GAS (Goal Attainment Scaling in Rehabilitation), GAS-light, and gaslighting.

Jonathan Edwards said:
Sure, but was the word 'gaslighting' used in the film?
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I haven't seen the film but I doubt it. It was called "Gas Light" (the 1938 play) and "Gaslight" (the 1944 film) because

"The flickering gaslights which he claims she has imagined were caused by his turning on the attic lights, thus reducing the gas to the downstairs lights."

I doubt very much that any character was given the line: "But my dear, can't you see he's gaslighting you?"

 
Though the inspiration for the term ‘gaslighting’ is the original book and film, the question is when it came into use both in academic and in popular media, as already pointed out by @Jonathan Edwards . I had thought it had been in general usage as far back as the 1970/80s, but wonder now if I am misremembering.

Wikipedia says
  • The term "gaslighting" first appeared in print in a scientific publication 1969 in an anthropology text.
  • "Gaslighting" is occasionally used in clinical literature but is considered a colloquialism by the American Psychological Association. The article "Gaslighting: A Marital Syndrome" (1988) examines certain male behaviors during and after their extramarital affairs and the impact of those behaviors and associated attitudes on the men's spouses.’
  • The New York Times first used the common gerund form, gaslighting, in 1995, in a Maureen Dowd column. However there were only nine additional uses in the 20 years to follow.
  • The American Dialect Society (ADS) recognized the word "gaslight" as the "Most Useful" new word of the year in 2016.
  • Oxford University Press named "gaslighting" as a runner-up in their list of the most popular new words of 2018.
So though I could theoretically have known the word as a psychology undergraduate in the late 1970s, it did not come into popular usage till much later. So the inventors of GAS-Light might reasonably be assumed to have been unaware the alternative (potentially itself gaslighting) interpretation of their term, however this is not an absolute certainty.

Nevertheless we are left with the irony of the term in this context even if it had not been a conscious irony on the part of its authors.
 
Off topic, but has anyone else noticed how no police procedural/crime drama/scandi-noir is complete without someone stumbling across a badly injured victim who's about to expire, and repeatedly urging them to "Stay with me..."?

A few years ago, around Boxing Day, the BBC aired a new dramatisation of Dicken's A Christmas Carol. And blow me, when visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Tiny Tim is fished out of a pond having fallen through thin ice, and the scriptwriter has Scrooge say: "Stay with me, Tiny Tim." Laugh? I nearly choked on a mince pie.
 
Dx Revision Watch said:
Off topic, but has anyone else noticed how no police procedural/crime drama/scandi-noir is complete without someone stumbling across a badly injured victim who's about to expire, and repeatedly urging them to "Stay with me..."?

A few years ago, around Boxing Day, the BBC aired a new dramatisation of Dicken's A Christmas Carol. And blow me, when visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Tiny Tim is fished out of a pond having fallen through thin ice, and the scriptwriter has Scrooge say: "Stay with me, Tiny Tim." Laugh? I nearly choked on a mince pie.
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Sorry to perpetuate this tangent, but the one that always puzzles me is the related insistence that trauma victims and the seriously ill remain awake. The only reason for this I can think is that it enables those treating to monitor mental state and levels of consciousness, though my first thought is wouldn’t be better for to be unconscious during the aftermath of a trauma.
 
When I was a graphics student, in the early 70s, a small group of us were set a brief to develop an advertising campaign for Ayds - a soft fudge-like sweet that was supposed to have appetite suppressing properties and promote weight loss. This involved presenting our visuals at the offices of J Walter Thompson, in Berkley Square, London, where one of our visiting lecturers worked. JWT had the Ayds account.

In the 1980s, the company had problems too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds
 
dave30th said:
No, it arose out of the film but was not used in the film.
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Are you sure about that David? Did it arise and then disappear? And then arise again?
Was it just that you thought it arose out of the film or were persuaded that it arose?
Did it sort of flicker in and out of a sort of Wicki consciousness?
Was it just a dream you wanted to tell me about seated in my armchair on the Persian carpet?

This seems to have got out of hand.
Since I am burdened by the same social circumstances as L T-S and never heard of gaslighting before 2018 I think she can be let off the charge of deliberate insult, but whatever...
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
Are you sure about that David? Did it arise and then disappear? And then arise again?
Was it just that you thought it arose out of the film or were persuaded that it arose?
Did it sort of flicker in and out of a sort of Wicki consciousness?
Was it just a dream you wanted to tell me about seated in my armchair on the Persian carpet?
Click to expand...
Maybe just a trick of the gaslight.
 
chrisb said:
It would be interesting to hear how she refers to it these days.
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The "GAS" and "GAS-Light model" documents are on the KCL website:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/cicelysaunders/resources/tools/gas

GAS - Goal Attainment Scaling in Rehabilitation
GAS is a method of scoring the extent to which patient’s individual goals are achieved in the course of intervention. In effect, each patient has their own outcome measure but this is scored in a standardised way as to allow statistical analysis. Traditional standardised measures include a standard set of tasks (items) each rated on a standard level. In GAS, tasks are individually identified to suit the patient, and the levels are individually set around their current and expected levels of performance.

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) is an individualised health outcome measure that was first introduced by Kirusek and Sherman (1968) for assessing outcomes in mental health settings. This technique is found to be suitable for health problems which warrant a multidimensional and individualised approach to treatment planning and outcome measurement and has been used to demonstrate clinically important change in a variety of settings including elderly care (Stolee, Stadnyk, et al 1999; Stolee, Zaza, et al 1999), chronic pain (Zaza, et al 1999) and cognitive rehabilitation (Rockwood, et al 1997).

(...)

Our department has led an international programme of work to encourage the consistent use of GAS in routine clinical practice. This has led to the development of the following resources:

  • the GAS-Light – a simplified version of GAS designed to be usable in routine clinical practice
  • a verbal rating scale for clinicians who prefer verbal descriptors to numbers
  • a GAS calculation spreadsheet for calculating GAS T scores
  • Scales to measure patient engagement in goal setting and their satisfaction with the goals selected
These resources are free and can be found below:

Training
Please contact Elica Ming-Brown for further information on the next training date. Please note: GAS Training is not mandatory for UK ROC.

Main projects
Our department has led an international programme of work to encourage the consistent use of GAS in routine clinical practice, including the GAS-Light – a simplified version of GAS designed to be usable in routine clinical practice.

Work is ongoing on using GAS to assess functional outcomes from focal interventions such as botulinum toxin intervention (BTX). In particular this work involves using GAS to measure the outcome of intervention related to upper limb spasticity and relate GAS outcome scores to the scores of other objective measures appropriate to this type of focal intervention.

BTX intervention does not stand alone and is used in conjunction with other therapy interventions. Therefore our projects in this area also aim to explore this complex intervention in more detail.

GAS Methodology
Application of goal attainment scaling
 
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