The Problem Of Psychology

Silvia Hartmann

The Permeation Of Psychology

How many people are involved in psychology, using its precepts, concepts, methods and techniques in 2025 in the USA?

• Professionals & Staff: This group, including psychologists, counsellors, social workers, and supporting staff, totals around 1.5 million people.
• Clients in Treatment: A significant number of individuals receive formal care. Roughly 35 to 40 million people are in therapy or receiving professional treatment in a given year.
• Psychology Books: Sales data from 2024 and 2025 show that popular psychology and self-help books sell millions of copies annually. While a single book might sell tens of thousands of copies in a given year, some classic titles have sold over 100 million copies over their lifespan.
• Mental Wellness Apps: The market for mental health apps is booming. The US mental health apps market size is projected to be worth over $11 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow significantly. In 2024, over 60% of adults in the US actively used mobile health apps, and the use of mental health apps increased by 54.6%. With roughly 260 million adults in the US, this suggests tens of millions, if not more, of people are using these apps.
• Social Media Consumers: Over 150 million Americans consume psychology based content across all media platforms.

Even accounting for overlap among these categories (a person might read a book, use an app, and also be in therapy), the sheer size of the social media and app consumer base means the total number is far larger than what is typically considered the "psychology world."

The number of people actively involved with psychology in their lives in the US today, is at least 165 million people.

Psychology's Cultural Permeation

It would be fair to say that it is now virtually impossible for anyone in the US to have avoided exposure to the ideas of psychology. The concepts have permeated American culture to the point of near-total saturation.

This cultural lens of psychology, however, has significant problems.

The Problems with Psychology

1. Lack of a Conceptual Framework to Define the Field
   Psychology struggles to unify under a single, coherent philosophical framework. Unlike physics, which has clear foundational principles, psychology spans competing paradigms - behaviourism, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, etc. - without a shared ontology or epistemology. This leads to fragmented theories, inconsistent definitions of key concepts like "mind" or "behaviour," and inability in establishing universal principles to guide meaningful enquiry, research or downstream applications.

2. Lack of Definitions
   Stemming from the absence of a unifying philosophical framework, psychology lacks precise, universally accepted definitions for core concepts like mind, human mind, consciousness, subconsciousness, unconsciousness, stress and emotion. This ambiguity leads to inconsistent research methodologies, conflicting interpretations of data, and challenges in replicating studies. For instance, one researcher’s definition of "consciousness" as self-awareness might differ from another’s focus on neural correlates, muddying cross-study comparisons and theoretical progress with the absence of actionable methods as the result.

3. Failure to Understand or Address Emotions
   It is extraordinary that the major cause of the non-medical malfunctions of the human mind, namely emotions, has no definition, no essential understanding what emotions are, how they come into being, and a lack of actionable methods to change emotional states, given that the functioning of the mind is downstream from the emotional states in homo sapiens.

4. Failure to Understand or Address Relationships
   Psychology suffers from a foundational "Individualist Myopia," built to diagnose and treat the individual while not factoring in the relationship systems in which the individual is embedded sufficiently. This is a core category error and the direct result of a field which has no coherent model for relationships themselves, only for the individuals within them. As a result, psychology misinterprets distress signals from dysfunctional or stressed system as a disorder originating within the individual. This lack of functional models of relationships has severe repercussions for intrapersonal relationships, and also cascades naturally into the non-understanding of couple dynamics, family dynamics, group dynamics and social dynamics, with no actionable methods to improve relationships being possible to develop as a direct result.

5. Failure to Understand or Address Stress
   Under high emotional stress, every normal human being will demonstrate all the symptoms of mental illness. Stress disturbs all mental and physical processes; and the opposite of stress, positive states of being, fundamentally changes physiology, thought and behaviour for the better. The failure of psychology to understand or address stress, and to develop suitable methods and techniques to put clients into higher states of functioning, whilst misunderstanding patterns of thought and behaviour caused by stress as mental illness is particularly egregious.

6. Lack of Clear Delineation from Psychiatry
   Psychology often overlaps with psychiatry, creating confusion in scope, practice, and public perception. While psychology is supposed to focus on understanding behaviour and mental processes through research and therapy, psychiatry emphasizes medical diagnosis and treatment of physical disorders, usually involving medication. This blurry boundary leads to turf wars, confused research results (i.e. psychology research being conducted on medicated subjects), inconsistent treatment approaches, and misunderstandings among professionals and patients.

