Case Conferences" In 1973, Paul Meehl published the polemic "Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences". He discussed his avoidance of case conferences in mental health clinics, where individual patients, or "cases", are discussed at length by a team, often as a training exercise. Meehl found such case conferences boring and lacking intellectual rigor. In contrast, he recalled numerous interesting illuminating case conferences within internal medicine or neurology departments, which often centered around pathologist reports and objective data about patients' pathophysiology. In other words, case conferences outside mental health disciplines were benefiting from including objective evidence against which clinical expertise could be compared and contrasted. Meehl argued for creating a psychiatric analogue to the pathologist's report. Additionally, he outlined a proposed format for case conferences beginning with initial discussion of clinical observations, and ending with a revealing of a subset of patient data (e.g., psychological testing results) to compare with attendees' clinical inferences and proposed diagnoses. Meehl also elaborated upon the issue of clinical versus statistical prediction and the known weakness of unstructured clinical decision-making during typical case conferences. He encouraged clinicians to be humble when collaborating about patient care and pushed for a higher scientific standard for clinical reasoning in mental health treatment settings. Meehl directly identified several common deficiencies in reasoning that he had observed among his clinical colleagues, and to which he applied memorable names: Barnum effect: Making a statement that is trivial and true of nearly all patients, but which is made as though it is important for the current patient. Sick-sick ("pathological set"): The tendency to generalize from personal experiences of health and ways of being, to the identification of others who are different from ourselves as being "sick". Me too: The opposite of sick-sick. Imagining that "everyone does this" and thereby minimizing a symptom without assessing the probability of whether a mentally healthy person would actually do it. A variation of this is Uncle George's pancake fallacy. This minimizes a symptom through reference to a friend/relative who exhibited a similar symptom, thereby implying that it is normal. Multiple Napoleons fallacy: "It's not real to us, but it's 'real' to him". "So what if he thinks he's Napoleon?" There is a distinction between reality and delusion that is important to make when assessing a patient and so the consideration of comparative realities can mislead and distract from the importance of a patient's delusion to a