The total failure of positivism in clinical psychology is what resulted in the current state of affairs, pushing for more of it won't bring about any imagined golden age of psychology, only further `the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time' [0]. Positivism is a flawed doctrine and at this point should be considered nothing but dangerous dogma -- at least in the case of psychiatry.
[0]: I believe it was Mark Fisher that said something to this end but I digress.
By any objective standard - suicide rates, lost days of work, self harm, substance abuse, murder, etc. - we are worse off or no better today than in 1960 when we were supposedly emotionally stunted and oppressed. Every extra dollar spent on psychology/psychiatry since then has been a waste.
That's not even touching on the crisis of reproducibility that has made a mockery of the entire field and put it somewhere between catholic confessionals and recreational drug use in terms evidence based outcomes.
You brought very little in defense of positivism, so I'm at a lose as to what I can respond with there. What I will say is that, by relying on a macroscopic outcome and declaring that any increase must be caused by the psychiatric field, you ignore the very obvious fact, something positivism constantly struggles with, that the world has changed since the 60's. Is the rise of social media the fault of psychiatry? Is underemployment? How about Fortress Europe?
By most microscopic measurements, clinical psychology is a cure that does help the majority of patients. Both in the long-term and short-term.
That is where we disagree.
Clinical psychology makes people feel better about themselves in the short term, long term there is a distinct lack of evidence of positive outcomes. And a lot of unrepeatable experiments that show positive trends which disappear when looked at more closely.
I used them, they were great for scoring high quality drugs. All I needed to do was memorize a list of symptoms, regurgitate them and get referred to a specialist and do the same again.
Which is why as an adult I find the whole area of psychiatry to be bunk. And that's supposedly the harder of the psychological sciences. If you can't deal with false positives you have no place in medicine.
If I came in to a doctors office and demanded they reattach my missing leg, while clearly having two legs I'd be met (rightly) with skepticism, somehow when it comes to the mind it doesn't work that way. Surely someone would have figured out a way to measure the missing serotonin by now?