What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
The Texas Wars of
Robert Gates:
On Affirmative
Action and Mexican Migrants
What's Robert
Gates's not-so-distant dirty past? Greg Moses turns over the
dirt in College Station, how Gates fought affirmative action
there and how Reagan and Bush's's slippery spook will run the
new Border War.The End of the Libération
Myth! Meet Libération, turncoat tool of neoliberalism.Pierre
Rimbert traces the decline and fall of one of radical journalism's
great hopes --the paper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. Daniel Wolff describes how Bob Dylan
plays the music of the Apocalypse. Remember, we are funded solely
by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
A Defining Difference Between Psychiatrist
and Psychologists
Abusive
Interrogations
By STEPHEN SOLDZ
Ever since the United States government
decided to deviate from accepted international and American standards
of treatment of prisoners of war and other detainees in its Global
War on Terror, the participation of health professionals in coercive
interrogations of detainees has posed a fundamental moral issue
for these, supposedly "helping," professions. Unlike
the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical
Association, the American Psychological Association considers
it acceptable for its members to participate in coercive interrogations
at Guantanamo and the various other American detention centers
around the world. [For those unfamiliar with the differences
among mental health professions, psychiatrists are specialist
medical doctors whereas psychologists are not medical doctors
and receive a doctoral degree in psychology.]
American Psychiatric Association
President Steven S. Sharfstein took the lead in getting that
organization to change its policies. Last summer he delivered
his Presidential Address at the organization's May 2006 conference.
This address has some very important and pertinent words on the
issue. To a psychologist, especially disturbing is his use of
the issue as a defining difference between the two, sometimes
collaborating and sometimes competing, professions:
"We must also exercise
vigilance over our other core values. When I read in the New
England Journal of Medicine about psychiatrists participating
in the interrogation of Guantanamo detainees, I wrote to the
Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Defense expressing
serious concern about this practice. In mid-October I found myself
on a Navy jet out of Andrews Air Force Base, along with the top
health leadership in the military and other leaders from medical
and psychological organizations, on a 3-hour trip to Guantanamo
Bay. We were given an intensive 6-hour tour of the prison and
briefed thoroughly on interrogation methods and the involvement
of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, known as BSCTs (pronounced
"biscuits") in the process.
We were introduced to two psychologists
on these teams, and we asked pointed questions about their practice
and involvement in giving advice during interrogations. We were
reassured repeatedly that although there may have been various
"stress techniques" used in the past on detainees,
today's interrogations focused on building rapport with detainees,
as positive relationships were much more effective in gaining
good information than anxiety-inducing stress that could rapidly
evolve into frank torture.
Not good enough. After returning
to Andrews, we began a spirited 3-hour discussion over dinner.
I found myself looking eye to eye with top Pentagon brass-they
are much taller than I am, but we were sitting down. I told the
generals that psychiatrists will not participate in the interrogation
of persons held in custody. Psychologists, by contrast, had
issued a position statement allowing consultations in interrogations.
If you were ever wondering
what makes us different from psychologists, here it is. This
is a paramount challenge to our ethics and our Hippocratic training.
Judging from the record of the actual treatment of detainees,
it is the thinnest of thin lines that separates such consultation
from involvement in facilitating deception and cruel and degrading
treatment. Innocent people being released from Guantanamo-people
who never were our enemies and had no useful information in the
War on Terror-are returning to their homes and families bearing
terrible internal scars. Our profession is lost if we play any
role in inflicting these wounds.
It was clear to me that the
military was not of the same mind on the subject, although within
their ranks many good doctors are struggling with conflicting
ethical pressures. There has been debate within our association
on this topic, but we must be uncompromising about our standards
in terms of working with military authorities when we are not
serving a healing role.
I urge those of you who are
interested in this topic to attend a special Presidential symposium
on Wednesday, chaired by Dr. Paul Appelbaum and myself, when
top psychiatric forensic psychiatrists and Army leaders will
engage in a discussion with each other and the audience as we,
as a profession, try to alter the debate that now rages on within
the Administration."
As President Sharfstein looked
eye to eye with Pentagon brass, then American Psychological
Association President Ronald Levant was along for the trip
to Guantanamo. While the psychiatrists' President told the brass
"that psychiatrists will not participate in the interrogation
of persons held in custody," here is what the psychologists'
President had to say:
" 'I accepted this offer
to visit Guantanamo because I saw the invitation as an important
opportunity to continue to provide our expertise and guidance
for how psychologists can play an appropriate and ethical role
in national security investigations. Our goals are to ensure
that psychologists add value and safeguards to such investigations
and that they are done in an ethical and effective manner that
protects the safety of all involved,' stated Dr. Levant upon
his return.
'This trip gave me an opportunity
to ask questions and observe a brief snapshot of the Guantanamo
facility first hand,' Levant stated. 'As APA's work in studying
the issues presented by our country's national security needs
continues, this trip was another opportunity for the Association
to inform and advise the process.' "
As a psychologist who has had
his share of tension with psychiatrists, it deeply saddens me
to admit that President Sharfstein has it correct. What distinguishes
the two professions is that psychiatrists have taken a moral
position, at the cost of a potential loss of access to top military
decision-makers and funding-providers, while the leadership of
psychologists, in contrast, have put access and, potentially,
funding, above taking a moral stand on the perversions of the
War on Terror. In the process of protecting this access, the
psychological association has regularly used deception and bad
faith, trying to argue that participation in interrogations is,
indeed, ethical.
Members of the psychological
association have initiated efforts to change its policies. Perhaps
realizing that psychologists are becoming the butt of jokes as
medical doctors, psychiatrists, and anthropologists all take
major positions refusing collaboration with the abuses of the
War on Terror will motivate more of the association's membership
to actively reject their leadership's trading morality and human
decency for access to the powerful. When, at last, the organization's
support for abusive interrogations is changed, the members should
push on to an independent, thorough, public investigation of
the multiple sordid links between the psychological association
and the military-security establishment. Perhaps then the differences
between psychiatrists and psychologists can be refocused upon
issues of best practices rather than worst practices.
Stephen Soldz is psychoanalyst, psychologist, public
health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate
School of Psychoanalysis. He maintains the Psychoanalysts for
Peace and Justice web site and the Psyche, Science, and Society
blog.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
