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by xg15 1083 days ago
I mean, it's based on more science than all the alternatives.

Yes, the standards are a lot less rigorous and reproducability is worse than in the "hard sciences", but at least they are trying to get some kind of objective, reproducable result in the first place.

The alternatives to therapy are basically: Religion, family knowledge, random self-help books or trying to work it out yourself. In all three, the methods are even less stringent and objective than in psychology.

In my experience, psychology as a field is also open to new information from biological hard sciences, such as neuroscience.

Finally, note that psychology is not just used in therapy but also in advertising, UX design and tech in general, often in manipulative ways which run counter to the interests of users. Evidently, it works there. So then, why would the same knowledge suddenly be useless pseudoscience when it comes to therapy?

1 comments

>Yes, the standards are a lot less rigorous and reproducability is worse than in the "hard sciences", but at least they are trying to get some kind of objective, reproducable result in the first place.

This is a major red flag. This whole field is reeling under Credibility crisis.

People should be exposed to medical treatments which are tried , tested aproved and regulated. Which this field cant be further from yet they have the authority to advice people as under pretext of psycologists and therapists.

There should be even more regulation for psycologists and therapists , just like there is approval process for vaccines . Howcome we are allowing so many people to be exposed to medical treatments which have barely any regulation and no reproducablity.

That's correct and I agree that a lot more should be done. I'm just saying that right now, there is no better option. Also, if therapy really had no significant positive results (in aggregate!) I think we'd hear more about that from affected patients. Instead, you can find lots of accounts from people who said that therapy has greatly improved their lives.

(This is different from the horrible transgressions of the 19th and 2/3rds of the 20th century where the "results" were mostly how the patients appeared to others but not how they felt themselves - if you bothered to see them as humans at all)