Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's awake show, where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey peoples, thanks for tuning in today. I've got some pretty deep
Speaker 1 00:00:34 And interesting stuff to get into. So grab yourself something to drink. If you want get comfortable and let's do this. I have a very strange relationship with the field of psychology. I've dedicated my life to studying it. Despite the fact that I consider most of it to be pseudoscience, pseudo means that something is presented to a peer legit, but isn't, it's applied to science. If the practices, beliefs and statements are claimed to be scientific and factual, but are actually incompatible with the scientific method. You may wonder why anyone in the right mind would spend so many years doing something he doesn't believe in. Well, the old saying goes only crazy people go into psychology and that may be true, but there's a more interesting reason. I do it after decades of research into the human condition. I've arrived at the conclusion that psychology, the study of the human mind is the Royal road to understanding not only ourselves and the world, but all of life.
Speaker 1 00:01:49 Why? Because the mind is the foundation of everything. It generates all that we experience and know from the simplest sensation to the grandest scientific discovery, to the most sublime, spiritual experience by mind, do I mean thinking no, I meet all of the minds, functions, consciousness, sensation, perception, cognition, thought, feeling intuition, imagination, judgment, language, memory, and so on. Neither do I mean the brain, because you'll never find your experience of life. Say, uh, a beautiful sunset or a spiritual insight by analyzing a slice of brain tissue. All you'll find there are cells and neurochemicals. You won't find a thought or a feeling in the brain either. You'll only be able to observe the neurochemical processes involved in what you experience as thinking and how the brain converts chemistry to actual experience. In fact, how we're able to experience and know anything at all is the greatest mystery in the universe.
Speaker 1 00:03:12 You might be thinking, Whoa, doctor's wig is crazy. First. He said, most psychology, a pseudoscience. And in the next breath, he said, it's the Royal road to enlightenment what the problem? Isn't the intent of psychology, namely, to study the mind and develop ways to help people based on what's discovered. The problem is the paradigm. The model that psychologists use to try to understand people at its core, it's deeply flawed. A few years ago, an international review study in which 270 researchers on five continents, including the U S examined a hundred research reports in the most prestigious psychology journals. And what they discovered was shocking. Only 36% of the findings held up when the experiments were redone, since then an avalanche of analysis have been done. That reveal how most psychology experiments are based on faulty science. The situation is obviously alarming. You'd think the great academic institutions of America and abroad would know how to train psychology doctoral students in the scientific method.
Speaker 1 00:04:35 But apparently this isn't the case. If you ask researchers anywhere in the world, whether they have a problem, reproducing experiments in biology, chemistry, or physics, they'll tell you no. So what's up with psychology. Here's the issue listen closely objectivity in psychology is subjective. That's right. That pesky little thing in science that forces us to analyze events in a way that transcends our own ideas, opinions, judgments, and beliefs. In other words, the core element of the scientific method in psychology, especially traditional psychological research and practice. It's almost totally absent. Whoa, what did I just say? Isn't research practice and teaching in psychology based on bonafide science. Nope. I know I'm going rock and roll on you. So let me play a quick guitar vet and then I'll explain
Speaker 3 00:06:02 <inaudible> <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:06:43 Okay. I'm back to provide answers. I turn to Archimedes the ancient Greek mathematician, physicist engineer, inventor and astronomer, who famously said that he could lift the earth off its foundation. If he was given one solid place to stand and a long enough lever philosophers call this kind of hypothetical vantage point an Archimedean point. It's the place from which you can objectively perceive something in its totality. You can completely remove yourself from what you wish to study, observe and understand it in relation to other things remain independent of it and have no unintended influence on your findings. You can see it like it truly is. As I said, this notion of pure objectivity lies at the heart of science to create a scientific theory, a scientist has to form a hypothesis, test it, try to refute it, modify it, analyze the results, and then decide whether they support or undermine his idea. The method doesn't use opinion or guesswork, but rather inquiry based on systematic observation measurement and experiment, a scientific theory, isn't some kind of dreamy, an unreliable speculation, a philosophical viewpoint, or a personal feeling. It's an explanation based on a rigorously tested set of objective observations. When a scientist does research, it's like she standing behind a thick glass wall that separates her from what she studied. Every experiment is designed to eliminate her own opinions, as well as all other conflicting variables. So she can arrive at an objective conclusion.
