As I read the article, it occurred to me that one of the fundamental flaws of modern psychology (and its offshoots such as psychiatry and psychotherapy) is that they all tend toward a solipsistic, individualist treatment of the self. Other than specialized fields like group psychology, psychologists really try to ignore the collectivist aspect to societies; they try to treat one person at a time while ignoring our families, our communities. When they do make efforts at integrating these larger groups in treatment, it's an afterthought, and it's never quite consensual, because, after all, in this world, to treat someone (especially to drug someone) you require their direct consent, and even in couples therapy, there is usually one less-than-willing partner who just accedes to keep things together.
Furthermore, it's always through an attitude of "here is one person who is ill and needs to heal, let's rally around him for his treatment." That is not how it works. People develop mental illnesses oftentimes from traumas and abuse and decades of shame. Therefore, the entire family, the whole community, needs to make efforts at healing if they are to stop this vicious circle. It is not merely one man's problem, it is not one man's responsibility, and it is not one man's shame.
Speaking personally, the genesis of my mental issues is clearly not "chemical imbalance" but rather my relationship to the world. What I heard and saw on TV, my experiences with Mom, Dad, and Sister, my formative years in school and church--with, you guessed it, other people.
I see a lot of pop-psychology YouTube clickbait that goes "Heal your relationships! Here's how!" and I don't doubt that people can take certain action with willing parties and heal certain relationships, but geez, guys, it took me 50 years to get to this point of isolation and alienation, and I alone will never heal relationships that have taken such a beating. It would take collective, cooperative will and action to do so.
Treating one person at a time with these methods is like trying to catch the ocean and dye it green, one drop at a time. It just doesn't make sense. That's only one of many reasons why there are poor outcomes, especially for psychiatry, where they just toss you in a looney bin with lots of other messed-up people, and now that's your community and that's your reality, deal with it.
> As I read the article, it occurred to me that one of the fundamental flaws of modern psychology (and its offshoots such as psychiatry and psychotherapy) is that they all tend toward a solipsistic, individualist treatment of the self.
This is by design. Psychology is intentionally about the individual and when it occasionally does look at groups it tends to do so through the lens of how a group produces value for the individual.
Sociology is the study of collections of humans. It is intentionally about the group and when it occasionally looks at individuals it tends to do so through the lens of how an individual produces value for the group.
This is not too dissimilar from the study of finance (generally micro, focused on individuals or companies) vs economics (generally macro, focused on the relationships between companies or countries).
Right, though I feel the OP's observation is that while sociology and psychology are both academic disciplines, there doesn't seem to be any equivalent to therapy, but applied at the community level.
It feels like this is something that maybe good priests/churches used to do that accidentally got lost as society became more secular.
> It feels like this is something that maybe good priests/churches used to do that accidentally got lost as society became more secular.
Certainly, and I could expound on this point at length, but suffice it to say that the elites of most long-lived world religions have had extensive experience, knowledge and wisdom in so-called "psychology" fields for millennia. In fact, as the State disestablishes religions, something must fill the vacuum, and in fact psych*y are used much in the same way as religion formerly was.
Psych*y is in fact a compulsory and State-Established Religion for most of us in the West, particularly in these United States, because of the coercive nature of the clinic and hospital system, the court-ordered treatments, the subsidized "medicine" drugs and practitioners, and so forth.
Most of us can tell you, even some atheists know, that psych*y is a shitty poor excuse for a religion, and no substitute for an actual faith practice, and the way the State foists it on us today is basically abuse.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but it's not a complete wash. I know if I go off my meds I go to a bad place pretty quickly. That's not society, that's something a bit off with pile of cells that I currently call "me."
Humans and society are messy. There aren't easy answers and we are a culture dying for easy answers. Sometimes it really does help to have an impartial person sitting there just letting you bitch once a week. Sometimes it doesn't.
Same here. I’m bipolar. Modern medicine and therapy has allowed me to have good quality of life instead of barely surviving with increasingly severe manic episodes.
Somehow enough progress is made in the real world that psychology manages to meaningfully advance.
