We sure know more about the mechanism of addiction today but there are still drug addicts in the streets. I'm no fan of psychoanalysis but there are some flawed arguments in the article: Posted by sheauga at 1:13 PM on May 19, 2003

Psychologists also provide a valuable service by preparing fact sheets with tips on how to deal with people who are not fully functional. Also, the report cites some evidence that early intervention in the form of a single one-to-one recital of events and discussion of emotions evoked by a traumatic event does not consistently reduce risk and may even put some survivors at heightened risk for later developing mental health problems.' 'Some interventions - including mass education via media outlets - although beneficial, have the potential for unintended harm. It's from a national meeting of psychologists trying to figure out how to respond to 9-11:Įvidence-Based Early Psychological Intervention for Victims/Survivors of Mass Violence.Ī Workshop to Reach Consensus on Best Practices' (Available as a 123-page. This report is also critical of 'talk therapy,' but it may give you a different perspective on the practical applications of psychology. Posted by tdismukes at 11:10 AM on May 19, 2003 (Psychopharmacology is the one area of research which the clinicians are taking advantage of, but that is still at a primitive level of development.) As nads suggests, we may have another couple of hundred years to go before we see results from psychology to rival those of the older sciences. The researchers doing basic research have probably many decades to go before they produce reliable tools for the clinicians. Clinical psychology, on the other hand, is a totally different discipline - primarily an artform - one with mixed results. The last few decades have produced some promising findings in cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, social psychology & other subdisciplines that actually make effective use of the scientific method. Later theorists, such as Skinner, at least made an honest effort to be scientific, but they hadn't found an effective experimental/theoretic paradigm that would allow them to generate any kind of useful results. Freud & company never had any kind of scientific basis.

Scientific psychology is even younger than that. Nads - ' Psychology on the other hand is just over 100.'

A terrible beauty peter watson