Positive Psychology: The Great Scam

Seated behind a couch, Psychologists see themselves as healers of the mind,

but the truth is otherwise.

Theodore Dalrymple, the eminent psychiatrist and author whose many books include titles such as Admiral Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality, believes that most of what psychologists write is sheer nonsense.

He gives examples of this in his many lectures. But above all he says that psychology treats us as though we were objects rather than subjects thereby distancing ourselves from responsibility for our actions.

Thus psychologists preach that if we have a mental disorder of some kind, we are no longer responsible for our actions. If those actions are unacceptable, they then make up the mental disorder to fit that behaviour.

This may involve crimes and I will present a very disturbing example of how this plays out in criminal cases below.

The idea that we are objects who cannot take responsibility for our actions lies at the heart of the problem with modern psychologists and their treatment of us and means we must never be confronted with the truth. We must be validated and supported. This is the principle behind Positive Psychology, and it begins in childhood where children must never be told anything negative.

Besides Dalrymple, other psychiatrists have written on this subject, most notably Alston Unwin in his book (co-authored by Murray Walters} Seeing things as they really are: Self Deception and Human Misery.   

Like Dalrymple, these authors emphasize the fact that because psychologists, as a result of poor training and limited experience with the mentally ill, tend to believe that once a patient has a diagnosis, he loses his self-agency or “free will” if you prefer and is an object at the mercy of his diagnosis.

This problem with psychologists is one of the main reasons why education authorities have lost control of classroom behaviour in our schools. Thus, if children disrupt classes and don’t control their behaviour, they must have a mental diagnosis of some kind, usually Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity or Anxiety and, unless these disorders are “treated”, the behaviour will not improve.  Psychologists are not trained to make these diagnoses. They make them, nonetheless, as though they are members of the medical profession.

The idea that psychologists want to be considered doctors, in part, stems from Sigmund Freud the inventor of the now discredited school of psychology, Psychoanalysis. Freud, although a medical doctor was a neurologist not a psychiatrist, so he entered the field of psychology in order to make a living.

There is no scientific basis for Psychoanalysis. It is a scam just like Theranos, the company founded by the now, jailed Elizabeth Holmes, which claimed it could make instant diagnoses using a single blood test, or Bitcoin, the idea that you can create a currency from thin air.

Like these other scams, Psychoanalysis enthralled millions of people. As Dalrymple points out, scams like this depend on the gullibility of the victims and the fact that the treatment cannot be scientifically validated. Freud’s” treatment” consisted of sitting for many hours on a couch freely associating one word with another until the patient reached back into his disturbed childhood and reconstructed it. Dalrymple talks about one man who spent 4,000 hours sitting on the analyst’s couch.

Psychologists are at pains to elevate their discipline to the status of science because they believe that this will lend them credibility.  They want to be like medical doctors, to diagnose illness and prescribe medication. Their lobby groups agitate for this status. In almost every Western country the bodies that represent them call for approval for their members to prescribe. This call is extending to being able to prescribe for children.

They want the community to imagine them as psychoanalysts, the ones with medical degrees, sitting behind the analyst’s couch taking notes. Very few psychologists understand what it is to have a medical degree. After only three years of an undergraduate degree and a year of supervision, they can hang up their practicing shingle.

The idea that they believe that they can be like doctors is illustrated by the notion that psychologists think that the pen-and-paper psychological tests they give to patients, which they refer to as “standardized testing instruments’, are like the medical tests that doctors perform on their patients, x-rays, blood tests and the like.

They believe that, just as doctors can make diagnoses with pathology samples, they can make diagnoses with these psychology tests.

For example, they believe that you can diagnose Schizophrenia or Attention Deficit Disorder by giving people psychological tests. The utter absurdity of this is illustrated by the fact that for the last 150 years, no medical specialist from any distinguished University or research institute has ever been able to determine either precisely the cause of these conditions or the areas of the brain affected nor settle upon a universally accepted means of diagnosing them.

In other words, there are no medical tests that diagnose Attention Deficit or Schizophrenia so, enter the psychologists who claim that by using a pen and paper test they can reliably confirm the presence of these disorders.