The fact you embrace and accept metabolic damaging substances (all psychiatric substances are) and lack some very critical understanding in mitochondrial DNA damage and ATP production bottlenecks down on the cellular level is fascinating (which were the reason you had manic episodes to begin with if we were to make an educated guess). You are basically digesting and taking substances that further damage you and in the long-term are going to make you even worse. "Meaningful advice" like that is what keeps people enslaved to big-pharma and the largest human enslaved era the human history has ever witnessed.
There's a lot of neat stuff in there but no real conclusions to draw from it beyond a potential avenue for further research. I'd like to see what comes out of it.
Usually beliefs that specific have a source. Knowing a bit about the biology involved, I got curious. In this case, the source was actually interesting and mentioning it might be of value to others.
Sometimes I'll indulge in snide comments but I try not to. They tend to detract from the conversion and the people I'd reply to are usually doing a good enough job of that on their own. ;)
I can tell you that 9 out of 10 physicians (and other HCPs) who have attempted to "treat" me, very definitely found their "medical degrees" in a Cracker Jack box, because the "medical profession" as it is constituted today is the most exploitative, abusive, pseudo-scientific bullshit factories I have ever seen. It doesn't take a "medical degree" to see through their transparent fairy tales that pass as diagnostics and treatments. It's a travesty. Your tax dollars at work.
Fortune tellers and psychopractitioners both come to some very authoritative-sounding, wild conclusions, especially if you're not very articulate or are outright lying to them. Small wonder both are popular with the kids.
The confidence in their own prognoses--despite no concrete evidence whatsoever--is impressive to behold.
Yes indeed; most mental disorders are 100% diagnosed by outward behavior and claims made by the unreliable narrator that is the patient.
Also, I've noticed that psychiatrists use very precise wording to communicate and ask questions, and all their words have very well-defined meanings, but those meanings are elusive to the smartest of mental patients. What does it mean, pray tell, when a physician asks you "are you hearing voices?" How much sleep have you been getting? Oh, you haven't meticulously logged it on graph paper every day for a month? Just estimate your sleep hours, unreliable narrator.
Also, physicians are prohibited from using technical jargon when communicating with patients; they must use layman's terms only. So this leads to a wonderful cornucopia of confusion when your patient is well-informed and educated about the relevant medical terminology, but the doctor can't oblige that mode of communication, and garble garble fluzzle zinko.
Most judgements on me are passed completely based on affect and demeanor. My affect can mean the difference between a cordial 20-minute sit-down with the doc or a 3-week "voluntary, not really" hospital incarceration that will cost $60,000.
I expected no less from this massive propaganda of psychiatric killing that is ongoing. Your comment is a tiny hope in the hell they have created, wish you the best.
It doesn't take a medical degree to conduct information analysis on the whole psychiatric academic industry and field. They just bluntly lie their ass off on a constant basis and all research is mostly manipulated from money-making incentives. The rabbit hole is actually much deeper than that and it boils down to a capitalistic antagonistic society that thrives on making people sick to pump the value of the currency.
But that was achieved by doing specific research (clinical trials, followup investigations and investigations into chemical mechanisms) which is totally unrelated to psychology.
If sitting and talking helps do it. If not move one to something that does.
> But that was achieved by doing specific research (clinical trials, followup investigations and investigations into chemical mechanisms) which is totally unrelated to psychology.
A lot of psychiatric medications are not well understood, not the chemical pathways, not the chemical mechanisms, some of them just "work" for some people, some people require a different one, and we don't know exactly why. In that sense it's not too different from talk therapy, we know that some work but I don't think we know exactly why.
> I know if I go off my meds I go to a bad place pretty quickly.
Sincere question: how would you know if this bad place was withdrawal from meds or the reappearance of your pre-existing "bad place"? (Pre meaning before you began taking prescribed psychotropics.)
If GP was bipolar or schizophrenic, and meds suppress that, he was on a bad place (bipolarity can be okay but you will alienate your friends and family.)
People throwing around labels like "bipolar" or "schizophrenic" without factual scientific evidence of what those labels really are is the real problem in the pursuit for scientific truth.
