Is psychology a religion?

A thought occurred to me this morning when thinking about the American Psychiatric Association's "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5)". Is this book or a Bible? Is there Orthodox psychology? The APA is always changing it, why? I just feel like this is a rock I've never uncovered and looking for input from people that have gone down this road already.

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Shut up you schizophrenic incel

Some of it is, yes. The dogmatic pick and choose what they want to believe. For instance, gender dysphoria was considered a mental illness until recently. They're also susceptible to bullying from identity groups that don't like objective observations. The trans movement always played dirty until they got their way.

So I'm on to something?

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Psychological disorders should be looked at as collections of symptoms and behaviors and not as compartmentalized ailments like a flu or infection. Most psychologists fail to grasp this, tainting the entire field.

You are retarded. Psychology is largely evidence and experiment based while faith is, by definition, not. Religion is an organized system of gudelines regarding morality and how to live one's life. There is no moral element to psych beyond experimental ethics (which are for pussies anyway) and the goal of psych is to understand not instruct.
The DSM changes the same way medicine changes. We learn new things or find out that things we thought we knew were wrong. APA is a bunch of idpol faggots and make stupid decisions but conflating them with the entire field is dumb. Psych is a science, even if only just, and sciences are immune to whatever fake bullshit the kikes try to preach.

Basically yes, but then again all of medicine is.
Psychology based on facts exists in the literature but is extremely, extremely rare. Usually it's "hypothesis -> throw shit at wall -> claim victory without proof" instead of "hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion". For example, there was a funny (because it was retarded) paper that claimed children under X age were not able to tell the difference in the scale of items. First, the child was presented a rideable toy car. The child would go straight to it and play. Next he was presented a model toy car. He looked at the psych as if she was retarded, so she told him to try to enter the car. When the kid did as instructed, she claimed it was proof the kid didn't understand scale.
This is an example of "good psychology" in psychology. Average psychology is far worse, it goes something like: ask 20 men and 42 women if they like ice cream. Don't control for population in any respect. Notice that 1/2 of the men and 3/4 of the women like ice cream. Claim this is proof that women have a more developed tongue. Notice how beside having 0 proper control, there is also 0 connection between the experiment and the conclusion.

Not sure why you guys are talking about psychology by the way, this is psychiatry.
But yes, psychiatry is also a religion of sorts.
Just look at bipolar: only bipolar-1 was considered bipolar until the 90's, and recently, they added cyclothymia (aka "feeling slightly down sometimes while happy some other times" aka being a normal person) as a kind of bipolar, despite widespread disagreement in the scientific spheres.
Doctors don't care of course, they just follow their little flowcharts and that's that.

Psychology and all its variants are more of a very recent Western cultural philosophy than a science. The idea that you need pills all your life for anxiety or depression is exclusively a post-Enlightenment Western society practice. Psychologists are believed wholeheartedly as authority figures similar to shamans.

These are ritualized cultural behaviors.

Yeah you are right. They are different. Still wondering who makes the rules and adjusts things. It's like who gives the power? How do they explain unknowns?

You are intelligent. Do you do work related to psychology? I can tell you know your shit.

It's basically a think tank. As I recall, in the US, each hospital independently choose which policies to go with. They have a body of policy makers to perform those choices, which includes health econometrists (they estimate the cost of a treatment in $ / QALY = quality-adjusted life-years), administrators (whose job is to make the hospital profitable as a business), some "elected" doctors (selected by those administrators), whose job is to enlighten the process based on their clinical experience, and so forth. It wasn't like that before the 80's, where some legal cases resolved that the hospitals were ultimately responsible for patient care, e.g. not the individual doctors. Before that, doctors were the ones making all the decisions, admins only existed to provide the required material and staff.
Ultimately, the think tank-like organizations are an association born from the collaboration of several entities involved in a specific domain and hospital admins just select their work because it is published and they're so-called experts so that's that. They then require all doctors at the hospital to follow the guidelines so as to minimize costs.

I took a pain psychology class during my master's. I'm actually a bioinformatics researcher. I get involved with clinicians of all types as a result, but this isn't my primary area of expertise anyway.

In Canada, instead of each hospital deciding independently, health agencies are the ones that make decisions, with hospitals going together and recommending changes to the health agencies. In this process, researchers submit letters to the health agencies recommending policy modifications using their prior research as justification. A quorum of admins, health econometrists, doctors and scientists review those when making changes to guidelines. This is usually how public healthcare systems work, because ultimately they're the ones bearing the costs, not the hospital per se.

The canadian think tank-like entity that corresponds to the APA is not atomic, for mood disorders it is CANMAT.
occupational therapy, rehabilitation, mental health services and home care is provincially-managed but the rest is federally-managed.

I dont know, but i know gender dysphoria can be found in it.

Thanks Canada bro. When you start letting unvaccinated Americans in I'll be visiting.

