So in the news last week, we saw that the Phresh study, a cutting-edge, 15-year-long study of Alzheimer’s in two large low-income, majority-Black Pittsburgh neighborhoods has been cancelled for clearly political reasons (Glenza, 2026). (Their cancellation letter says so: the other reason given is just pure ignorance, unless it’s deliberately disingenuous, which is to say, an outright lie.)
National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya, a Trump appointee, described long-accepted self-report metrics that link trauma, deprivation and discrimination to health status as, “not in alignment with NIH’s priorities related to ‘promoting research focused on scientifically valid measurable health outcomes’.” The work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities”, one letter said. The result, researchers said, will almost certainly rebalance studies to include more white participants (Glenza, 2026).
Self-report (i.e., questionnaires you fill out, paper-and-pencil personality tests, surveys, and the like) definitely have their faults. But they are known faults and good researchers have empirically-validated means of compensating for them. And for various reasons, much of psychological research is based on self-report. So claiming that you can’t use tests that themselves have been validated independently of the studies in which they are used is just, pardon me, bullshit. And if Alzheimer’s is not a “scientifically valid measurable health outcome”, I never met one. You either have it or you don’t, and we’re all pretty much in agreement as to what “it” is, amirite?
Which leaves us with the political reason. It doesn’t “effectuate” (what a pretentious word for “accomplish”!) what MAGA wants. Which, by the way, is not what science is even for. If, though, NIH’s goal is better health for all Americans, you have to ask: How does this not effectuate that goal? Has NIH’s goal become health for all white people? For the middle class? Or is health just not a priority any more?
Psychology is Not All Between Your Ears
As I’ve said many times before, and will again, psychology is not all between your ears. As this cancellation amply demonstrates, it is political, it’s social, it’s geographic, economic, historical, racialized, gendered, and… did I say political?
Black Americans have nearly double the risk of developing Alzheimer’s compared to whites (Glenza, 2026). Politics is going to keep us from understanding the impact of racism (and poverty, and other structural failings) on the Black brain. This cancellation is even going to delay diagnosis and treatment for as many as 600 specific Black brains in two neighborhoods of Pittsburgh alone.
“…censoring research can have life or death consequences,” said Olga Akselrod, senior counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program, and one of the lead litigators in the case. “It is dangerous for public health when research is censored based on political litmus tests…” (Glenza, 2026).
It’s one of the reasons this administration is frequently called “eugenicist.” There’s so many of us for one reason or another who are just going to be left to die.
Nothing About Us Without Us
I know about the stubbornness of some researchers where Black people were just a throw-aside, [to] get two of them [and] say, “We studied all [Black] people,” said one participant in the study.
It takes time to earn trust, and the researchers have spent years doing just that. It’s going to be lost when they can’t deliver on the main promise that they made at the outset, which was to share the results with the residents (Glenza, 2026). One of the best things about this study was the way it morphed from the outset based on what the researchers were hearing from their participants and the data they were collecting.
Our whole view of the issue is skewed so white that it even took me a minute to find a photo of a Black woman in a sea of white faces to illustrate this article.
(Nothing About Us Without Us began, I believe, as a slogan among American Indians, quickly spread to the disability community, and of course now applies to any minoritized group systematically shut out of research positions/authority. Pitt really respected that demand with this study.)
The Fallacy of Personal Responsibility
We used to call race an “individual risk factor” for Alzheimer’s (Glenza, 2026) and lots of other things but we know now that much of it is structural. Which means that you can’t study it without taking race (and poverty, and whatever else has been demonstrated through years of research to be relevant) into account, and it means that you can’t just blow it off as “DEI” or “woke” and cancel it because you don’t like that. (The whole point of social psychology, by the way, is precisely that psychology is not all between your ears: We’re all influenced by society to a surprisingly profound degree.)
ACES is a nearly thirty-year-old concept (Glenza, 2026): There’s no news here, and it’s hardly unscientific, as the White House claims. (As I said, that’s either scientific illiteracy or deliberately <ahem> disingenuous.)
If this was helpful in any way, please… buy me a coffee! It helps keep the guinea pigs in kibble.
References
Glenza, J. (2026, September 18). ‘Clear retribution’: Dismay as key Alzheimer’s study cancelled amid Trump attacks on science. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/18/pittsburgh-trump-funding-cuts-nih-alzheimers
Coming Wednesday: A brief lesson in self-report data — what it can and cannot do, why it’s essential, etc. To receive a notification when it drops, just fill out the form:
Leave a Reply