Guardian has a good article about how many psychological "studies" can't be replicated - especially in social psychology where political forces have taken charge.
Add these study problems to the collapse of "talk therapy" and the rise of over-medication (over 25% of US women 40 yrs old and older are on meds). There is currently a big push for "brain scans" because its hoped they will inject science back into he field (and offer tests that can be billed) but these scans were being ridiculed 10 years ago because they often confuse symptoms with causes.
I've said it a long time - psychology as a whole has become fraudulent because it doesn't understand causes - but wants people to assume it does. Practitioners often make people worse (many not realising it).
Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results
"A major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science. An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original findings...John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University, said the study was impressive and that its results had been eagerly awaited by the scientific community. “Sadly, the picture it paints - a 64% failure rate even among papers published in the best journals in the field - is not very nice about the current status of psychological science in general, and for fields like social psychology it is just devastating,” he said.
That's true enough and a lot of people haven't ever accepted psychology as a science. That hasn't stopped a lot more people from pretending though - especially as pharmaceutical companies have massaged doctors into becoming agents for what I think of as "ghost psychology" where millions of people think "being sad" for a couple weeks could mean they have a "chemical imbalance" that needs medication to prevent suicide.
That's how drug companies got government to allow them into schools where they could screen "at risk" children by asking a few questions like "Are you unhappy at school?" and "Have you been sad for more than two weeks?". A few "yes" answers to those questions could get a kid medicated. A parental release form allowing a kid to participate in program was sent to a kids home and considered affirmatively "signed" if it was never sent back. This went on in over 500 school districts.
The program was touted as an "Evidence Based Practice" or EBP. Such practices could include "Promising Practices" - those that "experts believe are likely to rise to the level of evidenced-based when scientific studies are completed."
That's one way 10% of a population ends up on meds under the guise of "evidence based" suicide prevention (a criminally overused excuse imo).
Of course the same political or market driven ghost science turns up in other areas. The polar bear hysteria back in 2004 was caused when four dead polar bears were found after a huge arctic storm. "Researchers" said ten bears were spotted just before the storm and the four dead ones after the storm must mean 40% of bears died. That was called "fingerprints of evidence" that could be substituted for actual evidence
That is really disturbing to read, and does somewhat fit with things I have heard about the use of psychiatric medication in the US.
To my knowledge, we do not have those issues in Europe, though no doubt we have plenty of related issues.
Yes I know the antidepressant problem was/is worse here. The "TeenScreen" program was shut down in 2012. It was spawned at Columbia University. Marketers of all kinds know how to use academics - who often end-up working for the industries seeking the "research". The bureaucrats charged with overseeing the regulations end-up working for industries or the universities and round and round.
The new push now is to treat kids as young as 5 or 7 with hormones so they can "decide" want gender they want to be. This is suggested to avoid the risk of suicide (very high according to "research" conducted by groups political in nature)
The hormones of which you speak are actually very safe, just hormone blockers. They delay the onset of puberty and their effects are 100% reversible. They are not given to children simply for the fun of it - much consideration is taken and they are given in cases where the child struggles with their gender identity. They provide these children with more time to learn about and understand their identities, including the implications of gender reassignment or even simply living as a gender different to the one to which you were assigned at birth. Children who take these hormones can go on to live unencumbered by secondary sex characteristics which cause them dysphoria and have much easier transitions. It is a decision certainly not taken lightly but can help avoid a lot of upset and tragedy.
I find your post frankly quite inflammatory. To suggest, by putting "decide" in quotation marks as you did, that one can simply pick and choose one's gender at will is extremely offensive. I also think it's narrow-minded to dismiss the research as being politically-driven. Suicide in transgender youth is staggeringly high, with 50% in the USA having attempted suicide at least once by the time they're 20. Regardless of your political affiliations, I believe that you can appreciate that that statistic is far too high.
Forget your perfect offering
There's a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen
Yeah, to clarify, in my post when I say 'children' I'm referring to older kids. Like Irene, I find the idea that they're given to children as young as 5 extremely unlikely or in very special circumstances where the child has a surprisingly developed understanding of gender.
