Psychology Gone Wrong with Dr. Maciej Zatonski

It is with some trepidation that we approach today’s topic. Nevertheless, given our throughline of the science of the mind in this podcast, the founders feel strongly that we need to address the pervasive cultural trend of psychotherapeutic practices. Psychotherapy is often taken for granted in many modern societies, and it’s often incorrectly seen as synonymous with psychology. What’s more, it’s also infiltrating culture, technology and art.

We imagine that even the most open-minded and skeptical listeners with the sharpest skills for intellectualizing may have a reflexive resistance to the thesis of this episode: [that] many of the foundations of talk therapy are either severely outdated, predominantly pseudoscientific, or simply incorrect. Just like we did with Dr. Bruce Hood in our conversation about self and identity, we’re going to entertain the idea that certain concepts we take for granted are far from settled fact.

We’ll challenge our listeners to consider that psychotherapy is neither a legitimate science nor a medicinal practice validated with demonstrable success. In taking a deep dive into the history of psychology, we’ll see that it began as something more at the intersection of armchair philosophy and modern shamanism rather than as a medical practice emerging from rigorous science. We’ll cover the “speciation” of different approaches to the mind, ranging from therapeutic practices to empirical sciences, each with their own evolutionary trajectories. We’ll look at the modern infrastructure supporting these disciplines, with their respective economics of knowledge production. And we’ll discuss perverse incentives to medicalize otherwise normal travails of the human experience for the purposes of selling new drugs, building academic careers, or writing sensational, empty popular science articles in the era of clickbait journalism chasing programmatic ad revenue.

This is going to be hard. The benefits of therapy are touted everywhere in modern culture. Therapy is presented to us as a normal part of life by our friends, popular TV shows, celebrities, esteemed news organizations such as the New York Times, and even our doctors. Yet, just as we wouldn’t go in for a new experimental brain surgery without learning as much about it as we can, we shouldn’t blindly adopt new therapies claiming to fix something as poorly understood as the “self” or the human mind without first thoroughly examining the claims, methods, and outcomes. If our goal in using psychotherapy is to be a good friend, family member, partner, lover, co-worker, and citizen, or if it’s to generally improve our mental well-being, then we would argue that it is absolutely critical to understand what psychotherapy can and cannot do.

To be clear, we aren’t saying that mental health isn’t important. In fact, we think it’s very important, and that’s why it’s also important to understand the fact and fiction surrounding the most popular approaches to mental health. But we’re going to go beyond just focusing on the ways in which psychology has gone wrong, and also suggest a revised framework for understanding ourselves in the modern world. This framework will build upon other related ideas we’ve discussed, including “The Science of the Self and Identity” with Dr. Bruce Hood and “Cognitive technologies for communication” with Dr. Judy Fan, and we’ll continue to flesh it out across future interviews.

Today we’re talking with Dr. Maciej Zatonski. Dr. Zatonski is a surgeon and researcher known for debunking unscientific therapies and claims in clinical medicine. He is the founder of the Polish Skeptics Club and a leader in the public understanding of science in Poland. He has been honored by the Polish Academy of Sciences for his work to purge the medical curriculum of obsolete and bogus therapies.