Speaker 2 00:08:59 So
Speaker 1 00:08:59 Why doesn't this method work in psychology? Why can't we simply apply it like they do in the others,
Speaker 2 00:09:06 The sciences? Well, here's the problem. Unlike all other fields of science,
Speaker 1 00:09:13 Psychology is unique in that the human mind is both subject and
Speaker 2 00:09:19 Object. In other
Speaker 1 00:09:21 Words, the object being studied the mind is the same thing as that, which is studying it
Speaker 2 00:09:29 Mind. The mind is studying itself.
Speaker 1 00:09:34 The polar opposite of having an Archimedean point of view. If there's one thing we can never completely remove ourselves from to attain an outside vantage point. It's our own minds, no matter what we say
Speaker 2 00:09:50 Sense, perceive, think, feel,
Speaker 1 00:09:54 And know about ourselves. And the world were inextricably entangled with our own consciousness. There's no position outside of this from which to put forth any other hypothesis, even the most transcendent spiritual experience must happen within the mind's awareness. The result is that traditional psychology is at its core ideology, not science. I've read hundreds of research reports and I've never seen a psychological study that didn't involve some form of philosophical prejudice, personal ideology, or subjective viewpoint on the part of the researcher.
Speaker 2 00:10:41 It's just the
Speaker 1 00:10:42 Nature of the game it's built in. In fact, in research, objectivity goes totally out the window. Even the questions we put to the test grow out of our personal, psychological, cultural, and philosophical makeups.
Speaker 2 00:11:00 Now this isn't a new dilemma. It was first
Speaker 1 00:11:04 Scribed in 1890 by philosopher and psychologist, William James, who proposed something called the psychologists
Speaker 2 00:11:13 Fallacy. He said, quote,
Speaker 1 00:11:17 Great snare of the psychologist is the confusion over his own standpoint, with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hear after call this the psychologist's fallacy par excellence. This applies not only to research,
Speaker 2 00:11:40 But to
Speaker 1 00:11:41 Traditional psychotherapy practice as well. Every time a clinical psychologist automatically assumes his interpretation of a client's behavior represents the nature of that behavior. He commits this fallacy.
Speaker 2 00:11:57 The fallacy
Speaker 1 00:11:58 Grows out of a flawed premise known as inter subject of confusion or confusion of standpoints. This happens when the psychologist fails to account for the fact that every individual has an utterly unique process.
Speaker 2 00:12:18 You see psychologists
Speaker 1 00:12:20 Suffer from the same thing. Most of us suffer from namely the conviction that our own perceptions and interpretations represent. Objective reality, psychology education and training amplify this air by offering simplistic pre-packaged explanations for people's problems.
Speaker 2 00:12:44 The result
Speaker 1 00:12:45 Is that most psychologists rely on formulaic strategies that are only effective. If the client happens to click with that particular way of looking at things often, what happens is that the client just goes along with whatever the psychologist says because he or she is seen as an authority figure. Introductory psychology courses teach that everyone is unique, but this idea gets swept aside pretty fast. By the time you get your diploma, you've bought into the idea that there's some kind of psychological user's manual for life. And the psychologist's job is to get his clients in sync
Speaker 2 00:13:29 With it. In reality,
Speaker 1 00:13:31 Most clinical psychology is nothing but the institutionalization of philosophical, cultural and subject of notions of how people should be. It has few of the hallmarks of real science.
Speaker 2 00:13:49 The most
Speaker 1 00:13:49 Glaring example in all of this is the concept of mental illness.
Speaker 2 00:13:54 The whole idea
Speaker 1 00:13:55 Is a takeoff from medicine's concept of disease entities.
