Reddit reviews Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease

> Psychology has existed as a scientific discipline using scientific methodology for quite a long time.

I'm sorry, but it's not me who is saying this is false -- it's the past president of the APA, who argued for scientific standards but was shouted down by his own membership. And more recently, this point was made by the present Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, in a much-read article in Scientific American entitled Faulty Circuits -- the title is meant to suggest that "mental" problems are actually physiological problems, in some cases potentially remediable using medical, not psychological, methods.

Psychology cannot be a scientific discipline unless and until it puts forth falsifiable theories about the working of the human mind. This has not happened yet, and there is no prospect for it to happen in the future. As a result, clinical psychologists can do pretty much anything they please, because there is no scientific evidence to declare one treatment ineffective, and another one effective. This constitutes a wall between medicine and psychology. On one side we have treatments that must meet scientific standards. On the other, we have treatments that don't, and that can't. I don't see how to make it clearer than that.

The research on CBT is a case in point -- the research results are scattered about, many papers contradicting others on the same topic, with no one seeming to notice. A number of meta-analyses have come to the conclusion that there is no difference between therapies.. In "Manufacturing Depression," Psychotherapist Gary Greenburg calls CBT "a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment."

The only way psychologists can claim to be part of a scientific field is by redefining science -- and that's exactly what they do. It's science because it's called science. It's science because it's listed as a science in college curricula. It's science because there are scientists doing science in the field (true). But that is not enough to make a field into a science -- for that, one must shape falsifiable theories and then test them, then discard those that are falsified. Psychology won't do that -- there are any number of outright beliefs in the field that masquerade as scientific theories.

> CBT has tons and tons of evidence supporting efficacy as well ...

Yes, and there is an equal corpus of research evidence suggesting that it is no more effective than any arbitrary therapy. I can't tell you how many studies I've read that claim support for CBT in which there was no control group as that term is defined in science. One group got CBT, the other group were told to go home. The result was counted as support for CBT, and it was called "science".

> To suggest that psychotherapy (or as you mislabel it, clinical psychology) is without scientific evidence is surprisingly ignorant ...

Not as ignorant as making up positions for other people, as you have just done. There are scientists doing science in psychology, they gather and publish evidence (and I have made this point more often that I care to remember), but those who understand science realize this is not enough to turn a field into a science. Scientific fields are not knit together by white lab coats and clipboards, they are knit together by tested, falsifiable theories, theories that are unceremoniously discarded once they have been falsified.

Asperger Syndrome wasn't discarded because of the overwhelming evidence that it had no agreed meaning or clear diagnostic criteria, it was discarded after it was exposed as an obvious scam by (a) people like me who pointed out that it was a way to stigmatize bright young people and push them into therapy, (b) people in the public school system, who noticed a lot of opportunistic parents who used it to get special (undeserved) attention for their kids, and (c) by the original advocate for its inclusion in DSM IV (Allen Frances) who now regrets his advocacy and is working to reverse it.

And none of this is remotely science. Science is not what you think it is. It's not advocacy, it's not collecting evidence for a particular outlook and discarding evidence that goes the other way (a serious problem in the field). It's not research without theories, and it's not theories without research -- both problems in the field.

Physics is not a science because it has theories, and it's not a science because there is lots of evidence-gathering going on. Physics is a science because the evidence that is gathered either supports or contradicts the theories, and physical theories are regularly discarded when they prove not to be supported by evidence.

This is why psychology is not a science.