The young man in question is called Bear. Never was a name so ironically bestowed for this Bear is anxious, tentative, and terrified of overstepping. He’s in love with a co-worker at the local music store, a girl called Nikki, but cannot steel himself to declare his affections to her. In a hippy shop selling crystals and dreamcatchers, he buys a “One Wish Willow” — marketed as a “collectible toy from the Eighties”. He breaks it in half as instructed, and wishes “that Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the world”. He immediately gets his heart’s desire, and all hell breaks loose.

To boomers, this may sound like a familiar tale of the terrifyingly unhinged power of the female libido, with shades of Fatal Attraction or Single White Female. But this film is no nostalgic reprise of that late-Eighties theme. The obsession of the title belongs as much to the male as to the female; and if anything, the latter is to be thoroughly pitied. Thanks to the fulfillment of Bear’s wish, Nikki is subject to an all-consuming romantic possession that drives her towards abject self-debasement and social humiliation against her better nature. During a rare moment of lucidity, she begs for death as a release, and who would blame her? We’ve all been there, Nikki love.

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Actress Inde Navarrette pulls off an astonishing feat as the obsessed young woman, alternating insane aggression with comic pathos. Her devotion is child-like in its intensity, completely untrammeled by attempts to play it cool. Most of the time she is all id, no ego, openly begging Bear for more affection, ferociously guarding him against imagined rivals, and covering the front door with tape to stop him leaving for work. When that fails, she becomes literally rooted to the spot until he returns, with devastating consequences for the carpet.

But for all of Nikki’s spellbound antics, the more interesting character is Bear — sensitively played by another relative unknown, Michael Johnstone. His story makes a compelling contrast to the original “monkey paw” trope, created by author W.W. Jacobs in 1902. Jacobs’ short story depicted a cozy working-class domestic scene, interrupted by the arrival of an acquaintance fresh from the colonies, carrying with him a mysterious shriveled object that will grant three wishes. Ignoring the visitor’s dire warnings and his own misgivings — “it seems to me that I’ve got all that I want” — the family patriarch, Mr White, wishes for two hundred pounds. Next morning White receives this exact sum as compensation for his son’s death, “caught in the machinery” at work. The old man’s second wish is to bring his horribly mangled son back. His third wish is to cancel out the second, finding himself too afraid to answer the ominous knock at the door.

As befits a child of his time, director Barker says he first came across The Monkey’s Paw via an episode of The Simpsons, but one hopes he has read Jacobs’ story too. Along with all the timely social anxieties it expressed about the costs to the working classes of industrial progress, and the threat from the exotic foreigner (Mr White, anyone?), there was a simpler message there too. The Indian fakir who originally put the spell on the monkey’s paw, Jacobs wrote, “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow”. White’s mistake was to fail to accept his lot in life, trying in Promethean fashion to alter destiny instead. As such, he firmly belongs in the pantheon of classic Gothic overreachers, along with Victor Frankenstein and Dorian Gray.

But Bear’s tragic flaw is precisely the opposite. He is a chronic underreacher who uses his modernized monkey’s paw as a lazy proxy for a deliberate, intentional choice. Romantically he is paralyzed, terrified of being seen to “take advantage” of a girl — even though that’s precisely what he eventually does. And even after it seems clear Nikki has fallen under his spell, still he can’t bring himself to publicly own his feelings. When she asks him if he likes her, his guarded response is: “Why, do you like me?”.

Crazy as she is, Nikki can tell what Bear’s real problem is. At one point she gives him a “Tiger’s Eye” stone as a love gift, to bring him “confidence and will-power”. But it doesn’t work, reappearing during the film’s finale to no avail. It’s not hard to conclude that through this character, Barker has neatly encapsulated the predicament of a generation: unable to ask a pretty girl for a light, let alone steal fire from the gods.

According to some recent estimates, nearly 50% of men between 18-25 have never asked a woman out on a date. Possible reasons are legion, but include the fact that there are simply fewer chance encounters with strangers as social life has moved online. There is an attendant awareness in the young of social media’s potential for making private humiliations public. And there’s the surrounding progressive culture, placing huge emphasis on the potential for men to get sexual approaches wrong. Unfortunately, the threat of heavy social censure only seems to produce confusion and fear in conscientious types, while leaving habitual sex pests perfectly unperturbed.

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In a sense, then, Obsession acts as a permission structure to examine this inadvertent mess, drawing to the surface of consciousness a widespread ambivalence, but without telling viewers how to feel about it. Such story-telling neutrality makes a nice contrast with the socially conscious horror that was popular about a decade ago, following the success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Made at a moment of peak didacticism, Peele’s film — though otherwise pretty good — was widely interpreted as saying black people should be afraid of white people, and that white people should feel bad about this. For a while afterwards, we got a spate of clunky lectures disguised as horror films, addressed primarily to viewer’s consciences and only secondarily to their viscera.

But Obsession prefers showing not telling, and is all the better for it. When I eventually staggered out of the cinema, senses bruised by spectacle and noise, the world looked temporarily different. Strangers’ smiles seemed uncanny, the birdsong eerily pronounced. I felt peculiarly in touch with the numinous, and that doesn’t often happen to me in Horsham. It was as if I’d had a tiny holiday from reality, or a restorative miniature psychotic break.

You don’t get much of this uncanny afterglow from streaming films at home, which is another reason why the phenomenal success of Obsession and Backrooms is so cheering. It is striking that both Barker and Kane Parsons — the 20-year-old director of Backrooms — began experimenting with their craft on much smaller screens, bypassing turgid studio systems by taking their output straight to YouTube, and building massive fanbases there. But still the silver screen retained its old power to bewitch. As a result, now these directors are luring the kids out of their bedrooms to watch with other people — a fact that may do wonders for the birth rate, if nothing else.

Presumably these newcomers are encountering the thrill of mental surrender to a huge cinematic experience at close quarters, with no pause or mute button available, in a place where it is frowned upon to have a rival screen out at the same time. And who knows? Perhaps they are also learning of that time-honored way to make an easy move on your love object, something that also used to be big in the Eighties: reaching for a trembling hand in the scary dark.

