Clericalism and a Culture of Arrogance

[Mary S]

Yesterday morning I heard a couple of things on the radio concerning sexual abuse that discuss problems that have parallels in the problems of bad/counterproductive/abusive therapy. I’ll discuss these in different threads.

One was an interview with an activist nun (Simone Campbell), discussing sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

She summarized Pope Francis’s comments that clericalism is “the righteousness on the part of the ordained clergy, that they were always right, that protected them as opposed to caring for kids or for the others who were abused by the clerics.”

 When asked if admitting women into the clergy would help solve the problems, she said, “Well, I actually am kind of worried about that. I mean, unless we change the system - if you just made us cardinals or bishops in the same system, we'd probably get as arrogant as they are. This is what we have to change - the culture of arrogance.”

 Both of these concepts do seem to apply well to the problems with therapy. But imagine a therapist saying the things about therapy that Sister Simone said!

[disequilibrium1]

Most all psych literature I see seems written in delusional omnipotence— the practitioner is absolutely certain of causation and consequence. The therapist knows whatever visits his brain must be true. The mental health field seems built on a foundation of whim and impulse masquerading as science and fact. Unfortunately they lure the their clients into their fact-free culture, lowering the standards for evaluating truth vs. fable.

[Mary S]

7 hours ago, disequilibrium1 said:

the practitioner is absolutely certain of causation and consequence. The therapist knows whatever visits his brain must be true. The mental health field seems built on a foundation of whim and impulse masquerading as science and fact. Unfortunately they lure the their clients into their fact-free culture, lowering the standards for evaluating truth vs. fable.

Oh, yes -- my worst therapist once said, "Consider me to be something like a computer: what you say goes in, mixes around with my training and experience, and out comes a response!". I was speechless.

Her comment was in response to my asking her a question that could also be phrased in terms of a computer metaphor: my question was like asking for details about the program that the computer was running. So her response also showed that her understanding of computers was far less than my non-expert but basic-literacy understanding of how they work.

Based on this and other experience with therapists, I have to agree with your comment "The mental health system seems built on a foundation of whim and impulse masquerading as science and fact." In trying to think of a word to describe this, I looked up charlatan, and got the definition "a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill; a fraud." Sadly, that does seem to describe it, at least for many therapists -- some more than others. But I suspect many of them don't realize that they are charlatans -- they are just super overconfident.

But for some of them, the problems seems that they are too trusting, too easily  convinced, perhaps gullible -- e.g., the problems with replication come from believing poor quality science, out of ignorance of what high quality science is. And I was very gullible when I first tried therapy; I didn't know how to deal with the contradiction between what the therapists did and my understanding of science.  I gave them too much benefit of the doubt, and discounted my own ability to evaluate their competence.

 

Edited August 30, 2018 by Mary S