Pseudoscientia Proliferans

A new disease.

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there is a lot to be critical about.

If you like what you read, please click the “like” button at the bottom of the text, it helps spread the posts to new readers. If you want to comment, please use the link at the end rather than email me as they get lost and nobody sees them.

****

Following the post on Reprising Mesmer (June 9^th), a reader commented: “But most pseudosciences fade quickly - this one is being funded to the tune of colossal amounts by both state and private funding.” He wondered why: is it a hidden aim, such as anaesthetising the population to the horrors of the our endless colonial wars? “Perhaps there’s a real aim behind all this experimentation, and it’s not what is claimed. Which is why the funding never dries up on this pseudoscience.”

The next week’s post asked: “When is a Science?” (June 16^th), which quickly brought up a discussion on “neurodiversity.” A PhD psychology candidate, who is presumably stuck in the thick of this movement, did not see that it had any scientific basis, just another of many fads: “The problem with neurodiversity is that is provides no explanation for the diagnoses (which basically includes everything) it assumes it can explain.” He gave a long but incomplete list of all these terms, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, dyslexia, dysphasia, aphantasia (a new one for me), rejection sensitivity dysphoria, etc:

Psychologists turn these, as I see them, prejudices or dislikes into biological conditions which we must find the “neural correlates” for so then they can…..do what? A neurosurgeon would just laugh if asked to medically act on such “findings”. This is how I see psychology works, lurching from fad to fad (EMDR, Power Posing, Resillience) which they must find the neural correlates for (basically meaning we must give someone a lucrative career in doing nothing of lasting value except to indulge their own career/narcissism).

Another reader asked: “is there another blanket term that refers to intellectual, perceptual or sensory handicaps?” The short answer is Yes, and we’ll come back to it but these discussions raise the crucially important point of how psychology and psychiatry get away with this. Can anybody name another field claiming to be “scientific” that, as the reader noted, “Despite having two ‘sciences of the mind’ (which we don’t have for any other science such as physics/biology) ...” shows no intellectual development? This is the question right at the heart of critical psychology/psychiatry: Where’s the science? Show us your articulated theory of mind and the model of mental disorder that flows logically from it, and your theory of personality as a subset of the theory of mind and the model of personality disorder it generates, and then we can judge whether psychiatrists and psychologists actually know what they’re doing or whether the whole thing is a vast exercise in using pseudoscience to dupe the general public for financial and other base reasons.

We can agree that, in the complete absence of an articulated theory of mind, psychiatry and psychology are hobbled from the start. The best they could do is stick to questionnaires like intellectual testing, which presumes nothing. For example, you don’t need to know anything about how birds fly to work out which one can fly furthest or fastest. That’s pure performance. Same with IQ tests, they test performance on that day and nothing more. Psychology can get a long way by keeping to its concept of the mind as a “black box” but that’s not available to psychiatry, which wants to label people as “functional” or “dysfunctional” and then do something about the dysfunctional, i.e. its practice is based on value judgements. Perforce, the next step in the process is looking inside the black box: is the brain itself sick, or is the mind malfunctioning purely as a psychological unit? To answer that, there is a logically prior question: How does that lump of squishy pink stuff between your ears give rise to the sense of being something that functions in the psychological realm? Here we are again, back at the same question that exasperated Descartes 400 years ago, now known as David Chalmer’s “hard problem of consciousness.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, these two traditions, of trying to explain human behaviour by psychological means or simply assigning it to biology (details to be provided later), were alive and well and poles apart. In Leipzig in 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, the first person to call himself a psychologist, opened the first dedicated psychological laboratory. He planned to use the quantitative methods pioneered by Hermann von Helmholtz to study the mind but he didn’t see any limits on his subject matter. In addition to important work on what we now call biophysics (perception, etc), he gathered a huge amount of information on folk psychology, meaning how ordinary folk talk about psychological matters. This quickly led into a morass so, by 1913, the American psychologist John B Watson felt justified in saying there was no hope for a psychology that allowed non-physical matters (i.e. metaphysics) to intrude:

I do not wish unduly to criticise psychology. It has failed signally, I believe, during the fifty-odd years of its existence as an experimental discipline to make its place in the world as an undisputed natural science ... We have become so enmeshed in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content that I, as an experimental student, feel that something is wrong with our premises and the types of problems which develop from them ... I can state my position here no better than by saying that I should like to bring my students up in the same ignorance of (the mind-body problem) as one finds among the students of other branches of science [1, pp163,166; I use this quote a lot, it set the path for psychology for the rest of the century].