7. Struggling for Scientific Credibility Amid Soft Science Status
   Psychology grapples with an identity crisis, yearning for recognition as a rigorous science while battling perceptions of low academic esteem compared to hard sciences like physics or chemistry. The field's reliance on subjective measures, variable human behaviour, and challenges in controlling experiments, caused by the absence of a guiding framework, demands scepticism about its scientific validity. This drive to be taken seriously has lead to overreaching claims and methodological compromises, like p-hacking, which undermine credibility further.

8. Replication Crisis and Questionable Research Practices
   Psychology faces a well-documented replication crisis, where many landmark studies fail to produce consistent results when retested. This issue stems from questionable research practices, such as small sample sizes, selective reporting, and major publication bias toward desired results. The crisis erodes trust in psychological findings, highlights the field’s lack of scientific foundation, and hinders the development of reliable interventions, further exacerbating the failure in addressing mental health issues effectively.

9. The WEIRD Problem
   Research heavily samples Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) populations, limiting generalizability. A 2010 study in Behavioral and Brain Sciences noted 96% of psychological study participants are from Western countries, despite these representing only 12% of the global population. However, the problem exacerbates exponentially when we consider estimates suggest 50–80% of studies use university students, with psychology students comprising 20–50% of those. Apart from being WEIRD, we need to consider the age and mental/emotional states of university students in general, and in particular, psychology students, before we generalise any findings to the population at large.

10. Research Not Accounting For Participant's State
    Most existing psychology studies were conducted without accounting for the participant's state and as this is the one factor which defines their performance, these studies will have to be re-done in order to arrive at scientifically meaningful conclusions. In this context, state is defined as operational state in body, mind and energy body. For example, an anxious or stressed participant will produce entirely different results than the same participant in a better state, making any form of psychology study which does not account for state practically useless.

11. Over reliance on Neuroscience In Research
    Flowing from the desire to be seen as a "hard" science, psychology has increasingly pivoted toward neuroscience, prioritizing brain-based explanations (e.g., neuroimaging, neural correlates) over broader behavioural, emotional or social factors. This "brain hat obsession" risks reducing complex mental phenomena to mere biological processes, side lining holistic approaches and creating an over dependence on expensive, sometimes inconclusive technologies like fMRI. It can also alienate subfields like social or developmental psychology that don’t easily fit the neuroscientific mould.

12. Scattered and Ineffective Methods and Techniques
    Building on the previous issues, psychology’s lack of a unified philosophy, clear definitions, distinct boundaries from psychiatry, perceived lack of scientific rigour, and over reliance on neuroscience contribute to a fragmented landscape of methods and techniques. Therapeutic approaches, ranging from CBT to psychoanalysis to EMDR to mindfulness-based interventions (borrowed from Buddhism), often lack cohesion, standardization or consistent empirical support, leading to variable outcomes. This disarray has failed to effectively address the escalating global mental health crisis, as evidenced by rising rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide despite increased psychological interventions.

13. Over commercialization of Mental Health Services
    Psychology has become increasingly commercialized, with a proliferation of practises that prioritize profit over evidence-based efficacy. A diagnosis (autism, SMI) can funnel individuals into for-profit pipelines of businesses benefiting from immense amounts of public funds. These pipelines reinforce pathological identities, foster dependency, and deliver no long term beneficial results to the individuals, or society at large.

14. Stranglehold of CBT Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
    CBT is a multibillion dollar industry. In the US, this comprises of an industrial complex of insurance reimbursements (~$4 billion), private out of pocket payments (~$2 billion), government programs (~$1,5 billion), training (~$1 billion), research (~$300 million) and digital CBT apps & platforms (~$1 billion). This is in spite of psychology's “gold standard” methodology being based on scientifically unsound theories, producing less than 20% efficacy and usually being paired with medication, both in research as well as in clinical practice. CBT routinely starves research funding for more promising methodologies and has positioned itself to be the only game in town to the detriment of psychology, science and the citizens whilst being built in to the deep structure of LLM/AI user interactions.

