There are several problems with your post, I’ll pick a couple and try to quickly go over them:

the definition for social anxiety in one country could be considered the definition for agoraphobia in another

That’s not true, someone with social anxiety will have problems being on a video call with other people, someone with agoraphobia not necessarily.

Simon Whistler give a very debunked rundown on psychology ten years into his career

His career is not that of a psychologist, so not sure what the longevity of his career matters here.

the highly rigged Stanford Prison Experiment, which has never been able to be replicated with the same results.

That’s how science works, someone makes an experiment and gets a result, others either validate or get a different result, and when science has a consensus it advances. Like you have mentioned here, the consensus is that the Standford Prison Experiment results are non-reproductible therefore it’s not accepted by the scientific community.

Modern psychology is littered with these false rules and expectations.

You seem to be expecting a 100% cause-effect response, which is not how biological sciences work, the same is true of medicine for example.

the Milgram Experiment

AFAIK the Milgeam experiment has been reproduced several times.

Stockholm Syndrome

Which is not recognized as a condition. I’m not sure what your point was here, it’s like someone criticizing chemistry because of the atom model an the ether theory.

you can point to and say "if conventional psychology was right, this event in my life would’ve never happened how it did?**

That’s not how it works, what you’re suggesting is called anecdotal evidence, and you would find the same problems in any other science, especially biological. For example, I personally know dozens of people who’ve smoked all of their life and don’t have lung cancer, that is NOT evidence against cigarettes causing lung cancer, just because some amount of people don’t get it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a cause-effect relationship.

There is a rule

It’s not a rule, it’s a theory

in the field of psychology

It’s not from psychology but from game theory, which is mostly mathematics.

called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It says that if you question two people a certain way, they will be incentivized to spill beans and betray each other.

That’s not what it says at all, it makes no prediction on what people would choose, it’s a dilemma because choosing one option is Bettie for you but the other is better for everyone.

Me and a friend were once arrested because he got into a fight because someone cheated on his sister and I sped him away. The officers tried inflicting the Prisoner’s Dilemma on us, but we’re both open books, to the point where we knew the whole point was we were willing to face whatever comes. The cops had nothing. They let us free.*

So it was not a Prisoner’s dilemma, if it had been if you both had talked you would both have served a sever sentence, if neither had talked you both would have served a lower sentence. There’s no option where both walk free in the prisoner dilemma, either only one walks or you both serve sentence, that’s where the dilemma comes from, if both keeping quiet gets everyone free there’s no dilemma.

I think you have some misconceptions about psychology in general. E.G. you name Stanford Prison, and then explain that it has not been replicated. The act of trying (and failing) to replicate those results is psychological research, and then you reference this research as argument against psychology. Also, you seem to suggest like psychology is deterministic (A happens to someone, so they react in way B), while it is a probabilistic science (if A happens to someone, the chance that they will react in way B increases by X% to Y% with a probability of 95%).

One comment on your example: The prisoner’s dilemma (the way I know it) is not a psychological, but a game theoretical concept and is usually applied with the assumption of rational actors a one-shot interaction, which means that it doesn’t apply to your situation with your friend.

In general, it seems that your disdain for psychology stems from laypersons’ broad and biased understanding of psychological concepts.

Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist.

Ok, I’ve actually debated with myself whether to post a comment on this question or not. There is a lot to unpack on this question, and as a matter of fact, Lemmy might not be the most appropriate space to talk about such a complex topic at length. I will try my best to answer in a balanced and rational manner. I’m a psychologist, have read all those experiments and papers, and I can say that maybe there are other points of view and deeper understanding you can approach from on these topics before casting such a wide negative opinion on a whole field of science.

