Those people who talk nature vs. nurture without having a scientific understanding of what they're talking about are to psychology as anti-evolutionists are to biological engineering.
Grain of salt? Try a bucket (says the person currently writing a psychology thesis).
Intelligence is a terribly loaded term. Performance on IQ tests? That is almost entirely nurture - try being given a few pieces of paper in a language you've never encountered. Or imagine being from a culture without any written language at all. Of course you'd fail horribly. A favourite lecturer of mine years ago said that an IQ test is really only a test of culture. I'm inclined to agree of that.
Intelligence though... Well. That's another bucket of salt (or your flavour enhancer of choice). From what I recall of the research, the upper bounds and lower bounds are limited by nature. The rest is up to nurture. Of course, part of that could be things like not hitting your children on the head with a hammer, and helping them to develop healthy attitudes regarding study, making sure you don't lock them in a cupboard and make sure that they get to interact with other people and learn to read and write - at least if you want them to score well on in IQ test.
The saddest thing about knowing plenty about psychology is that I might have an IQ of 144, but I know that it doesn't actually mean anything much, other than me having a solid understanding of the culture that my IQ test was from. It probably also correlates highly with being a perfectionist and learning stuff well in school, which in turn generally correlates highly with depression, anxiety, OCD and a pile of other disorders. Honestly, does it mean I'd be a happier person? A better person? Hell no. The happiest people I have ever seen had Downs Syndrome and extremely low IQs. The best people I've encountered would have had average IQs at best.
You know what I love about psychology? We can leave the political correctness bullshit behind us and actually talk about what IS the case.
It's glorious. I love it when there are piles of armchair psychologists saying something so hard as though if they believe it enough it'll be true... and then cite properly conducted research that says the exact opposite. Of course, then they tend to turn around and tell you that psychology isn't a science and doesn't teach us anything.
I've done my undergrad in psych and am now working on a thesis. While intelligence isn't my area of research, it is something that I've had drilled into me over the years. The thresholds are entirely nature - inasmuch as 'nature' = inborn in some way, which may be genetic but also other factors such as foetal alcohol exposure. How people do between the upper and lower bounds is a mixture. For example, those twin studies... I haven't read them, but I strongly suspect that the children raised in other families were raised in a similar (ie, probably white) cultural environment. What I'd really like to see is what happens when one twin is raised in an environment from a different culture... given that an IQ test has a lot to do with testing culture. This is why people can't use lower test scores from certain other cultures as support Nazi ideals... Maybe it's been done already, do you know?
*nods* I think its interesting that you mention the length of time it takes to adjust - the amount of time you've mentioned is similar to the amount of time seen in research when uncoupling of the sleep/wake and body temperature cycles happen.
I have had a read of Steve Pavlina's log and found it quite interesting, I haven't read everything thats there yet, but I'm sure I'll get around to it. If I thought I'd be able to find participants for a long-term study on polyphasic sleep, I'd do it in an instant. The high drop-out rate is pretty important though - is it just a matter of 'disclipline' or are there physiological differences between you and people who have dropped out?
I also find your mentioning of REM sleep to be interesting. I honestly don't think that you'd drop into REM sleep straight away - and REM sleep isn't the only sleep in which you dream. I would think it much more likely that you'd go into stage 4 sleep immediaely and then progress from that through to REM sleep. Why has no one who has done this gone to a sleep lab and gotten EEGs of what happens during their nap times?! Don't mind me, I just love evidence and have spent way too long studying sleep...
I have had a read of your follow-up article and from what you said yourself, it generally doesn't work for people. of the fifteen or so people who ended up trying this, about 12 of them dropped out within the first month of starting. High drop-out rates like that have a tendency to signal either ineffectiveness or ridiculously bad side effects. Did you take any baseline measures of how you felt before you began and then afterwards without having access to how you said you felt at the start? Were you ever hooked up to an EEG and/or an EOG to see if you were having microsleeps? I'd love to see this tried in a decent scientific context, but somehow I can't see people participating. I'm half tempted to attempt the schedule myself and get my psychophysiology lecturer to do some baseline tests on me and then some at various times during the attempt. I can't really see myself doing it, given that I have classes that go for 5-6 hours. I'd be completely screwed if I fell asleep in them.
