I tucked away this article by Stephen Dubner after learning of it on Furious Seasons. In it, Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, asks a number of experts from the worlds of mental health and neuroscience "How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made?". I'll have more to write about some of the comments in the post on other days, but I wanted first to start with this:
John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, author of Brain Rules, an affiliate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and columnist for the Psychiatric Times.
“I certainly applaud the point of view of explaining psychological processes in biological terms … I am also the first to admit, however, that the view we get can be very disturbing.
How much progress has psychology really made in the last century? A lot, though the journey has been depressingly uneven.
Psychology is a truly original scientific product of the 20th century — the first real attempt to take the interior mental life of people seriously. Before that, we were drilling holes into the heads of mentally ill patients to drive out hallucinogenic spirits, or saying mental health was the interactive balance between a person’s bile and their phlegm.
My personal hero in the exodus away from mental superstition is a large bolus of ego named Emil Kraepelin (1856 to 1926). He had the audacity to assume everything that was psychological was simultaneously biological. Emil posited that by using the investigative tools of natural philosophy to study the brain, one could eventually ferret out the secrets of the mind. To show how truly radical this idea was, astronomers in his day were actively debating whether or not the dark places on the moon were caused by enormous swarms of migrating insects."
I am really hard pressed to see psychology as "a truly original scientific product of the 20th century", especially so clinical psychology. When I was first in graduate school, I had a long and contentious dispute with one of my teachers, Donald Mosher, about whether or not psychology was a science. Having spent half of my undergraduate career as a physics major, it seemed very clear to me that psychology was far more art than science. Discretion being the better part of valor, I dod not press the point too hard but we did argue it again and again over the years I was there.
Psychology, and let's assume throughout this that I am speaking specifically of clinical psychology here, wants to be scientific, wants it desperately. As does psychiatry. But if one looks closely and the theoretical foundations they rest on, regardless of one's orientation, there is precious little science there. Using statistical methods and diagnostic nomenclature does not a science make. There is certainly the stuff of an interesting article in exploring the meaning of this desperate desire to be a science, but that is for another day.
In light of the studies exposing the inflated success rates shown for al manner of psychotropic drugs, and the doubt that Wampole casts on the superiority of cognitive behavioral therapy, our most "scientific" therapy, it is very difficult to support the current state of mental health treatment, psychiatry and psychology as scientific, far less the entire enterprise of psychology.
This is not to ay that I believe we have not come very far in 100 years, because we certainly have. But to lay claim to what we do as science seems absurd to me.