This was the opening shot in the behaviourist revolution that led to conditioning, reinforcement schedules, Skinner boxes and, ultimately, nowhere. As a sort of “brave new world” non-mentalist science of the mind, it failed, as parodied in the film “Clockwork Orange.” Since then, as reader PC describes, psychology has fallen into line as a sort of psychiatry manqué, more concerned with the biology of how people experience emotions than with the psychology of why they experience just these emotions and what to do about them. All of this is in keeping with the broad thrust of positivist science, the notion that there are no values or emotions in science, just plain hard facts. Science can only deal with observables; the mind is in principle unobservable; ergo, discard the mind and build a valueless and mechanistic psychology, manifest as CBT.

Psychiatry, meantime, luxuriated in the idea that it had caught the slipery imp of mind in a biological net. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was, as he loved to remind people, an entirely new science of mind, unlike any that had gone before. This stripped away the veneer of civilisation, leaving only the raw and brutal basic drives that powered our minds behind dark curtains. These, he believed, were of the same nature as instincts in animals, the only difference being that we conceal them, from each other and, more importantly, from ourselves. Thus, our basal instincts can work their mischief in the dark, causing unpleasant emotions and disturbed behaviour without the subject knowing why. Freud claimed that, using his technique of “free association” and by analysing dreams, it is possible to bring them to full awareness and then deal with them maturely.

This was accepted as valid science by the early positivists and even mid-century. In 1949, Gilbert Ryle, one of the most influential of British philosophers, referred to Freud as “psychology’s one man of genius” (he was having a dig at behaviorists like Watson, Skinner and Eysenck). Why were they so accepting of what we now see as a classic pseudoscience? The only people who can answer that are long gone but it seems that removing all human values until all that remained was primitive urges, much the same as those of animals, swung them. They were satisfied with a theory that saw humans in the same light as cattle, fighting and mating in the paddocks; Freud promised them that in a sort of hydrodynamic form (the dominant science of his age) so they were let him through the door of science. It didn’t last. By the early 1970s, the psychoanalytic world was falling apart, leaving psychiatry to be captured by the men in white coats, the biologists.

The important point is that while they keep up a flood of claims to be the “true science of mental disorder,” biological psychiatrists have managed to take control without ever once showing their scientific credentials. Now if you tell them that, they get shirty and stamp off, muttering angrily about “ridiculous antipsychiatrists.” Crucially, they don’t stand their ground and say: “Here are our credentials. Here is our theory of mind, here our model of mental disorder and why it should be seen as biological. And this, if you can understand it, is our theory of personality and the model of personality disorder that flows from it. Are you satisfied now?” No, that’s exactly what doesn’t happen.

It’s probably unique in the history of science that people can be given so much power and so much money to inflict themselves on so many disadvantaged and defenceless people without justifying it. For example, and the one that annoys me so much, is this: Where is the justification for taking from their homes people who have broken no laws, detaining them in generally awful surroundings, denying practically the whole of their human rights, and forcing them to take very unpleasant drugs they don’t like and don’t want that shorten their lives? These are very big moves, you know, it’s not trivial to lock a person away and refuse them permission to communicate with their relatives, as happens. The people who are doing it wouldn’t like it if it were done to them, so where’s the theoretical justication? It simply doesn’t exist. It happens for historical reasons only, plus the urge to have a quiet, ordered society, so how do they get away with it?

The answer is they distract everybody, away from these basic questions to a glorious vision of a society relieved of mental disorder. One after the other, they wheel out promises of “bold new treatments” and “imminent breakthroughs” which occupy the airwaves and beguile the grants committees, allowing them to ignore fundamental principles of human rights. This is psychiatry’s variant of what the philosopher, Karl Popper (1902-1994), called “immunising a theory against refutation,” the clever word games ideologues use to avoid having to admit they’re wrong. In Objective Knowledge, from 1972 [2, p30], Popper analysed the steps taken by people who are always able to deny they’re wrong with another “Yes, but...” (sometimes known as “yesbuttery,” similar to “adhockery”). This is typical of religions and of supposedly scientific movements such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. It doesn’t matter what evidence is put to them, they can always wriggle away with another bit of the theory. Robert Colls found a quote by Marx on this:

Engels once wrote to Marx saying he had made an “ass” of himself in something he had written on India. Marx reassured him that “in that case, one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have of course so worded my proposition as to be right either way” (here, p97).

