Clinical Psychology SUCKS or The Psychological Paradigm in the 21st century
I just felt the urge to throw some random rant.
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY SUCKS
I just had to say it.
Psychology became a science at 1879 at Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt. It was seperated from philosophy since what seperates science from philosophy is the experimental procedure that science makes use of.
It all started with simple psychophysical experiments trying to study the nature of consciousness. Because psychology is the science that studies the consciousness and the behavior of everything that can have these qualities.
Wilhelm Wundt, father of psychology
If you study the history of psychology you’ll see that the introspespection that Wundt proposed as the correct method for studying psychological phenomena gave its position to behaviorism, since it was deemed impossible at that time to trust verbal announcements of internal evects. Behaviorism then gave its position to cognitive psychology, once the computer paradigm both allowed and proved that the internal is an integral part of the study of an organism’s behavior.
Somewhere in between you’ll hear some words about clinical psychology or humanistic psychology. You’ll wonder what these things have to do with psychology. Do they measure anything? Do they study the full spectrum of human behavior or even have an idea of how they’re going to do that? NO
So what are these two? They’re psychotherapy damn it!
Alright, you’ll probably be thinking "what the hell is this guy trying to say?". I an saying that psychology needs a clear method and theory in order to achieve its goals. Somewhere in the road the whole thing got lost and a lot of theories popped up out of nowhere. However, we don’t live in the 50s. We live in the 21st century. And instead of trying to create a unified method or theory, we lose our time with theories from the Jurassic period.
Leave such theories to this guy
I am not trying to say that these theories are useless. They can be useful, but in a psychotherapeutic context, not in a psychological context.
Of course, concerning clinical psychology, many theories (even behaviorism) have been part of it. What makes me treat clinical psychology as a different theory altogether is the fact that it is based on the following premises:
1. Some people need psychological support, either because they are mentally ill (as we described in Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck?) or because they ask for it
2. This help can be given without medical support (as opposed to psychiatry)
What this has to do with the study of consciousness and behavior? I tell you: nothing!
Of course someone might say "What are you saying you idiot? Depressive people or schizophrenic have an entirely different internal and behavioral content, which clinical psychology studies". Yes, but it studies this in order to ail it. Clinical psychology is an applied field. Psychology on the other hand is a fundamental science.
I ain’t no idiot dude…
Take a look at this BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Inter-ethnic violence predicted by same rules that govern chemicals. The article says
"Over time, mixed ethnic groups tend to separate as people are drawn towards living around others like themselves. This reflects a universal process that is also seen in chemical and biological systems. And according to May Lim and colleagues, when this separation reaches a given threshold, violent conflict is highly likely."
"Using such information about the geographic distribution of ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia, in the early 90s, just prior to civil war, and India, using both countries’ census data, the researchers were able to predict with a high degree of accuracy where real future violent conflicts took place (as determined by historical records)."
So what do we see? That the laws of chemistry can be indeed applied on the human behavior (at least in this case). Meanwhile, most other psychologists are occupied with being guests in b-rated tv shows.
I don’t know if psychotherapy helps people. Maybe they just think it does (check this out How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance). And maybe this is alright by itself. The only thing that surely gets benefited from psychotherapy is the economy. Money flows, people get jobs and people that would have otherwise been unable to work, benefit the economy via the production of more workplaces (as we described in Psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and mental disease: Does psychiatry suck?).
If you haven’t noticed already, I love hard science. I love mathematics. I love models. I love quantifying. But, can the human behavior be quantified? The answer maybe was very complex some decades ago. But now, with the computer power that we possess, I believe that the answer is a definite YES.
Of course, there is always the old cliche that the human behavior can’t be put into models. But why should that be? Nietzsche had theorized about the existence in society of an undercurrent of christian morals that people aspire to, without even realizing it.
What happens in this case is that conceptions about mankind that date back to ancient religions and philosophies, based on absolutely no evidence, prevent us from seeing the obvious: that we don’t differ not only from any other animal or organism, but from every other phenomenon.
There is however one and only one difference between man and beast. The unfathomable ability of man to gratify himself, his kind, his abilities and his achievements to semi-godly status.
Mankind peering at itself
Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instict describes how we have been focused on things that make people different instead of focusing on the common traits we all share, like for example marriage, reproduction and religion. I am not making this reference in a "Love-Peace-Unity" context, but in an epistimological context. Since all humans share common traits, we have a solid foundation upon which we can build our laws of psychology and study the human animal.
Of course, the observant reader, will have probably noticed by now, that what I am proposing in this article has obvious social implications. But we will not discuss these for now, since I want this article to be purely of epistomological nature.
So, there we have it. A new paradigm for psychology paradigm. A way to quantify and measure the human behavior. A paradigm founded upon the cold hard science that the great fathers of psychology tried to incorporate, but they failed with their weak technological means.
Hail the new era kids!
The sunshine of the new paradigm shift
P.S. 1: I am not a a maniac, fascist hardcore scientist that tries to turn societies into machine and people into robots. I am just posing an epistimological argument here
P.S. 2: I wish I could analyze the theories and philosophies of the great fathers of psychology, but I don’t wan’t my articles to get a zillion lines long, nor do I have right now the time, but I promise I’ll do it later. That’s the same reason that I couldn’t write a few more things about the schools of psychology mentioned above.
