As a distinctly un-scientific (and proud of it) practitioner of the unprovable craft of counselling/therapy, whose position has always been that science is the least appropriate way of understanding the struggles and joys of being human, one piece of news caught my eye that both saddened and encouraged me. Under the self-explanatory headline “Cage life may drive lab animals so insane that experiments are invalid” the article explained how scientists began to study the animals upon which most clinical trials are inflicted, at night, when the lights were switched off in the labs. The animals, mostly rodents, displayed repetitive compulsive behaviours, such as cage-scratching and bar-chewing, which are called stereotypies. On further study, they realised that such symptoms were linked with clear signs of brain damage, associated with insanity.

It is undoubtedly sad that so many animals are driven mad in our search for self-development and knowledge. What’s encouraging is that we’ve finally begun noticing it. When discussing this with my wise old friend John, he caustically remarked that it doesn’t necessarily make the experiments invalid; after all, for most of us humans, we are driven mad by living in this society in some way or another. With suicide the primary cause of death among young men between 18-25, he has a point.

What this piece of news drove home to me is that scientists are human, too. Fallible. Unpapal. The body of knowledge that they possess is undoubtedly driven by, at its core, the pure motive to know; but examined objectively, it is only as consistent and thorough a discourse as the number of ideas that have occurred to individual scientists, who have, in turn, attracted funding to be followed through.

If someone hasn’t thought of it, and been politically clever enough to attract funding to prove their thesis, it doesn’t become scientific fact. The gaps that leaves in our knowledge are many. The scientist who had the bright idea of setting up the infra-red camera at night, to see how his institutionalised charges behaved, when the cats were away, obviously was unusual: he must have liked mice.

Not a trait that is particularly useful when one’s drive for knowledge depends on precisely the opposite: distancing oneself from the suffering of sentient beings, quelling all unease at the sight of, say, a human ear grafted onto a mouse’s back, or watching them die of tumours or dementia or poisoning. His insights have opened up a Pandora’s box of implications and doubt, and a good thing it is too.

Too much academic “scientific” psychology is based on “rats and statistics” – studying the behaviour of humans and identifying the common traits among us – i.e. the lowest common denominator. Perhaps psychotherapy lies a little too much at the other extreme, only seeking the unique potential in each person, at the expense of acknowledging the biological, political, and environmental constraints with which we have to work; but, for a starting point for healing, the poetic/artistic/individualistic perspective is, by far, the more preferable.

Scientists have made a few other discoveries recently, that seem weirdly late, in that one would have supposed that they would have been made in the 19th, not the 21st century. Elephants, for example. We all learned when we were at school that there are two species of elephant: the African and Indian. Wrong. There are three. In Africa, they have only discovered this year, there are two distinct species, the African Savannah elephant and the African Forest elephant; the two are so markedly different genetically that they cannot interbreed.

In another development, a scientist, who sang in a choir beside the organ when she was a girl, remembered the shudder in the air when the lowest notes rumbled out from the pipes, so low that she could not discern a pitch. When she was working with elephants she felt the same shudder, but could hear nothing; and so she got some recording equipment, speeded up the tape, and discovered that elephants use infrasound, below the range of human hearing, to talk to each other, especially over long distances, as that range of sound travels many miles, similar to whalesong underwater.

At last, there was a scientific explanation for the anecdotal evidence that elephant herds would stop in their tracks simultaneously with other herds many miles away, and change direction together, in parallel. Not magic, but something we hadn’t discovered until now.

Why should it matter so much that science is only as advanced as the fallible human beings who practice it? That intuition, human experience, market forces, politics, apparently random coincidence and luck influence it as much as any other field of knowledge? Because we place an inordinate amount of trust in science, above all other realms of wisdom.

It is only since science has confirmed the existence of the greenhouse effect, and the link between forestation and burning carbon fuel, that some limited, perhaps ineffective, definitely overdue global action has been made to curb pollution. Yet there have been many who have argued passionately on the issue for decades; but because their reasoning was intuitive, poetic, instinctive, “irrational”, they were ignored by politicians.

I’m not saying science is “bad” – that’s falling into the trap of seeing things in black and white, rational vs irrational, scientific vs sentimental terms. The more science takes note of the power of the mind, the “soul” of the objects of its study, the healthier things are; for example there’s interesting research going on about why placebos work.

Similarly, from a “new age” perspective, the more that therapists learn from scientists about how the mind works, and cease to treat all developments in psychopharmacology with a knee-jerk suspicion, the better. I have heard too many people say with disdain that they’d never take anti-depressants if they were feeling low; and yet as they’re telling me this, they’re taking a deep lungful of tobacco smoke. Nicotine is the gateway drug to recreational drug abuse; according to recent research, nicotine addicts become used to the behavioural buzz of controlling emotions by their own actions, and the brain adapts accordingly.

Nicotine actually enhances the effects of other addictive substances and behaviours. Those who don’t smoke, and don’t suck all their feelings back into themselves in lungfuls, are less likely to get into other addictions. And addictions are the main way we perpetuate our depression, while fooling ourselves that we’re alleviating it.

It’s madness; we are becoming as mad as the mice upon which we’ve been basing our science for generations. But at least we – and I mean the “we” that includes scientists – are beginning to notice it. It’s about time.