THE CONSEQUENCES OF DENYING COHERENT BELIEFS.

Onetime counseling student Suzannah Alexander asserts, "Psychology Has Lost Its Credibility."  That's what happens when you let trendy approaches and the pursuit of grants get in the way of objectivity.

Not only do you have the denial of reality in matters of biological sex, but in the science sector, there have been research and publication abuses, and for two decades now, a replication crisis has undermined much of the field’s scientific integrity.

While p-hacking and other poor research techniques account for some of the replication crisis, different aspects of the research issues come from a willful denial of all reality.

In a sneak peek of the 2024 revision of Research and Evaluation in Counseling, Bradley Erford spends 20 pages questioning the nature of truth, the rejection of objective reality, multiple realities, and critical theories.

Why am I not surprised?

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, unfortunately, aren't yet well-enough developed to be able to assess such claims in a systematic way.  We're a century or so away from eugenics and sterilization, three score and ten years or so away from frontal lobotomies, and forty years ago Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had regime psychiatrists diagnosing dissidents as schizophrenic, in order to make the dissenters go away whilst claiming the corrective labor camps were for more conventional criminals alone.  There is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for neuroses and psychoses, but the committee that revises it responds to Popular Sentiment.  That is not the behavior of scholars confident in their paradigm.

Current academic thinking is complicit in some sort of experiment against reality, but I'm not sure which experiment that is.

It will not end well, either for the discipline, or for the people offered bad advice from allegedly credentialed experts.  "[O]nce academicians lose sight of the distinction between the positive and normative and attempt to make the world on the basis of will alone, or, worse, the latest fads and fashions suggest that anything goes, the academy is done for."

Alas, the scholars and practitioners of counseling are not simply racking up Minimal Publishable Units nor estimating angels on the heads of pins, they are wrecking real lives on the basis of sloppy thinking.  "One must wonder what they mean when they call something 'evidence-based.'"  Isn't that a lapse in the theorizing?  If there is no objective reality, or if everyone's daydreams become one of those multiple realities, what are the rules of evidence?