Bipolarity is mood regulation issue. You have two phases, manic and depressive. You can have issues getting out of manic phases, depressive phases, or both. My mother issue was only with regulating manic phases, that were notably triggered by NSAIDs (and some food). She got out after a day or two. Probably triggered around her 28-30 year old. She lost her marriage, friends and my sister to her mood swings. Nowadays, with lithium, she's much more stable.
Why are you implying I'm throwing around labels? Do you think I never read anything about bipolarity? Do you want to enter a citations battle, where I cite studies on bipolarity? And which scientific truth? That mood regulator help regulate mood? I mean, it's their names, I saw the results, do you want citations on that?
I am really sorry for your mother and hope she is well. However, I do not agree that lithium is the answer you're looking for, nor the fact that she has mood swings is the problem. The problem is the reason behind the mood swings. Treating symptoms will never bring an effective solution to the problem. I can only imagine the cognitive overhaul and deterioration that comes with substances that mess with electrolytes (lithium). No matter what you read on "bipolarity", it lacks critical and fundamental deterministic proof. Don't get me wrong but, I like problems solved, not pretending to implement a "lithium" patch that completely and effectively blunts quality of life.
If you go off your meds you go to a bad place pretty quickly and that's called withdrawals, in most cases which are protracted. You have been massively misinformed and led to believe there's something wrong with "you" as an entity when in fact you just have a great deal of metabolic damage caused by a vast amount of different experiences such as eating super-processed foods, having some mild food intolerance on specific foods that greatly impacts your mood, and overall great mitochondrial dysfunction. It is of increasing evidence that the keto-genic diet and being in ketosis makes quitting those meds much more easier and it is for a fact those meds cause directly what they claim to treat. Good luck.
I have had so many of the same thoughts! Therapy has benefitted me greatly over the years and I have definitely grown from the experience. It has also helped me sort out the aspects of my life that therapy can help me address, and those areas in which it offers very little. There is no substitute for a supportive, nurturing environment of peers, lovers, elders, children, activity partners, business partners, etc. - take what you will from that list in which you personally find sustenance. Therapy is designed in part to help navigate those relationships, but an hour a week of talking individually to a specialist is woefully inadequate to repair any of them. The best it can do is give you coping tools and rudimentary communication skills. Increasing we are isolated and one or more of those key relationships is missing or badly dysfunctional and any support system that was once there in which those relationships could be mended is now gone.
Let’s not forget however that those support systems had (and still have) toxic attributes. They favored men, and put women and minorities in a subservient role. They tied you to family that may be abusive, or a dogmatic belief system. Kick that social structure out from under people, and what do you have left? An ever-changing and often overwhelming tapestry of less substantial and more poorly-defined relationships. Isolation as a replacement for conflict resolution. Therapy has not really caught up, nor is it even designed to address any of this.
Psychology and psychiatry are worlds apart and I think you're confusing one with the other.
Psychiatry fits within what you described: individualized treatment, medication, etc. It's a branch of medicine after all, and it fits within the whole context of medical care as it is conceived currently (that is, brushing aside social context, community, etc)
Psychology is all about context, that's kinda its motto. A good therapist always considers the family, socioeconomic backgrounds, all the things you say it ignores.
> Psychology is all about context, that's kinda its motto. A good therapist always considers the family, socioeconomic backgrounds, all the things you say it ignores.
Not what I said. I said they don't treat the family or the community. Psychology is typically an individualistic treatment of a single person (or a couple).
One of the things that most shocked me when I started skimming psychology papers (trying to understand the state of evidence and validated theories for psychotherapy and other psychosocial treatments) is how much of it revolves around attributing dysfunction to a person's beliefs. It feels a bit like virtue ethics dressed up in a lab coat.
I'd even take it a step further and say that modern psychiatry and psychotherapy are generally just another arm of the state, directing people towards acceptable behaviors decided by white men. Much of it ultimately revolves around being a good little worker bee, and if they can't convince you to do that, they'll drug you until you're pliable.