15. Deceptive Trade Practises & Complicity By Omission
    The psychology industry actively perpetuates and most importantly, fails to correct wildly inflated efficacy statistics, in what amounts to systemic false advertising to the general public. Great proclamations of 70% success for CBT, 80% for psychedelics, or over 90% satisfaction for couples counselling are presented as fact to the citizens. These figures collapse entirely under investigation, revealing a reality where CBT's efficacy is less than 20%, psychedelic research is in its infancy, and couples counselling suffers from dropout rates as high as 47% whilst still leading to a ~40% divorce rate. Neither the psychology industry nor academia makes any significant effort to correct these highly misleading figures, a fundamental breach of public trust by omission.

16. High Rates of Mental Illness, Addiction and Suicide Among Practitioners
    The disarray in psychology’s foundational issues (lack of unified philosophy, unclear definitions, blurred lines with psychiatry, questionable scientific rigour, and ineffective methods) not only impacts patients but also takes a toll on practitioners. Psychologists display remarkably high rates of addiction and suicide, reflecting significant occupational stress, burnout, and dissatisfaction. Psychologists face high mental health risks (e.g., 30% suicidal ideation, 61% depression per 2022 studies), yet stigma, professional fears and first hand knowledge about lack of efficacy deter help-seeking. A 2018 study found 66% of UK psychologists avoided treatment due to career concerns and knowing from experience that treatment would not help them with their own mental health challenges.

17. Politicized Approaches Due to Ideological Divergence
    The field of psychology has become increasingly polarized due to the politicized training young practitioners receive in universities, where ideological frameworks often overshadow evidence-based practice. This emphasis on social justice, identity politics, or specific cultural lenses fragments the field further, creating divisions among practitioners with differing ideological leanings. It also strains the patient-practitioner relationship, as clients may feel alienated or judged if their values clash with their therapist’s approach, undermining the therapeutic relationship and thereby, therapeutic effectiveness. Both “trad” and “woke” approaches align in placing agency outside the client (“It's the brain/it's the past trauma” and “It's the systemic oppression” respectively), which is inherently disempowering and may contribute to client stress.

18. Rising Client Dissatisfaction and the Search For Alternatives
    Clients are increasingly dissatisfied with traditional therapy due to high dropout rates (20–30%), unmet expectations, weak therapeutic alliances, and systemic barriers like cost (up to $275 per session) and long wait lists. This frustration, compounded by psychology’s fragmented methods and politicized approaches, is driving clients toward AI chatbots like Woebot or Replika, with 28% of people using AI for mental health support in 2024 for its affordability, privacy, and 24/7 access. However, AI’s superficial responses, lack of empathy, and ethical risks—like data privacy breaches or mishandling crises—highlight the field’s failure to meet demand, further eroding trust in human practitioners.

19. Lack of a Defined Healed State (Absence of Endecology)
    Psychology fails to define or conceptualize a “healed state” for conditions like anxiety, PTSD, or bereavement, leaving clients and practitioners without a clear goal. Instead of aiming for a tangible outcome (e.g., restored well-being), therapy often focuses on managing symptoms indefinitely, trapping people in cycles of stress talk without resolution, managed by medication. This fuels dissatisfaction, inefficacy, a loss of agency and a sense of hopelessness, all of which are contra-indicated for successful therapeutic relationships.

20. The DSM’s Structural and Conceptual Mess
    The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR, 2022) lists over 300 disorders with inconsistent criteria, frequent revisions, and reclassifications (e.g., Asperger’s folded into autism spectrum disorder, gender identity disorder renamed gender dysphoria), creating confusion for practitioners and clients. Its ever-expanding, often arbitrary categories arrived at by votes, not science; pathologize normal human variations (e.g. chronic stress mistaken for mental illness) and lack a coherent theoretical foundation, undermining credibility fuelling further confusion, and reinforcing the trauma cult’s overreach without the concept of cure.

21. Vague Diagnostic Labels and Time Ambiguity
    Diagnostic labels imply a static, often permanent condition without clear timelines for onset, duration, or resolution. This ambiguity - Are you “disordered” now, forever, or temporarily? - traps clients in a disempowering “patient” identity, hinders progress toward a healed state, and causes iatrogenic harm by pathologizing normal fluctuations. It also drives treatment without end, “A client cured is a customer lost.”

