:

With its foreboding talk of an impending epidemic that will overwhelm services and its eye grabbing before and after photos of a woman after two and a half years of taking crystal meth, Coombes’s article reminded us of an article published 80 years earlier, warning of yet another contemporary psychiatric epidemic.1 2 As in the BMJ article, a first photo shows a relaxed and dignified man before the “habits of the secret vice began to show,” while the second photo shows the same man, now haggard and furtive, “three years later, when he had become an inveterate victim of the vice.” What was this vice that threatened to overwhelm the asylums of the day? “Self-pollution, the unnatural and degrading vice of producing venereal excitement by the hand.”

A recent nationwide electronic survey of psychiatrists by the national director for mental health found no evidence of an increased prevalence of psychiatric disorder . . .