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What would you say is the optimal path for research in psychiatry/psychology?

• astazangasta 11y ago
  Probably not the best person to ask. I have a limited understanding of psychiatry but still tend to take a dim view of it. I think the brain is substantially more complicated than psychiatric theory suggests, and so I think that the modern science is far away from useful and accurate models. fMRI, for example, is a very gross way of examining brain function and seems to me rather like trying to read source code by examining the number of bits of entropy in a file. I think that psychology is more useful for understanding the human mind, but even here I wish they would eschew the ersatz methods of science (stats, p-values, controlled studies) and go back to more qualitative descriptions of the psyche; we're not even close to successfully bridging between psychology and biology. But this is all a lay understanding of the field and probably no better an insight than yours.
• aidenn0 11y ago
  It might be nice if they actually started doing some research. Psychology research takes all of the issues that harder sciences have (e.g. most experiments are never reproduced), and then combines that with extremely low-power experiments, and then mixes in the fact that most research must be on humans, which means your experiment won't pass the ethical review board.