'I haven't always been on the outside, throwing stones at my own profession,"
began psychologist-turned-critic Tana Dineen at a recent meeting of the Crisis Workers
of Ontario in Belleville, Ont. Before 1993, when she abandoned the psychology
profession in protest, Dineen assumed that psychologists recognized "an obligation
to scrutinize their ideas, to question assumptions, and to raise questions about
socially sanctioned beliefs."
Instead Dineen, author of the book Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry
Is Doing to People, found that most therapists are just "swept along by their
own opinions and their own beliefs."
When she was practising psychology in the 1970s, it was fads like primal scream
therapy and Gestalt therapy, while today it's regression therapy (which she believes
can cause false memories), thought field therapy (TFT), eye movement and desensitization
reprocessing therapy (EMDR) and alien abduction therapy.
"This is the kind of junk that the colleges of licensed psychologists will
do nothing about," laments Dineen. "These therapists are dangerous people,
and people continue to get sucked into their beliefs."
Also disturbing, says Dineen, is the profession's habit of convincing people whose
lives are normal that somehow their lives should be more fulfilled and that psychologists
can help.
"Because they hear this stuff [from talk shows, self-help books and workshops],"
says Dineen, "there's this idea out there that psychologists have all the solutions.
But they don't."
Dineen told the nearly 200 therapists at the conference that, when she practised
psychology, she often felt little different than her clients. She thought many of
their problems were just normal ups and downs.
"But I couldn't say, 'That's nuts. Go home. You're OK.' They would just turn
around and go elsewhere," claims Dineen. "And what I'm finding today,"
she adds, winding up for one of her biggest beefs, "is this tendency for the
profession to help their clients ignore responsibility with psychologically endorsed
excuses [like post- traumatic stress syndrome]. And they are taking these excuses
into the courts to help the accused. The victim motif is very strong in our culture."
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