As well as all this, your own experiences with light and dark and falling asleep immediately really fly in the face of current sleep research that has looked at different length sleep/wake cycles. What is it about your one that 'works' when many, many other ones haven't?
Finally, if you ever do get around to trying the schedule again, I'd love to hear from you as would quite a few sleep researchers I would think.
Any decent study will control for the genetic makeup.
Besides this, I don't know about universities in the USA, but at mine here in Australia, we have a very diverse mix of ethnicities - any given sample is likely to include quite a variety including white, Australian Indigenous, African, Chinese, Malay and others.
Not only this, I doubt that the genetic variance in sleeping habits would be large enough to cause a significant difference in results. That having been said, it would be interesting to examine in detail. There is of course always room for individual differences.
There is no "wasted minutes", only ever growing debt and madness which payoff latter by sending you instantly to sleep.
Not so. Even in extended trials of people whose sleep/wake cycle became completely decoupled from their body temperature rhythm and day/night cycle still showed significant differences in how long it took to get to sleep at different times of the day. It's even been theorized that there are 'wake maintenance' zones.
indeed, some people naturally have no REM at all. on the other hand, it does signify a very deep state of slumber. if you can get to rem directly, you're skipping many of "entering sleep" stages most people go through. REM sleep does NOT signify a very 'deep' state of slumber. It is characterized by rapid eye movement - EEGs also show a lot of activity, similar to when people are awake with their eyes open. It also tends to take place closer to stage one sleep (lightest) than stage four (heaviest). People are generally more easy to wake up during REM than during stage 4, so your statement that REM signifies a deep state of slumber is absolutely untrue.
I suspect that it would be likely that people who deprive themselves of sleep in this way would tend to go to stage 4 sleep more quickly and be REM deprived, based on what I've seen of sleep deprivation research. People don't dream solely during REM sleep.
As for light cycles, most people sleep through some part of daylight. 15 minute and one hour naps throughout the day is not seriously going to injure your daylight exposure. Sitting in cublices all day will.
I'm not talking about negative effects of no daylight exposure. I'm saying that you are likely to find it easier to stay awake if you make sure that you get strong light exposure during your wake periods. Light acts as a zeitgeiber, prompting awakening. While it is true that a lot of people sleep through some part of daylight (myself included), I don't know of anyone who finds it easy to sleep outdoors here in Australia during summer and stay asleep when exposed to the bright light. Additionally, shining a bright light in peoples eyes constantly has been used as a torture method to induce sleep deprivation, for quite some time. I know that the GULAG did it...
---
I certainly didn't say that it was impossible to do polyphasic sleep, just that it was stupid. I still hold firm to that statement. I strongly doubt the scientific validity of the practise. I have to do a thesis this year, I think I've got an idea to pitch to my supervisor now... People can adjust to polyphasic cycles as well as to things such as the 28 hour day. In fact, in a free running environment without external cues, people tend to live around a 28-30 hour day. Others have been known to live something as short as a 12 hour day. Before I'd believe any of the sales pitch, I'd love to see some decent studies on it because all of the research to date, long and short term, tends to imply that it's probably not a good idea, at least in a normal environment. In circumstances of long-term sleep deprivation, people tend to swear that they feel fine. Examination of their performance in cognitive tasks say otherwise. I would also love to see how many sleep lapses these people have during their day-to-day living. I've noticed a few people saying that doing the uberman cycle increases appetite. Appetite increases are strongly correlated with sleep deprivation.
All this aside, as you said - it's virtually impossible to do for a long period of time. That is, unless the person doing it is a non-working agoraphobic who doesn't have to worry too much about conforming to the real worlds expectations that he'll go to certain places and do certain things at vertain times. Even if it was physically great for you (which I really doubt), the practical considerations alone would be enough to warrant not bothering with it for most people.
I know my children like the naps during the day, even if it means they only get 8 hours of sleep at night instead of 10.
It's called a 'siesta'. It's an incredible new invention by children - all part of their plot to take over the world!