I find your comparison a little too blunt, too rough and lacking in complexity, but ultimately the comparison of politic and psychology is a valuable one in literature. For example, Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus explores this relation through a poetic, philosophical lens. As analytic philosopher and radical psychiatrist, these two synthesize a response to Freudian [more specifically, Lacanian] mode of thought. I assure you that this topic is old ground, and that this pair's writings on it paved the way for a larger positivist response to the problems discussed in this thread.
Good thoughts. I think the idea that a lot of our mental disorders are actually rational responses to a disordered community/society has a lot of merit. We are social creatures, we need to be considered in that context.
Life is difficult enough that there are many psychological defenses in place - both at the individual and societal level - to keep us focused on our survival and not devote too many mental resources to considering underlying questions of motivation, purpose, or fairness.
Some people are in particular circumstances, or perhaps have certain personalities, such that those defense mechanisms aren't as strong, and once they step off the pure survival path, they experience a recognition of cold reality which can't be understood from the those who've never strayed from the survival path.
It's rational to reach many of the conclusions which mental ill people do. Not all, by any means. But I believe in some aspects of depressive realism, and I think many people who take their own lives are making a reasoned decision, as sad as that fact may be.
i don't follow how someone whose defenses are being overwhelmed would be able to step of the survival path. on the contrary, they should be constantly in survival mode such that they are not able to develop other necessary mechanisms to be able to function in society, or the defense mechanisms they develop get in the way of that normal functioning. suicide can easily explained with wanting to end the pain or fear of even greater pain.
a key mechanism to develop growing up is trust and learning how to relate to others. i don't think "normal" growing up should keep us focused on survival.
I'm using survival in a non-traditional way here. I'm not talking about "survival mode," I mean the normal development path you're describing, which is actually the one that best leads to survival.
This is why I hate the focus on psychological resilience in the work place. It puts the onus on the individual to deal with stressful situations rather than asking what can be done to remove unnecessary stress in the first place.
But seriously there are some therapeutic interventions that are closer to what you describe. I worked in them early in my career. They tend to be (or are exclusively?) aimed at pediatric populations with a high level of need. But we would work in the home 2-3x a week with the child, parents, siblings, etc. we would do community outings to evaluate and work in that context, do school observations and teacher collab, etc. do parent training, relational work between parent/sibling/child, connect parents to therapy if necessary, case management and other services like snap, etc. The child was the “identified patient” but we were working with the entire family unit
As said it was generally unavailable unless you displayed exceptional need (eg your school was kicking you out because your behavior was so bad and your parents were putting you in respite care/considering residential treatment). It cost a lot. not nearly as much as residential but enough that no commercial insurance would pay for it. So if you got to that behavior level you had to go through the nightmare evaluation process of proving your child’s behavior was bad enough to qualify as functionally disabled to qualify for Medicaid entitlement because they’re the only ones that would pay. Even if you were under the income threshold for Medicaid and didn’t need the entitlement you still had to prove need for the service.
So I guess this is a long way of saying that there are alternative modalities to deliver therapy. There’s actually a ton of them. But in practice you’ll likely never see them because no one wants to fund them outside of the most extreme circumstances and even then it’s often hard to get new approaches off the ground. New approaches start in academia and this kind of stuff for adults doesn’t get grant funding afaik. Why bother, it’ll never happen outside of the research because there is very little public money for adult mental health services in most, if not all, states. Children get way more and still barely get enough.
So for adults you get the same old outpatient 45 or 60 minute psychotherapy, individual or group, where the only variance is the theoretical approach the clinician uses (which is increasingly “eclectic” aka “I don’t really do anything evidence based and just make it up as I go” but that’s a whole different issue). Or if your issues worsen you get inpatient for 3 days. If they worsen beyond that I hope you have continued access to insurance and social supports because then you’ll get a longer term residential placement. otherwise it’s often a shockingly quick road to homelessness or prison.
Critical psychology is an area within psychology that goes back to the late 1960s and that agrees with a lot of the criticism in OP and in your comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_psychology
If you are interested in learning more I have found these two books to be good introductions to the topic:
- "Psychology, Subjectivity, and Society: An Introduction to German Critical Psychology" by Charles Tolman
- "Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject: Selected Writings of Klaus Holzkamp" edited by Ernst Schraube and Ute Osterkamp.
