Flipswitch

Argument number 1:   All psychology is a scam!!!!! If there is one mantra that arises from the anti-psychology/anti-psychiatry movement over and over again, it is one simple idea:  All psychology is a scam.

Flim-flammery!  Shennanigans! Hocus pocus!  Baloney! Snake oil! Hoax!  Fraud! Suckers’ game! and on! and on! and ON!  Yep, this is THE central thing that anti-psychology types keep coming back to over and over again.

Psychology is “supposed” to be full of learned experts that can peer into the human mind and unravel it for you in intricate ways that they can offer to you in order to tell you quote “the truth” unquote and “heal” you.  Just one problem, they say.  None of that is true.  After all the years of training of your average psychologist, there is virtually nothing that they know that can’t be learned over a weekend with a send away kit from the ACME “Make Me a Psychologist” Company.  Their so-called “treatments”  don’t work, and never have, all too often making things at least worse if by nothing else than separating the unsuspecting sucker that buys into this smoke and mirrors from his or her hard earned cash.  Nope, these people are simply trying to feel superior to the rest of us by saying they’re experts of the mind, while stigmatizing normal behavior by saying it’s a “brain abnormality” when what they really mean is that society simply doesn’t like such normal behavior.  They cozy up to drug companies who are all too happy to dope us all up on the prozium du jour so that we sleep instead of take charge of our own lives.

And the antipsychology crowd turns to the past for its arguments as well.  “Have you even seen the horrible abuses that happened in the past because of psychology?  They used to say slaves were “mentally disordered” because they wanted to escape slavery.  We’re supposed to trust these folks?”  And much much more.

No, these people are modern day priests in a growingly secular society.  You see, it used to be the preacher that told you what was okay in the religion practiced by a society.  Now, with the rise of science, it is a psychologist that determines what reality is and, more important to our discussion, what it is not.  But of course, they have no more insight than did the charlatan preachers of old.  Perhaps much less in fact.

Instead, the anti-psychology crowd say two things: first of course is our trusty old mantra of “it’s all a scam!”  But further, to them, the ultimate goal of this scam is social control of people by a small group of elites and the apparatus of the state.  Not to mention, separating a sucker from his money!