The Precarious Nature of Pseudoscience and Psychology
First of all, let it be clear that I adore the field of psychology simply because it is such a young discipline. One is able to alter the life of an individual for the better with little more than commitment and communication. A lot of doctors would prescribe medication because of chemistry's grounding in science, but here's the rub: to rely solely on chemical processes to modify our behavior, we must also subscribe to the fundamentalism of behavioral psychology, which puts humans solely in a "survival by chemical reaction" box. On the other hand, casting out medical advice and following the rabbit down the hole leads to people rubbing healing stones over painful lumps instead of getting tested for cancer. Both are ludicrous. Psychology, in the eyes of most medical institutions, is the definition of pseudoscience, our book is called the Diagnostic and STATISTICAL Manual (DSM). The entire field is one of guesses, chance and hoping that an individual can be convinced that they are merely of a certain category. This is equivalent to cooking a meal for an American family and hoping to "correct" the attitude of their disappointed Japanese guest with a 50mg dose of Serzone. Also ludicrous. Psychology is attempting to be included in the scientific community but because that community has become so hard pressing for tangible evidence (grant bait), our field has become one where a doctor is almost expected to "try this pill", up our prescription and only stop experimenting when we tell them that we are feeling better. They feel successful and we buy their medicine. It's no wonder this has worked for so long, the majority of people have been walking away happy. Unfortunately, it's not psychology, it's pharmacology. This is what happens when we expect to fit within a medical frame a subject that both is a valid part of (e.g. behavioral psychology, mental illness) but also transcends (imagination, intuition). Proper psychology is supposed to be a replacement for the group indoctrination of yore. Chemicals are valuable for specific neural issues, but stretching them into areas where just listening to a person might have helped can result in discomfort and psychological tears in the long run. Unfortunately, talking doesn't need grant money, so we drum up ways in which we can apply neuron-inhibitors to patients and jot down the results. It is both the responsibility of the patient and the professional to, at first, put the medicine on the back-burner, secondly, work together to try and untie the psychological knots that life will naturally tie. We've become comfortable as a society and thus, lost our psychological strength and ability to rebound. We need to be trained in correct thinking again, something that we've lost in the last two centuries of scientific empiricism. So, the problem of psychology is one of trying to fit in with traditional ideologies and ours is a field where acknowledging individual patterns in a single human (the who, what, where, when and why's that make us up) is less important than just administering tangible tablets with the finesse of a shotgun. Fortunately, we are epic beings and most of us know this. The nineties were a whirlwind of children being medicated instead of being let loose from their leashes and I expect a punctuated storm as they grow older. Hover parenting and Ritalin have suppressed a generation of children and we didn't think twice because at the time, psychologists were on board. So acknowledge synchronicity and it's role in your life, pay tribute the spirits dwelling in the forest, tend to the imagination, it's there for a reason and it needs exercise. Empirical evidence is fun but imagination hasn't been proven yet either and just because it's not as real to me as it is to you doesn't mean I wouldn't be completely fascinated by your story and attribute to you great depth as a human being. How to balance: Embrace the ludicrous and then apply that kind of thinking and passion to a tangible discipline that you enjoy. Pair them up, alchemy and cooking, astrology and computer programming, but don't think for one second that you are likely to live diving headfirst into one or the other. Society tend to sway us to one so we start wearing crystals on our foreheads but we can't stop smoking or we fall for the automatic model of behavioral psychology but we can't lock in that second date. Great people usually harbor and do each half of their psyche justice. The new age movement was just the antecedent to Atheism, both a a bit radical for my liking. We're all bigger than what we see on the outside, but we're also taught to fit in so we become nervous talking to each other about what's going on on the inside. Find a group online and become a regular, cherish those who think like you do. Respect differences and learn to celebrate when you discover something new. But never, ever, ever just take a psychologist's word for it. We are, and until we have evidence that outweighs our statistics, nothing more than experimenting whether you know it or not and it is you who will either help us to create strategies to overcoming struggles or lie back and let us administer the a chemicals to "fix" you.
