Lauren Slater has been presenting herself as a science writer or as a writer of "creative nonfiction." Her books and articles (e.g., in the N.Y. Times) have been very widely read. Sadly, after much reading and careful thought, I have concluded that Lauren Slater's books and papers cannot be trusted. Whenever we lack external confirmatory evidence, we do not know if Slater's stories are true. My conclusion is based on careful readings of some of Slater's writings, on my reading of critiques of Slater's work by reviewers, and on letters from several psychologists and psychiatrists who claim that stories about them were fabricated or badly distorted by Slater for her book Opening Skinner's Box.
Lauren Slater may have a tenuous grasp on reality. She does claim a history of severe mental illness. Another possibility is that Lauren Slater is not mentally ill, but she is an attention-seeking compulsive liar bent on using distortions of the truth to make news and make money. If this seems like an overly harsh judgment, please read the evidence cited on these pages.
In her most recent book, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The 20th Century, Slater reports interviews with several famous psychologists and psychiatrists. Unfortunately, many, if not all, of those interviewees deny having said some of the things attributed to them by Slater. Letters from some of the interviewees are available from links at the bottom of this web page.
Slater's books, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir and Spasm - A Memoir with Lies (she tells me that the former is a later printing of the latter), seem to imply that she has difficulty with the truth. From the Amazon.com synopsis of Spasm:
Between the ages of 13 and 17, Lauren Slater was epileptic. Surgery stopped her seizures; but by then the psychological reflex was ingrained - the habit of invention to fill the gaps in her memory and experience. She'd learned to lie. She may even have lied about her epilepsy. She may never have had it at all. Her memoir is a work of non-fiction that uses the freedoms of fiction to shape the story of its author's life.
Slater characterizes her approach to writing as "creative nonfiction." How creative may one be while still considering one's work to be nonfiction? Slater seems to feel that artistic license allows for any sort of fabrication.
Some of the documentation for my concern is contained in the materials you will find on the following web pages...
Letters about "Opening Skinner's Box"
Newspaper articles about "Opening Skinner's Box"
Relevant journal articles
Spitzer, Lilienfeld and Miller responded in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease to Slater's claim that she had replicated Rosenhan's famous pseudopatient study. Their paper was followed by a response from Slater, a rejoinder by Lilienfeld, Spitzer and Miller, and an interesting commentary by psychiatrist Mark Zimmerman, a neutral third party. Those four papers are available here...