The magical word they use for these tests is “standardized” This means that the test validity has been proven by giving these tests to hundreds of people who allegedly suffer from these disorders. This is the certification of circularity. I give a test to 100 shepherds about sheep and when they all pass, I can say thereafter that everyone I give the test to who passes it, is a shepherd.

And how do they know the people they are testing have these Mental diagnoses? They look up a large manual of diagnostic categories called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Ed. This catalog is simply a list of mental disorders and attached to each is a list of symptoms and or behaviours that indicate when a possible condition is present.

The relatively small number of psychiatrists who have reached an agreement about these lists of symptoms and behaviours do not represent the vast bulk of professionals working in Mental Health research.

Furthermore, Professor Allen, the psychiatrist who oversaw the release of the 4th Edition of this manual, makes it clear that psychologists have no understanding of what the Manual is for. It is not meant to be a method of diagnosing mental disorders like ticking off a Chinese restaurant menu; it is simply a research tool to assist mental health experts in undertaking research to an agreed formula.

Professor Allen has pointed out that the rigid use of the manual, especially its most flawed 5th Edition, is creating a problem with over-diagnosis and over-treatment of mental disorders especially because the lists of symptoms and behaviours are so broad and over-inclusive that anyone or indeed everyone can be diagnosed with a mental illness.

Everyone psychologists see, or test has a mental disorder. They fail to understand that this is the reverse of how medical practitioners work because most of the people we see do not have a disorder, mental, medical or otherwise and our task is to reassure and to prevent suffering.

The over-diagnosis of mental disorders by spurious testing is a serious problem for the National Disability Insurance Scheme where a massive increase in patients, especially children claiming to have these diagnoses, threatens the entire financial viability of the health scheme thereby depriving those needing genuine medical care of treatment.

Spurious claims to be able to diagnose and the idea that people who have these “diagnoses” lose their free will is most disturbing when psychologists do reports for court supporting an accused.

One of the worst examples of this was the terrible rape and murder of a teacher in Neerander New South Wales the week before her wedding. During the murder trial, a psychologist pointed out that the killer had been diagnosed in youth with Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity and she believed that this single fact, if it really were true and it was dubious, somehow distanced the killer from his terrible crime.

I have never encountered a psychologist who sent back a letter either to me or my colleagues telling us that there was nothing wrong with the patient and the psychologist had no need to see them.  

Patients are never not diagnosed and never not treated. One would have to be very suspicious of any psychological test that never found the person who completed it completely healthy.

Part of this scam of diagnosing everything is the use of language. Take the term “mindfulness.” What does this mean? Some of the terms have a scientific flavor, though are equally meaningless such as “neurodiversity.”

These are good popular examples of the language that psychologists use to give them the aura of medical or scientific respectability. But, in reality, those words are modern neologisms and are just a couple of samples of the language of pseudoscience going back with countless examples to Sigmund Freud.

Once a patient begins treatment with a psychologist the aim, from the point of view of the latter, is to keep the treatment going indefinitely because the treatment does not cure the patient it keeps the patient locked in a dependent relationship and is a regular form of income for the therapist.

Dr. Unwin in his book notes this and makes the point that psychologists lack the ability to end their treatment which tends to just go on and on. He notes that as time goes by the treatment becomes more unstructured and sessions deteriorate into chat sessions or worse, sessions in which the psychologist chats about his or her own life and family as though how he or she runs their life should become a blueprint for the patient to follow.

Psychologists did not always have their sessions subsidized by the government and initially, the medical profession opposed the idea because there was a fear that dependency would develop. If that happened each psychologist would end up with a limited pool of patients and close their books.

This was exactly the situation historically with the Freudian psychoanalysts, some of whom spent their whole careers making a living from a pool of twenty of thirty patients. The same is now happening with psychologists lobbying heavily to have the number of approved sessions multiplied and the subsidy they are paid for each session increased even though the number of patients they see remains limited.

When the COVID crisis occurred, psychologists lobbied the government to increase the number of subsidized yearly sessions claiming they were preventing suicide, at least that was their argument. In fact, the suicide rate did not increase substantially nor is there any evidence this had anything to do with psychologists or their treatment. In any case, the number of approved sessions per year was doubled from ten to twenty.

