i've been on the patient end, too, don't get me wrong. i've had all the horrible doctors pumping me full of horrible medications at much too young an age and with much too few avenues attempted beforehand. i've been on antidepressants, anti-anxieties, antipsychotics, tranquilizers, stabilizers, all kinds of things that i really never needed. every medication was worse than the last, amplified every problem more than it quelled it, and they collectively turned me into something even my mother couldn't recognize anymore, all before my sixteenth birthday. i certainly don't blame you for rejecting that kind of approach, because i do too, and i very adamantly oppose the overuse of psychopharmacology that is so common now. but i also don't think that my bad experiences discredit psychology in general. my bad experiences are what have prompted me to pursue the science of psychology.
i know that there are a lot of bad doctors, but it is unfair to say that there is no science to the entire field. to judge the whole by one of its parts is unfair. that's really what i'm saying. there are hundreds of thousands of people devoting their minds to understanding the mind, doing it correctly and methodically, studying things and re-studying them, observing things and re-observing them, not working on commission from pharmaceutical companies or trying to experiment on anyone just to see what happens. we can acknowledge that we can never have it as simple as a scientist studying mating patterns of grasshoppers, but that doesn't make it not science. it's an unfair judgment to project over the whole picture, when there is a population within the discipline of psychology working very hard to ensure that we all abide by the same scientific method as anyone else. the problem lies in the fact that so few of those people become psychiatrists because it's so full of unethical pill-pushing and ignorance of the emotional and intellectual human being, and instead stay in research where none of the general population ever experiences them. that's all. i just think there's so much more to it than you think there is.
good luck with the struggles that don't find their ends very easily, and i do hope you continue to see improvement (even if it just takes care of one little step in the process, it's still an improvement). it does take tremendous dedication to go through so much for so long, and you deserve a lot of credit for that.
Re: TREAD SOFTLY FOR YOU TREAD ON MY DREAMS
i know that there are a lot of bad doctors, but it is unfair to say that there is no science to the entire field. to judge the whole by one of its parts is unfair. that's really what i'm saying. there are hundreds of thousands of people devoting their minds to understanding the mind, doing it correctly and methodically, studying things and re-studying them, observing things and re-observing them, not working on commission from pharmaceutical companies or trying to experiment on anyone just to see what happens. we can acknowledge that we can never have it as simple as a scientist studying mating patterns of grasshoppers, but that doesn't make it not science. it's an unfair judgment to project over the whole picture, when there is a population within the discipline of psychology working very hard to ensure that we all abide by the same scientific method as anyone else. the problem lies in the fact that so few of those people become psychiatrists because it's so full of unethical pill-pushing and ignorance of the emotional and intellectual human being, and instead stay in research where none of the general population ever experiences them. that's all. i just think there's so much more to it than you think there is.
good luck with the struggles that don't find their ends very easily, and i do hope you continue to see improvement (even if it just takes care of one little step in the process, it's still an improvement). it does take tremendous dedication to go through so much for so long, and you deserve a lot of credit for that.