Housing Mobility and Adolescent Mental Health

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To me, this exchange in the Letters section of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) highlights grave difficulties that the fields of Psychology and Psychiatry experience with the critical examination of their basic constructs. These problems originate at least as far as Freud, whose work famously inspired Karl Popper to begin examining his 'problem of demarcation'—how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Psychology's continued reliance on (what Popper called) 'verificationism' and 'inductivism', and its concomitant failure to engage *critically* with its own contructs and theories, seem likely to me to lie at the heart of many problems it poses for society. Included in this would be the explosive growth of diagnostic categories like 'ADHD' (with concomitant overtreatment) and the so-called 'replication crisis' in Social Psychology. Below, I include a link to a PubMed Commons commentary, where I draw some of these connections in greater detail as they relate specifically to Dr. Kessler's reply. For the story of how Freud inspired Popper, please see Popper's "Realism and the Aim of Science" Ch 2 §§17–18, pp. 162–174. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25005663#cm25005663_16261

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