☕ @lilacwriter07 - Tumblr Blog

new year's resolutions

l start doing: learning Spanish, baking (sugar free), starting on the book (drafts are ready) exercise

the big maybe: perhaps trying to see how to open a book store (perhaps the year after, I shall put this on my list still)

stop doing: caring what others think

#new year's resolutions #just doing things to keep myself busy #fun things to do :)

callmeizukunotdeku

sometimes i feel like i don't have the right to critique the field of psychology because i am not an expert in it but every time i look into the field to try and resolve this i nope out so fast because it just gets worse

callmeizukunotdeku

@lilacwriter07 trying to keep it short but it's still too long for tumblr's replies so i'm moving to reblogs

psych as a field has more credence than other humanities because of "science"; freud and the other psychologists of the time (and our time because this is bullshittttt) were pretty much philosophising about human nature and how we be thinkin shit and how all that works and then we organised formal studies to figure out How True This All Was, but the philosophy was made on biased premises, so were the studies, so the results of the findings tend to be a lot less accurate than we'd like to think

i'm sure there's some accurate early psychology (i'm not actually sure, more optimistic than anything) (also with the phrase "early psychology" i am referring to the late 1800s) but i can't think of an example off the top of my head; what i do know of early psychological theories has been disproven and what i know of early psychological tests have been unethical

i don't know anyone in the field of psychology who'd look back at the early days of the field and argue they were doing good and ethical things back then, but i do know a lot of people (most people, as we tend to trust Science as an institution without questioning a lot of internal biases) (the people who do this the most do tend to be experts in their field) (disclaimer that i'm pro-science in a sense that is beyond this post and just think the vast majority of psychology is rotten) who look onto modern science and think it's good and ethical now because we have things like ethics review boards for experiments before they can even be tested, whatever--a lot of bad science still gets done with harmful intentions; the part i know the most about is trans healthcare (i'm incredibly tempted to look into other aspects of this but have not (yet) for the sake of my own sanity)

abstract example:

the DSM is the tool with which people are diagnosed with psychological whatevers in order to procure treatment; when it comes to not feeling at home in your body, there are two things you could be diagnosed with: body dysmorphic disorder or body dysphoric disorder

dysmorphia is when you don't feel at home in your body

dysphoria is when you don't feel at home in your body and you're trans

i don't think these should be separate things and that we'd progress a lot of thinking about trans people if we didn't treat their healthcare as fundamentally different than the healthcare of cis people and that separating these disorders contributes to the alienation of trans people

concrete example:

the chair of gender studies in the DSM-5-TR, the most updated version of the DSM is transphobic. his name is kenneth zucker. his therapy focuses on making trans kids identify with the sex their doctors assigned them with at birth and his work promotes the idea that trans kids will become cis given time (formally known as desistance). he was the head psychologist at a child, youth, and family gender identity clinic at CAMH in toronto for 35 years, up until his clinic was shut down because he was engaging in conversion practices, and i'll say it again: he is the chair of gender studies in the most recent version of the DSM

he's helped other transphobes get their theories in the DSM and stopped reformed transphobes from retracting papers they realised were false and he is considered a leading scientist in the field and public enemy number one for trans people and he defines the criteria that determine whether or not trans people are allowed healthcare

this is the aspect of psychology i know the most about, though considering how blatantly a transphobe is allowed to head gender research, i can't help but believe this same thing is happening in other aspects of the field as well

so yeah, i think psychology is a rotten field, and sometimes i feel like because i'm so biased against psychology, i shouldn't speak on it, but most of the time, i see the shit people can get away with in the open and decide that we could really use more dissenting voices here