Virgin Island — for that is the show’s name — is effectively Dangerous Liaisons rebooted for the modern era. In the 18th-century French novel, manipulative libertines systematically despoil the innocence of various naïve virginal types, ruining them for polite society thereafter. Victims are forced to spend the rest of their lives sheltered in some rural convent or monastery, safely away from disapproving eyes. In the updated version, manipulative libertines sequester 12 sexually inexperienced young adults in a rural convent-like environment, systematically despoil their innocence, and send them out into the world again, remade as newly respectable and technically adept members of the pornified 21st century. Or that’s the theory anyway.

I watched the first two episodes, released this week, between my fingers. Corrupter-in-chief is the “groundbreaking sex therapist” Danielle, flanked by her right-hand woman, Celeste: two MILFs on a mission to save the earth from the perils of mass chastity. “One in eight people aged 26 are still virgins in the UK,” warns Danielle in concerned tones. “This is happening all over the world,” adds Celeste. “Even the French are having less sex.” To combat the problem, they have come up with what they call the “Somatica Method” — building what they call “mutually vulnerable, two-way relationships with clients” and teaching “real-life intimacy tools to them within a safe, non-judgmental space”, according to their website.

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On the show, they put their anxious, socially-challenged clients on an island, dress them in mandatory grey garments, do a few breathing exercises, show them a few sex toys, then dive into the main business: touching them up more and more intimately, in order to bring about “disinhibition” and overcome their “shame”. Celeste and Danielle are willing to get to second base for the cause, but apparently leave the harder stuff to a team of “sexological bodyworkers”, all of whom look like they just arrived from a yoga retreat in Goa. Taking charge of any “emotions that come up” is an accompanying “licensed mental health clinician”, though I’d like to know who gave her the license.

In case it’s not already obvious, none of these people are British. Their clients, in contrast, are very much so. It’s like watching Adrian Mole at a sex-positive boot camp run by Kamala Harris. “Take a deep breath down into your belly and connect your body with your hands,” seductively drawls Danielle to Brummie Jason, exhorting him to touch her limbs as the rest of the group look on appalled. “Think of your hands as if … ‘I’m going to get pleasure out of her arms’, do you know what I mean?” Jason nods nervously, keen to show he understands: “I’m going to wank off your arms.” Another bloke in the group, a parliamentary researcher called Ben, tells the camera he is a “logical person” who has created a spreadsheet listing all his previous dates. “I see dating in the same way a football manager would see their team. I like to analyze things and see what I can do better.”

The dominant emotion during group sessions is abject embarrassment. Faced with the sight of middle-aged Celeste moaning in ecstasy before them, or pretending to be an animal in heat, the rigidly averted gazes and squirming body language of the onlookers speak for many of us. The therapists pretend they can’t understand why participant Emma feels tearfully overwhelmed, forced to watch two weird strangers get hot and heavy in front of her, the cameras focused tightly upon her face all the while. “Witnessing sexual desire is clearly unsettling,” one would-be Dr Freud suggests; “I feel like she is a bit stuck.” But actually, the reactions of “the virgins” (as they are collectively referred to by the chirpy Northern narrator) are refreshingly normal. “It was like watching a sex scene with your parents but times 100,” said one. Pronounced another: “it was very Jungle Book, and I was feeling very Downton Abbey.”

In other ways, too, these youngsters seem reassuringly old-fashioned. In every reality show, the closest that viewers are likely to get to a revealing glimpse into real personalities is via the unselfconscious participants of the very first series: they haven’t seen the format, don’t really know what they are getting into, and aren’t acting to camera with the perception of some earlier version of the show in mind. In the case of Virgin Island, the touchingly awkward and likable cast don’t seem to be doing it to chase fame, but because they each genuinely believed its makers could help them find love and connection. It’s almost as if they have never seen reality television before.

Porn doesn’t seem to have corrupted the men’s preferences; the internet hasn’t turned them into bitter incels, or the women into man-haters; they all still apparently long for monogamous romance, and are sweetly supportive of one another without much drama. And despite knocks to confidence in the past, and many expressions of self-doubt, they still seem hopeful and willing to give relationships a whirl. They haven’t, for instance, defined their lack of sexual experience as a core part of their identity, called themselves “asexual”, and given up the libidinal ghost.

Whether they end up scarred for life by the whole experience is another matter. Says the team’s resident mental health expert at one point, explaining the concept behind having sex with a supportive stranger, “this is a container to practice a relationship”. But what her clients apparently crave above all is intimacy; and I don’t see how practicing certain complicated physical gyrations and accompanying sensations gives them much help with that. Intimacy with another person requires that your sexual activity isn’t paid for, and that it hasn’t become a weird kind of spectator sport.

The idea of ordinary therapy is already strange enough: practicing some kind of friendship with a sympathetic but distant figure, unguardedly spilling your guts to them, yet with a steep fee and a sharp cut-off time on the hour. Any professionally inappropriate feelings, arising as a result of the therapist’s unusual degree of access to the very depths of your soul, are pathologized as “transference”; but that doesn’t necessarily make them go away. God knows what happens to tender hearts starved of affection when the therapist also starts shagging you. Should any proto-romantic ideas emerge on the show, presumably the mental health expert will come along with her license to remind participants it was only ever pretend. But never mind: at least they’ll have the solace of knowing their fumbling amatory “practice” sessions have been immortalized on screen, with an option to be sold onto Netflix later.

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Given the usual redemption arc for this sort of series, it’s probably more likely that in future episodes, our innocent anti-heroes will finally arrive in the 21st century. Under the tutelage of Celeste and Danielle, the lovably stammering, cack-handed geeks will cast off their inhibitions and become the gimlet-eyed, icicle-hearted progressive Lotharios they have always secretly dreamt of being: pangender, polyamorous, and wielding ethical vibrators made out of ocean-bound plastic with great aplomb.

Already by the end of the second episode, there were worrying signs of encroaching technical ability and emotional disassociation from a few. Strangely protective as I now feel towards the inhabitants of Virgin Island, I won’t be watching to find out the results of this gruesome piece of televisual conversion therapy. I suspect the finale will be as painful as when Winston Smith comes out of Room 101.

For studios, the financial appeal is pretty obvious. Each character has its devoted fanbase; if you put two characters in one movie, you can get both of them along to the cinema at once. And because the draw is the characters, not the quality of the movie itself, you can skimp on a decent script or convincing effects.

