Distant healing, psychics and RTE's Morning Ireland were strongly criticised at the Psychological Society of Ireland's annual conference. Mr Paul O'Donoghue, a psychologist with the Central Remedial Clinic, Dublin, said charlatanism might be defined as the "profession of expertise which one does not possess". Distant healing was a practice which claims it can effectively treat a wide range of conditions from dermatitis to cancer.
Mr O'Donoghue said one centre advertised distant healing at a cost of £20 for an individual and £40 for a family. The only "evidence" produced as to its efficacy were letters of praise from satisfied customers, he said. "This is pseudoscience. This would never constitute acceptable evidence in science as it is normally practised . . . as the old adage warns, buyer beware."
He told the conference of a client he saw recently who had attended a distance healer and was given advice via a "supposed spirit" of some long-dead Indian personage. Such practices were outrageous and constituted an affront to both users of the service and mainstream practitioners. "During the summer of 1997 I was taken aback to hear, on Morning Ireland, lengthy presentations and discussion on the visitation of an alleged poltergeist to a house in Galway. That this item should command space on the airwaves in the body of a serious news programme first thing in the morning appalled me." As for astrology, the idea of planets moving through constellation in such a way as to influence earthly affairs was patently ridiculous, he said. Planets were local bodies and did not, in any meaningful way, move through constellations.
Mr O'Donoghue said there were problems in mainstream areas also. The facilitated communication movement in the United States had resulted in a spate of litigation following the revelation by a number of facilitators that their severely autistic or disabled charges were suddenly communicating, and were claiming to be sexually abused. Facilitated communication involves the facilitator supporting the arm of a person who does not have sufficient control to type.
It had been clearly demonstrated that in the vast majority of cases it was the facilitator, not the facilitated, who was producing the message, he said. "It is important to note that the facilitators truly believed that they were facilitating messages from their clients."
Alien abduction stories had become so common, particularly in the US, that they hardly raised an eyebrow, said Mr O'Donoghue. This "abduction" happened as a person was going off to sleep or waking up, he told The Irish Times. It was a natural phenomenon, a hallucination. The difficulty with intervening in any of these cases was that the targets of the criticism were often involved in systems that could not be refuted by common sense or science, he said.
Scepticism was not synonymous with cynicism, he told delegates. "Positive criticism and debate are healthy and are encouraged in science and psychology. There is an onus on us (psychologists) to engage actively in such activities, to promote our field honestly and openly and to encourage good and ethical practice. We also have a duty to inform the public."