P.S. 3: Don’t take this as an argument for the abolition of psychotherapy. I just have many arguments against therapy. This, however, doesn’t mean you won’t see clinical articles in Encefalus 
P.S. 4: If you feel the urge, too, throw some random rant back at me 
Further Reading:
August 6th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
You have lots of misinformation here, I’m afraid. I was taught that what distinguishes clinical psychologists who work with patients/clients from other professionals who do therapy (including social workers and marriage & family therapists) is that clinical psychologists do psychological assessments (what most people think of as psychological testing). Yes, they might do therapy too, but that’s not unique to the profession.
You also say that “most other psychologists are occupied with being guests in b-rated tv shows,” but, of course, this is *far* from true. And, by the way, your example, Dr. Phil McGraw, does not appear in the April, 2008, list of clinical psychologists licensed by the State of Texas, where he’s based (http://www.tsbep.state.tx.us/roster_2008.html). While he does appear to hold a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, he can’t call himself a clinical psychologist until he has had the appropriate post-doctoral training and earned a license. You’d also be hard-pressed to find in that list of licensees even one name you would recognize as a media psychologist.
There are *many* clinical psychologists who do *only* assessments and no therapy or research, and there are many others who do only psychological research and neither assessments nor therapy. Most of the clinical psychologists on university faculties, for example, do research either primarily or exclusively. It’s the researchers who provide the clinicians with the scientific basis for their therapeutic work, including the humanists, as well as the behaviorists, psychoanalysts, and all the other varieties you cite. There are lots of other psychological specialties besides clinical psychology, all investigating some aspect of consciousness or behavior or whatnot, but clinical psychologists also make enormous contributions to the science. Research clinical psychologists are the ones who develop and validate psychological tests. Every clinical psychologist must earn a Ph.D., and to get a Ph.D. they have to do a doctoral dissertation, which requires research, not therapy (although therapy may be involved). So every single clinical psychologist is not only an informed consumer of basic scientific research, they are also contributors to that research.
So you believe that a grand unified theory of human psychology is within our grasp? I very much hope you are correct, but I don’t see how. There isn’t even any agreement on how the concept of “free will” works, or consciousness itself, for that matter. That’s still in the realm of the philosophers (e.g. Daniel Dennett). There’s no agreement on how many factors are involved in “personality” (though, curiously, all the most popular guesses are odd numbers: 3, 5, 9). How about this: Why don’t you invite some local clinical psychologist, or, better yet, a local professor of clinical psychology from a university, to lunch, and have a conversation with him or her about this stuff? I think you’d find it enlightening and fascinating.
Warm regards,
Dan Henderson
MA, Clinical Psychology 1992
Sunnyvale, CA
August 7th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Your answer is very well educated and constructed. I’m happy that you didn’t get offended. My objections to clinical psychology are two
1)I am not sure if and how it helps. This is a matter which I will not discuss here, because it touches many other issues. I have commented on a few things on some previous posts, and I will express more of my opinions in the future.
2)It is an applied science. Even the research that clinical psychologists perform happens in the whole context of therapy. I am a great fan of cognitive sciences, because they have taken back psychology to what was in the 19th century: the study of consciousness and behavior, without any further implications.
Concerning the subjects you mention in your last paragraph, these are the subject that I find most fascinating about psychology in this century. And I find even more fascinating the fact that we finally study them. Right now I have only one article http://encefalus.com/neurology-biology/split-brains-consciousness-michael-gazzaniga/ , but more will come.
Concerning the conversation with the clinical psychologist, why don’t you contribute to Encefalus?
If you wish to become a guest blogger just send me an email. I planned to invite professionals to write, but I believed that my blog needed some more time to draw the necessary attention. If you agree just contact me.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:52 am
You do seem to have equated clinical psychology with psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology – which I would say is a 100% bad idea, clinical psychologists would be incredibly irked by that, especially as they had to do a PhD and a psychoanalyst did, well…nothing. Maybe a course on Freud.
The clinical psychologists I’ve met seem to be all about the cognitive-behavioural therapy. Applying it, testing it, often both. And it’s funny how some research clinical psychologists in particular aren’t all fuzzy and humanistic – they treat people a bit like computers e.g. depressed person + CBT = cognitive error modification = less depressed person.
I did my research project on a CBT-type thing, and I expressed skepticism to my supervisor about the effectiveness of CBT, saying I just didn’t see how it could possibly work. Being an expert on the subject, she referred me to the hundreds of articles showing it does (obviously the hundreds of never-published-but-binned articles are on rubbish heaps somewhere as well!), and researchers are doing experiments alongside the therapy effectiveness experiments to try and elicit WHY it works. I don’t think they have much of an idea yet, but if it helps some people without recourse to drugs (which, from sort-of personal experience, doctors are very willing to throw out), so much the better.
If you’re interested in my research project, or the research group that does this kind of testing, feel free to email me and I’ll throw you some links!
April 15th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Hey, thanks for posting a comment on my thread. Yes, I’ll send you a mail as soon as I find the time.