After 2 years of therapy I'm convinced that psychologist are the sarcedotal class of our time. Like astrology in Imperial China, psychology serves as the science for ad hoc justification.
I know a few people who benefited from therapy; some very much.
If you think your therapist is the equivalent of an astrologist, you should try another one; it's not unusual.
If you try enough astrologers, fortune tellers or priests, you'll probably find one with the necessary life experience and empathy to earnestly benefit you. Their stated methods differ, but I think all these people are basically in the same line of work and, insofar as any of them are capable of helping others, they're all doing basically the same thing. They ask questions and have people talk about their problems, evaluate what they hear, and offer advice based on what you've said and their professional and personal experience.
And all of them should be thrown out of court rooms. Expert testimony from fortune tellers and psychologists is trash as far as I'm concerned. Rolling for a new psychologist to help yourself get better is fine and dandy, but in an adversarial courtroom environment this whole thing breaks down. When your ex-spouse brings a psychologist to court to testify against you, you don't get to "try another" until you get good results. All you can really do is hire one of your own to throw shit back in the other direction. It's farcical.
You cannot be serious with this comparison. Changing therapists once or twice because different types of therapy work on different people and because you need to be comfortable around yoir therapist is in no way comparable to people dialing the TV astrologer every morning until the nonsense they literally make up on the spot happens to be what they meeded to hear by pure chance.
Psychology might not be as rigorous of a science as physics or whatever, but it still follows the scientific method and therapy is primarily evidence-based. Would you also be so quick to compare a doctor trying multiple different antibiotics on a patient dying from an infection to repeatedly throwing a dart into a pharmacy and trying whatever it hits?
(Also a newspaper or TV astrologer who talks at people using mass media is not doing the same sort of thing at all. I'm talking about astrologers who do one-on-one consultations, as priests and psychologists offer. And just to be clear, I have no religion and I don't believe in astrology.)
If one complains over the internet that therapy works like astrology, instead of actually talking to their therapist about this topic, then therapy is for them a waste of money, as it's clear that they have no participation and trust. Changing therapist - like I suggested - misses entirely the point, now I see.
Complaining that patient X went to therapy and didn't work and therefore therapy doesn't work is like complaining that a computer science degree is useless because developer X doesn't find a good job.
People is complex and treatment is complex as well. It's perfectly possible that even an unqualified person (e.g. the so-called "coaches") can improve a case, that qualified people didn't, for legitimate reasons. I actually do know at least one unqualified person who practices therapy, and I think they're able to help some cases, but that doesn't detract from qualified therapists.
On the other hand, there is a structure to human mind, and people who systematically studied it for years have tools that unqualified people generally don't have. One may not subscribe, say, to Freudian theories, but the relation with the parents is extremely relevant to one's development, and without knowledge and tools, the practicioner will likely stumble.
1. Check the definition of an analogy (this is the case where the dictionary is actually useful), maybe it will make clear why what I wrote was not meant as a perfect depiction of reality;
2. Psychology has not really a good track as a science: between replication crisis, statistical illiteracy of the researchers, ideologically motivated reasoning and outright fraud it is not clear to me that believing in Psychology is any different that believing in Theology: they are both self-consistent systems that fail to make prediction on the physical world and, while intellectually interesting and provocative, I would not like that anyone makes decisions about society and my life using concepts from these disciplines.
P.S.: Actually, thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect much more about the similarity between these two seemingly different disciplines.
Like glaugh, I appreciated the definition of a new-to-me word appearing inline :)
It is a cut-copy-paste definition of a rarely used word.