The Martha Mitchell effect is the process by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, or other mental health clinician mistakes his or her patient's belief in real events for delusion and diagnoses accordingly. A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. ...

Description

According to Bell and Vaughan: "Sometimes, improbable reports are erroneously assumed to be symptoms of mental illness," due to a "failure or inability to verify whether the events have actually taken place, no matter how improbable intuitively they might appear to the busy clinician."^[1] As examples of such unlikely events, they list:

• Pursuit by practitioners of organized crime.
• Surveillance by law enforcement officers.
• Stalking by a private investigator hired by a spouse who suspects infidelity.

Quoting Joseph Berke, the authors note that "even paranoids have enemies!" Any patient, they explain, can be maliciously targeted, even one with a history of paranoid delusions. Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior. ...

Origin

Psychologist Brendan Maher named the effect after Martha Beall Mitchell.^[2] Mrs. Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, Attorney-General in the Nixon administration. When she alleged that White House officials were engaged in illegal activities, her claims were attributed to mental illness. Ultimately, however, the relevant facts of the Watergate scandal vindicated her. Martha Beall Mitchell (2 September 1918 - 18 June 1976) was the wife of John Mitchell, United States Attorney General under President Richard Nixon. ... Mitchell (far left) meeting with Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and John Ehrlichman on May 26, 1971. ... Alberto Gonzales, current Attorney General of the United States The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. ... Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 - April 22, 1994) was the thirty-sixth (1953–1961) Vice President, and the thirty-seventh (1969–1974) President of the United States. ... North façade of the White House, seen from Pennsylvania Avenue. ... Mental illness (or emotional disability, cognitive dysfunction) is a broad generic label for a category of illnesses that may include affective or emotional instability, behavioral dysregulation, and/or cognitive dysfunction or impairment. ... The term Watergate refers to a series of events, spanning from 1972 to 1975, that got its name from burglaries of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington, D.C.. Though then-President Nixon had endured two years of mounting political embarrassments, the...

See also

• Delusion

A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. ...

References

1. ^ Bell, Vaughan et. al. "Beliefs About Delusions". The Psychologist. Vol. 6 No. 8. August, 2003.
2. ^ Maher, B.A. (1988) Anomalous experience and delusional thinking: The logic of explanations. In T. Oltmanns and B. Maher (eds) Delusional Beliefs. New York: Wiley Interscience