Previously in series:  Epistemic Viciousness

Robyn Dawes, author of one of the original papers from Judgment Under Uncertainty and of the book Rational Choice in an Uncertain World—one of the few who tries really hard to import the results to real life—is also the author of House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth.

From House of Cards, chapter 1:

The ability of these professionals has been subjected to empirical scrutiny—for example, their effectiveness as therapists (Chapter 2), their insight about people (Chapter 3), and the relationship between how well they function and the amount of experience they have had in their field (Chapter 4).  Virtually all the research—and this book will reference more than three hundred empirical investigations and summaries of investigations—has found that these professionals' claims to superior intuitive insight, understanding, and skill as therapists are simply invalid...

Remember Rorschach ink-blot tests?  It's such an appealing argument: the patient looks at the ink-blot and says what he sees, the psychotherapist interprets their psychological state based on this.  There've been hundreds of experiments looking for some evidence that it actually works.  Since you're reading this, you can guess the answer is simply "No."  Yet the Rorschach is still in use.  It's just such a good story that psychotherapists just can't bring themselves to believe the vast mounds of experimental evidence saying it doesn't work—

—which tells you what sort of field we're dealing with here.

And the experimental results on the field as a whole are commensurate.  Yes, patients who see psychotherapists have been known to get better faster than patients who simply do nothing.  But there is no statistically discernible difference between the many schools of psychotherapy.  There is no discernible gain from years of expertise.

And there's also no discernible difference between seeing a psychotherapist and spending the same amount of time talking to a randomly selected college professor from another field.  It's just talking to anyone that helps you get better, apparently.

In the entire absence of the slightest experimental evidence for their effectiveness, psychotherapists became licensed by states, their testimony accepted in court, their teaching schools accredited, and their bills paid by health insurance.

And there was also a huge proliferation of "schools", of traditions of practice, in psychotherapy; despite—or perhaps because of—the lack of any experiments showing that one school was better than another...