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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Step 1: Define your field as a soft science and call yourself a professional. Charge $100/hour.

Step 2: Convince customers/government to give you "parity" with hard sciences (c.f. "mental health parity" in Obamacare, etc), in spite of providing no hard scientific evidence.

Step 3: Profit.

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It's not like psychology chose to be a soft science, it just is because providing the hard scientific evidence required is either impossible, unethical, or both. To prove psychotherapy is effective for depression, you would have to gather up thousands of people with clinical depression, give half therapy and let the others go it alone, which raises serious ethical questions and makes it difficult to find volunteers. And that's just a regular study, how would you go about making a blind study? For pills you can just use a sugar pill, what's the placebo form of therapy? Do you just have a random lay person pretend to be a therapist? Doesn't that raise all kinds of ethical questions?

So we have to content ourselves with correlation studies

To prove psychotherapy is effective for depression, you would have to gather up thousands of people with clinical depression, give half therapy and let the others go it alone, which raises serious ethical questions and makes it difficult to find volunteers

This is no different from an RCT drug trial.

I agree that a blind study is impossible. But yes, I would still love to see randomized trials comparing an actor to a real psychiatrist (as well as to nothing at all). At the very least, if actors are equally effective, we can save billions of dollars by replacing expensive psychiatrists with struggling actors.

The problem with correlation studies - particularly for subjective in-my-head issues - is that the thing which causes people to see a shrink might also be causing them to get better.

Your original post that I wanted to reply to walk flagged so ill do so here.

You might like this lecture by Alan Watts:

>While there are indeed individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy, it is the sheerest arrogance for anybody to say that he is officially qualified to do so. We do not know how it is done, just as we do no know how musical, literary, and artistic genius is done.

Alan Watts - Western Psychology vs World Religions

https://youtu.be/-LzJlTCaV9U

I'd really recommend the link another poster gave: http://www.apa.org/about/policy/resolution-psychotherapy.asp...

There's a lot of studies listed there, including a bunch of RCTs, mostly comparing different types of therapy. I couldn't find any attempting to use a "placebo" therapy, but I only really skimmed it. Does that help?

Glad to see that self-congratulatory snark and drive-by skepticism is alive and well! The amount of time it took to post this could have instead been devoted to finding research of the type you supposedly seek in good-faith.

Starting point that contains cites: http://www.apa.org/about/policy/resolution-psychotherapy.asp...

Thanks, will take a look.

Do you know of a more science-focused link that focuses strictly on high quality experimental evidence? This link might have useful information, but it seems mixed up with a lot of low quality science, ethical stuff, advocacy and other things. Hard to find the good stuff without reading a lot of random unrelated papers.

Do you want to volunteer for an experimental psychological regime?

I was walking past a hospital notice board the other day, and there were in fact quite a few notices about experimental psychological treatments for particular conditions. Some of them looked like they were trying to find drug-free ways to control conditions that would normally have had drugs thrown at them. Seems like a noble aim, and I do hope people took them up on the studies.

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