At the beginning of this chapter I suggested that astrological predictions provide a fool’s-gold standard against which to evaluate the predictions achieved by psychiatric diagnoses. We are now in a position to apply this standard. While diagnoses clearly are superior to star signs, this superiority is not striking and is only evident when large groups are studied. When the focus is on the individual, the clinician wanting to predict what will happen to her patients in the years ahead would do almost as well by resorting to horoscopes.
