Is it normal to be skeptical of modern psychology's take on suicide?
I've been reading a lot online and listening to classmates and professors talk about modern psychology's supposed understanding of human nature. Why people do the things we do. What our needs and motivations are. How we feel. And most importantly, how each of us is "supposed to" behave. Or rather, what the right types of behaviors for given life experiences are. The more I read the proposals and analyses of modern psychology, the less confidence I have that its proponents understand reasonably the nature of the human brain, and how this, together with life experiences, translates into behavior. I appreciate that psychologists use statistics to weed out chance occurrences in their models of human behavior, but what I have a lot of trouble with is many psychologists' assumption that they understand the motivations of individuals--why a given person choose to do something, or reacts to something in a particular way.
Even worse than the presumption of knowledge about why people choose to act certain ways, often modern psychology doesn't just model associations, but it then imposes moral evaluations on certain beliefs or behaviors. A huge social-professional taboo, for instance, is some patients' (or private citizens') decision to end their own lives. I have almost never read an article by a professional psychologist acknowledging that it's possible for someone to make such a decision while in control of her/his own mental faculties. There is this assumption in psychology that the suicidal must be "mentally ill." And there's no challenging that assumption. It simply is true, regardless what many people assert about their own awareness of their own minds.
Often it seems to me modern psychology is a type of new religion. Except psychologists are empowered to involuntarily incarcerate citizens. For our own good, of course. Which makes me wonder just what the value of "freedom" is if humans can't make certain decisions about our own bodies and lives--decisions that don't deprive others of their own body-ownership and lives.
So does anyone else feel skeptical of many/some of the so-called confident understandings about human motivations modern psychologists put forth?