Speaker 2 00:14:00 A disease
Speaker 1 00:14:01 Entity is a set of signs, symptoms, and biochemical markers that can be distinguished from all other signs, symptoms, and biochemical markers in order to differentiate data and identify a disease medicine relies on a deep understanding of how the body works. And hundreds of studies on the specific questions they wish to answer. When researchers identify a new medical illness, it's like they're drawing metaphorical lines in the sand, decisively separating one set of parameters from all the others. When psychologists come up with a new illness on the other hand, they do so without any such kind of research. In fact, they no underlying principles or processes, they simply reach a consensus as to which symptoms appear to fit together into a cluster. It's like medicine was in the 18 hundreds before germs were discovered, symptoms were classified and treated without any knowledge of what was causing them.
Speaker 1 00:15:11 Every new addition of the psych diagnostic manual shifts around the symptoms, diseases and treatments, because they're based on the intuitions of experts done an actual research in this sense, psychologists are drawing metaphorical lines in a bucket of water. There's simply no evidence or foundation for their claims. A medical disease is a distinct entity. That's identified after a long and rigorous set of experiments and analysis. In contrast, there has never actually been a study that confirms the existence of a mental illness as a distinct psychological entity. Not one, we all agree that someone can feel depressed, anxious, compulsive, suicidal, or act completely nuts. But the idea that these are diseases with precisely demarcated features and underlying mechanisms, just like medical diseases has absolutely no scientific basis. In fact, all attempts at proving, the existence of these supposed of disorders have failed applying the medical paradigm to psychology doesn't work because the mind is qualitatively different from everything physical, including the human body, mental, emotional symptoms are intangible fluid processes of meaning, not physical processes with measurable quantitative parameters like medical diseases are when the mind studies the mind using conventional science methods.
Speaker 1 00:16:59 All it's doing is exposing its own beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions. Steven Hyman, past director of the national Institute of mental health. The world's largest funding agency for research into mental health first began expressing concerns about the psychology diagnostic manual known as DSM more than a decade ago. He noted that its categories had been invented to provide a common language for psychiatrists, but it never been intended as more than useful constructs placeholders until psychiatry could develop real knowledge, objective measures like they have in medicine. Thomas incell, recent N I M H, director psychiatrist and neuroscientist also weighed in on the flimsy nature of psychological diagnosis in his blog on April 29th, 2013, he said psychological diagnoses, lack validity, because they describe symptoms without any information about what's causing them. It would be like making a diagnosis of chest pain or headache, chest pain and headache are symptoms, not diseases.
Speaker 1 00:18:24 In order to diagnose a disease, the underlying mechanisms have to be identified, but the psychology manual doesn't do this. Why? Because there's no such medical entity as a mental illness in the first place, depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, et cetera, names, symptoms, feeling depressed, anxious, obsessive, not diseases. The fact that drug companies figured out how to mask one symptoms says nothing about what's creating one's problems. People think that if a drug numbs their mental pain, then it must mean the brain mechanism behind the problem is understood. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Despite psychiatry and big pharma's billion dollar campaigns to convince the public that mental health issues are caused by a brain disorder. There are no studies that actually demonstrate this. Every research report about the brain and mental health qualifies its findings with the phrases could be maybe is thought to be, might be so odd.
Speaker 1 00:19:51 This is because causation has never been demonstrated. It's also why psychological diagnoses are made through questionnaires, not medical exams. FDA clinical trials have demonstrated that most of the effect of psychiatric medications like antidepressants is placebo. And the remaining effect comes not from correcting specific brain abnormalities that produce mental symptoms, but from something entirely different, these drugs contain psychoactive ingredients that induce complex varied and unpredictable, physical and mental States that people experience as a general, not as distinct targeted therapeutic effects. In other words, the drugs don't correct a specific brain problem. Rather they put the person into a generalized altered
Speaker 2 00:20:48 State that takes his mind somewhere else and thereby suppresses his symptoms. That's okay to do temporarily, but you're not correcting a brain disorder. If you want to be scientific toward your problems, you have to take them seriously and process them, not just suppress them. See you next time. Stay aware.
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