I was thinking about this as I read The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Minds, Brains and Bodies, by Clayton Page Aldern. At the risk of sounding cynical, it struck me as a cinematic crossover event. What are people worried about? Climate change. What else are people worried about? Modern life and mental health! What if we got someone to write a book about… how climate change is damaging our mental health? Then we’d get the climate worriers and the mental healthers buying the same book!

Aldern is not the first person to think of this, and to be fair, climate anxiety is a real problem. Every few weeks a newspaper will run an article by someone saying they won’t have children out of fear that the world won’t be fit to live in, and a global 2021 survey found that more than half of the 10,000 young people surveyed agreed with the phrase “humanity is doomed”. For what it’s worth, I think they’re entirely wrong about that — climate change will have a lot of negative effects on the world, and it’s reasonable to be worried about it, but it’s not going to kill everyone.

On the whole, though, he wants to say something both more subtle and more ambitious than “people are worried about the future”. He wants to say that climate change itself is damaging our brains. He wants to say it’s doing this in obvious ways — we get grumpier and stupider when it’s hot — and in more insidious ones, with the spread of unpleasant diseases and neurotoxins, and, most poignantly, by causing us grief and displacement and loss of identity and all these things which then have various impacts on our brain.

He does this with the weight of academic authority behind him: he is a “neuroscientist turned environmental journalist”, according to the blurb. (Although he does only have a master’s degree in neuroscience. I did a philosophy MA in 2005 but I would feel a bit of a fraud calling myself a “philosopher”.) This makes the book’s flaws all the more baffling, until you remember that it’s a crossover event.

There’s a certain kind of pop-science book that relies on a particular format: story, study, lesson. Christopher Chabris, a psychologist, first noted it in the work of the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer. But it’s a staple — you’ll notice it in Malcolm Gladwell books, for instance. You tell some moving, heartwarming or inspiring story; you recount the results of some study which apparently explains what’s going on in people’s brains in those situations; and then you draw them together to give the reader some pat little take-home message.

I rather thought that we had progressed beyond those books, at least in the upper-mid-market pop science titles that might get reviewed in The Times and New York Times, or excerpted in The Guardian. The “this study on 17 undergraduates at Ohio State University shows that actually creativity stems from our right anterior superior temporal gyrus” stuff so rarely withstood the scrutiny of the replication crisis in science that almost all of them turned out to be essentially content-free.

But Aldern follows the formula to the letter. Each chapter starts with a desperate anecdote: a child dying from an amoebic brain disease caught from a swimming pond; a father whose family burned to death in a wildfire. Then there’s a study, usually in zebrafish or fruit flies, showing us how changes to our environment make us forget, or how living near mountaintop-removal mines is associated with higher rates of depression. Then there’s a flowery lesson presented in conclusion: “The weight of nature presses, but we get to press back. A depression is a state, but it is also a refuge, a place from which to come forth.” OK then.

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But what people want from these books isn’t science per se, with its nagging uncertainty and its boring on-the-one-hand-on-the-others. What people want, I think, is vibes: a thrilling sense of fear and sadness, like watching a horror movie or a weepy. (A crossover event between Nightmare on Elm Street and The Bridges of Madison County, perhaps.) That’s my theory, anyway, which would explain why this book can contain claims that are not only under-evidenced but obviously, screamingly false, and still have E. Annie Proulx call it an “important watershed book”.

For instance, Aldern cites one study which looked at the children of mothers who were caught up in Superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey in 2012. It found, he said, that among other things, boys who were exposed in utero to the stress of climate change saw a 60-fold increase in ADHD. Think about that for five seconds. What is wrong with that picture? This study found that the prevalence of ADHD in US children and adolescents in 2022 was about 10%. A 60-fold increase in that prevalence would mean that 600% of boys exposed to storms while in utero get ADHD!

In Aldern’s defence, and to my surprise, the study really does claim a 62-fold increased risk specifically for ADHD in boys. But it’s obviously nonsense, a product of small sample sizes made even smaller by chopping them up into bits — boys, girls, boys with ADHD, girls with depression — and picking the most dramatic results. It is the sort of number that should make your eyebrows shoot up immediately. (And in fairness, the study itself only mentions that clearly implausible number down in the results section, and leads on somewhat more credible, though still pretty mad, ones.) Nomura’s study “almost beggars belief”, Aldern says, coming close to, but not quite reaching, an insight.

Aldern also, hilariously, says that a local brewery “saw a gap of 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-3°C)” between indoor and outdoor temperatures at one point. How, you might wonder, can a difference in temperature be positive in Fahrenheit but negative in Celsius? Easy: if you’ve put 25°F into an online temperature calculator and just copied-and-pasted the result. Yes, if the temperature outside is 25°F, that means it’s -3.9°C and pretty nippy. But if the temperature goes up by 25°F, then it can’t go down in Celsius. Again: this stuff should be obvious to anyone who’s paying attention, and that makes me think that no one involved in the book was paying attention.

But this book isn’t a serious effort to find stuff out. Maybe I, as a crashingly literal bore who wants to know how much we know, am the wrong audience. This is a book for fans of the climate crisis and the mental health epidemic, and anything that can bring the two heroes into the picture at the same time is fine.

For instance, Aldern says that “climate change causes amnesia”, because a changing environment triggers forgetting to aid learning. He backs this up with a study in fruit flies and then extrapolates from it to say that people who live near a vanishing glacier in Iceland are therefore… developing amnesia? Except he doesn’t quite say that: he slips into flowery gesturing language. (He often does, usually when it seems like he doesn’t know exactly what point he’s making: “History can be an act of elegy, but perhaps it can be an act of evolution, too.” Righto.) But I’m left baffled. Is the claim that people who live near this glacier will remember things less well, or not?

To be clear, climate change certainly is changing our brains, because our brains change with every new experience we have. That’s what learning and memory is: the subtle rewiring of our brains to store new information. But for most people, climate change — at least so far, in most of the world — is subtle; bad, but subtle. The changes it has wrought in most of our lives so far are minor. The Covid pandemic or the war in Ukraine driving up petrol prices will have changed our environment far more in recent years.

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Or, to be honest, much more quotidian things than that. If you’ve moved house or changed jobs, had a child, started a new relationship or ended an old one, you will have felt the world around you change much more dramatically than anything that climate change has (so far, for most of us) done. And maybe these events do cause us to forget more, or cause our identities to “slip”, as Aldern claims climate change does. But we don’t tend to think of them as fundamentally eating away at who we are. No one’s going to write a book called The Weight of Moving House about the neuroscience of having to remember which box you packed the duvets in.

