It would be helpful to say I do not write to have Johnny Depp, the actor the celebrity, my concern has two dimensions: one, a human, father, and husband, is being sacrificed by activists who labeled Amber Heard as a "survivor" now they do not accept their advertised, branded face be abuser, not a survivor; two, what is going on could happen to any of us, when we seek justice in the court, the abuser find a couple of unethical, negligent experts to accuse us.
Dr. David Spiegel's Testimony as a psychiatrist was a failure in its literal meaning; he passed many rules and boundaries that should not have been passed by scientists. Meanwhile, it is interesting that no one from the psychiatry field denounces such scientific testimony as "abuse". As he is an expert on abuse, I suggest we see what is "science abuse"?
First of all, he testified in a way that understands by a large number of listeners that johnny Depp's drug and alcohol abuse caused domestic violence. However, now and then, he mentioned percentages or pronounce words to imply the likelihood of his sayings, but it is clear that he take the stand to accuse Johnny Depp of abuse. But I believe he knows that most of what he said was in vain.
I say that David Spiegel has abused science because science is not about certainty. Science gives us insights into a big number of cases. That is the first notion in social sciences; For example, suppose a psychiatrist conducted research on sexual abuse, and turned out that 70% of abusers suffer from drug abuse. To this point, if the research was a good one, the example was big enough to represent all human beings, the method was right and valid and interpretations make sense, then we can say for any given group of abusers with 100 members there is a chance to find 70 of them being also drug abusers. No more than.
But 70% is a big number, thus can we conclude that drug abuse is the cause of sexual abuse? Based on the research it just "could" be the case; why? Because we have 30%, 30 cases in every 100, that are sexual abusers but they are not drug abusers. If something would be a cause it should every time and always create the effect, except for rare conditions that prevent effects. So if bipolar disorder is the cause of periodic manic, it should cause periodic manic in more than, let's say, 95%. 5% would be for rare cases for example.
In the case of the abusers' example, no one could say drug abuse cause sexual abuse. first, it is just about probabilities and likelihood; second, when given drug abusers that at the same time also committed intimidating partner violations, be under study a psychiatrist could relate those two based on previous studies. But if we just know, that a certain person was a drug abuser, that is not possible to deduce that she or he was a sexual abuser too, a simple fact that undergraduate a student knows. I'm going to the next point which is the absence of distinguishing causation from correlation.
In the second place, Spiegel's Testimony was an obvious failure in science due to his negligence of "correlation". Causation and correlation have many similarities which could confuse observers. I will explain it in an easy-to-understand way. By definition, causation is the relationship between a cause and an effect in which the cause created (produced/ bring about) another thing called the effect. Correlation is a mutual connection between two things that usually appeared side by side; such as flu and runny nose, as well as, between fever and runny nose. Generally speaking, although causation is a kind of correlation because cause and effect always appeared at a time, every correlation is not causation, too. For instance, fever and runny nose correlate, perhaps more than 90%, but neither fever cause runny nose nor runny nose causes fever; the virus which is responsible for Flu (influenza) causes both fever and runny nose. Another example, is always thunderbolt and thunder are seen together, first thunderbolt then thunder, but they are not causing and effect, they are in correlation. The cause for both is something else: electric discharge between the atmosphere and ground which causes both thunderbolt (lightning) and thunder (loud sound).
Now let's see what is the problem in Spiegel's mind. He related sexual abuse, precisely IPV, to abusing substances, drugs, opiates, and alcohol, on the ground that they have unstable moods, impair judgment, cause forgetting, etc. He added that a big number of his clients have these problems, seemingly he was making the point that he knows what he says. Suppose always drug and alcohol misuse and abuse could be seen together, even let's say in 80% of cases. In such a supposition no one could say drug abuse cause IPV; because it should be studied if one is the cause of another one, namely, the correlation possibility would be rejected with great certainty. It is necessary because maybe there is a hidden psychological disorder in the person that pushes them into abusing drugs, and that very disorder makes an inclination in the person to commit IPV.
Furthermore, if drug abuse is always with the sexual abuser, how could Dr. Spiegel know that sexual abuse is not the cause of drug abuse? He said drug mixing and abusing impair judgment and cause sexual abuse, or help the person to commit IPV. But let's suppose, as a layman, that when someone committed sexual abuse against a partner, that crime bothers the abuser when the person thinks about it, got judgemental about her/his personality, and so on; thus, to forgot about it gradually takes drugs, alcohol, mixing them. It could be a possibility.
To conclude, the most powerful reason for refuting Spiegel's testimony is that what he said was even from a psychiatric viewpoint very hard to believe. Spiegel stated that mixing opiate with alcohol, which should not be mixed impairs judgment, then the person could not judge between good and bad, as in normal time can; so far is good. But the problem is that mixing opiate with alcohol not only impairs judgment but also weakens strength in the person. When one takes drugs and opiates or opioids and alcohol together, judgment impairment is accompanied by sedation, hard breathing, respiratory failure, or even death (In the end a few scientific materials are linked). Question to Dr. Spiegel: if Depp's co-use of alcohol and opioids and other drugs was at a level that impaired his judgment, how much is it possible for him to tear up a phone, injured his hand, despite that committing domestic violence in which he penetrated a bottle to the vagina of a young, sober, healthy woman? Doest possible that mixing those did not cause sedation, breathing problems, and respiratory problems? Just should it be judgment impairment and necessary end up in IPV? Please give it another try.
Here I just explained the core reasoning of the testimony, in another one I should give some time to violating the psychological code of ethics.
For effects of mixing opioids with alcohol any simple search in scientific databases bring on much research, but for naming two reliable sources see:
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