Just to point something out of the gate, psychology is indeed one of the most misrepresented sciences in popular science communication. It is very difficult to explain in lay terms that what we know, experimentally, is from a really recent and young science. Psychology only really took off at the turn of the twentieth century, and just like most sciences, we have changed so much in the past 20 years alone that the public has had a very hard time keeping up with what happens in academia. If you were to scrutinize chemistry back when psychology was barely making its first steps, from today’s perspective, you would think they were all wackos. We didn’t even had a coherent model of the atom, radiation wasn’t even known as a phenomenon and Pluto hadn’t been dreamed, much less observed by the human eye. Look at medicine in the 19th century and by today’s standard they were all butchers. But the point is that, they weren’t malicious. Scientists were still trying to act in good faith with the limited knowledge available at the time, while still trying to expand said knowledge.

As a result, someone like Simon Whistle—who is not a psychologist but educated in business and law, and just a comedy media communicator—is probably working entirely on popular science’s musings of already old science papers. Because that’s what science does. We change what we affirm to be, probably, the truth as new experiences, ideas and theories are accrued in the collective understanding of reality. So, are there things that psychologist has been wrong about? Yes, absolutely. That’s what science is. But changing the general masses ideas about it is an entirely different matter, and it goes at its own rhythm and speed.

One of the barriers is that psychology and human behavior and conscious, as well as subconscious thought, are things everyone has their own experiences and opinions about. Thus processing scientific experiences that clash or contradict an individual’s anecdotal observations is challenging. Because, as with any science, nothing can be entirely deterministically predicted. Even physics, which we understand rather well, still has a margin of error and wide possibility for failure on predictions. Reality is simply too complex and has way too many variables for any single event to be predicted with absolute certainty. So, you will find experiences that seem to contradict scientific knowledge from psychology. But the truth is there are actually very few formal scientific laws in psychology.

Just to address your example, there is no prisoner’s dilemma rule. It is not even from psychology. It is a game theory thought experiment. As such, it doesn’t actually predict at all what people are going to do if placed on such circumstance, it’s just an exercise to reason about what would a rational person do on different circumstances. By definition, on a formal prisoner’s dilemma, the prisoners are defined to be guilty of some crime. So, I really doubt you were put in a prisoner’s dilemma by the cops.

Just to reiterate. No, psychology is not littered with false rules and expectations. The public’s perception about psychology is, indeed, littered with misrepresentations that claim that psychology has rules and expectations. Trust me, we don’t have none of those you claim that are rules.

Finally, as for diagnosis. There is no per country definitions of mental illness. There are two comprehensive bodies of diagnosis. One is the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) managed by the WHO (World Health Organization) that standardizes and defines criteria for all medical diagnosis internationally. Including neurological, and psychiatric illnesses. Then there’s the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) managed by the APA (American Psychiatric Association) that standardizes diagnosis criteria of only mental disorders that was, until recently, a US only academic endeavor. There is overlap, which may cause this confusion that you seem to have. But they have radically different purposes and uses. Mainly, the DSM does a greater effort to contain psychiatric specific information regarding mental disorders that are not and probably will never be part of the ICD. While the ICD is far more international, comprehensive and integrated standard.

But that said, diagnosis is a very personal thing, think back about the confusion the public had about COVID during the pandemic when we knew so little. Even something as common as the influenza, every person manifest and experiences wildly different levels of severity and combinations of symptoms. For a myriad of variables, factors and reasons, some people die of the flu, some people have a mild nose discomfort for a while and are never aware that they were infected. This is the challenge that doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists face every day. As a teacher of mine liked to say, “the difference between your anecdotal experience and science, is that your anecdotal experience gives you one data point, a scientists ideally works with millions of data points”. You had your one anecdote, a doctor (or any other science based health worker) sees the experience of thousands of patients, and would have read about millions of other’s experiences just by the time they finish their basic education.

Nice try, ghost of L Ron Hubbard

I’m not sure if it counts, but I’ve never fallen for a scam, and I’m good enough and quick enough at spotting them that my friends use me as a scam detector. I recently had someone DM me on Tumblr telling me how much my art inspired them and that they wanted a collab, and I immediately got suspicious because it was worded in an odd way. Went and checked the profile and found out it was part of a credit card scam ring that recently moved to Tumblr from Instagram.