You know, this actually kind of makes sense. A decade ago, back when I was told by a psychiatrist i had a psychosomatic illness and sent to a psychologist to find the cause, i wasted a year talking to this guy and i kept asking "ok, you just talk to me about random stuff but can we find this psychological problem and fix it so i can go back to being able to do things?".
At the beginning he had the excuse of saying "we just started, we are getting there" but soon it became obvious that he had no game plan, there was no systematic technique that he was applying to try to figure out my psychological problem, he was literally just talking about random things and that's all he was able to do, like a con artist pretending to be skilled at psychology except that's actually just how psychology works. They just talk to you about irrelevant things and the Phantom psychological problem is supposed to pop up out of nowhere (except it never does).
Every time I have mentioned this to a doctor, the blame was shifted on me: psychological causes are insidious to find and i was too stubborn to be helped. Regardless of what your view may be on this, it seems a bit strange that the process psychologists use is never called into question, no? Surely there is room for improvement, if the problem is so insidious to find, but nobody ever talks about it. Psychologists are mythical beings that are perfect at their job apparently so there's just no need to talk about it. In every other field we talk about what we are doing and how to improve, but not in psychology. Seems a bit suspect if you ask me.
This paper says that those psychological factors should be systematically classified and be predictive of symptoms and illness. There should be clear evidence on how they work, in great detail. I think the authors of this paper have missed the memo that the reason these things are kept vague is that they are bullshit you can only shove down people's throats by keeping a secretive veil over the whole thing. They are specifically designed to be opaque so doctors can make vague claims in order to keep difficult patients between a rock and a hard place.
Nope sadly as someone with an actual psychology degree I've watched as people from any other background than scientific psychology has decided to wonder themselves into coaching or 'brainwashing techniques' (CBT is just a delivery mechanism and someone with a qual in that isn't qualified to know whether what they are brainwashing
in is healthy or of any use, just how to 'make it happen'). It isn't the older, proper scientific psychology that is at issue here - but the 'transformed' de-skilled version that came with the 'mental health, CBT, IAPT' type thing. And out went the oversight of actually diagnosing people precisely and matching treatments in the specific (vs the preference of the medicine side to generic programmes because everyone just needs to generically think better they pretend is mental health).
Those trained learn the spiel and the hubris (although I think to wander into it with no more than a few days nonsense course in 'pretend CBT, but it was actually more NLP about communication and making other people say things you want them to say') and are then basically empty. In fact the less deluded and more itsy bit of intelligence they have left then at least they feel awkward when they realise I have a degree in psychology and are respectful enough to shut their cakeholes down. The real dumbasses you can see in their mind half-hearing you say that (vs their arts degree) and then sea-lioning with some nonsense phrase like 'but people with hydrochondria do exist, we all know one don't we'.
This business area has just boomed because it has given some people a license to think they've something to offer other people. And its the vulnerable and hard on their luck because of being badly treated by others that get chucked under them because support networks have been deconstructed by ideas 'all such people should be sent to mental health' and then weedle away with manipulation trying to ferret for a justification for their parastic behaviour. Some of them have ended up there because they've had the same done to them and the misogynistic society has said that is the only path that is left for them: they can have an OK life if they agree to be part of the system doing it to others who haven't yet been persuaded of it, and they believe it because 'look at them now making a living from doing the coaching'.
I highly doubt those behind all of this are proper, decent, scientific psychologists with training in the cognitive and biological and perception-based science. They'll be at best psychiatry-type area who wondered in free to make their own analyses based on literature written in some cases by Freud and all of which not scientifically tested but at best based on the 'inference' medicine believes to be science (but luckily for other areas of medicine does get backed up by the observation involved with deductiion because, well, there are body-parts to measure).
But more likely people who've been taught 'embedded' communication techniques like CBT and so think they know psychology but really have just got a differently-named version of the hard-sales courses someone in recruitment or sales would get. Along with sadly getting a bigoted mindset programmed in by being told a few rumours of personality based on fake associations in dodgy research. But definitely never the critical thinking for them to see wood-for-trees on those. Scientific psychology knows personality research is flawed and how the Big 5 is as accurate as you are going to get at explaining personality, which they researched in order to demonstrate 'how little' and keep a lid on the 'pretend characteristics like perfectionism' nonsense. That one isn't even internally consistent given any man on the street will describe someone/thing entirely different for that tropey term (one will be the slack woman who likes pretty pens at the start of term, another will be the person who is just very good at their job).
Just like the cliche of 'the person that you should give the most power to is the one who least wants it', noone who genuinely cared and was interested in the mental health of others and understanding psychology proper would be going around calling people perfectionists and spouting this tosh. A respectable psychologist would never jump to conclusions labelling an acquaintance at a dinner party by some pseudo-psych term either if they were responsible and so on. These are just little rabbles of people who gossip about 'maybe people like that act this way because....' and then don't realise you are supposed to fill that gap with deep, proper scientific research instead of them gaggling up and brainstorming top-of-the-head ideas based on their own internal not-very-nice ideas of others (then thinking a little leading survey proves it).