Polyphasic sleep isn't an effective long-term way to decrease your overall sleep time. For starters, it tends to take people a certain amount of time to get to sleep, which changes depending on time of day and overall sleep debt that has been built up. This wastes precious minutes. As well as this, there have been quite a few studies that have examined what happens to people who try polyphasic sleep. The results tend to involve an ever-increasing sleep debt. You could try looking for the '90 minute day' - most participants who come out of those experiments will afterwards sleep for quite a while. That's pretty strong evidence that they've built up quite a bit of sleep debt.
You don't WANT to maximise your REM sleep at the expense of slow-wave sleep. While it's true that REM sleep tends to happen in 90 minute cycles mostly unrelated to the sleep/wake cycle, REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep. In normal people, it tends to happen most towards the end of the sleep period. It's also interesting to note that people suffering from clinical depression tend to have a greater ratio of REM sleep to non-REM sleep.
It would be much more effective in my opinion to gradually decrease the amount of sleep you get each night by something like 15 minutes. Once you get down to around the 5-6 hour mark, you're likely to start to suffer for it, but if you break the rigid routine, you're likely to require less sleep than you did before decreasing sleep time. The theory goes that people who do this sleep more efficiently - they also tend to get greater periods of slow-wave sleep early in the sleep period.
And of course, the so-called 'Uberman' cycle completely ignores the effects that light and dark have on people. Try looking up the research of Dr. Leon Lack into bright light therapy. If you are stupid enough to try polyphasic sleep, you might want to make sure that during your wake periods, you're exposed to quite strong light and during your sleep periods, you don't get any. Even if your sleep/wake cycle becomes uncoupled with the time of day - which is unlikely considering that people with different sleep patterns like this STILL find it more difficult to get to sleep at certain times of day - bright light and darkness will probably have a big impact.
Always? Thats a pretty broad generalization there. I know from my own experiences and those of others that this is not always the case. I know that in the past when I had an experience with depression that I felt like quite a few people were listening to me and helping me - and my depression was quite severe - full-blown suicidal ideation etcetc. But then I was actually capable of seeking the help that I needed. I think that a lot of people who suffer from mental illnesses aren't capable of this and don't have the same extensive support network that I do.
I do agree that if your approach to interacting with reality isn't working that you need to be the one to change it, but really... the role of a psychologist shouldn't be to change peoples perceptions of themselves or reality but to help to enable the client to change for themselves.
In a decent therapy session, the client should be doing most of the work, with only the occasional suggestion or clarification from a psychologist. Maybe a psychologist might amplify an issue experienced by a client, or heighten feelings of ambiguity experienced during a decision making process.
Yes, and the whole world is located in the United States, isn't it. Home of psychological research and really bad therapy that barely draws on the body of research. Just look at motivational interviewing as a therapy model. People still perceive psychologists as people who get other people to sit on a couch and recount their early childhood experiences, which is bullshit and the psychological equivalent of a doctor prescribing sugar pills for people with fibromyalgia.
Fact: Psychologists are as accurate at diagnosing mental disorders as an MD. Fact: Psychotherapy is as effective as medication at treating these 'organic disorders' you're talking about - and the effects of psychotherapy tend to be longer term than medical interventions. Fact: Any decent psychologist will have a very solid understanding of 'organic problems' as they relate to brain chemistry. No, we don't learn this stuff with an aim to prescribe yet, but it's coming. This is something that I don't particularly like the idea of.
I have regularly sat in on lectures in my universities school of medicine, particularly lectures that I know deal with mental illness and brain issues and have found that at times the level of information that these future doctors are given is not as in depth as the information that I have learned in psychology lectures.
Psychologists in many countries including my own are quite capable and permitted legally to diagnose people with mental illnesses. Not only that, there is an increasing push for psychologists to be able to prescribe psychotrophic drugs.
As well as that, I take offense at the way your comment belittles psychologists. "Treat the worried well". Yes, so we do, but there's a lot more to it than that. I'd love to see you do the same after completing an honors degree, followed by a phd. 6-10 years is a common amount of time for people to be at university before being able to be registered psychologists. Sorry for the flame.
What is it these days with all of the pseudo-psychobabble crap about people 'owning' their problems?
I think that there is a lot of potential for abuse and misuse of a test like this, despite the fact that in many cases it could be very useful. What about the people who test positive for having an anxiety disorder but that disorder isn't the main cause of their distress?