I think the best theory we have up to date for mental irregularities is metabolic dysfunction and damage at the cellular level through environmental stress, inheritance preconditions and super-processed foods. Psychology does and can have an impact but it's only a small fraction of the picture. Healing does not take community, you cannot find coherent and healthy community in a fully-antagonistic capitalistic society.
The author does a fantastic job of summing up the big issues facing psychology and a lot of my own thoughts regarding the academic side of the social sciences in general. So very few people in the field seem to care about the basics of the scientific method (reproducible experiments, hypotheses that can be falsified, etc.) or of producing research that can really be applied in useful ways. And unfortunately so much of it seems to bleed over into pop science and business "coaching" these days, too.
Re: lack of scientific method, education is another psych-related field with the same problem. Try reading a few of the foundational or trendy education articles: the articles that actually affect how teachers are taught to educate kids. Then look at the methods used in these articles, and realize that some of them have sample sizes of 20 or 30 children. In other words, the conclusions are useless.
Fear not. Teachers, even baby teachers early in their career, very quickly learn the utter emptiness of “evidence-based practices” and “research-supported high-impact instructional strategies.” I have honestly not met a single damned teacher, including ones who lead professional development sessions, who believes that you can actually learn anything about real, day-to-day teaching by reading the shit education researchers produce. Even people who use educational research to justify their teaching methods usually only do so to satisfy an administrator or district-level person who needs to check some box mandated by the state or federal government to be checked. Among teachers, the real conversations are about adapting methods or strategies in order to make them realistically applicable. Or, honestly, how you can describe your instructional methods in such a way that they seem to be “supported by research.” Actual teaching is very much a craft. Justifying what you have found through experience to actually work with students is just an exercise in bullshitting.
> I have honestly not met a single damned teacher, including ones who lead professional development sessions, who believes that you can actually learn anything about real, day-to-day teaching by reading the shit education researchers produce
Why do you think the teachers you have met are a representative sample of all teachers everywhere?
depends how you're sampling the population, doesn't it?
if the sample is drawn only from, say, students from the same class at a particular boarding school, how likely are the effects to apply to the entire population of students?
It depends on what the effect is and the hypotheses you are attempting to distinguish between. Sometimes you have to use your brain and think about it; science is not all randomized controlled trials, p values and curve fitting. :)
I know this is not the way it's done on HN, but since this isn't my thread I feel like I can throw in some amicus support for your side here by pointing out that an N of 30 is a sort of foundational number in stats, although it's not a magical number as there are some pretty rigorous maths behind it.
But it's not like social science people decided that an n of 20 or 30 was a good number to use because that's conveniently what they likely had access to (roughly the size of an undergrad classroom) for field data. and they didn't come up with it anyway), this is a number you're going to find in chapter 1, page 3 or 4 of any introductory stats text.
In this particular case there is still something else: the author doing a series of quite similar studies with relatively little impact so that even if everything they did turns out fake, nobody cares. It's the exact opposite of the conclusion of the famous speech "You and Your Research".
IMO there is a pretty simple partial explanation: no one reads anyone else’s research.
When you’re a grad student you have to read a few methods and applications papers. When you’re a professor you have to stay on top of what matters in your field but you mostly attend conferences and seminars for that.
Other than that… we don’t read anyone’s work. Indeed nearly all research isn’t ever cited and the fraction of cited papers not in the “central methodology” category above which are actually carefully read is probably extremely low.
yeah but how many people are reading math papers? if anything, math papers are harder to read compared to psychology papers . yet math does not have this problem.
But math builds directly upon other work: the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem is a house of cards, if any one of those various conjectures and proofs was proven false it would all come crashing down.
So, math papers are read, like blue prints, for building on top of them.
Psychology papers are, apparently, not the basis for anything.
Math can be structured and proven verifiably true or false. Things are labeled as conjectures when it's unknown if it's true in all cases. In less formal fields (all other scientific fields) there are more unknowns since experimentation failures cause issues. As the scale of the experiments' unknowns increase so does the difficulty for reproduction etc...
