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This chapter argues that misconceptions concerning the human mind are legion even among highly intelligent and well-educated members of the general public, and that these misconceptions can interfere with effective treatment planning and execution. These misconceptions can impede effective coping with everyday life problems outside of the therapy room and contribute to a search for futile solutions to psychological distress. It is further argued that the best remedy for combating these misconceptions in clinical settings is straightforward: education. Psychotherapists must often do more than administer efficacious treatments. In many instances, they must also function as good teachers of psychology, disabusing their clients of misconceptions concerning the human mind and imparting correct information in its stead.

To determine whether opiate consumption is affected by laboratory housing, individually caged and colony rats were given a choice between water and progressively more palatable morphine-sucrose solutions. The isolated rats drank significantly more of the opiate solution, and females drank significantly more than males. In the experimental phase during which morphine-sucrose solution consumption was greatest, the isolated females drank five times as much, and the isolated males sixteen times as much morphine (mg/kg) as the colony females and males respectively.

Why do so many otherwise intelligent patients and therapists pay considerable sums for products and therapies of alternative medicine, even though most of these either are known to be useless or dangerous or have not been subjected to rigorous scientific testing? The author proposes a number of reasons this occurs: (1) Social and cultural reasons (e.g., many citizens' inability to make an informed choice about a health care product; anti-scientific attitudes meshed with New Age mysticism; vigorous marketing and extravagant claims; dislike of the delivery of scientific biomedicine; belief in the superiority of "natural" products); (2) psychological reasons (e.g., the will to believe; logical errors of judgment; wishful thinking, and "demand characteristics"); (3) the illusion that an ineffective therapy works, when actually other factors were at work (e.g., the natural course or cyclic nature of the disease; the placebo effect; spontaneous remission; misdiagnosis). The author concludes by acknowledging that when people become sick, any promise of a cure is beguiling. But he cautions potential clients of alternative treatments to be suspicious if those treatments are not supported by reliable scientific research (criteria are listed), if the "evidence" for a treatment's worth consists of anecdotes, testimonials, or self-published literature, and if the practitioner has a pseudoscientific or conspiracy-laden approach, or promotes cures that sound "too good to be true."