> You're still creating a strawman version of psychology which ignores that psychologists and psychiatrists regularly develop studies that disprove or weaken ea

> You're still creating a strawman version of psychology which ignores that psychologists and psychiatrists regularly develop studies that disprove or weaken earlier theories ... Psychology isn't melting down because of what's present, it's melting down because of what's absent -- reliable, unifying, testable, falsifiable principles. Each scientific field is defined by those principles that stand the test of time and evidence. Psychology doesn't have any of those. It's a movable feast that can't stop moving. > And you're still overgeneralising bad cases onto a whole field. No, actually, Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, is doing that. His predecessor at the NIMH, Steve Hyman, is doing that. Allen Frances, editor of DSM-IV, is doing that. If what I say relied on strawman arguments, or if I were the only person saying them, I'm sure these very intelligent people, these leaders in the field, would refuse to say the same things and take the actions they've taken. It's not every day that you see a field collapsing from the top down. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-scientific-backlash-against-the-dsm.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s... Quote: "The reification of the D.S.M. might not have been more than a philosophical problem, were it not for the fact that, at least in Hyman and Insel’s view, it was beginning to hamstring research. And, indeed, the D.S.M. has frustrated scientists, who note that the most common symptoms of mental disorder—sadness and worry, for instance, or delusions and hallucinations—appear as criteria for many different diagnoses; that many patients can be diagnosed with more than one disorder; and that the few solid findings about mental illness that have emerged from genetic and neuroscience studies indicate that the D.S.M’s categories simply don’t correspond to biological reality." Wow. Look at all those straw men.