🚀 go-pugleaf

Excellently put, Tim!

Leave it to a student from a professional school to put this discussion
in the proper perspective. Somehow, I get the feeling that the
navel-gazing and lack of perspective-taking that so often plagues the
psych research community is *partly* caused by the pressures to
constantly defend the worth of what they are doing so they can eat more
than Top Ramen for dinner at night, and not have to put their kids up
for adoption. Economic pressures hardly contribute to a sound
epistemology of psychological research.

"You don't understand. This finger-tapping protocol is the first of its
kind! I've gotta make a poster to present this before the fiscal year
ends!" Uh, yeah.

The groovy thing about meteorology is that you don't see too many
meteorologists shouting on TV or in magazines about how their model of
forecasting "X" effect is true on any given day for any given place on
the planet. Why are we content to just hear about this city, this week,
and not demand some formula that is true for all time? Why don't we
expect the same degree of assurance and simplicity of weathercasters as
we do of clinicians? And weather is *tangible material*--just a wee bit
easier to study than a basketful of hypothetical constructs and
intervening variables such as "chemical imbalances" and "depression."

In any case, as Bob Dylan says, I don't need a weatherman to tell which
way the wind blows. Like increasing numbers of old-timer clinicians, I'm
headed for a private practice devoid of insurance ties. Will I one day
wind up in jail or on the street for malpractice--practicing Rogerian or
analytic therapy? God help me.

-Jason S.