There is no scientific evidence that Psychologists can predict suicide nor that anything they do prevents it.

It is not clear how, if a psychologist did not cure his patient in ten sessions, he would succeed with twenty. At the end of the COVID crisis, the government cut the number of subsided sessions back to ten again, and, as one would expect, psychologists protested vehemently claiming that the “crisis was not over” though the “crisis” meant a reduction of their income.

Once psychologists could bill Medicare for their treatment, I noted what Unwin observed. Those who want to continue the therapy now have a paid “friend”, the psychologist, someone whom they can talk to outside their family. So exactly what is this “therapy” and what are these sessions of treatment all about? Herein lies the core problem.

The first few sessions consist of “getting to know the patient” and perhaps one or two sessions of what is called “Cognitive Behaviour Therapy” which consists of reframing negative thoughts and outlook into positive thoughts and optimism.

Soon, as the sessions continue, this changes and the sessions become informal friendly chats. There is never any suggestion of confronting bad personal traits and habits or gaining insight into why the patient might be failing in life and upsetting everyone around them. On the contrary, the sessions focus on positive self-regard and affirmation. “Don’t think negatively about yourself’, “Don’t run yourself down”, “You’re a great person and you deserve love” and with this, the whole point of the therapy is lost.

It is not about change, it is about confirming in the eyes of the patient that whatever the world might think, they are great.

This is the basis of positive psychology. It is the pathway to narcissism and its mantra is: love yourself. Through this, the psychologist traps the patient into a relationship that continues indefinitely. The patient tells themselves that there is an intelligent person I can confide in who understands me and who above all, realizes that I am worthwhile and do not need to change.

It should be added that the therapist goes one step further, violating all the tenets of most schools of psychology even psychoanalysis; they begin to confide in the patient. They fuse the bond by talking about their children and their children’s problems, or why they divorced, or how they were sexually abused and dealt with it.  

These psychologists justify this by saying that they are merely giving the patient an example of what they have endured and how to cope with it as though the therapist’s life is a shiny beacon on the hill the patient should aim for or emulate. Though psychologists might desire to emulate the medical profession, total disclosure of one’s personal life is one area where they part company from doctors.

I leave the worst concern till last, the management and treatment of children. For the crisis that school behaviour and juvenile offending have become, we need to look no further than psychologists. We know that the State Educational authorities tasked with fixing a broken education system are the very people who broke it in the first place by infusing the education system with Positive Psychology.

Who do they rely on to advise them about student management in the schools? Psychologists. Here are examples of how it works. In primary school, if a student is being aggressive or doing something wrong you don’t correct him and explain why It’s unacceptable, you “distract” him and divert his attention to something else. Above all, you must never say anything negative to children. You must never use the words, bad, naughty, or fail. You must always be positive.

In older grades, again, you must not use negative language under any circumstances. Unlike in adult life, a student, even one about to graduate, no matter how badly spoken or behaved, is always given an excuse. They were tired. They were sick. They have ADHD.

As Dalrymple says no child is given agency for his or her behaviour. They are objects pushed about by merciless forces that control the bad things they do. Psychologists using positive psychology believe that every negative thing we say to children must be balanced by a greater number of positive things. “You came to school without your necktie, but your hair is neat, your shirt is ironed. I like your socks. Good on you.”

Furthermore, a strange thing, a strange way of speaking has emerged in schools, thanks to psychologists. Affirmations are offered where corrections are needed. Every note of criticism is met with a positive statement, hyperbolic and unrelated. This is repeated like a mantra after every constructive criticism. Where there is an intention to educate a child, it is received as though it is entirely negative, resulting in the repetition of a positive affirmation until it acquires a mystical or religious quality like warding off a curse.

It is to psychologists and positive psychology that we owe the chaos of the modern classroom.

Modern psychologists have become the answer to every major problem in society and at every major crisis or catastrophe including school behaviour, youth crime, natural catastrophes, and pandemics, psychologists are thrown at it. But nobody asks if they do any good or if they really know what they are doing.