We're barely exaggerating -- autism didn't even get a name until 1943, and for 20 years after that, the condition was interchanged with schizophrenia and totally blamed on bad parenting. As in, "Your child is 4 years old and hasn't learned to talk? You didn't hold him enough when he was a baby. Boom. Done. NEXT! Kid showing inappropriate reactions to social cues? Well, you clearly didn't spank him enough!"

It wasn't until 1980 that the main guide for mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published the six-point criteria for diagnosing the condition (and none of them were about how crappy your mother was). Finally, kids who once would have been labeled mentally disabled despite high intelligence now had another possible diagnosis. We didn't even start throwing the phrase "autism spectrum" around until the mid-'90s -- meaning doctors on the cutting edge of psychiatry were just waking up to the fact that there's actually a wide range of symptoms of autism at around the same time kids were walking around with one overall strap hanging down and singing Color Me Badd.

Archimedes had his bathtub, Newton had his apple, autism doctors had 90210.

So, yeah, claiming that autism is new is like saying germs didn't exist until we invented the microscope.

So, in the same way you shouldn't expect to get that coveted elementary school diploma without tackling kindergarten through fifth grade, you're not going to get the "at peace with a loved one's death" diploma until you make it through those five inescapable stages -- fighting it just delays the "acceptance" stage we're all trying to get to.

The Bullshit:

The five stages are something one lone psychiatrist came up with in the 1960s for a book she was writing. There's no evidence for it; it's just something she thought she observed ... while watching people in a completely different situation.

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It's like using advice from Housewivez Needz #69 to fix your marriage.

Here, ask yourself: Is there a stage that seems to be missing here? Well, how about the one where you yearn for the person to be alive again? As in, the emotion you actually feel the most after someone dies? Well, it's not there because the five stages weren't supposed to apply to people mourning the loss of others -- they are emotions the terminally ill express when facing their own deaths.

This all goes back to a hospital psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who interviewed dying patients at her hospital and noticed a pattern. Some of them were angry, others were in complete denial, still others were walking around in a Zen-like state of acceptance. While battling insomnia one night, Kubler-Ross gave labels to the death thoughts of her patients and wrote them up in her book on death, cheerfully titled On Death and Dying. Before long, psychiatrists and counselors were using DABDA to help grieving loved ones, a completely different population from who it was intended for.

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"You already have cancer. Let your sister have the five steps thing. Don't be selfish."

In reality, mourning looks different for everyone (although a Yale study shows that most people accept the death of a loved one immediately -- understanding that someone is dead and gone forever is usually the very first emotion that we process, not the fifth). That's important to know, because if you're struggling through a death and you think there's a finish line or pot of gold after you hit certain checkpoints, you're going to be in for even more hurt down the line. Hell, if human beings progressed through every traumatic event in a neat checklist, what the hell would we need psychiatrists for? You could just print that shit in a manual and issue it to everyone at birth.

The Bullshit:

There was one fatal flaw in the Stanford prison experiment: The guy in charge was stage directing the whole thing. Zimbardo didn't step back and watch the events unfold as an observer; he played the part of head guard, even going so far as using these totally scientifically unbiased instructions to his student guards: "In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none."

And remember, Zimbardo wasn't just the researcher/fake guard/sadistic mastermind of the experiment; he was a teacher, therefore an authority figure. There was pressure on students to please the researcher -- they were getting paid $15 a day for the experiment, and the department had clearly spent a lot of money building the fake prison. They were acting like sadistic guards because they wanted to please, not because their mock professional role emboldened them to do so. They knew what they were there to do. Oh, and a former San Quentin prisoner who served as a consultant on the experiment later admitted to feeding Zimbardo and his students suggestions on how to abuse their prisoners. So much for assuming decent, upstanding people spontaneously invented ways to be abusive.

BBC
"Remember, pee can be used as a punishment and a reward."

Also, you have to understand the context. This was the summer of 1971, a time of infamous clashes between protesters and authority figures (oddly enough, the riots in San Quentin and Attica prisons happened right after the experiment), including riots at Stanford that had to be broken up with tear-gas. When these students responded to a request to help a professor study the roles of authority figures and victims, they knew what point was being proven. It'd be like doing an experiment on gun control in the wake of several mass shootings.

Finally, despite Zimbardo's best efforts to smear all of humanity in one fell swoop, several of the student "guards" kept their moral compass intact and didn't abuse jack shit. Some even did favors for their inmates. The nice ones didn't get much attention in the subsequent reports because they didn't fit the professor's hypothesis that deep down we're all just waiting for permission to be assholes.

The Theory:

What if there was a magic pill to make your unborn baby smarter? You'd take the pill, even if you weren't pregnant or were a man, because nobody wants a dumb baby. That's probably why, in the early '90s, parents began buying into the "Mozart effect," the scientifically proven fact that both unborn and after-born babies get smarter from listening to classical music. It makes sense -- while dumb people listen to rock (or worse, country), isn't it the high-class achievers who sit around listening to classical, sipping wine and adjusting their monocles?

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"Listen to them assholes screwin' up that movement! 'Best of Chopin in the park' my ass!"

Thus, some states began distributing free classical-music CDs to parents of newborns. A prominent baby formula company packaged a free CD of classical music in their take-home bags given out to new parents at the hospital. So the millennials that are hitting college this fall should be pretty brilliant, huh?

The Bullshit:

Not only is the Mozart effect not a real thing, but it's an insane example of people misconstruing research to make it sound like what they want to hear.

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"When listening, did you notice the theoretical increase in penis size?"
"Yeah, totally."

The original 1993 study by Francis Rauscher did indeed find that listening to Mozart had a mild impact on performing spatial-reasoning tasks. That effect lasted for about 10 minutes. That's it. And it was a tiny study of about 36 people, and none of them were even children. They were college students. But that didn't stop a New York Times music critic from writing a fun opinion piece claiming that Mozart was now the go-to guy for making your babies smarter. Before you knew it, another music critic created a whole brand of Mozart effect products for parents who wanted to give their children a head start in life.

And here's the kicker: Once the experts got around to scientifically testing the theory on a large scale, they found out Mozart was OK at boosting performances on tests, but the British pop band Blur was better.

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"Woo-hoo."