As (another) psych student, specialising in counselling, anxiety and mood disorders, I feel that it is a huge trap for psychologists to believe that they have all the answers and know more about their clients than the clients do, regardless of the fact that the clients have been living with themselves all their lives. It is extremely important for professional psychologists to actually LISTEN and pay attention to what the CLIENTS concerns are, rather than simply doing a test and putting a label on them. Here's a surprising fact: LABELS ARE NOT ALWAYS USEFUL!/yelling.
Recognition of an anxiety disorder can sometimes make clients worse rather than better, depending on the disorder, particularly if they cannot recognise it without a conclusive test.
Working in the field of anxiety disorders, the biggest issue that I've heard from people with various anxiety disorders (OCD, GAD etc) has been that psychologists and psychiatrists don't actually LISTEN to them, that they are too intent on labelling people rather than helping them. I hope for your sake that you do not become one of these.
I don't think its anal rape so much as homosexual gay rape that seems to be so amusing to people.
If it was a male doing the same thing to a female prisoner, I doubt that it would be found so amusing.
For a society that has gone far, we still manage to be amazingly hypocritical at times.
People who don't consider psychology to be a science must have an unfairly narrow view of either science or psychology. Even if the entire concept of people on a couch delving into their life history is not considered a science (including by psychologists, who have refuted much of the old Freudian psychbabble) isn't scientific, what about branches of social sciences that look at brain scanning research into psychological defects? Developing human-machine interfaces? Some of the most 'sciency' of sci-fi concepts rely heavily on ideas from psychology and the social sciences - machines becoming 'human', humans embraching mechanical bodies or implants, social and genetic engineering to create 'perfect' societies and any number of other often-used concepts in science fiction.
All that aside, isn't something supposed to be considered a science if it is examined using carefully validated, empirical research? An interesting fact to consider is that psychological test results commonly have the same level of accuracy in diagnoses as medical assessments for disorders for which both psych and med assessments can be used (eg dementia).
Slashdot Mirror
No. Proof that anything is possible would be if said Slashdotter was also a girl herself.
Those people who talk nature vs. nurture without having a scientific understanding of what they're talking about are to psychology as anti-evolutionists are to biological engineering.
Grain of salt? Try a bucket (says the person currently writing a psychology thesis).
Intelligence is a terribly loaded term. Performance on IQ tests? That is almost entirely nurture - try being given a few pieces of paper in a language you've never encountered. Or imagine being from a culture without any written language at all. Of course you'd fail horribly. A favourite lecturer of mine years ago said that an IQ test is really only a test of culture. I'm inclined to agree of that.
Intelligence though... Well. That's another bucket of salt (or your flavour enhancer of choice). From what I recall of the research, the upper bounds and lower bounds are limited by nature. The rest is up to nurture. Of course, part of that could be things like not hitting your children on the head with a hammer, and helping them to develop healthy attitudes regarding study, making sure you don't lock them in a cupboard and make sure that they get to interact with other people and learn to read and write - at least if you want them to score well on in IQ test.
The saddest thing about knowing plenty about psychology is that I might have an IQ of 144, but I know that it doesn't actually mean anything much, other than me having a solid understanding of the culture that my IQ test was from. It probably also correlates highly with being a perfectionist and learning stuff well in school, which in turn generally correlates highly with depression, anxiety, OCD and a pile of other disorders. Honestly, does it mean I'd be a happier person? A better person? Hell no. The happiest people I have ever seen had Downs Syndrome and extremely low IQs. The best people I've encountered would have had average IQs at best.
You know what I love about psychology?
We can leave the political correctness bullshit behind us and actually talk about what IS the case.
It's glorious.
I love it when there are piles of armchair psychologists saying something so hard as though if they believe it enough it'll be true... and then cite properly conducted research that says the exact opposite.
Of course, then they tend to turn around and tell you that psychology isn't a science and doesn't teach us anything.
