Toxic Psychology

Abstract

For some, especially those claiming benefit from counselling or others who have found clinical psychologists less harmful than medicationwielding psychiatrists, the idea that psychology might be toxic will seem odd. After all, is it not clinical psychology that has done its utmost to supplant and undermine the ubiquitous ‘medical model’ in psychiatry? Is it not to counselling that so many turn, either as directed by their General Practitioners or via the expert advice of a newspaper columnist with suitable letters after her name? Surely modern day psychology is the new alchemy, turning all it touches to gold and laughing at the physically constrained treatments of medicine and its offspring, psychiatry? I want to explore a less benign discourse of psychology, particularly clinical psychology, by examining some of the ways the discipline has embraced the post-industrial language of progress and the gloss of science in order to position its practitioners as, almost by definition, noble seekers after both truth and the general good.