I think it's part of the wider difficulties psychology and psychiatry are having with the so-called replication problem. My view is that by their nature these fields are more prone to junk science. I think there are several reasons for this:
- It's much easier/cheaper to do a psychological study and with much less pre-registration, so publication bias effects are much higher
- In other fields of medicine there are more objective measures (it's hard in oncology to hide the fact that, despite your supposed miracle cure, your patients are still dropping dead)
- Most importantly, in other fields of medicine, study subjects and patients are believed. Whereas if you're a Freudian, you can defend your work with 'well of course they would deny wanting to sleep with their own mothers'. Even worse, in psychiatry you can portray your critics as mentally unwell or 'resistant'. Your poor results are no longer your fault, but the fault of your patients who don't want to get better. Or you can state that in fact you get brilliant results and it's only a few psychopaths who deny it.
This is not to say that all psychology/psychiatry is junk science; it's just that a significant portion of it is, and the normal scientific checks and balances - which aren't perfect anyway - seem to be much less effective here.
I think there is also the fact that psychiatry often does have to deal with false perceptions in people, and tries to help them overcome these. Extremely low self-esteem would be an example, where the person's perceptions of their own inadequacies are largely false. From another life a long time ago, I know what I am talking about here. Fixing this, with or without external help, is essentially about correcting those false self-perceptions, and the flawed behaviours that accompany them.
So good psychiatry/psychology is nonetheless rooted in changing people's perceptions and behaviours. In effect it is a tool in the psychiatrists toolkit, which like all tools, can be used for good or bad. The tool is not at fault - helping people to modify their perceptions and behaviours is perfectly valid and beneficial when this tool is properly used.
It is the
abuse of this tool that is abominable, and the those who use it abusively are the abominations. The tool is not the problem, just the people who misuse it.
I think it is also true that psychiatry lives in a largely subjective world, and psychiatrists have deluded themselves (somewhat ironically) into thinking subjectivity is more important that objectivity. That may be true for conditions where subjectivity is core to the issue anyway (such as for low self esteem), but not where physical problems are paramount ... they should basically just keep their long noses out of these conditions!
. They were just round the corner and they didn't let me know!
