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Comment by comfypotato | Hacker News Reader

> If that we’re the case

This isn’t necessarily true. There’s a wide variety of reasons for which diagnoses of mental illnesses would vary greatly. Equating Psychology to hard sciences is naive. It is the softest of sciences, but labeling it as non-science would be ridiculous.

I personally think Psychiatrists in particular have one of the most difficult jobs as physicians. It’s made worse for patients by the fact that a poorly performing Psychiatrist has many scapegoats behind which to hide.

Unfortunately I spend a lot of time around mentally ill folk, myself included. A good dose/choice of medication and a good therapist-client-match work modern miracles on people, and it’s very easy to see when you’re around it. It’s very similar to a surgery with a low success rate.

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> softest of sciences, but labeling it as non-science would be ridiculous

It is about as scientific as chiropractics and acupuncture, full of anecdote and very little substance, you even provided some yourself. How can you possibly trust much of anything coming out of those disciplines when the majority of papers can't even be replicated?

Simple:because, unlike chiropractic and acupuncture, some papers can be replicated.

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> You appear to have no vested interest in someone who claims to have benefitted from therapy, and it’s very apparent you don’t see a therapist yourself.

I could replace therapy in that sentence with chiropractics or acupuncture and it would express an equally meaningless platitude.

> Suggesting that the recent decades of funding and research in the general psychology domain haven’t yielded good results is humorously ignorant.

And yet if we look at populations (as we do to benchmark real medicine) in much of the western world deaths from despair are up, depression and anxiety are up, population happiness is trending down. What a testament to those decades of research.

> From this perspective, you “having a problem” with it makes you look like a sociopath

This is a clear violation of HN rules, I suggest you take a look at them. What I have a problem with is people being duped into spending tons of money by charlatans. People in need spend money on tons of things they are convinced help them (supplements, psychics, acupuncture etc), that isn't evidence of their utility.

> clear violation of HN rules

Sorry. Also, it’s not directed at you but rather someone who would deny another what they knew to be good medicine. It would be valid, in that case, would it not? (Still against the rules, I guess. I wouldn’t mind being banned for accurately labeling a sociopath; that would be a decent signal to spend my time elsewhere.)

You actually believe therapy to be a complete farce, which I hadn’t comprehended before this point.

Read some systematic literature review abstracts. Parse some statistics. Ask a physician you trust to explain it to you.

Research doesn’t suggest that therapy improves the lives of everyone but rather that it’s effective treatment for disease. You could similarly find papers that say the same thing about acupuncture or chiropractors: when I say “research” here, I’m referring to many orders of magnitudes more psychology papers. Tens of thousands would pass your replication crisis criticism criteria.

You really should take that chip on your shoulder to a therapist or a surgeon rather than on HN though. Acid comments won't help people consider your point of view if exposed with such aggression.

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