22. Obsession with Trauma/Pathology
    Psychology’s over fixation on trauma as the primary explanation for mental health issues oversimplifies complex human experiences, pathologizing normal struggles within an ever more chaotic environment, and directly creating iatrogenic effects. The constant focus on trauma keeps clients stuck in “stress talk,” reinforces a victim narrative, has the potential to significantly disrupt relationships and hinders progress toward a healed state This fuels dissatisfaction, perpetuates ineffective methods, and ignores the overwhelming majority of actual lived experience, whilst offering no path to a better future.

23. The Fixation on Verbal & Cognitive Processing
    Mainstream psychology, particularly in its therapeutic applications, is overwhelmingly built upon the "talking cure", the central assumption that healing occurs primarily through cognitive insight and verbal articulation. This fixation is deeply problematic, as it can trap clients in cycles of "stress talk" without resolution and may even be iatrogenic by forcing them to re-process trauma verbally without addressing the underlying physiological state. Furthermore, this cognitive-verbal bias creates significant cultural and class barriers. The model implicitly favours clients who are highly educated, verbally articulate, whilst it systemically disadvantages or excludes individuals from cultures that express distress somatically or communally rather than through individualistic verbal confession, those who lack the specific educational background or social jargon required to "do therapy" correctly, populations that are less verbal for any reason (e.g., children, those with different neurotypes), and men.

24. The Iatrogenic Harm Problem
    The extent of iatrogenic harm caused by psychological interventions is not known. While studies suggest that a notable minority of clients (e.g., 10-20% in some contexts) may experience adverse effects, the precise prevalence is unclear due to under-reporting, varying definitions, and the complexity of distinguishing iatrogenic harm from underlying conditions or external factors. It is unknown to what extent the methods themselves are the cause due to research bias and institutional capture, nor what effects on society at large the uncritical adoption of psychology itself may have caused.

25. Harmful Influence through Entertainment & Media
    Psychology, amplified by all forms of media, has deeply infiltrated public consciousness, encouraging self-diagnosis, normalising public abreaction, and creating a victim mindset that pathologies normal interactions and strains relationships. Concepts like micro aggressions and oversimplified disorder labels leads to seeing pathology everywhere, causing iatrogenic harm by fostering self-victimization and mistrust (e.g., labelling harmless interactions as narcissistic). This creates an erosive spiral into ever more chronic stress, and ever more disturbed behaviour as disturbed behaviour becomes not only normalised, but actively celebrated and rewarded, which results in even more psychology being applied.

26. Fostering a Culture of Pathologized Fragility and Social Disconnection
    Psychology has created a societal culture of over-pathologization, eroded resilience, and fragmented social bonds, directly furling the mental health crisis. By labelling normal emotions like sadness or stress as disorders, psychology convinces people they’re inherently flawed, driving self-diagnosis and a victim mindset (e.g., 60% of young adults believe they have a disorder, per 2024 surveys). This undermines resilience by promoting dependency on professional intervention, fostering learned helplessness. It also fractures relationships by encouraging mistrust, directly causing family estrangement. These iatrogenic effects inflate the mental health crisis, rather than alleviating it.

27. The Black Box of the Therapeutic Relationship
    Psychology has accumulated a wealth of data showing that the therapeutic relationship is crucial, but a lacks an agreed-upon model for how or why it works, indicating a lack of understanding of its own core process. This leads to the misattribution of positive outcomes to ineffective and potentially iatrogenic methods and techniques rather than to the actual causes, which may be found in the non-understood dynamics of the therapeutic relationship (people magic) instead.

28. Failure to Address Spiritual Issues
    Psychology’s secular, science-driven focus often sidesteps spiritual concerns, leaving a void for clients seeking meaning, purpose, or existential answers. The field’s emphasis on measurable outcomes and biological or cognitive frameworks struggles to engage with deeply personal spiritual needs, alienating those who find therapy disconnected from their beliefs. As a result, there’s a growing societal trend where people are returning to religious institutions for community, moral guidance, and spiritual fulfilment. This shift reflects psychology’s failure to integrate spirituality holistically, pushing clients toward faith-based alternatives that offer a sense of transcendence and belonging psychology lacks.