Climate change is real and will cause real problems. And some of those problems will be psychological: no doubt a lot of people have suffered and will suffer trauma, as changing weather patterns mean their crops die or their houses flood or burn. But this isn’t mystical or subtle, it’s just bog-standard “horrible events are unpleasant to live through”. You don’t need studies about transient forgetting in fruit flies to explain it.

What would be more interesting to examine, perhaps, is the nature of climate anxiety itself. It makes sense to worry about it — as mentioned, it’s big and unsettling, and full of unknowns. But in the West, I think, there’s also a nagging sense of guilt: we drove the cars and built the factories, we polluted the atmosphere, and we got rich doing so. I do wonder if books like this are a manifestation of that guilt: we buy them to show that we’re the good guys, we worry, the climate plagues our thoughts.

The irony is that — precisely because, for most Western people, climate change is still a relatively distant concept — the real impacts of climate change on mental health come via the media, including books such as Aldern’s. But the case that climate change is “changing our minds and bodies” in some subtle, insidious way — any more than all the other changes in our environment — is, to put it mildly, not convincingly made.

But it’s not there to convince us, any more than Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is meant to convince me that King Kong is really on the loose. It’s just a crossover. Love climate change? Love mental health? Then you’ll love The Weight of Nature!

Eloise is a champion of neurodivergence, an omnibus term that’s recently ballooned in popularity, which can include autism, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or indeed any other psychiatric condition that’s hot right now. The term is designed for making sweeping pronouncements. Forget the fact that, say, autism and schizophrenia are so different that they have at times been described as opposite conditions. Forget the fact that saying you’re neurodivergent has as much medical meaning as saying you have a disorder of the body. The idea is that there’s a group of people whose brain chemistry differs, in some beautiful way, from some Platonic norm. And it’s an idea that’s taken on great symbolic power in contemporary liberal culture.

There is, for example, a thriving ADHD community on TikTok and Tumblr: people who view their attentional difficulties not as an annoyance to be managed with medical treatment but as an adorable character trait that makes them sharper and more interesting than others around them. (They still demand extra time to take tests, naturally.) It’s also easy to come across social media users who declare how proud they are to be autistic; I’m glad they’re proud, but their repetitive insistence makes me wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince, us or them.

Darker, there’s the world of “DID TikTok”. DID, dissociative identity disorder, is a profoundly controversial condition, once known as multiple personality disorder. Many serious experts question whether it exists at all; at the very least it’s incredibly rare. And yet thousands of adolescents have diagnosed themselves with the condition, and happily perform their various personalities for their social media followers, typically in ways that defy all established psychological understandings of the disorder.

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Against this backdrop, Eloise is a marketing department’s dream come true: hers is a story of the young, beautiful, dysfunctional — and successful. Eloise is the perfect 21st-century woman, from a certain internet-enabled philosophy of human affairs. She is an admirer of witchcraft and believes that women have a mythical connection to water. She does a lot of drugs and becomes bisexual. She uses Tumblr and travels the world, vacationing in Lisbon and the south of France, and moves to Los Angeles to be an actor, taking care to embed that period of her life in a self-defensive patina of irony. She lives an enviable life of obvious socioeconomic privilege, which she does not have time to recognise, as she’s too busy cataloging her psychiatric maladies.

She crams them into every last anecdote: apparently nothing happens to her that she does not ultimately attribute to those maladies. Eloise’s love of swimming as a child is, for instance, laboriously explained in terms of her neurodivergence. I’m talking thousands of words. It seems never to have occurred to her that a love of swimming is not exactly rare among children, or that she doesn’t have to justify her joy at being in the ocean by making it “deeper”. Again and again, she holds perfectly mundane attitudes and behaviours up to the reader and says “Isn’t this special?”

The label of neurodivergence is so vague and capacious, pretty much anything can be pulled into its orbit and made “diverse”. There’s a meme that crops upon Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter that starts with “the neurodivergent urge to…” and is immediately followed by, well, just about anything a person does. Common examples include the neurodivergent urge not to reply to an email or to order food in rather than cooking what’s in the fridge.

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Take Eloise’s nightmares. She has, at times in her life, suffered from debilitatingly bad dreams that made sleep a constant source of fear and pain. This sounds like an awful condition, and she deserves sympathy. But she gives the game away when she writes: “Maybe my relationship with dreaming wasn’t like everyone else’s.” Not like everyone else’s, no. But certainly like that of many people who suffer from recurring and terrifying nightmares. Eloise writes that, according to the Mayo Clinic, nightmare disorder “only affects around 4-5% of adults, which shocked me: did adults really not have nightmares?” It’s as if she genuinely does not know the difference between 4% and zero.

It is perhaps comforting to see every last detail of one’s life as the product of some uncontrollable force. “I am this way because I was born this way,” Eloise writes, in a remarkably bald denial of personal responsibility. As a pawn of the various interior forces that do combat in her brain, she is adamant that there is nothing wrong with her, that her suffering is all in service to some deeper way to live, and that she is proud of the very conditions she asks us to treat as a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card for her behaviour.

The implication is that the neurodivergent might just be better than other people. As with introverts, social media users have developed a discourse around neurodivergence that is nakedly self-celebratory, a bragger’s genre. Eloise has clearly endured a great deal of hardship, but like her culture she seems to feel that this hardship can only be given meaning by being woven into a journey of self-actualisation. Eloise writes that her life is “underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession”. Can you imagine a sadder statement: an adult telling you that there is nothing to distinguish her or give her value but her psychiatric conditions, conditions she shares with millions of others?

Diagnosis is the Holy Grail of the neurodivergence narrative. Eloise fixates on hers and its quasi-mystical powers. No reader could doubt that her problems are real, but she seems to have treated getting diagnoses like a consumer on Amazon. She states flat out, on several occasions, that she went shopping for an autism diagnosis, went to doctors with the express intent of wringing one out of them. There was a time when self-diagnosis was understood to be unhealthy, and perhaps embarrassing, but this is a brave new world we’re living in now.

