Five Things Psychologists Know But Can't Say Out Loud

A working psychologist describes the field's view of human nature as a window onto both the good and the uncomfortable, and shares five hard-won observations that clinicians rarely state plainly to the public — among them that most people who say they want to change are actually unwilling to pay the cost of changing, that the symptom is often protecting the patient, and that "insight" by itself almost never produces behavioural change. The framing: these aren't cynical, they're clinical.