>Is this book or a Bible? Is there Orthodox psychology?
If you wanted to ask whether the DSM-5 works like a Bible, then my answer to that is: In many ways, yes.
>The APA is always changing it, why?
Because of political lobbying by interest groups. Getting insurance companies to cover new diagnoses and so on. Essentially, that's what the DSM-5 is good for. A guideline for insurance companies to cover conditions contained in the book and requesting government gibts.
>Still wondering who makes the rules and adjusts things.
Depends on where you live but the decision to cover diagnoses is usually done on the state level by the state parliament/statehouses or whatever institution that is in control of the legislation. Political organizations can either lobby for or against including certain diagnoses. For example, the pharmaceutical industry is known for lobbying in favor of 'mental disorders' that can be medicated with pills sold by the same pharmaceutical companies. So, the same industries can also determine or at least influence the way these disorders are treated.

>or at least influence
Very much determine in practice my dude.

You are conflating bad practices with the field being bad. I don't deny that the vast majority of modern psych studies are all bullshit but that is not a valid criticism of psychology as a field. The amount of absolute faggotry in modern History papers is ridiculous but History as a field of study is still a 'proper' discipline.
The APA is explicitly a psych association. Disorders like those found in the DSM are part of abnormal psych. The difference between psychology and psychiatry is the purpose driving the action. Psychology is about understanding while psychiatry is about correcting or treating.

DSM IV was very good. DSM V was absolutely ass-fucked by pharmaceutical interests and activism, with a closed door process on deliberating on what went into it. On top of that, within the university, the people TEACHING psych are adding leftism on top of it, such as making students take implicit association tests and asked to discuss privilege, or my TA dragging our lecture on sexual disorders to a halt to bring up a trans rights and gender bread person slide, and told us to ignore our textbook on gender dysphoria because it's out of date and "icky".

I took the same psych coursework exactly 10 years earlier (not a psych student, just trying to keep my thumb on the pulse of psych as I get another degree) and they didn't have any fucking worke shit at all, even touching the third rail about the IQ question. Now, they don't even teach about IQ at all

Yes yes yes!!

If I were teaching abnormal psych, and I wish I were on more than qualified, the very first thing I would make students recite every single day of the class and multiple times throughout it is that "all models are wrong but some models are useful"

Currently the way they teach abnormal psych is extremely rigid and they don't really show or explain how the personal lives of human beings and their expectations and cognitive distortions of feet upon each other in various feedback loops to produce what we describe as a psychological illness. Instead we get a very cut and dry memorization and checkbox way of understanding these disorders, which is out of psychology's attempt to be more medical and allegedly scientific, even though in medicine of physiological pathology you either have a disease or you don't -- perfect example being sickle cell. Very few psychological illnesses with the exception of some that are based on structural problems of the brain such as schizophrenia (I also believe that antisocial personality disorder is incorrectly categorized as cluster B personality disorder, on account of the fact that people with aspd have structural differences within their brain visible on a CT scan), and even then despite the structural issues causing schizophrenia the real illness that needs to be treated is the way that the structural issues affect the cognitions of the person sufferings schizophrenia and the distress that it brings their life, not trying to fix the structure of the brain itself as that is not yet possible.

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That's more psychiatry than psychology. Psychiatry beat out psychology for control of the DSM-5. As a med fag myself who is very interested in psychology, seeing a psychiatrist for a mental health issue is next to useless. Psychiatrists have medical degrees and then specialize in applying that medical degree and their understanding of physiology to psychological illnesses. Psychiatrists are useful in a hospital setting for psychiatric emergencies, and helping patients cope with side effects of the many medications they are on in the hospital setting that produce psychological disturbances. What psychiatrists cannot do is help a patient work with a personality disorder -- they only know how to throw pills at things to make a chemical change.

>but that is not a valid criticism of psychology as a field
It is given that this bad practice is state of the art.
>The APA is explicitly a psych association
iatric, not ology. It's literally in the name user, look it up. I mean it's even literally in OP's pic written in full.
>Psychology is about understanding while psychiatry is about correcting or treating.
Not at all. Psychiatry is medicine, psychology is not: it is a social science. The point of psychiatry is to understand in a medical context, the point of psychology is... well truthfully there's no point, it's just throwing shit at walls really. Everytime it's evaluated properly, it is found that there is 0 statistical evidence for psychotherapy (not the same as psychology by the way) as treatment. In theory, psychology is about connecting the conscious and the subconscious: how behavior and conscious thought affects mood and so forth. In practice, it's just making shit up.
The only treatment psychologists are allowed to apply is psychotherapy. Psychiatrists are also allowed to do psychotherapy, and there's a reason they virtually never do.

when that*

>they only know how to throw pills at things to make a chemical change.
Correct, except that's still better than the psychologists' track record.

>The APA is always changing it, why? I just feel like this is a rock I've never uncovered and looking for input from people that have gone down this road already.

It all makes sense when you realize the DSM is literally written by insurance companies and not by Psychiatrists.

pseudoscience, sure