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Once enough people insist on mental illnesses as upbeat and fashionable lifestyle brands, then any of us who oppose it are guilty of the most grave sin of all, the sin of perpetuating stigma. It’s stigma to call autism a disorder, despite the fact that it renders some completely nonverbal and unable to care for themselves; it’s stigma to suggest that someone with ADHD bears any responsibility at all for problems at school or work; it’s stigma to speak the plain fact that people with psychotic disorders sometimes commit acts of violence under the influence of their conditions. It’s stigma, in other words, to treat those of us with mental illnesses as anything else than wayward children.

Stigma, that cartoon monster, has never been in the top 100 of my problems in 20 years of managing a psychotic disorder, but never mind; stigma is the ox to be gored in contemporary pop culture, and so we must fixate on it to the point that we sideline the health, safety and treatment of those with mental disorders.

What I find tragic about those who buy into the neurodivergence narrative is that they become their illnesses. And yes, there are alternatives. Eloise and people like her seem never to consider one of the possible ways that they could have dealt with their myriad disorders: to suffer. Only to suffer. To suffer, and to feel no pressure to make suffering an identity, to not feel compelled to wrap suffering up in an Instagram-friendly manner. To accept that there is no sense in which her pain makes her deeper or more real or more beautiful than others, that in fact the pain of mental illness reliably makes us more selfish, more self-pitying, more destructive, and more pathetic. To understand that and to accept it and to quietly go about life trying to maintain peace and dignity is, I think, the best possible path for those with mental illness to walk.

But in this culture, all must be monetised, all must be aspirational, anything can be marketed. Eloise lacks the self-awareness to ask whether there’s something exploitative and ugly about turning psychological illness into fodder for soap opera and motivational posters. Again and again in this book, Eloise gins up the kind of statement on mental health that you might find in an Instagram meme, wedges it awkwardly into some prosaic story about her youth, and then skips away. At one point she mocks “Airbnb-style Live Laugh Love signage”, and I could only think, you’re writing a book filled with it.

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The most real, most human, most honest, and most humane part of Eloise’s book is something she wrote in a journal in 2009, when she was a teenager:

I fear my mind, as one single assembly by one fireman on fire safety in primary school caused this deep-seated fear. That shows the true extent of my mind’s power over me. Although these things are unlikely to happen, just yet, I fear every one of them one day. I don’t need a doctor to tell me that is a problem. But I want, so badly, to get better.

This is what it’s actually like to have a mental illness: no desire to justify or celebrate or honor the disease, only the desire to be rid of it. But the modern conception of neurodivergence (and disability activism generally) wants to have it both ways. Sometimes, people would prefer for you to think of their conditions as debilitating hindrances for which they may demand special dispensation. And sometimes they would like them to be seen as positive personality quirks that make them unique.

It is hard to witness the damage that has been done to this young woman, by a culture that insists she views her suffering as part of a beautiful journey. Today’s activists never seem to consider that there is something between terrible stigma and witless celebration, that we are not in fact bound to either ignore mental illness or treat it as an identity.

Were we wiser and more serious, we might be able to see psychiatric disorders as both natural and lamentable, as beyond the control of the individual but still within their responsibility. We would have sympathy for those who suffer from them, but recognise that sympathy only accrues to those whose conditions are unfortunate, unhealthy. We might be honest and say that, yes, it’s bad to be afflicted with psychiatric disorders.

We might, then, have the courage to say that mental illness sucks, that there’s nothing good about it, that the efforts to bend it into some superpower of greater creativity or deeper living is sour grapes from those who can’t escape. We might help people like Eloise, rather than celebrating them as self-actualised girlbosses. We might have the wisdom to ease her suffering, while we patiently tell her that there’s nothing beautiful about it.

Katy Perry’s Firework was perhaps the ultimate chin-up-tits-out song for the first generation to be fully net-native from childhood onwards. And not just because in the official video Perry shot sparklers from her boobs.

Her song struck a chord with many: Firework peaked at number three in the UK charts, and number one in the US. Her prescription for feeling bad is simple: don’t feel bad. Instead, all you have to do is “own the night like the 4th of July”.

But how, in practice, is one meant to “own the night”?

A new book offers some suggestions — aimed, it seems, at the adults who were once teenage Katy Perry fans. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? invites us to see becoming less paper-thin as an important form of self-improvement. “To me,” opines author Dr Julie Smith, “working on maximising our mental health is no different to working on our physical health.”

Looking through the problems Smith describes, one can infer a few things about the implied reader and their struggles. This person is anxious, perfectionist, keen to be liked, prone to minutely dissecting social interactions, spends a lot of time scrolling through social media and worrying about others’ perceptions.

This suffers “low mood” and “anxiety”, struggles with “stress” (there’s a whole chapter on it) and thinks a great deal about couple relationships (another chapter). Typical self-limiting beliefs include imagining that failing at one thing makes them a ‘loser’, or that because someone hasn’t called in a while it’s “because she hates me”.

Dr Julie never explicitly addresses her book to one sex or the other. But I’m willing to bet you know more women than men who fit the description above, an egregious bit of stereotyping that is supported by studies which show women consistently score more highly for anxiety, perfectionism and neuroticism than men.

It’s tempting to suggest that the kind of neuroticism addressed in Dr Julie’s book is new: a product of the navel-gazing social media age, perhaps. And considerable evidence has been amassed now to suggest that social media is making young people more neurotic — especially young women.

A few months before Firework reached number one, in October 2010, Instagram was launched. In the four years that followed, as girls sang along to Katy Perry’s song about transcending your insecurity to wow the crowd, the rate of hospitalisation for self-harm among American girls aged 10 to 14 doubled.

Similar trends are visible in the UK: the Guardian reported in 2017 that over the decade 2007-2017 the rate of hospitalisation for self-harm among girls under 17 had risen by 68%. And Instagram is heavily implicated: summarising its effect on self-perception, a 2019 internal presentation by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, reported: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”.

But delving into historic medical literature on women’s mental health suggests that while Instagram may not be helping, it’s possible that the platform is exacerbating something that already existed. Feminists have long written critically about sexist portrayals of women’s emotionality in medical literature. Over three centuries ago, in 1681, the physician Thomas Sydenham offered a description of what he calls the “hysteric diseases”, which sounds strikingly like the emotional world experienced by Dr Julie’s implied reader:

“They indulge terror, anger, jealousy, distrust, and other hateful passions; and abhor joy, and hope, and cheerfulness… They love the same persons extravagantly at one time, and soon after hate them without cause… So unsettled is their mind, that they are never at rest.”

