Psychology Has Lost Its Credibility

Should we be worried about the power psychology professions have in our everyday lives and the direction of the field?

In researching “Trusting the ‘Experts’ is Risky Business,” I came upon the news of an Indiana family who lost custody of their transgender teen even when there was no finding of abuse. The U.S. Supreme Court let the judgment of the lower court stand, a judgment that calls into question advising trends in psychotherapy.

In this case, by order of the courts, the parents were both forced into therapy and prohibited from discussing gender identity with their child outside of the therapy setting. Meanwhile, the child complained of feeling unsafe with his parents. Again, the court stipulates that there was no finding of neglect or abuse.

In sum, the parents lost their First Amendment Rights—in their own home— and, ultimately, their child based on recommendations and information from psychology and the psychotherapy community.

Their case caught my attention because the parents objected to their child’s transgender identity, a poorly defined condition where current recommendations call for treatment with aggressive drugs that can cause sterility and surgeries, including castrations and breast removal.

Children, including teens, don’t understand the ramifications of these interventions and cannot provide informed consent. Caring parents and psychology professionals should be questioning this.

Yet the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Psychiatric Association, The American Academy of Childhood and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and the American Counseling Association have all taken a stance of extreme support of medical gender-affirming care, even as the WPATH files and the Cass Review revealed these practices are based on poorly researched pseudoscience amounting to experiments on children and vulnerable adults.

The willful oversight of these findings is an alarming indicator of the current direction of the psychology-based professions.

It’s also the tip of the iceberg.

Not only do you have the denial of reality in matters of biological sex, but in the science sector, there have been research and publication abuses, and for two decades now, a replication crisis has undermined much of the field’s scientific integrity.

While p-hacking and other poor research techniques account for some of the replication crisis, different aspects of the research issues come from a willful denial of all reality.

In a sneak peek of the 2024 revision of Research and Evaluation in Counseling, Bradley Erford spends 20 pages questioning the nature of truth, the rejection of objective reality, multiple realities, and critical theories.

Under critical theories, it reads:

research is viewed as a political endeavor that should facilitate social action to benefit the powerless in society. Further, it accuses the research process from other paradigms of silencing less powerful groups in society.

You don’t see any rebuke for this blatant perversion of science. Quite the contrary. He remarks,

One can also easily see that diverse theoretical variations are likely to emerge from postpositivist, constructivist, and critical theory approaches, leading to rich discussions and attempts to converge and differentiate emerging theoretical propositions.

That’s not all. In a clear ideological overreach and ethical breach, some disciplines, like counseling, have insisted that practitioners take on, uphold, and promote multiculturalism values for decades. The APA has a new strategic plan to use psychology to solve societal issues.

It is hard to overstate the precariousness of this house of cards in terms of credibility.

Yet, the machinations of modern life proceed like the Titanic at full throttle. The law looks to these practitioners and this science when making judgments and drafting policy, like allowing kids to hide major life changes from parents or get gender-affirming care without parental consent.

The Biden administration has pushed to remove all age limits for trans surgery, and in the fall, the Supreme Court will take on Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors law. The decisions they come to by necessity will draw from this well of psychological information.

In 2019, the AACAP made a statement with the intent of stopping states such as Tennessee from passing laws banning medical interventions for transgender children. In the title, they attempt to legitimize their position by claiming these laws were ‘efforts to ban Evidence-Based care.’

One must wonder what they mean when they call something “evidence-based.”

Image by Andrii Zastrozhnov — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 363495456