Psychology, sociology, economics and other high level scientific forms have so many unknowns that it's extreamly difficult to verify if a claim is scientifically true so its not surprising to me that fraud is easier in these fields than others.
I have no idea of the scale of this problem in math. Maybe you do.
The average scientific field has hundreds of journals. In Econ there are five to ten which matter. It’s too time consuming to read more than a small fraction of the work that comes out even in my own sub-field. I would have thought math was even worse but I don’t know the field.
In math you have subsets of researchers who read each other's papers and work over a few decades to explore something, returning various nuggets and conclusions to the general body of mathematicians along the way until the whole thing is worked out. Eventually, in the most successful cases, the work is condensed into a book or something and a lot of people read it. It is a lot, perhaps thousands of times, harder to come up with theorems than it is to teach them, and atop that even harder to come up with broadly applicable yet effective conceptual systems (which can be introduced in a couple pages once you know which axioms are going to produce all the right facts later on), which is the basis for the whole enterprise.
The irony of the piece is that psychology's greatest contribution to science over the last several decades is probably meta-science, or empirical introspection about the scientific process itself.
Modern meta-analysis has its roots in clinical and educational psychology, and now there's the lens focused on replicability and preregistration. If history is any guide, about 20 years from now the methods that come out of this will start to be applied widely and routinely in biomedical research and then elsewhere.
The useless fat in science isn't limited to psychology: there have been controversial articles all over the place about decreasing scientific returns for investments, and drowning out of innovation by incentivized noise. Sure, maybe there's less fat in some fields than others, but there's plenty of fat to go around.
What's maybe unique about psychology is how much outrage and exposure there is about it. Other fields might be in denial but the time will come.
Also, part of the reason we don't mourn the loss of fabricated or unreplicable studies is because the people who hung their hat on it continue to do so, burying their head in the sand. Everyone else probably was silently waiting for more evidence to come, and came it did, and then it was swept under the rug of self-correcting science.
Modern academics is sort of a marvel in how much bullshit it can absorb without consequence. It's like the The Blob of modern institutions.
Great summary of the field and very well written. Particularly:
>The second formerly useful proto-paradigm is something like “situations matter.” This idea maintains that people's contexts have immense power over their behavior, and the strongest version maintains that the only difference between sinners and saints is their situations. The most famous psychology studies of all time are “situations matter” studies: the Milgram shock experiments, the Asch conformity studies, the bystander effect, the Stanford Prison Experiment (since revealed to be much more of a scripted play than a study). The now-much-ridiculed “social priming” studies, like the one where you unscramble words about being old and then walk more slowly, are also “situations matter” studies. So are “nudges,” where tiny changes in situations bring big changes in behavior, like redoing the layout of a cafeteria to encourage people to eat more veggies.
Does anyone know any good situationist studies aside from the big names?
Let us assume half of studies do not replicate. this does not tell us about the implications of those that do. I think there is the tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water here. STEM, especially computer science, has its own bullshit papers problem too. Arxiv is full of 7-page computer science papers with 7 -co authors about things that feel like pure resume padding and very light on any sort of actual science or rigour. stuff like "hate speech and the algorithms on twitter" Same for math papers in which common formulas are rederived. The problem is the incentives are aligned to favor quantity over quality, and this is in all fields . a huge resume/cv full of items looks more impressive.
I think it was put out from adult supervision far too soon. Sociology also. I think the only path back may be mandatory reproduction, before publication in the lead journals. If it isn't duplicated, it ain't happening.
It seems to have coincided with when pharma figured out how much money there was to be had with official sounding diagnosis names and treatment plans. Not to say there aren't any helpful drugs in the category. There are, but there's also quite a lot of tagging people with a narrowly-defined condition and prescribing the latest we-don't-really-know-how-it-works thing.
I'm not a psychologist, but I believe CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has made pretty good progress in the recent decades. Is that correct?
I think studying well defined and important things is... extremely important :) I think for example it should be possible to measure remission from depression.
I also think though that psychology could 'make philosophy out of its physics' (in an analogy with an experimental field like chemistry or material science), and form theories about happiness, well being, etc.. that are grounded in insightful philosophies. And then try to measure or make some progress and recommendations to guide the field (like, how should we define well being, how should we measure it, and what kind of interventions help it).