Unlike Dr Julie, Sydenham wastes no time in attributing this form of mental distress more to women than men. Few women, he asserts, “are quite free from every species of this disorder”. But unlike the ancients who thought neurosis was a function of female physiology, Sydenham thought it was mostly an effect of material ease.

In his observation, women who do hard physical work don’t suffer from “hysteria”, while men “who lead a sedentary life, and study hard” do. Sydenham called this male version “hypochondria” rather than hysteria, but describes both ailments as characterised by similar symptoms: “lowness”, “disordered mind” and “incurable despair”. For Sydenham, this ailment of ease inevitably includes more women than men, for men “cultivate the earth, hunt and kill wild beasts for food, and the like”, while the wealthier a woman gets the more likely she’ll be to be exempt from such gruelling work.

But perhaps material comfort is a double-edged sword. We might infer from Sydenham’s comments that without a healthy channel for aggression, and a sense of being able to act on the world around us, both sexes grow restive — and a historically sexed division of labour has made this especially the case for women. The accompanying sex role stereotypes, meanwhile, have long since taught women to bury all such dark and dangerous emotions.

Far from pursuing agency and a full range of emotional expression for its implicitly female readership, Has Nobody Told Me This Before? continues the time-honoured tradition of teaching women to internalise. Sigmund Freud based his theories of the human psyche on the twin pre-rational drives of sexuality and aggression; but these, considered fundamental human drives by psychoanalytic psychotherapy, barely feature in Dr Julie’s manual for self-optimisation: two mentions each. In contrast, “anxiety” appears 77 times. And while there’s a brief discussion of anger, this is only in the context of grief. Implicitly, anger is never about aggression — it’s always a cover for something cuter and more deserving of sympathy, such as fear or loss.

At the micro-scale, the book offers uncontroversial and often practical advice on how to be slightly less neurotic. Our minds can play tricks on us, Dr Julie advises, so troubleshoot practical reasons for feeling low, such as tiredness or thirst, before you catastrophise. Try not to obsess about things that go wrong: go for a short walk and think about something else. Write down three things a day you feel grateful for. Get enough exercise, sleep regularly and for long enough, eat real food and not too much of it, stick to a regular routine.

But its overarching message is unnerving. In Dr Julie’s world, there’s no question of using kinetic emotions such as anger or aggression to change anything around us. Rather, when experiencing strong emotion, she encourages the reader to use “physical movement” to “use that physiological arousal in the way it was designed to be used”.

I doubt Dr Julie has in mind the physical movement of her reader’s fist toward someone else’s face, which is arguably how the “physiological arousal” of anger is “designed to be used”. But this bait-and-switch exemplifies the pervasive message of this book: that somehow, we’re all alone in a world of shadows, where authentic encounters with other people are not possible. Nothing we feel can ever be expected to change anything, so it’s best we learn to manage it.

When experiencing strong feelings of any kind, she advises, the solution is never to act on them but rather “build your awareness of how you respond to various emotions” so you can “practise stepping back from them and responding to them with compassion”. In other words, “managing our mental health” means not becoming more immediately present in your social world. It means learning to detach from the kind of strong, kinetic, engaged and embodied feelings you’d need if there were real people out there, and instead detonating excess emotional force in a carefully controlled vacuum.

And this should be enough, the book implies, for each individual contains the solutions within them. As Katy Perry puts it:

It’s always been inside of you, you, you
And now it’s time to let it through

The chapter on “values” makes this clearest of all — for it invites the reader to compile her own ex nihilo. “Getting clarity on our personal values can guide us on setting goals that will bring meaning and purpose,” she declares, a statement that a cynic might observe is on the circular side: deciding what you understand the meaning of life to be will help you to determine the meaning of life.

One might also wonder if it’s a little cruel to ask an anxious, neurotic, socially uncertain and emotionally labile perfectionist to conjure a viable personal philosophy into existence without help from external referents. But leaving that aside, Dr Julie doesn’t acknowledge how the demand that each reader determines her moral system in a vacuum can backfire. For while it holds out a promise of self-containment, it also explains why anger is so curiously absent from this book.

For there are forms of righteous anger that aren’t covers for fear, loss or past trauma. This kind of anger is a fundamentally social emotion that expresses outrage at some other or others violating a set of shared principles. But in Dr Julie’s world, there are no shared values. And this means anger can never be righteous – and thus can only be detonated safely, in isolation, and never employed constructively in social encounters.

This presents further difficulties, too. For losing the shared terrain on which legitimate anger might be expressed doesn’t eliminate the underlying human tendency to aggression — even if Dr Julie doesn’t acknowledge that such a tendency exists. And if Sydenham catalogued the psychic distress more than three centuries ago of people who lacked healthy means of expressing agency and aggression, those means have shrunk still further today.

This is especially the case for girls, 84% of whom were shown in a recent study to be too sedentary — a higher figure than for boys, just as in Sydenham’s day. At the same time, studies show girls are more likely than boys to be both the victims and also the perpetrators of online bullying.

No wonder, then, that girls and young women are miserable. We raised a generation with few direct outlets for healthy aggression, and the most sedentary lifestyles in history, and told them not to assume any shared values with those around them — which meant they could never be legitimately angry. Then we handed them a set of social media tools for covert interpersonal aggression and watched their mental health implode.

Fittingly, Dr Julie first attained the fame that landed her this publishing deal on Instagram. She has thanked her audience by writing a book which denies the existence of any basic human drives and disavows the social importance of any shared values, while reinforcing every young woman’s essential isolation and concurrent duty to self-improve.

I’ll say this for Dr Julie’s book: it offers some useful tips to the Instagram generation, in coping with the main modern delivery mechanism for covert female aggression: Instagram. But it offers nothing to broaden the Instagram view of life: a competitive, value-neutral performance, where self-optimisation is everything and other people aren’t entirely real.

Every young woman is a firework; every young woman owns her own night. And no one is coming to help her with it.

In their understandable desire to get on with trials that might help people who are suffering, many researchers have sidestepped the question of what depression actually is. Instead, they’ve simply agreed on a definition and stuck to it. The Beck Depression Inventory is a questionnaire routinely used to diagnose and define depression: if you’ve ever spoken to your GP about feeling low, you might have come across it. It’s named after Aaron Beck, one of the most important figures in the history of psychiatry (who died aged 100 on November 1st this year). He came up with 21 questions that cover guilt, feelings of failure, weight loss, insomnia, and suicidal thoughts, among other common depressive complaints.