Psychiatrists are a bit different in that, having never committed themselves to an actual theory or model, they can’t be proven wrong. Instead, they keep everybody looking ahead to a golden future. If anybody is so rude as to point out what they said last week, they sneer: “Oh, but that’s so very last week, you have to keep up with the science.” We can call that “saltatory immunisation,” meaning avoiding refutation by constantly jumping ahead of the disconfirming evidence (I made it up).

The history of science isn’t quite my thing but I’m sure psychiatry’s liberties are unprecedented. I doubt that any professional group has ever got away with so much money and so much influence with so little justification. If this sort of deception happens in finance, people go to prison, and rightly so, but psychiatrists? No, they just keep on spouting pseudoscience and the world throws money at them. Part of the problem is the fact that criticism of mainstream psychiatry is suppressed by the people who control the journals, other mainstream psychiatrists. Instead of forcing researchers and opinion writers to justify what they’re doing by providing a formal model of mental disorder, they allow them simply to change the subject, away from this year’s failures to the promise of next year’s breakthrough. We have all sorts of prizes and awards for psychiatrists “forging ahead” but none for the quietly determined people who, years later, manage to get something published that exposes a major error – or deception. It can take decades to expose the falsity in psychiatry, and there are no thanks for doing it.

So back to “neurodiversity.” First point: any term that starts with the prefix “neuro-” is crap until proven otherwise. Second: our reader asked: “... is there another blanket term that refers to intellectual, perceptual or sensory handicaps?” Yes, there is. There is a single word for a very well known mental factor that causes all sorts of subjective disturbances in higher mental functions. Trouble is, psychiatry hates it and it doesn’t fit with the biological ethos so they ignore it. It’s common, it’s psychological and there’s no chance of making a career or money from it, so psychiatry doesn’t want to know about it. It’s called anxiety. Personality-based anxiety alone can produce a huge range of fluctuating disturbances in higher mental functions. With anxiety, there’s no need to talk about a “sick brain,” especially when there’s no other evidence of brain failure.

But nobody wants to know about anxiety, almost universally it’s seen as a moral failing: “Get a grip, stop being a girl, there’s nothing to be frightened of, it’s all in your mind.” That doesn’t help one iota as, on the other side, the sufferer is saying: “I’m such a failure, I’m letting everybody down, they must really be disgusted by me, I’ve got to get a grip.” For these people, getting a “neuro-label” means “There’s nothing morally wrong with me so I don’t have to work on myself or change. It’s society’s fault, they have to adjust to me and stop picking on me.” This is precisely why the “neurofad” is spreading so fast, it’s the ultimate “get out of censure” card. Also, there’s the huge pressure of practitioners creating a “lucrative career in doing nothing of lasting value except to indulge their own career/narcissism.” There is huge money in ADHD, why shouldn’t they get their share?

Moreover, the idea that we have to keep inventing new “diseases,” as the reader noted, falls foul of another rule in logic, Occam’s razor, aka the principle of parsimony. This says: The number of explanatory entities must never expand beyond the minimum needed to do the job. By the simple move of adding “neuro-” or “dys-” to some mental function or other, we start a whole new industry of unnecessary explanatory entities. The creator is invited to talk at conferences and is offered book deals, probably a university post; the “sufferers” escape moral pressure to “pull themselves together”; and lots of people make money out of YouTube channels talking about it (don’t ever search YouTube for anything starting with ‘neuro-’, it will drive you mad).

So: is there one “hidden aim” behind this industry? I don’t think so. To me, it’s sufficiently vague and flexible to satisfy all sorts of emotional needs, social ambitions, career goals and business plans in patients and practitioners, families and businesses. They just come together and head off down the road for a while until the wheels fall off the whole deal, then the supporters scatter and reform behind another guru or saint or scientific genius. That’s why it’s so durable. To paraphrase that mawkish film, “Being atheoretical means never having to say you’re wrong.” It’s great while you can get away with it.

References:

1. Watson JB. Psychology as the behaviourist views it. Psychological Review, 1913; 20:158-177.

2. Popper KR. Objective Knowledge: an evolutionary approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

****

My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.