In this day and age I find it incredible disturbing that psychology is leaning more and more toward the popular opinion rather than the facts of the matter. It seems that rather than asking the hard questions that people don't want to ask, psychology is bowing to the general flow/opinion of the population. It seems that day by day people are more and more likely to just not voice their opinions/questions due to the fear of being 'canceled' which is basically just bullying someone into shutting up because they don't agree with them. Has anyone else seen this? What happened to 'there are no bad questions' or 'everyone has the right to their own opinion'? I'm very curious to hear about others opinions on this. This may be a centrally American phenomenon, but I wouldn't know given that I live stateside.
- All the best to everyone, Red
Hi Red,
I think that psychology both influences and is influenced by the population, but in many different ways. As others have said though, this isn't limited to psychology, but is true of other fields too. Perhaps climatology is an example that's very much in our faces at the moment - it's one of those specialities where everyone who has an opinion is an expert
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The terminology gets mixed up - psychology is not in itself focused on pathological states, but on mind and behaviour. It's primary focus is on healthy people, in the same way that physiology is the study of healthy people and is all about how we are made up and how we work. For physiology, at least these days we have many centuries of hard knowledge based on observation and research, trial and error, to rely on, so there is little controversy about the basics of the way we work in this regard. There is still a lot of controversy about some of the details of course - it's very revealing to see the debate about COVID vaccines for example. Our populations in general are really very naive about medical interventions and many of us judge them in black and white, bur rarely are there clean solutions to complex problems of our physical bodies - every medical intervention carries risk and so do all vaccines. That makes for major ethical problems because the people who are harmed by a vaccine might well have survived the illness, whilst many who are unharmed by the vaccine might have died or been disabled by the disease without it. It's not as simple as judging purely on a person by person basis either, because pandemic vaccines are only really effective when a large percentage of a population receives them. That moves the issue away from the mechanics of the actual medicine into the issue of whether it is morally right to harm some people who would otherwise have been OK in order to protect a much larger number who wouldn't - all without knowing in advance who would lose the lottery of chance. It then becomes a political issue, because there is no consensus on what is the right answer to this - people become hyped up emotionally about it and then become hyper-(ir)rational about how they champion their political views, and how they challenge the opposing views.
So with psychology, except that this is still a very young science so even the basics are not really well understood. The way the brain is structured and works in a chemical and electrical sense, does seem seem to be progressing well, but the understanding of how the mind works, as opposed to the brain, is still not really well understood and so it's open too competing ideas and theories. This is so fundamental that it spills over into raw philosophy on the one hand and science on the other, because the phenomenon of human consciousness doesn't fit well into either of their conceptual frameworks - in other words, it isn't understood in any kind of objective way. This is where we are with healthy minds, so when it comes to disorders of the mind, of consciousness, we have a very unstable theoretical basis for understanding and treating them. Most treatment is based on what seems to work, rather than what fits with fundamental theory - for example my wife's psychiatrist has no idea why the cocktail of drugs she's taking is effective enough to give her an almost normal life, while other related drugs are completely ineffective. Her treatment evolved through trial and error.
Things are even more open ended when it comes to talking therapies, and the search is more like for the right guru than it is for a medical practitioner. Very rarely can someone suffering from a psychological problem get a complete cure, like you can with a broken arm for example, so we go on the hunt for a solution like some people try different religious denominations, looking for one that fits them. Is it any wonder that we get fashions in psychological therapy, and that the internet then runs out of control with these fashions which take on a life of their own regardless of rationale? This is more tragic than the words can express - there is deep suffering behind that search for a cure. What adds fuel to the fire of controversy is that many people with such problems do get better spontaneously, or have ups and downs, and of course the placebo effect is very powerful with some of these complaints - this can convince them that the most recent treatment has worked, when it might only be a coincidence. Don't get me wrong, because many treatments do help some people a lot, or at least a little, but none of them work for everyone, and some are probably little better than snake oil. But of course if you got better, that must mean the treatment was valid, mustn't it? Sadly, it means that many psychology ideas gain committed disciples even when they really are snake oil, or are being applied to the wrong problem.
I think that naming psychological states is another and very powerful way in which people influence and are influenced by psychology. If we are ill, it's part of the human condition that we want to know what is wrong. We want a qualified person to examine us, come up with a diagnosis and offer a treatment. The diagnosis as expressed professionally will be the name of a condition, and with that name will come a body of knowledge about the characteristics and progression of the illness, the possible outcomes, the range of treatments available, etc. The professional will understand that with psychological disorders, there isn't a stable underlying theory and that the name of the condition is there only to act as shorthand for this bundle of information. There isn't a tight boundary between these names given to the disorders, and in fact as the years go by, the professionals discard some of them and replace them with other names that bundle up the symptoms and treatments in a different way.
The trouble is that these names of disorders attract lay people like a magnet and they stick to them like glue. We identify ourselves with our illnesses, real or otherwise, and research them diligently / obsessively. Really good professionals will watch out carefully for this, because when it happens we start to explore all the symptoms of our assumed disorder and before we know what's happened we've got them all even if we didn't beforehand. You can see how this works outside the field of psychological disorders with models such as MBTI - some people spend a lot of time seeking their type and when they settle on one, some of them latch onto it and identify with it very strongly. If we have to let go of it, it can feel like we've lost a bit of our soul if we have clung too tightly. People do this too with named psychological disorders, and then face the serious problem that being cured can lead to an apparent loss of their identity - they have defined who they are by the content of the disorder. I fear that you are right, and that when people group together and associate the contents of their psychological states with a variety of political force fields, then this will have an impact on the content of psychology as a profession. That isn't anything new though - until fairly recently homosexuality was considered a psychological disorder and still is in some countries. Political pressure changed all this, and that will have had a symbiotic effect of how it is understood in psychological terms. In some countries, at least until fairly recently, you were mentally ill if you support any opposition to the prevailing government and will be 'treated' for it. I guess that's the inevitable challenge for an 'ology that deals with human states of mind and behaviour.
Behind all this is the ages old problem of very real, deep human suffering and the hope of a release from it. It's no wonder with such powerful drives, and with the lack of a solid theoretical foundation in the current remedies, that society creates all kinds of shibboleths and politically energised fashions around them. Personally, I'm hopeful - we are still in the childhood of psychology, but things are better than they were 100 years or 50 years ago. We will all muddle through I guess, but unless there is some sort of unexpected breakthrough, I guess improvements will come in 50 year timespans.
Sorry this is so long, but I got interested