The problem is that the medical profession, and psychiatry researchers, might be relying a little too much on that list of symptoms. Indeed, in an odd, unintentional, circular move, they might have actually turned lists of symptoms into the very definition of depression. An essay by the eminent psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler argues that this is a fundamental mistake: the number of boxes a patient ticks on the list of symptoms that get you a diagnosis isn’t the same as “depression” (nor is their Beck Depression Inventory score) — even if psychiatrists and researchers often act like it is. The Inventory is very often used as the criterion for improvement in studies of treatment: if you achieve a 50% drop in symptoms as measured on his questionnaire, you count as having been positively affected by the treatment. But these criteria are a decent index of many of the common symptoms — not all of them. We know anxiety commonly comes alongside depression, Kendler notes, but it’s not on the standard diagnostic list. If we confuse the disease itself with a useful-but-limited list of its manifestations, we’ll find it harder to truly understand patients’ experiences.

Some researchers have gone a step further: should we stop using the concept of “depression” entirely? One study of thousands of depression patients found over 1,000 unique combinations of symptoms that all still count as “depression”. Maybe it’s time, argue some, to focus on understanding subtypes, or even just specific symptoms, rather than the monolithic entity of “depression” itself.

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In some senses — and perhaps ironically — this accords with Beck’s philosophy: he was known for being sceptical of focusing on the ultimate, root causes of mental illness. Which brings us to the other major contribution for which he is remembered: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Beginning in the 1960s, Beck reacted against the most popular form of therapy at the time, which was based on Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of the mind. Beck — who himself was originally trained to administer psychoanalytic therapy — began to doubt that depression symptoms were always caused by childhood traumas and unconscious repression. Some of the Freudian theories were rather far-fetched — as Tony Soprano says to his psychoanalytic therapist, after she suggests for the umpteenth time that he might be harbouring some Oedipal desires: “I don’t wanna fuck my mother! I don’t give a shit what you say — you’re never gonna convince me!”

Instead, Beck suggested a much more proximal reason for the disorder: depression patients (and those with other disorders) are suffering from “thought distortions”. For example, they might catastrophise, blowing minor unfortunate occurrences in life out of all proportion. They might overgeneralise, thinking that a fallout with one friend means that they’re hated by everyone they know. As well as focusing his Depression Inventory on these kinds of thought patterns, Beck argued that therapy should target them and train patients out of them, rather than looking for some underlying explanation for all their symptoms.

Beck won the argument: although psychodynamic therapy still exists, CBT has now become the most popular — and by far the most studied — type of psychotherapy. New guidelines, announced this week, give patients the option of group CBT as the first line of treatment for mild depression; but even before then, it was extremely widely used. Its application goes well beyond depression: the language of CBT, with all its ideas about catastrophising and perfectionism and self-blame, is now, as Scott Alexander has memorably argued, “in the water supply”. But “popular” and “culturally influential” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”. What do the studies say about whether it works?

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Despite the sheer volume of research, the evidence is actually quite poor. The meta-analyses (reviews of all the studies that have looked at a particular question) do conclude that CBT works compared to doing nothing (a common control group, to which the therapy is compared, is made up of people who are on a waiting list for treatment). But it’s worth remembering that positive studies are more likely to be published than ones concluding that the experiment in question doesn’t work. And the overall literature on psychotherapy does show signs of this kind of bias.

So, even if the studies are right that CBT is beneficial (and in my view they most likely are), the extent of the benefit might be somewhat exaggerated. Those meta-analyses compare CBT to other common forms of psychotherapy, including the psychoanalytic kind (these days usually called “psychodynamic” therapy). The general picture is this: the effects of CBT are essentially the same as any other kind of psychotherapy. They all reduce depression symptoms, and they all still seem to work up to a year later (this particular kind of meta-analysis has to assume all the trials are comparable, though — and that’s often quite a big assumption).

It’s a very similar story for drugs: the meta-analyses show that essentially all forms of antidepressant work better than placebo. But these effects are likely a bit overblown by all the dodgy practices in the scientific literature. And the evidence for one antidepressant being substantially better than another is, to use the kind of language one often sees in the review studies, “limited” (which means researchers only have the vaguest clue).

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Although this is good news in one sense, it’s worrying (even depressing) in another. There is evidently a gaping hole in our evidence base on treating depression. If essentially all the major therapy types work to the same degree, despite being based on entirely different — often opposing — principles, it’s pretty difficult to pin down exactly why they work. What exactly are the therapists doing in their sessions that makes the treatment effective? Can we really say that Beck was correct about CBT being the best treatment if other forms of therapy, which take an entirely different approach, can do the same job?

Maybe it doesn’t matter whether therapists stick to Beck’s plausible cognitive theories or Freud’s absurd psychosexual ones. Maybe just having a regular interaction with a smart, sympathetic, well-organised person who focuses on your problems is what helps. That wouldn’t explain, though, why the analyses showed that some forms of self-directed therapy can also make a difference. Either way, all this raises the question: how can we make our therapies better if we don’t know the active ingredients? But then, how can we establish the active ingredients if we don’t even know what we’re treating?

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

But this year’s winners would do well to consider what happened to many Nobellists after they accepted their prize. Take Kary Mullis, who won his Nobel as the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR (a fundamental technique that’s now used not just in Covid tests but in essentially all laboratory genetics research): he spent the last part of his life strenuously denying that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Or Luc Montagnier, who won his Nobel for discovering that very HIV virus — and went on to publish research on what amounts to homeopathy.

More recently, Michael Levitt won the Nobel in 2013 for important computer-modelling work relating to protein structure (his Twitter name “@MLevitt_NP2013”, NP for “Nobel Prize”, helps you see just what a big part of his identity the award is). Throughout the Covid pandemic, he has been drastically wrong in his rosy predictions — and sometimes conspiratorial-sounding theories — about the spread of the disease. In July 2020, for instance, he stated that Covid in the US will be “done in 4 weeks”.

All these brilliant scientists lost their grip on reality after they won their Nobel (and there are many other examples; there’s even a name for the phenomenon: Nobel Disease). But at least, in all those cases, the Nobel itself was awarded for a genuine scientific breakthrough. There’s one case where the prize was given, and has never been rescinded, for a disastrously misconceived “discovery” — one that went on to blight thousands of lives.

