Featured Do you think that psychology is influencing the populous, or vice-versa?

I'm not a fan of how clinical psychology either normalises or pathologises psychological traits/conditions. The notion of mental or psychological health is analogical to physical or biological health/illness/disability, but often times is employed univocally.

For the most part, I don't think normative prescriptions are applicable outside the areas of morals and physical functions. It seems like overreach to prescribe that people ought to think, feel, or socialise a certain way, even if it impacts their life negatively. That said, I am not opposed to people wanting to change their thought processes or feelings utilising professional services or medications, so long as it is entirely optional, in the way that cosmetic surgery is optional.

In practice, I don't think mental traits like ADHD, depression, etc should be pathologised, but should instead be regarded as traits that people can either try to opt out of, or try to utilise and adapt to, with the support of the community.

 

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 .

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

 

I'm glad I hit the right sort of note . I could feel what you were struggling towards, so I thought I'd try and explore where it led.

The worry that popular opinion could sway and damage the rational foundations of science and medicine is a very real one. There has always been an element of it, but the Internet makes it a far more efficient process these days. There seems to be a growing mass view that truth is decided by a sort of democracy, but just because a large number of people hold an opinion that doesn't make it true. Our future well-being may depend on whether common sense can prevail over such illusions when common sense seen through the lens of those illusions seems to be in error, often in terms of both validity and in terms of ethics.

 

Inattention shouldn't be qualitatively separated from physical hyperactivity in this context because attenuation of focus, not sedation, is the main aim of ADHD medication. Was there any evidence of neurological damage in your case? Because if ADHD is a natural deviation of cognition then there should be no reason to pathologize it—unless, like he says, it's convenient to uphold a second-rate educational system that perpetuates a single approach to learning.

It's not really his opinion when he's citing other research. But they should have added references to the description.

Consider that the format of the event didn't allow to go deeper into any given topic. Regardless, when the occurrence of mental disorders rises along with increasing industrialization and changes in social dynamics, that's immediately a red flag. The whole psychiatric endeavor is an extremely ham-fisted triage without holistic solutions, and I don't trust it.

 

My bad; I meant "accentuate."

 

My point above, which I'll repeat, was precisely a rejection of the pathologisation of diverse mental functioning. So I'll stick with calling ADHD, autism, depression, etc, traits instead of disorders. I'll also reiterate, that the decision to "opt out" by attempting to use medications or professional services, should indeed be entirely optional, with no normative prescriptions.

I replied, not to repeat, but to underline that you have not made any case for applying terms like "disorder" to traits which are neither moral, nor physically functional. You have merely insisted on defining some mental traits as disorders and presumably others as normal/normative.

Neither have you made a case for treatments being anything other than extensions of lifestyle preferences, and have merely asserted normative (first line) regimens.

Part of my reason for rejecting normative assumptions about mental traits, besides the fundamental lack of justification for them, is for the same reason I reject eugenics. Eugenics assumes that some human traits are better than others, and makes unjustifiable prescriptions about the desirable frequency of traits (or genes) in a population. Nevertheless, people can optionally choose to pass on their traits or not, but prescribing which traits ought or ought not be passed on is gross overreach. Ultimately, broad society isn't simply a selective aggregate of only some people with only some traits, but rather a beneficial cooperation between all people with their innate variety of traits.

 

It's a good question. I've often doubted the possibility for psychology, or any subject for that matter, to be completely objective and impartial in its perspective. Any person who evaluates another through the lens of psychology is themselves biased by their own psychology. In which case a lot of the professional conclusions and diagnostic criterias are simply constructs formed from the loudest or most prevalent voices, that change according to the dictates of the current culture.