29. Inability to Integrate Non-Conscious or Transpersonal Phenomena
    Flowing from its strictly reductionist materialistic paradigm and lack of clear definitions for consciousness, psychology fundamentally fails to engage with the non-verbal, unconscious, or transpersonal realms of human experience. This failure has relegated even the investigation of foundational concepts, like those explored by Jung, to the fringe. It has created a field that is unequipped to deal with the data emerging from non-ordinary states of consciousness, whilst at the same time, the recent resurgence in psychedelics as a 'magic fix' for depression and anxiety—without a conceptual framework to handle the 'why' and 'how'—demonstrates the field's inability to address the complete human experience

30. The Soul Problem
    The field of psychology carries the name “the study of the soul,” but it does not study the soul. This perfectly encapsulates and demonstrate the core problem of a lack of a cohesive framework, the inability to define concepts, which causes the impossibility of creating meaningful research from which actionable methods may flow. Attempting to operate from a strictly reductionist materialistic paradigm has removed the soul from psychology.

Conclusion: The 100 Year Failed Experiment

A hundred years ago, there existed ~500 psychologists. Today, psychology permeates the entire society, media, education, healthcare, military, tech, and governance, with billions in annual investment and a mushrooming psychology economy. At the same time as spending and engagement has proliferated, the problems with mental health have not decreased, but increased in parallel. This increase in mental non-health is apparent in general statistics, but also in the stress of ever more fractured societal landscapes, with rising crime, drug abuse, violence and polarisation.

Based on this, we may conclude that Psychology is a failed experiment in the quest to significantly improve human health, wealth and happiness.

Actionable Solutions To The Problem of Psychology

I recognize and deeply respect the dedication of honest researchers and honest practitioners, as well as the courage of clients, and the deep interest by society at large to understand more about themselves.

My critique is designed to begin discussing the problems in the underlying concepts of psychology itself, in the hope of improving outcomes and contributing actionable solutions in order to benefit individuals, families, and society at large.

What is required is to understand that Psychology as it currently operates cannot be expected to solve the problem of the human being itself.

In order to understand human beings, a paradigm shift is required which places the human being firmly at the heart of all scientific enquiry, as the human being is the lens through which all science is conducted.

It is thereby proposed to shift to Paradigm 6, where the study of endecology (from Greek, endeka, the number 11) is the first priority.

In practice, this means:

Short Term Solution (Actionable Now)

Modern Stress Management

If every practitioner and every client were to adopt a simple Modern Stress Management program, outcomes would improve immediately and regardless of the topic under investigation.

Improvements would be measurable in these particularly important key areas:

• Practitioner Exhaustion/Burnout
• Client Satisfaction/Engagement
• Therapeutic Relationship
• Actionable Home Continuation
• Reaching Therapeutic Goals Faster

Applying Modern Stress Management is instantly actionable, non-disruptive to established systems and practices, and very easy to learn.

Putting both practitioners and clients into better physical, mental and emotional states results directly in better results.

General adoption of Modern Stress Management creates a fruitful field of research with measurable outcomes and new discoveries to be made in practical application.

Mid Term Solutions

• Re-focus research to the core areas of the therapeutic process, which is the therapeutic relationship.
• Widen the lens from trauma to include all the other forms of significant life events which shape behaviour.
• Re-focus research on the Star Events to establish a baseline of endecological functioning for the human mind.
• Widen the lens from the reductionist materialist paradigm and start a discussion on how to put the soul back into psychology.
• Adopt the Modern Energy Chart to begin the study of emotions.

Long Term Solutions

• Create a philosophical framework which clearly defines what the mind of a human being is, and how this field brings about a measurable increase in health, wealth and happiness to the citizens it serves.
• Built upon this philosophical framework, develop clearly defined concepts which are going to be researched.
• Develop actionable methods for the citizens which are scientifically sound and proven to increase health, wealth and happiness.
• Improve interdisciplinary research and communication across the fields pertaining to body, mind, energy body (Third Field), to contribute to the understanding of the human totality.

Silvia Hartmann

Author, “Paradigm 6: The New Philosophy of Love & Logic”

Founder, The Guild of Energists The GoE