{"id":115274,"date":"2018-07-30T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=115274"},"modified":"2018-07-24T12:29:32","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T11:29:32","slug":"another-crossroads-for-the-american-psychological-association","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/another-crossroads-for-the-american-psychological-association\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Crossroads for the American Psychological Association"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will votes next month mean continued progress toward redeeming the profession?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cAmerica happens to be my client. Americans are who I care about. I have no fondness for the enemy, and I don’t feel like I need to take care of their mental health<\/a> needs.\u201d <\/em>
\n\u2014 Bryce Lefever<\/a>,\u00a0former U.S. Navy clinical and SERE psychologist,\u00a0member of the APA\u2019s 2005 Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics<\/a> and National Security<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

23 Jul 2018 –<\/em> The President is a big fan of waterboarding<\/a>, and worse. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called torturers\u00a0\u201cpatriots.\u201d<\/a> New CIA Director Gina Haspel oversaw\u00a0torture<\/a> at the agency\u2019s infamous black sites. Chief of Staff John Kelly subjected Guantanamo detainees to\u00a0brutal treatment<\/a>. National Security Adviser John Bolton is notorious for dismissing\u00a0international law<\/a>. The list is incomplete, but it\u2019s sufficient to make one thing clear: for the Trump<\/a> White House, inhumanity awaits as soon as the right opportunity arises.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Source: Roy Eidelson<\/p><\/div>\n

This then is the political climate in which leaders of the American Psychological Association (APA) will meet next month in San Francisco at the annual convention. There they will hold two critical votes<\/a>, both with important ramifications for whether the APA will again\u00a0lose its way<\/a> and\u00a0stumble badly<\/a> when next confronted with the stark choice between do-no-harm ethics on the one hand and expediency and careerism on the other.<\/p>\n

The first resolution (known as \u201c35B\u201d) aims to allow military psychologists to return to clinical roles with prisoners at sites that operate in\u00a0violation<\/a> of international law, such as Guantanamo. To be clear, according to current APA\u00a0policy<\/a> approved with overwhelming support, it\u2019s already permissible for\u00a0independent<\/em>\u00a0psychologists (e.g., employed by the International Committee of the Red Cross) to provide mental health care to detainees, and for military<\/em>\u00a0psychologists (e.g., employed by the Department of Defense) to provide treatment to military personnel.<\/p>\n

In light of Guantanamo\u2019s\u00a0ugly history<\/a>\u00a0of abuse<\/a> and torture\u00a0in which military psychologists played\u00a0key roles<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0it\u2019s hard to fathom why any prisoner there would choose to confide in a psychologist whose primary duty is to the U.S. government<\/a>. Rather, there\u2019s good reason to think that the proposed return to these positions is less about the detainees\u2019 welfare than about the Pentagon\u2019s image and interests, while also serving to cover over a sordid legacy. At the same time, if approved, this resolution would eliminate any chance that the Defense Department might turn to\u00a0independent<\/em> trauma<\/a>– and torture-informed experts to support the detainees who remain.<\/p>\n

The second resolution (known as \u201c13D\u201d) seeks to remove the 2015\u00a0Hoffman Report<\/a> from the APA website. This independent 500-page report presents a detailed, evidence-based account of APA\u2019s missteps and ethical failures over several years \u2014 years during which association leaders secretly coordinated with government officials to support psychologists\u2019 involvement in the Bush Administration\u2019s often-ruthless detention and interrogation operations. However, these troubling findings have led some of the military psychologists named in the report \u2014 along with their proponents \u2014 to respond with defamation lawsuits in three jurisdictions, a formal ethics complaint and more threats of the same, and now a call for public suppression of the report itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ironically, the resolution\u2019s sponsors argue that removal of the Hoffman Report is necessary to defend the profession\u2019s \u201cdo no harm\u201d principles. But that claim is seriously off-target. Psychology\u2019s fundamental ethical commitments are much more effectively fortified in a very different way: through transparency so that current and future psychologists can better learn the painful lessons of this tragic period in U.S. psychology.<\/p>\n

Driven largely by a faction of military psychologists, both of these\u00a0resolutions<\/a> are seemingly audacious attempts to take us back in time, to erase from record and memory<\/a> the reality that psychologists were essential cogs in the Bush Administration\u2019s shameful and misguided war-on-terror torture machine. Approval of these proposals could also open the door wide to the prospect of renewed participation in \u201cdark side\u201d operations, this time on behalf of a president who\u2019s already demonstrated his fondness for no-holds-barred brutality.<\/p>\n

At their upcoming meeting, one therefore hopes that APA\u2019s Council of Representatives \u2014 including those members who are more recent additions to the leadership<\/a> and perhaps less familiar with the relevant history \u2014 will see through the various self-serving and deceptive arguments behind \u201c35B\u201d and \u201c13D.\u201d For each resolution, a \u201cNo\u201d vote is a vote for continued progress toward redeeming the profession.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Roy Eidelson is a member of the TRANSCEND Network<\/a> and was a member of the American Psychological Association for over 25 years, prior to his resignation. He is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting<\/a>, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility<\/a>, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology<\/a>. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 psychologytoday.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 Jul 2018 – The President is a big fan of waterboarding, and worse. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called torturers \u201cpatriots.\u201d New CIA Director Gina Haspel oversaw torture at the agency\u2019s infamous black sites. Chief of Staff John Kelly subjected Guantanamo detainees to brutal treatment. National Security Adviser John Bolton is notorious for dismissing international law. The list is incomplete, but it\u2019s sufficient to make one thing clear: for the Trump White House, inhumanity awaits as soon as the right opportunity arises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":115275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}