Forget your perfect offering
There's a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen
Erm, I'd be extremely surprised if hormones are given to children for transgender issues.
They started pushing this in US a few years ago. A guy named Dr Spack has been made into equivalent Jonas Salk by media:
"Adapting protocols developed by doctors in the Netherlands — the "Dutch masters," he calls them — Spack was one of the first doctors in the United States, certainly the first based at a major urban academic children's hospital, to try to tackle this problem, treating kids as young as nine with hormone blockers to delay puberty.
Today, clinics for transgender kids in British Columbia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Hartford, Providence, and Washington, DC, have either been created or expanded. And in almost all of these places is a doctor that Spack has trained, mentored, or guided.
"As centers like Norm Spack's are starting up in a number of places, a lot more pediatricians and a lot more child psychiatrists will be educated about this issue and will be able to refer children," says Laura Erickson-Schroth, a psychiatry resident at NYU and a former student of Spack's who is helping to set up a clinic like GeMS in New York"
Still - there is a huge difference between a five year old and a nine year old.
Oh Spack has even "treated" 4 yr olds
Spack's "report details a fourfold increase in patients at the Boston hospital. His Gender Management Service clinic, which opened at the hospital in 2007, averages about 19 patients each year, compared with about four per year treated for gender issues at the hospital in the late 1990s.
The report details 97 girls and boys treated between 1998 and 2010; the youngest was 4 years old."
My transgender sibling was diagnosed with gender identity disorder at the age of 4. It isn't particularly shocking for children that young to suffer from gender dysphoria that never goes away. Seems unnecessary to administer hormones to a child that young regardless.
Psychology is interesting, but I have never completely trusted it as a science. It's important not to go to one extreme or the other in terms of how much we trust the field of psychology. I think knowledgeable psychologists would have to agree to that as well. Theories change and practices are proven to be ineffective. Pills are easier but that isn't just in this area. Look at some physical ailments that could be treated with the right diet and exercise for some people, but are instead treated with medication. I'm not judging anyone for choosing medication over what could amount to a life time of hard core life style changes, and I know in some cases diet and exercise really are not enough. I just know it isn't those of us on the medications who profit from it in the end. Totally different topic, I suppose.
I don't know if psychology has ever really been a science. The human mind is not like the rest of the body, which generally works alright until it has a problem, at which point it needs treatment. The human mind does not work like this, it is a thing that is capable of processing all of the information your senses send it every single waking moment, it also co-ordinates highly complex motor movements and creates the illusion of consciousness that your entire existence depends on.
Clearly the mind is far more complex than a heart or a liver, which *can* be understood by medical science. Despite the pretence of knowledge that psychology brings, it has still failed to accurately describe the processes of the mind in a way that withstands empirical testing. I'm glad to see that people are finally waking up to this.
Sorry just going to jump in here on the issue of treating transgender children, as said before, young children are not treated with hormone replacement therapy until they are 16 with parents permission or 18 without in the UK (i'm not sure on US policies but I am pretty sure they are similar) however, children can be prescribed hormone blockers to delay their puberty, which is an integral part of gender reassignment, as has also been stated, the effects of hormone blockers are completely reversible, while i'm shocked to see that a child as young as 4 was prescribed these, we don't know if there were underlying reasons that made them prescribe them at such a young age. As for 8-9 year old children, especially those assigned female at birth, many of these children could already be hitting puberty, it's well known that children are hitting puberty at young ages now, I myself began to develop breast tissue age 8 or 9, and had my first period age 10.
Being transgender can cause a lot of distress, developing features that you feel should not be there is horrible, and can cause many teenagers to develop mental health issues and unfortunately, in some cases, take their own lives. Gender specialists are an important resource and children with gender dysphoria should be taken seriously, personally i'd rather have a couple of kids changing their mind and hitting puberty later than they should have, rather than feeling trapped in the wrong body and possibly taking drastic measures, often endangering their lives whether intended or not.