Much to be said about the second half of your comment, enough that I'll leave it to the better educated. On the former, an article titled "the declining effect of CBT" was foundational to my disillusionment regarding new therapy techniques. Nothing is new under the sun, but fresh techniques often overperform in talk therapy studies. A long symbiotic relationship between providers and those in need have resulted in a blooming field, and metastudies generally show all talk therapies as slightly more effective than [only] drugs, and all drugs as [only!] slightly more effective than no intervention.
I am not of the field, bit did dig into the CBT hole (both reading and consulting a trained therapist), and I have the impression that the effects are overstated (and, at least for me, this was totally the wrong approach). The main issue I see with the studies I tried to look at was that they compared the answers to some psychometric scales between people following a CBT method and people following "talk therapy". My problem with it is that, while CBT is pretty formalized and can be "administered" in a not so terrible way even by an if-statement based chatbot [1], "talk therapy" is a very broad category, and the effects will be mostly dependent on not only the skill of the therapist, but also the fit between the therapist and the client. So yes, CBT will consistently give small results, but comparing it to consulting a random non-CBT therapist is as absurd as comparing the travel time by bus to the travel time by jumping in and out of random trains until you reach the destination.
[1] before I get attacked on this: I do not say that there are no good therapists with CBT training - but I am confident most of them would still be very good even without the training or method.
My question after reading is, why aren't psychologists focusing their effort on real problems? Some of the "problems" the listed articles bring up seem vague and useless. I am not even vaguely familiar with this field, so I hesitate to assert any more than that. Other fields have useful problems they solve and that's were famous breakthroughs come from.
Who cares if monkeys are paying for sex if people are killing themselves from depression? Are there not tons of psychological illnesses where progress could be made in new techniques to help people live their lives well? Maybe reduce the need for drugs?
If you tell people 60% of the DSM-V[0] is fake, they might wake up and listen. Assuming that the DSM-V is based on peer-reviewed research, that ought to be the case.)
“Participants said they wanted cleaning products more after they were forced to argue against something they believed (vs. arguing for the thing they believed).” So glad for studies like this.
Psychology might be too complex for the current scientific method. Millions of variables and not enough humans to control.
I don't even know whether I should read pop-science books any more. Or read anything any more.
At one point the 10,000 hours rule was so popular that it almost became common sense. And it's bull. Ego depletion was so well known. And boom it's not replicable either. Is everything just food pyramid?
I suppose but if someone actually practices something for 10K hours they are almost certainly going to be considerably better at it than people that do not even come close to that much practice. As they say in Pirates of the Caribbean - it's not a rule - think of them more as guidelines. I have always approached those types of books as opinion rather than fact. I think they are important for expanding ones views.
While I strongly empathize with the author's feelings on this (I've had similar feelings in my own field), I also want to voice an opposing viewpoint:
> Good/useful/valuable/important/positive-ROI science doesn't necessarily require everyone to know what the major discoveries are nor even care when 60% of studies fail to replicate.
Handful of reasons I feel this way:
- If I care deeply about exactly 10 of the 100 publications in my sub-field, and you care about a different 10, it may not matter much to either of us when 60 of them are later refuted. I may have not cared about those specific conclusions, already been skeptical about them, or have several other studies and my own unpublished results to maintain my confidence in the broader idea.
- While we all have great examples of dramatic upheavals in _other_ people's fields — pick your favorite of cosmology, genetic engineering, mathematics, etc. — when you're immersed in it, science is much more incremental, subtle, and complex. Congratulations! You've ventured on beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect. Scientific progress is not a series of miracles.
- Relatedly, I'm guessing most scientists are much more aware of the shortcomings in their own and their peers' research. Do keep this in mind while reading the perspective of an insider. Be skeptical, by all means, but not only of psychology.
If Einstein's paper on Special Relativity were proven wrong there would be quite a stir. Is there such a paper in psychology carrying such weight? Or even a central idea?
