Flutterby™! : Psychological Experiments

Up-Front: Yes, this is a dig at the history of psychology as a discipline, but it's also praise that the discipline is learning and changing.

Charlene's doing some study on psychology, taking some classes, a lot of reading, and I mentioned something about how I thought the consensus in modern psychology was that reliving traumatic experiences was generally just reinforcing the negative impacts, and she said she'd like to find more, so I went and dug through a few papers, and...

You know, it's fairly easy to throw digs at medicine, to point out that up into the 1990s, except for trauma care, you were generally better off without medical intervention.

Evidence-based medicine is a relatively new invention, and has brought some amazing changes in understanding...

Well, yeah: A lot of the practices of psychology of the 1980s and 1990s have been, in the twenty-naughts and twenty teens, been found to probably have been actively harmful. I mean, forget the casual harms of the era of Freud and Jung preying on bored Vienna housewives, like seriously reinforcing the shit out of traumatic experiences in awful ways harmful. Sometimes it's amazing how long a discipline can go without someone calling bullshit.

So I posted this to Facebook, and it spawned some good discussion, and then this morning I see this come across my Twitter feed:

The Onion: Report: Majority Of Psychological Experiments Conducted In 1970s Just Crimes