9/20/2026.. Typin’ during radio show, actually…
These days I've been thinking about how I am against therapy as it stands today, which is ironic considering my major. I used to say this before as a joke, but I don't know. The more psychology classes I take, and the more research I read, I can really see how much we have yet to understand about our minds. I just feel like we are going to look back on this era of talk therapy and see how rudimentary it is.
As it stands, therapists can’t give you advice. That would mean liability. They can’t provide their personal analysis of you as a character. That would be unscientific. All you can really do in therapy is talk through your problems- the idea being that talking through everything out loud will expose your blind spots and allow you to process everything.
This approach doesn't work for people who are already well-practiced in metacognition, however. If you've gone through your thoughts a thousand times in a thousand different ways already, what is reiteration going to do for you?
Another gripe I have is with the liberal prescribing of antidepressants. Many people just have environmental problems… antidepressants should be prescribed ONLY if you have a chemical imbalance. Anyways..
My loss of faith isn’t limited to clinical psychology. I feel like the entire field of psychology is just too young. Also, since I’ve done a lot of literature review this semester, I feel like I can see past the veneer of authority these published papers put out. And I’ve found a lot of weird methodology and subjective interpretation.
I talked to a graduate student I'm working with about my newfound uncertainty, and she said there's a kind of wave students have to ride the further they get into their discipline. Basically, starting out, you acquire all this knowledge and you feel like you're on top of the world. But as you probe deeper, you realize you lack a bunch of knowledge in other realms. But you go on to fill in the blanks and become newly confident until you stumble across another gaping chasm of knowledge.
It feels different from other fields, though. It’s different from sciences like physics or… chemistry.. (I’m hesitant to invoke the names of ‘real’ sciences LOL) because a lot of psychological concepts are intangible and as of right now, it looks like all psychologists are kind of stuck in front of this yawning chasm made of a lack of technology and knowledge. Like, studies of the brain (in live people) mostly rely on blood flow, heat mapping, and zappin’ you with lightning. It’s about clues and more comparable to forensics, I think, because we gain the most knowledge when things go wrong (See: horrible accident with Phineas Gage, etc.). Also, even set areas in our brains that we are reasonably certain have set functions (see: Broca’s and Wernicke’s) don’t seem to impact people in the same way. Two people could get knocked in the Wernicke’s and one will lose the ability to understand language and the other won’t.
I just feel like physical sciences and true natural sciences are more concrete. On a whim last week, I went on a hike with the Geology club. Those students know things about their physical environments. They know that glaciers deposited boulders all over our campus, for one. I mean, the boulders are right there. You can touch and lick them if you are really inclined to. Rocks are going to react reliably in the face of pressure.
Meanwhile, individual brains are shaped by life experiences- like literally shaped. Like, for instance, if you’ve had a tumultuously emotional life, you’re likely to have a bigger amygdala (because that’s the part of the brain that consolidates emotion). And also, different people will be impacted differently by the same events. So there’s really no way to truly standardize brain research, at least right now.
Beyond that, I’ve just found myself questioning how replicable social psychology experiments are. Like, if a study is done in a lab, which is a sterile environment, who’s to say the people won’t act completely differently when they’re loose in the wild?
A rock’s not going to change no matter where you study it, you know?
But I guess that’s what’s so exciting about psychology. It’s like the true final frontier.. Not space, because physics has got that covered.
The graduate student I talked to said she enjoys seeing the studies and evidence that build up behind every principle we believe to be true in psychology. I do like to read clever, creative studies that get around whatever constraints we have or base their work on other principles and come to really intelligent conclusions. I am excited to see how this field grows during my lifetime.