I've done my undergrad in psych and am now working on a thesis. While intelligence isn't my area of research, it is something that I've had drilled into me over the years. The thresholds are entirely nature - inasmuch as 'nature' = inborn in some way, which may be genetic but also other factors such as foetal alcohol exposure. How people do between the upper and lower bounds is a mixture. For example, those twin studies... I haven't read them, but I strongly suspect that the children raised in other families were raised in a similar (ie, probably white) cultural environment. What I'd really like to see is what happens when one twin is raised in an environment from a different culture... given that an IQ test has a lot to do with testing culture. This is why people can't use lower test scores from certain other cultures as support Nazi ideals...
Maybe it's been done already, do you know?
*nods*
I think its interesting that you mention the length of time it takes to adjust - the amount of time you've mentioned is similar to the amount of time seen in research when uncoupling of the sleep/wake and body temperature cycles happen.
I have had a read of Steve Pavlina's log and found it quite interesting, I haven't read everything thats there yet, but I'm sure I'll get around to it. If I thought I'd be able to find participants for a long-term study on polyphasic sleep, I'd do it in an instant. The high drop-out rate is pretty important though - is it just a matter of 'disclipline' or are there physiological differences between you and people who have dropped out?
I also find your mentioning of REM sleep to be interesting. I honestly don't think that you'd drop into REM sleep straight away - and REM sleep isn't the only sleep in which you dream. I would think it much more likely that you'd go into stage 4 sleep immediaely and then progress from that through to REM sleep.
Why has no one who has done this gone to a sleep lab and gotten EEGs of what happens during their nap times?! Don't mind me, I just love evidence and have spent way too long studying sleep...
I have had a read of your follow-up article and from what you said yourself, it generally doesn't work for people.
of the fifteen or so people who ended up trying this, about 12 of them dropped out within the first month of starting.
High drop-out rates like that have a tendency to signal either ineffectiveness or ridiculously bad side effects.
Did you take any baseline measures of how you felt before you began and then afterwards without having access to how you said you felt at the start? Were you ever hooked up to an EEG and/or an EOG to see if you were having microsleeps?
I'd love to see this tried in a decent scientific context, but somehow I can't see people participating.
I'm half tempted to attempt the schedule myself and get my psychophysiology lecturer to do some baseline tests on me and then some at various times during the attempt. I can't really see myself doing it, given that I have classes that go for 5-6 hours. I'd be completely screwed if I fell asleep in them.
As well as all this, your own experiences with light and dark and falling asleep immediately really fly in the face of current sleep research that has looked at different length sleep/wake cycles. What is it about your one that 'works' when many, many other ones haven't?
Finally, if you ever do get around to trying the schedule again, I'd love to hear from you as would quite a few sleep researchers I would think.
Ceara
Any decent study will control for the genetic makeup. Besides this, I don't know about universities in the USA, but at mine here in Australia, we have a very diverse mix of ethnicities - any given sample is likely to include quite a variety including white, Australian Indigenous, African, Chinese, Malay and others. Not only this, I doubt that the genetic variance in sleeping habits would be large enough to cause a significant difference in results. That having been said, it would be interesting to examine in detail. There is of course always room for individual differences.
There is no "wasted minutes", only ever growing debt and madness which payoff latter by sending you instantly to sleep.
Not so. Even in extended trials of people whose sleep/wake cycle became completely decoupled from their body temperature rhythm and day/night cycle still showed significant differences in how long it took to get to sleep at different times of the day. It's even been theorized that there are 'wake maintenance' zones.
indeed, some people naturally have no REM at all. on the other hand, it does signify a very deep state of slumber. if you can get to rem directly, you're skipping many of "entering sleep" stages most people go through.
REM sleep does NOT signify a very 'deep' state of slumber. It is characterized by rapid eye movement - EEGs also show a lot of activity, similar to when people are awake with their eyes open. It also tends to take place closer to stage one sleep (lightest) than stage four (heaviest). People are generally more easy to wake up during REM than during stage 4, so your statement that REM signifies a deep state of slumber is absolutely untrue.
I suspect that it would be likely that people who deprive themselves of sleep in this way would tend to go to stage 4 sleep more quickly and be REM deprived, based on what I've seen of sleep deprivation research. People don't dream solely during REM sleep.
As for light cycles, most people sleep through some part of daylight. 15 minute and one hour naps throughout the day is not seriously going to injure your daylight exposure. Sitting in cublices all day will.
