Megacults, delusion, and the DSM

I hypothesise that the most excellent Chaplain Murray is baffled because certain apparent social norms and cultural narratives currently tend to resist and mask the fact that adults with imaginary friend are unequivocally mentally ill. No humanist chaplain wants to say so, but facing such realities is probably necessary to make any real difference to the mental health pandemic that plagues Western civilisation.

People have to find healthier ways to handle their mortality and lack of luck and success, and in so doing better protect themselves against further failure-inducing misinformation.

My position is not popular and is certainly not broadly regarded as socially acceptable, and so Chaplain Dr Murray has an understandable and common reservation about the idea that adults with imaginary friends are mentally ill if they're part of a megacult (religion):

As a philosopher and philosopher of science with some training in psychology and an AOS n the philosophy of psychology, I doubt that the DSMV is a correct representation of the real state of affairs. Like psychology itself, the DSM has some serious problems. Moreover, like all scientific resources, it is defeasible within the limits of the best experiments, methods, and data.

Note the reference to timely changes in the above APA information. One gets the impression that the eminent professoriate in charge of the DSM is aware there are social psychological issues around many of the handbook's current principles and positions. Yet the effect of the reproducibility crisis and the theory crisis (conceptual grounding by evidence and definition of concepts/terms in operationalisation) in psychological science (which to be fair, psychiatric neuroscience can disavow to some extent) is not yet corrected, and the premises of the basis of the stance of the DSM regarding faith and imaginary friends are, in my view, wrong, and are driven by inappropriate pragmatic and politically correct influence (that being said - the language used in the DSM regarding these issues is interesting in multiple ways in conceptual and inferential terms).

The DSM is not an immutable source of truth like the Bible is supposed to be (but of course the DSM beats the fictive screed of the Bible hands down), and it can be, and in this case is, wrong. I endorse optimistic metainduction about scientific theories, but I suspect that the DSM has been going in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons regarding the status of adults with imaginary omnipotent friends.

So while he has reservations, Chaplain Dr Murray also puts an associated problem with reception of the DSM most eloquently (and I look forward to reading his book):

If there is one thing that social scientists, social psychologists, and philosophers of science often have difficulty with, it is the intersection of normative and descriptive claims and assertions (and premises and arguments.) The DSM is - both by design and incidentally - part of what social psychology must model to understand properly what is happening with the psychologies of individuals in societies (social science is focused on groups, whereas social psychology is focused upon the psychology of individuals in social groups.)

The DSM is not just a snapshot of the state of the art in psychological (more specifically and correctly - psychiatric) science - it's a snapshot that is inappropriately influenced by politics and cultural pragmatism. Issues around cultural cohesion and social psychology are very complex, and the science is not as 'hard' as something like physics (and even in physics there are big disagreements about very well proven theories like quantum mechanics).

Cognitive bias, confirmation bias, p-hacking, HARKing, and underpowered experiments were serious problems for psychological science in the last two decades for very complex psychological and social psychological (and financial, methodological, structural, and other systemic) reasons. The science is still certainly worthwhile, and will continue to progress towards an even more powerful contribution to human epistemology. Yet there will be many hypotheses - and many conclusions - thrown out and revised along the way.

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