It is not clear that what you have to say has anything to do with the article. This article is about a child who is clearly intelligent, manipulative and posses

It is not clear that what you have to say has anything to do with the article. This article is about a child who is clearly intelligent, manipulative and possessive of unhealthy behaviors outside the norm. Instead it appears that you prefer to broadly tar the field of Psychology by arguing that facts can be distorted with careful presentation of statistics. >It has a long history of shifting its positions, and a long history of debunked and discredited bodies of theory This is not a bad thing on its own. It just means the search space is large and complex with many potholes and convergence will take a while yet. > Don't you think that, with a few weeks of study, I could apply any subset of mental disorders from the DSM-IV to any person I wished? No I don't think so. Not in any substantial way that couldn't just as accurately be replicated by a markov chain with the specificity of a fortune cookie. You can't just trivialize an entire branch of study like that. Certainly there is a lot of room for improvement and terms like disorder, psychopath, multiple personality, schizophrenic are abused and misused but there are behavioural patterns and characteristics by which people can be clustered. The mistake most people make is to think these clusters are static and disjoint. Your ideas on Psychology are outdated. What Freud believed is nonsense and without experimental feedback he could do little better. Things are better these days, there is cross-talk between areas like Machine Learning, Psychology and neurobiology. Here is a better example of what the future of Psychology will be like: http://videolectures.net/icml09_niv_tnorl/ http://videolectures.net/icml09_niv_tnorl/ Also: http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/news/psychopaths-brains-show-differences-in-structure-and-function/32979 http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/news/psychopaths-brains-...