I'm not talking about negative effects of no daylight exposure. I'm saying that you are likely to find it easier to stay awake if you make sure that you get strong light exposure during your wake periods. Light acts as a zeitgeiber, prompting awakening. While it is true that a lot of people sleep through some part of daylight (myself included), I don't know of anyone who finds it easy to sleep outdoors here in Australia during summer and stay asleep when exposed to the bright light.
Additionally, shining a bright light in peoples eyes constantly has been used as a torture method to induce sleep deprivation, for quite some time. I know that the GULAG did it...
---
I certainly didn't say that it was impossible to do polyphasic sleep, just that it was stupid. I still hold firm to that statement. I strongly doubt the scientific validity of the practise. I have to do a thesis this year, I think I've got an idea to pitch to my supervisor now...
People can adjust to polyphasic cycles as well as to things such as the 28 hour day. In fact, in a free running environment without external cues, people tend to live around a 28-30 hour day. Others have been known to live something as short as a 12 hour day.
Before I'd believe any of the sales pitch, I'd love to see some decent studies on it because all of the research to date, long and short term, tends to imply that it's probably not a good idea, at least in a normal environment. In circumstances of long-term sleep deprivation, people tend to swear that they feel fine. Examination of their performance in cognitive tasks say otherwise. I would also love to see how many sleep lapses these people have during their day-to-day living. I've noticed a few people saying that doing the uberman cycle increases appetite. Appetite increases are strongly correlated with sleep deprivation.
All this aside, as you said - it's virtually impossible to do for a long period of time. That is, unless the person doing it is a non-working agoraphobic who doesn't have to worry too much about conforming to the real worlds expectations that he'll go to certain places and do certain things at vertain times. Even if it was physically great for you (which I really doubt), the practical considerations alone would be enough to warrant not bothering with it for most people.
I know my children like the naps during the day, even if it means they only get 8 hours of sleep at night instead of 10. It's called a 'siesta'. It's an incredible new invention by children - all part of their plot to take over the world!
Polyphasic sleep isn't an effective long-term way to decrease your overall sleep time. For starters, it tends to take people a certain amount of time to get to sleep, which changes depending on time of day and overall sleep debt that has been built up. This wastes precious minutes.
As well as this, there have been quite a few studies that have examined what happens to people who try polyphasic sleep. The results tend to involve an ever-increasing sleep debt. You could try looking for the '90 minute day' - most participants who come out of those experiments will afterwards sleep for quite a while. That's pretty strong evidence that they've built up quite a bit of sleep debt.
You don't WANT to maximise your REM sleep at the expense of slow-wave sleep. While it's true that REM sleep tends to happen in 90 minute cycles mostly unrelated to the sleep/wake cycle, REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep. In normal people, it tends to happen most towards the end of the sleep period. It's also interesting to note that people suffering from clinical depression tend to have a greater ratio of REM sleep to non-REM sleep.
It would be much more effective in my opinion to gradually decrease the amount of sleep you get each night by something like 15 minutes. Once you get down to around the 5-6 hour mark, you're likely to start to suffer for it, but if you break the rigid routine, you're likely to require less sleep than you did before decreasing sleep time. The theory goes that people who do this sleep more efficiently - they also tend to get greater periods of slow-wave sleep early in the sleep period.
And of course, the so-called 'Uberman' cycle completely ignores the effects that light and dark have on people. Try looking up the research of Dr. Leon Lack into bright light therapy. If you are stupid enough to try polyphasic sleep, you might want to make sure that during your wake periods, you're exposed to quite strong light and during your sleep periods, you don't get any. Even if your sleep/wake cycle becomes uncoupled with the time of day - which is unlikely considering that people with different sleep patterns like this STILL find it more difficult to get to sleep at certain times of day - bright light and darkness will probably have a big impact.
Always? Thats a pretty broad generalization there. I know from my own experiences and those of others that this is not always the case. I know that in the past when I had an experience with depression that I felt like quite a few people were listening to me and helping me - and my depression was quite severe - full-blown suicidal ideation etcetc. But then I was actually capable of seeking the help that I needed. I think that a lot of people who suffer from mental illnesses aren't capable of this and don't have the same extensive support network that I do.
