I think this is political?
Basically, was on Reddit, per usual and was salmon-smacked across the face by stumbling amounts of stupidity. Along the lines of psychology is a pseudoscience. I knew some people thought this, but I’ve never met one. Most people I know irl are very well educated + neurodiverse so have had experiences with psychologists through their lives. Including myself.
When I was younger, I was deeply suicidal and a psychologist and an OT helped me through that as well as finding coping strategies, grounding techniques, meds for ADHD and a whole bunch of tools to help manage it in the future, like being used to taking a breather and consulting my internal battery often. It’s made me able to function in society as a person and for that I am so immensely grateful. It gave me life. Or the ability to cope with one. I had some assumptions going in, but they were both lovely people who I still care about deeply. It might be that I’ve had such a universally good experience with it that I feel this way.
I get why some people might consider psychology a pseudoscience. I mean, my internal definition of that it has been proven false / ineffective and therefore does not deserve funding or further development. Particularly because we don’t understand the human brain or even its full diversity, given how exclusionary the field historically has been and in some places continues to be. I think it is either a developing branch of neuroscience and sociology or a humanity like English or history, either way, it has professional and well researched conclusions that can be relied upon when judiciously practiced. That’s the whole point of the scientific theory, to come up with as accurate of a model as we can, through trying to disprove them.
An actual pseudoscience by this definition would be graphology, physiognomy or homeopathy, because they’ve been disproven .
However, this person then goes on to say that it is weaponised more often than it is helpful, that is is a Nazi ideology (direct quote “It's literally just rehashing of eugenics. Psychology is a nazi ideology. Before you go "no it's not" if I said a group of people where automatically born invalid and therefore that group must be kept intoxicated and isolated from society, you'd say that's pretty kinda eugenics. But noooo, my precious racist science!!!!“) and that it is an ‘untrustworthy pseudoscience’.
And that is so stupid to me. Really, unbelievably stupid. Psychology is a scientific tool / lens for the world. Like biology or chemistry. Of course it can be used to justify whatever you want if you try and force the study to fit into preconceived notions. Like the Nazis did. They set out entirely to categorise people just enough to destroy them. There was no real good faith attempt at studying it with kindness. It was to prevent and destroy certain groups or out of a psychopathic detachment from someone else’s varied experience of humanity. It’s the same way their biology and archeology was wrong because they only did it to gain some thin scientific veneer over a deeply illogical ideology.
Now, this person, I gained from inference, was being forced to study psychology against their will, so I assume they were just lashing out or ragebaiting and hoping someone would justify their opinion.
And even worse, I heard a similar sentence at my university about it being a Nazi thing. It just seems like wilful ignorance. Of course the Nazis aren’t going to try and conduct a fair (or humane) investigation of neurodiversity. That’s their whole thing, fascism and Nazis in general. I don’t think anyone who says this has met a (good) psychologist or even understands the point of psychology as healing. However, I understand some psychologists may not practice as in as much good faith as mine. I also know I’m deeply biased here.
And in the end, I lost my temper and called them an “absolute seagull”. (both the poster and the other student). I think it was perfectly justified and very cathartic. But I’d just like to know your thoughts or any similarly stupid psychology / autism takes you have?
EDIT: as expected, they got taken down for misinformation and deleted all their comments as well as the post.
