All Over the Map

By: Liz Massey


Do not try this at home
 
Would you do something that you knew in your gut was wrong for you or your loved ones just because an expert told you to do it?

I was watching a documentary the other day about the rise in the number of children treated for mental illnesses with psychiatric medications, and was struck by one sequence in particular. A heterosexual couple, who had seen reports on TV about the death of a young child on a regimen of drugs similar to what their son was taking, went to the psychiatrist to discuss lowering or eliminating their child’s use of the medications. The psychiatrist completely ignored the parents’ concerns, then ended up recommending they increase the dosages of the boy’s medications — and the parents agreed to it!

To me, this scene points out the paradox of expert advice. There are a number of things we have to turn to experts to get done safely — major surgery, building demolition and trench digging all immediately come to mind as things I don’t want to trust to beginners. Yet experts can get it wrong — very wrong — when trying to apply their general knowledge of the field to someone’s specific circumstances.

GLBT people ought to be especially wary of “expert” opinion. For generations, the only information available to the public about what gay people were like was treatises from psychiatrists, doctors, sociologists and theologians, who said we were sick or sinful. Evelyn Hooker was one of the first psychological researchers to dispute this “truth” in the late 1950s — and even then, Hooker’s data was only considered credible because she was heterosexual. There was no room until after Stonewall for our own interpretation of our life experiences.  

Experts have had a tough time of it lately, though. The Internet has exponentially increased the amount of information available to the layperson — doctors regularly meet patients who are better-read on their specific health concerns than the physician may be. Wikipedia has even challenged the notion that experts should be in charge of compiling information.

Advances in cheap, easy-to-use software have encouraged non-professionals to produce photos, videos, games, blogs, etc., for each others’ enjoyment. And the great surprise is that a lot of it is funny, informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking! Some experts hate this: entrepreneur and technical writer Andrew Keen, in his book The Cult of the Amateur, blames online “user-generated” content for everything from identity theft to the demise of Judeo-Christian values.

But there was another time when user-generated ideas and actions ruled the day: our great-grandparents’. Before television and radio, people wrote letters, sang songs around the piano, and raised barns together. Maybe it was easier back then to be good enough at a lot of things, but I wonder if our ancestors simply had to, by necessity, practice a virtue seen far less often in our own day: self-reliance.

The resolution to the expertise conundrum is this: use common sense. Know your limits. Understand that experts have limits, too, and balance expert advice against your own intuition and experiences.
In the end, we’re the experts in our own lives. We get to make the big decisions, and, no matter with whom we consult with to make those decisions, we have to live with the results.