> Much of clinical medicine is not done the way that you claim.

It was only a comparison, not an absolute claim, and regardless of how sloppy medical research gets, its practitioners can be called out on the carpet if they violate scientific standards. There's no similar behavioral standard in psychology, where absolutely anything goes -- in Recovered Memory Therapy, for example, psychologists persuaded clients that their fantasies were recollections of real, suppressed events, and many innocent people were charged with imaginary crimes before the public and legal outcry forced psychologists to reconsider their own fantasies.

The difference? Practices like Recovered Memory Therapy are the norm in psychology, and even though many such things been debunked, psychologists are free to practice them if they want. The reason is that psychological ideas are almost never proven to be bunk -- practices tend to be abandoned because of public skepticism rather then scientific study.

> As to not being able to study the mind scientifically, that is patently false.

Okay, fine. Post a link to a picture of PTSD. Or Asperger Syndrome. Or any of the other popular mental illnesses. When you do, I promise to send you a picture of cancer, or the structures responsible for Alzheimer's, or an electron micrograph of common cold viruses.

We can take a picture of common cold viruses, but we can't offer a cure. The difference between the common cold and PTSD is that, even though we know what causes it, doctors freely acknowledge that we are unable to offer a treatment for the common cold. As to PTSD, no on knows what causes it, a sufficiently prepared person can pretend to be suffering from it (or the reverse), and there is no clinically validated treatment. But this doesn't prevent psychologists from offering treatments that have not been vetted by controlled clinical trials.

> The mind is a computer program running on the hardware of the brain, and just as any computer program can be reverse engineered scientifically, so can the human mind.

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. We have no idea how the brain produces the results it does. We can't imitate it, describe it in a scientific way, or predict what it will do next. If what you said were true, experimental psychologists would be able to tell clinical psychologists what they can and cannot do, based on solid science. But this is a fantasy with no connection to reality.

> ... On the other hand, Behaviorism is still useful for some things. E.g., training your dog to perform tricks.

Yes, but that's not an explanation, it's a description. Descriptions aren't enough for science. I could say, "there are points of light in the night sky", but that's not science, it's accounting. If I dare to offer an explanation -- "those points of light are distant suns like our own" -- I have crossed the threshold of science, because my explanation can be tested and possibly falsified.

Psychologists describe, they don't try to explain, and they don't craft testable theories. This is why there's no theoretical core that defines psychology (and on which different psychologists agree), and that could control the behavior of psychological practitioners.

> Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology are the same department at MIT. This does not indicate a move away from Psychology, however.

Wake up and smell the coffee -- psychology is in the process of being abandoned as a serious approach to brain studies, gradually replaced by neuroscience and other quantitative approaches. Just look around with an open mind.

In the final report at the end of the Stapel Affair:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-repo...

The conclusion was "... three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true.

The commissions—one for each of the universities where Stapel has worked—concluded that "from the bottom to the top there was a general neglect of fundamental scientific standards and methodological requirements." That climate made it possible for Stapel's fraud to go undetected for many years, the report says."

Now think -- how do so many incompetents get away with so much for so long? The answer is that psychology is not a science.