US News blog: Doctor-journalist takes unusual tack
In a recent blog post for the U.S. News Brain & Behavior blog, Ford Vox, a doctor and journalist, took his interview in a direction many of us might never have thought of–and would be afraid to pursue if we had.
Howie Mandel, the host of television game show Deal or No Deal, has just written an autobiography called Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me, published by Bantam in November. The book deals, in large part apparently, with Mandel’s obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit disorder. Whether it’s a consequence of Mandel’s frankness or Vox’s interviewing skills, the interview is particularly revealing, and an interesting example of a story on mental illness that avoids the usual cliches.
But what caught my attention, more than anything in the interview, was that Vox persuaded Mandel to take a medical test to gauge the severity of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Mandel scored 21 out of 40, putting him in the ‘moderate’ range,” Vox reports in a postscript.
As a journalist, I wonder whether Vox could not have obtained that information more easily by getting Mandel’s permission to talk to his doctor, who presumably has already done some testing.
On the other hand, it’s given me some ideas. After interviewing a geneticist, ask him or her to provide a genome scan so we can discover whether the results favor his or her own alleles? (A clear conflict of interest.) Ask our editors to submit to testing to determine totalitarian tendencies?
Perhaps we should ask writers to submit to a basic assessment of their sanity?
Nah. We know how that one would turn out.
- Paul Raeburn