All of the central ideas in psychology are actually cribbed from philosophy (very selectively and almost never with attribution because you know, we're doing "science"; biased toward material that can be wrenched into guidance for "positive outcomes" that get the grants and TED talk invites), while all the data is extraordinarily messy, mantled under mouldering traditions of associating ones product with the group protection of a figurehead "school" (i.e. so-and-so's Biopsychoturbochemo Model) highly resistant or essentially unsuited to normalization, and of course unrepeatable in any rigorous sense.
The biggest difference between psychology, (alongsid its armed infantry counterpart psychiatry,) is that unlike math or physics or chemistry, which are all intrinsically descriptive, psychology is concerned with how to change behavior that has not yet happened. Not to describe phenomena that already exist but have not been encountered or formally described yet.
Isn't marketing psychology? People will buy something with probability x% if you hammer it into their eyeballs N times. Looks like hard enough science. And one responsible for half of NASDAQ market cap :)
Let me ask a simple question: What can be done about this, other than violence? I do not see a legal path going forward where all these corrupt individuals get removed from their positions of power.
play the long game and focus on better moral education. instead of just focusing on STEM schools need to teach children what is ethically good behavior. it won't eliminate the problem entirely, but it should reduce it drastically.
Silly question: why can't an AI be written which can read through all these piles of psychology papers, looking for various kinds of characteristics of fraudulent or sloppy scholarship, then summarizing its findings, assigning suggested reputation scores to various papers and authors?
The line that separates good psych science from bad is more subtle than word choice or tone, and often researchers who primarily do good work may present work with faulty conclusions without anyone knowing better. It has taken decades for the replication crisis to take this shape, and maneuvering of data, subjects, and results toward outcomes that don't reproduce is systematic and subtle. I'm not suggesting AI couldn't find this distinction, but what remains after is the rigorous proving of the AI conclusion - which might take just as long as if AI wasn't involved.
Psychology is the study of the most complex machine in existence, a machine smart enough to do psychology. Of course it's really difficult to test it compared to simpler sciences.
But if the author is trying to insinuate no meaningful progress in psychology was made in the last X years because of some twitter poll then that's doubtful -- scientists getting to the point they can scan neurons and reconstruct what you see through the activations.
I do agree that you could generate endless reams of pseudo-data about the human behavior by labeling and classifying tiny patterns, and that that's not very practical. But that doesn't invalidate the rest.
Perhaps one way to operationalize psychology would be to take a huge dataset, e.g. 1 million tinder profiles, and have a contest to identify the .1% that got married or something (and how long they stayed married for).
The idea that you can read minds or reconstruct 'thought pictures', as if that's something everybody has, is going to require a lot of evidence.
How about we don't "operationalize psychology". And how about we don't "operationalize psychology" by using an app meant to hook up singles and build chance encounters for love.
The mere knowledge that some of "us" will go to any lengths to manipulate psychology and make hidden adjustments "for our own benefit" smacks of the British Empire we left behind.
Or at least, that's a polite way to hint that "operationalizing psychology" is starting to sound like the 1940s, and the last resort is to link your 'psycho' thinking to the British Empire as a saving grace, as if that dead tree could cast a blanket over this 'lab monkey' nonsense.
Scanning neurons is neuroscience, not psychology. Given that pop psychology is pushing Jung around like he's still a recent discovery, then yeah, it hasn't progressed much.
Speaking personally, the genesis of my mental issues is clearly not "chemical imbalance" but rather my relationship to the world. What I heard and saw on TV, my experiences with Mom, Dad, and Sister, my formative years in school and church--with, you guessed it, other people.
I see a lot of pop-psychology YouTube clickbait that goes "Heal your relationships! Here's how!" and I don't doubt that people can take certain action with willing parties and heal certain relationships, but geez, guys, it took me 50 years to get to this point of isolation and alienation, and I alone will never heal relationships that have taken such a beating. It would take collective, cooperative will and action to do so.
Treating one person at a time with these methods is like trying to catch the ocean and dye it green, one drop at a time. It just doesn't make sense. That's only one of many reasons why there are poor outcomes, especially for psychiatry, where they just toss you in a looney bin with lots of other messed-up people, and now that's your community and that's your reality, deal with it.