From Closed Ranks to Open Doors: Elaine and John Cummings' Mental Health Education Experiment in 1950s Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During late 1951 and early 1952, married couple, social biologist Elaine Cumming and psychiatrist John Cumming, led a mental health education experiment in Indian Head, Saskatchewan. The study, which was intended to inform strategies toward deinstitutionalization, sought to determine if attitudes regarding mental illness could be changed through commonly used educational practices. It was shaped by the shared interests of powerful philanthropic, charitable, psychiatric, academic and governmental bodies to create healthier citizens and a stronger democratic nation through expert knowledge. However, in addition to the disappointing findings indicating that attitudes remained unchanged, the town appeared to close ranks against the research team. Nonetheless, the Cummings' later association with sociologists at Harvard University enabled them to interpret the results in a way that lent the study credibility and themselves legitimacy, thus opening the door to their careers as very successful researchers and policy-makers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.064 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".