My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.
Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny.
It's a soft science, it is what it is.
now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"
The scientific process is rarely perfect and levels of average levels of rigour vary between disciplines.
However, there are quite significantly varying levels of quality and rigour in psychological studies. Your criticism seems framed to ignore this and groups the charlatans in with the actuap scientists.
I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be.
Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.
We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.
Which makes these books all the more dangerous because the authors are overly confident about their conclusions and hence the attraction (which leads to book sales). When the unexplainable suddenly becomes explainable, the money rolls in.
The problem is that too many people believe you can do research on one group of people, and generalize that universally to all humans, when in fact, the variation in every population of humans is wide enough that you can't say for certain that a given treatment will work for a given set of symptoms—not because the treatments are bad, but because there are differences both in the causes of the same symptoms, and in the workings of the body & brain, between different people.
This doesn't make psychology/psychiatry/psychopharmacology a "soft science"; it just makes it a science that is still in its infancy. Once we have a better understanding of both the various underlying neurological/physical (and, for some, even gastrointestinal, given recent research showing that gut microbiota can affect the mood and brain) causes of various psychological symptoms, and the physical and neurological variations between people, it will be much easier to see, for instance, "ah, we shouldn't use Lorazepam for this patient, because their anxiety is caused by this which is much better treated by CBT and CBD, rather than that which Lorazepam directly addresses".
It's the equivalent of basing nutrition science on a Pew poll where people self-report their favorite food.
Sure, it's useful to know people's general preferences sometimes, but for science that data is junk.
It's saying "it's bad research, misquoting experts and references, drawing sloppy conclusions aimed at a lay audience".
You can do psychology and psychiatry better than that, even if acknowledging they are not hard science.
There's no excuse for being sloppy or outright fraudulent.
However, if you were unlucky enough to suffer with a completely debilitating mental illness, and all you have to treat it are a series of therapies that appear to work for some people, would you not try them?
Trauma therapies like EMDR and CBT can save or transform your life. Maybe they work no better than crystal healing or prayers for some people, but if your life was derailed I bet you would try anything...
Also, falsifiability is broadly rejected as solution to the demarcation problem.
I honestly think a lack of grounding in philosophy of science leads people to draw the line between science and pseudo-science based on nothing but vibes. For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.
Both of those have huge bullshit issues, that is the problem with such sciences you have to pick your poison and that guy just picked another than you prefer. Big things like stereotype threat turned out to just be bullshit, but you still see people believing in it since they want to believe in the idea rather than whats actually real.
Edit: Also almost everyone resorts to evolutionary psychology arguments when it suits them, such as why so many eats themselves fat etc.
Would I have to give up on my scepticism to do so? Why?
If I was in distress, and if there was no well-proven treatment available, I'd probably have a go provided the therapy wasn't actually a scam or actively harmful. I'd probably even attempt to engage with it honestly and openly.
But I'd temper my expectations based on the lack of reproducable evidence.
I mean people would even try those with enough distress. And to be fair a lot of surprising innovation comes from people trying those! But of course mostly they're a scam or actively harmful.
Dave Asprey made the claim according to the article not the author of the book. The only evidence I see in the article linking the claim to the book is at the end:
> Where then could Dave have gotten this idea that he has trauma from an experience he couldn’t possibly remember? Probably Bessel van der Kolk.
Which is pretty much nothing.
The article does not go into why I should care what Dave Asprey thinks or does not think on trauma. For all I know it is a cherry picked example of a bad opinion disconnected from the book and typical scientific opinion.