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In 1949 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the inventor of a disturbing procedure — an attempt to treat mental illness — where a surgeon either injected pure ethanol directly into the brain to kill a clump of neurons, or used a special instrument with a sharp wire to slice away the connections between parts of the brain’s frontal lobe. Oh, and before they did so, they had to first punch or drill a hole through the skull — usually somewhere near the eye.

The frontal lobotomy (or sometimes “leucotomy”) wasn’t the first ever attempt at “psychosurgery” — the treatment of mental disorders by operating on the brain. But its invention is most strongly associated with the Portuguese doctor, politician and general polymath Egas Moniz. Inspired at least in part by previous research on chimpanzees, who became notably less aggressive and more docile after their frontal lobes were chopped out, in 1937 Moniz reported a case series of 20 patients suffering from conditions like anxiety, depression and schizophrenia whom he’d had lobotomised.

According to Moniz, his “very audacious” and “always safe” procedure — which he couldn’t perform personally due to crippling gout in his hands — worked wonders: the patients were more placid, more rational — and easier to control. He declared some of them “cured”.

But was this evidence any good? As the psychologist Ann Jane Tierney put it on the 50th Anniversary of Moniz’s Nobel Prize:

“A contemporary scientist can find considerable fault in Moniz’s work, including the inadequate follow-up times, absence of control groups, and the superficial and subjective evaluations of patients performed by individuals least likely to be objective.”

That is, even setting aside the upsetting nature of the procedure — and we should set aside our “yuck” reactions, since there are many horrific-sounding medical procedures that are genuinely helpful — the evidence that Moniz put together to support the use of lobotomies was hopelessly unscientific and biased in favour of his desired conclusion that the technique was useful.

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And yet the Nobel committee, some years later, decided to give him the award. By this time, the lobotomy had skyrocketed in popularity and was being used across the world. The best-known proponent was the US neurologist Walter Freeman, an almost unreal character who seems straight from a medical-themed horror movie. Across several decades he performed thousands of lobotomies for an ever-widening list of complaints — not just psychiatric conditions, but also things like “being a badly-behaved child” — and did so theatrically, in front of an audience, often making the initial hole in the skull using an ice pick.

But, also by the time the Nobel was awarded, the horrific downsides of lobotomy were well-known: the fact that there was no evidence of any long-term benefits in the majority of patients was a quibble in comparison to the most obvious problem: the lobotomised were often changed entirely. Many emerged from the operation with altered personalities or slower-running brains; others lost physical abilities. Still others died immediately due to bleeds on the brain (Freeman claimed a 3.6% fatality rate but other sources suggest it was far higher). Most infamously, John F. Kennedy’s sister Rosemary, who had a learning disability, was lobotomised by Freeman and a colleague in 1941. The procedure, aimed at alleviating her seizures and aggression, was a disaster; it left her, permanently, with the mental capacity, independence, and continence of a small child. The story was hushed up, and Rosemary was kept in a psychiatric hospital and then a special school, far from prying eyes, until she died in 2005.

Even if he never intended for lobotomy to be used so terribly haphazardly, it does seem unlikely that Moniz deserved the world’s most prestigious scientific prize for inventing the technique. But there he is, on the official Nobel website among the other winners. We’re left with questions reminiscent of the ones being asked about statues of less-than-ideal historical figures: should we keep this reminder of a past that had very different values from our own? Should we somehow contextualise it? Or should we get rid of it altogether? Should we — more than 70 years after it was awarded — remove Moniz’s Nobel Prize?

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It has been suggested before. There are still people alive today who were lobotomised early in life, often with tragic consequences, and it might be seen as a measure of justice for them and their families to remove the Nobel committee’s endorsement. It’s not unheard of in science: some journals have begun to remove or flag research papers, even very old ones, from scientists who are under serious suspicion of misconduct.

But Moniz’s research — while slapdash, especially by today’s standards — wasn’t deliberately fraudulent, at least as far as we know. If we were to go back and wipe out the historical science that now seems poor-quality to us, we’d have to disown huge swathes of the literature, and rescind any number of prizes awarded over the years. On top of that, context reveals that Moniz might technically have won the prize for lobotomies, but it’s at least plausible that the committee actually wanted to give it to him some years previously, for his work on cerebral angiography (a pre-computer technique, still used to this day, that allows doctors to X-ray the blood vessels in the brain).

Besides, it’s worth asking: what’s the point of rescinding a prize given to a long-dead scientist for a treatment that’s almost extinct? Everyone now knows how terrible a mistake the craze for lobotomies was; psychosurgery in general — almost entirely replaced by drug treatments during the latter half of the 20th Century — is nowadays vanishingly rare. Formally condemning it isn’t going to practically help any of its victims.

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Perhaps the least the Nobel organisation could do is provide better context about Moniz’s award. At the moment, his page on their site notes, with some understatement, that the operation “could lead to serious personality changes”. The only other discussion I could find about him on their website is a bizarre essay from a psychiatrist in 1998 who defended Moniz in no uncertain terms:

“I see no reason for indignation at what was done in the 1940s as at that time there were no other alternatives!”

His phrasing isn’t exactly sensitive (the exclamation mark is in the original), but does he have a point? Lobotomy came before reliable psychiatric drugs or other treatments were developed; not all doctors who used it were as flamboyant or clumsy as Freeman. It’s among the worst dead ends in medical history, but shouldn’t we expect missteps and mistakes in our march towards scientific progress?

Maybe the real moral of the story — as well as those of all the Nobellists, who went off the rails — about the pitfalls of honouring scientists. The Nobel Prizes have been criticised as “absurd” in a world of collaborative, cumulative science that relies less and less on individuals. And maybe we shouldn’t expect there to be enough Earth-shattering discoveries for major awards to be given every single year.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t honour our best and most creative researchers; we just shouldn’t turn them into heroes with opinions that are somehow above criticism (a bit more criticism of our top scientists would’ve helped in the early stages of the pandemic, to give one obvious example). Perhaps having Moniz listed among the Nobellists is the greatest reminder possible that even the best scientists don’t comprise a pantheon of divine beings: they’re just humans, and some humans make terrible mistakes. Winning a Nobel doesn’t make someone infallible. It doesn’t even make their prize-winning discovery particularly “true”. The only thing that can do that — the only thing a scientist should really care about — is the evidence.