Psychology, The Church Substitute

As some of you know, I was a therapist at the Tennessee Psychiatric Hospital for 3 1/2 years before quitting and beginning a new career in construction. Later, due to the amount of ministry load I had along with my construction responsibilities, I quit construction and went full time in the ministry without salary or support simply because I had no time left to do anything else.

Now it is 28 years later. I have learned a few things during that time. I am going to share some of them here but before I do I would like to make it clear to the more anal readers that these are my observations and opinions and are not the result of "scientific studies" or "statistical analysis."

Let me begin by saying Psychology is a newbie on the scenes of mankind. It has to prove itself. I see some good and useful things coming from psychology but these things probably could be coming from other disciplines if psychology did not exist.

The classical studies that were taught to me when I was an undergraduate and in Psyc 101 are not really taught anymore. The first study is one in which 10 people with disorders were followed along with 10 others as a control group. One group was given "therapy" while the other was not. The ones who did not receive therapy recovered at the same rate as the ones who received therapy. The verdict? Therapy was not necessary.

The second study took a group of similar individuals and found that one individual who received therapy actually did better and went further towards "self actualization" than anybody else did. The problem is that one individual in the group also did much worse than anybody else did. So for one person, therapy worked and helped. But for the other, therapy lead to a downfall and seemed to be at the expense of others who did well.

These were, as I said, classical studies. Replicated and verifiable. What I have to say today is simply my opinion and observation over the years. I will write more about this tonight.