This is almost too sad to dunk on. People running the world have never had a reflective conversation with a professional trained to help process emotions and healthily cope with the human condition. They’re in charge of billions of dollars worth of resources and guiding society’s investment into the future. Cooooool
No wonder I have to hear “psychology is bunk” so many times from computer touchers that believe (without evidence) that there’s some killer app right around the corner that will fix traumas and disorders by treating the human brain just like a binary computer.
I’m a centrist - a lot of psychology is bunk but it’s because of the sheer amount of fraud that gets passed off as novel research. oh, wait sorry, someone just tugged my shirt to inform me that they actually love Malcolm Gladwell.
I won’t even argue with you there: a lot of it is bunk
but dismissing the entire academic field in favor of more computer touching with reductionist takes about how the brain works is silly to me.
Applied psychology gave us EMDR, CBT, DBT, and other useful practices. It also gave us effective but fucked up marketing tricks that have been refined for decades.
I’m more commenting on the consequences of poor science communication and the “publish or perish” regime on the state of knowledge on the field (honestly all of academia - physics isn’t without it’s own high profile scandals), allowing hucksters to mystify knowledge. psychology is merely distinguished because it’s principal results are very easy to explain to laypeople so you get a lot of people talking about like “Stockholm Syndrome” without the education to put those results into their proper context, and so they wind up generalizing those results much further than the research actually allows. you see the exact same thing taking root with physics and “quantum” this or that. also fuck Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Ferris.