In order for someone to answer this, I think you need to come up with some sort of definition what "actual", "useful" and "valid" actually means here in this context.
Lots of stuff from psychology been successfully applied to treat people in therapy with various issues, but is that "valid" enough for you? Something tells me you already know some people are being helped in therapy one way or another, yet it seems to me those might not be "useful" enough, since I don't clearly understand what would be "useful" to you if not those examples.
I am not entirely convinced that one needs to study psychology at university in order to be a therapist. Actually what I seem to see around me is that different people need different kinds of therapies. Maybe some need to talk to someone with a university degree in "psychology", others just need to talk to someone with empathy. Or someone neutral. Or they need faith. Or sport. Even homeopathy, if it helps (and knowing that the whole concept is bullshit). Whatever helps, helps.
Still anecdotal, but the people I know who studied psychology were not great at "maths". Like it's not the first choice of people who are good with science. And again in my experience, those people have a tendency to not be extremely good at understanding whether or not they can conclude anything from their numbers. Added to the fact that it's very far from "hard science", it doesn't inspire confidence in whatever is claimed to be "scientifically proven".
Then there are the psychologists who make you pass tests for some jobs. I have had that a few times in different circumstances, and it always baffled me how after asking me a few "weird" questions they would feel entitled to tell me "who I am", as if they knew better than I did. Again not inspiring confidence.
So I always had a tendency to say "I think when it's trying to say something about an individual, it's probably bullshit. But if you can make statistics on a group of people, I guess there you can learn things". And then you see that even those famous experiments that were supposed to be exactly like that were bullshit.
I don't know what experience of therapy you've had in the past, but this is typically not how it works. People get better when a treatment is applied that is suitable to them as a person and the context, not sure where you'd get the whole "people get better no matter what treatment is applied", haven't been true in my experience.
What would be the equivalent of Newton's laws in psychology? Does such a thing exist? Or does the whole field just prove how complicated human beings are by being incapable of proving anything else (which in itself would be an interesting result, don't get me wrong)?
See also the replication crisis.
Frankly, you made up accusation of academics from nothing and without bothering to check what they generally say. You just made it up
> While every obedient participant reliably pressed the shock lever, they regularly neglected or ruined the other steps required to justify the shock.
Procedural violations here include things like asking the question while the person in the other room was still screaming.
In a situation where they know that they are in a controlled lab experiment.
And based on everyone I've met, and on Dan Ariely's own actions (1), I've concluded this one is true.
We all cheat a little from time to time.
Ex : for me, driving a few km/h above the speed limit is "cheating a little"
1 : https://www.businessinsider.com/dan-ariely-duke-fraud-invest...
His relationship with Jeffrey Epstein isn’t a good look either.
Mason Cooley