I do agree that if your approach to interacting with reality isn't working that you need to be the one to change it, but really... the role of a psychologist shouldn't be to change peoples perceptions of themselves or reality but to help to enable the client to change for themselves.
In a decent therapy session, the client should be doing most of the work, with only the occasional suggestion or clarification from a psychologist. Maybe a psychologist might amplify an issue experienced by a client, or heighten feelings of ambiguity experienced during a decision making process.
Yes, and the whole world is located in the United States, isn't it. Home of psychological research and really bad therapy that barely draws on the body of research. Just look at motivational interviewing as a therapy model. People still perceive psychologists as people who get other people to sit on a couch and recount their early childhood experiences, which is bullshit and the psychological equivalent of a doctor prescribing sugar pills for people with fibromyalgia.
Fact: Psychologists are as accurate at diagnosing mental disorders as an MD.
Fact: Psychotherapy is as effective as medication at treating these 'organic disorders' you're talking about - and the effects of psychotherapy tend to be longer term than medical interventions.
Fact: Any decent psychologist will have a very solid understanding of 'organic problems' as they relate to brain chemistry.
No, we don't learn this stuff with an aim to prescribe yet, but it's coming. This is something that I don't particularly like the idea of.
I have regularly sat in on lectures in my universities school of medicine, particularly lectures that I know deal with mental illness and brain issues and have found that at times the level of information that these future doctors are given is not as in depth as the information that I have learned in psychology lectures.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Psychologists in many countries including my own are quite capable and permitted legally to diagnose people with mental illnesses. Not only that, there is an increasing push for psychologists to be able to prescribe psychotrophic drugs.
As well as that, I take offense at the way your comment belittles psychologists. "Treat the worried well". Yes, so we do, but there's a lot more to it than that. I'd love to see you do the same after completing an honors degree, followed by a phd. 6-10 years is a common amount of time for people to be at university before being able to be registered psychologists. Sorry for the flame.
What is it these days with all of the pseudo-psychobabble crap about people 'owning' their problems?
/yelling.
I think that there is a lot of potential for abuse and misuse of a test like this, despite the fact that in many cases it could be very useful. What about the people who test positive for having an anxiety disorder but that disorder isn't the main cause of their distress?
As (another) psych student, specialising in counselling, anxiety and mood disorders, I feel that it is a huge trap for psychologists to believe that they have all the answers and know more about their clients than the clients do, regardless of the fact that the clients have been living with themselves all their lives.
It is extremely important for professional psychologists to actually LISTEN and pay attention to what the CLIENTS concerns are, rather than simply doing a test and putting a label on them.
Here's a surprising fact: LABELS ARE NOT ALWAYS USEFUL!
Recognition of an anxiety disorder can sometimes make clients worse rather than better, depending on the disorder, particularly if they cannot recognise it without a conclusive test.
Working in the field of anxiety disorders, the biggest issue that I've heard from people with various anxiety disorders (OCD, GAD etc) has been that psychologists and psychiatrists don't actually LISTEN to them, that they are too intent on labelling people rather than helping them.
I hope for your sake that you do not become one of these.
I don't think its anal rape so much as homosexual gay rape that seems to be so amusing to people. If it was a male doing the same thing to a female prisoner, I doubt that it would be found so amusing. For a society that has gone far, we still manage to be amazingly hypocritical at times.
People who don't consider psychology to be a science must have an unfairly narrow view of either science or psychology.
Even if the entire concept of people on a couch delving into their life history is not considered a science (including by psychologists, who have refuted much of the old Freudian psychbabble) isn't scientific, what about branches of social sciences that look at brain scanning research into psychological defects? Developing human-machine interfaces?
Some of the most 'sciency' of sci-fi concepts rely heavily on ideas from psychology and the social sciences - machines becoming 'human', humans embraching mechanical bodies or implants, social and genetic engineering to create 'perfect' societies and any number of other often-used concepts in science fiction.
All that aside, isn't something supposed to be considered a science if it is examined using carefully validated, empirical research? An interesting fact to consider is that psychological test results commonly have the same level of accuracy in diagnoses as medical assessments for disorders for which both psych and med assessments can be used (eg dementia).