Psyche, Science, and Society

Bradley Manning to be moved

The Associated Press reports that Bradley Manning is to be moved out of Quantico to Fort Leavenworth

in the wake of international criticism about his treatment during his detention at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va.

It is unclear at this moment if this is a victory for decency and human rights or simply another maneuver.

1 comment April 19th, 2011

Compressive Soldier Fitness critique in TIME and Scientific American

The recent article by Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and myself critiquing the military’s Compressive Soldier Fitness program has received considerable positive attention, including blog posts on the Time and Scientific American web sites. Here are those posts.

Time:

Does the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program Violate the Nuremberg Code?

By Mark Benjamin

There is new criticism of the Army’s high-profile effort to train mental toughness into soldiers so they can better handle the stress of repeated combat tours. This time, the critique comes from a group of psychologists who say the program appears to be scientific research without consent.

The Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program is a $125 million effort to teach mental resiliency to troops. The program is a pet project of Army Chief of Staff George Casey, who retired this week, and is run largely by famed psychologist Martin Seligman through the University of Pennsylvania.

“This is a mandatory program for a million soldiers with no pilot testing,” says psychologist Roy Eidelson. “We don’t know if it is no use, harmful, or potentially helpful.”

Rather than simply screening soldiers for potential problems after combat, the Army says it is trying to provide troops with mental tools to help them handle the rigors of battlefield stress when they deploy and the impact it can have on a soldier and his family when troops return home. The program combines individual assessments, virtual training and classroom instruction.

Critics say the program’s aims are valiant, but its efficacy is far from clear. Eidelson and two colleagues, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz, wrote a critical essay about Seligman’s program in Counterpunch late last month.

The psychologists note that there is little scientific evidence to show that this kind of training works. “It is highly unusual for the effectiveness of such a huge and consequential intervention program not be convincingly demonstrated first in carefully conducted randomized trials,” they wrote. They argue that other well-meaning intervention programs to prevent delinquency, for example, have only been “modestly and inconsistently effective.”

Rather than a program based on experiments that prove it works for soldiers, the psychologists argue that the training itself may be the experiment. Seligman has referred to the program as “the largest study – 1.1 million soldiers – psychology has ever been involved in.” If that is the case, the Nuremberg Code, developed in response to Nazi doctors’ experiments during World War II, requires that soldiers give their consent to any kind of research for which they are subjects. “The soldiers apparently have no informed consent protections – they are required to participate,” the psychologists wrote.

The Army is dismissing this latest controversy as an academic tiff. “The Army is aware of this ongoing discussion and views it as an academic discussion and debate between the psychologist and behavioral health communities,” Army spokesman Gary Tallman says. “The Army’s CSF program continues to move forward to help soldiers and families.”

It is not the first scrutiny the program has attracted. Writing in Salon late last year, I explained how Seligman received a $31 million no-competition contract to begin the work, despite similar programs and research going on at other institutions around the country. Seligman is known for his close ties to the military and intelligence communities, and my article explored how his early work appears to have informed psychological interrogation tactics during the Bush era.

The Army has promoted the program hard, unveiling a website complete with flashy videos. Seligman scored a nice rollout article in the New York Times and the January 2011 issue of American Psychologist, the magazine of the American Psychological Association, published some glowing reviews of Seligman’s work. Seligman is a former president of the APA.

Scientific American:

Beware the military-psychological complex: A $125-million program to boost soldiers’ “fitness” raises ethical questions

By John Horgan

Fifty years ago, in the same farewell speech in which he warned about the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” on American politics, President Dwight Eisenhower also deplored the growing dependence of scientists on federal funding. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded.”

Eisenhower’s speech comes to mind as I gravely regard the latest example of the militarization of science, a $125 million collaboration between psychologists and the U.S. Army called “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,” or CSF. The program calls for giving “resilience training” to more than one million Army soldiers and civilian employees to help them cope with the stress of military life. A U.S. Army Web sitecalls the CSF “a long term strategy that better prepares the Army community—including all soldiers, family members, and the Department of the Army civilian workforce—to not only survive, but also thrive at a cognitive and behavioral level in the face of protracted warfare and everyday challenges of Army life that are common in the 21st century.”

The program is the brainchild of one of the most powerful figures in American psychology, Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. A former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), Seligman is best-known for founding the enormously popular positive psychology, or “happiness,” movement, which emphasizes positive rather than negative personality traits and emotions.

The APA’s main journal, American Psychologist, devoted its January 2011 issue, co-edited by Seligman, to explaining and extolling the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. No articles in the issue questioned the program’s scientific or ethical soundness, but the psychologists Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz did just that in “The Dark Side of  ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,’” a hard-hitting article published in the newsletter Counterpunch. (Scientific American‘s Gary Stix also critiqued the methods underpinning the CSF in this incisive recent article.)

Is it ethical for psychologists to help soldiers to participate in what may be unethical behavior? This is the toughest question raised by Eidelson et al. “Helping people who have already been harmed by trauma is essential,” they wrote. “But should we be involved in helping an institution prepare to place more people in harm’s way without careful and ongoing questioning and review of the rationale for doing so?”

The trio also charged that the CSF is based on “resiliency techniques,” developed by Seligman and others, that have been shown to be “only modestly and inconsistently effective” in studies of civilians. Indeed, according to Eidelson et al., the techniques are still so experimental that the CSF may violate the Nuremberg Code of ethics, which prohibits research on people without their consent. Eidelson et al. noted that soldiers “apparently have no informed consent protections—they are required to participate.” According to TIME blogger Mark Benjamin, the Army dismisses the issue of informed consent as an “academic tiff”—or, as an Army spokesman put it, “an academic discussion and debate between the psychologist and behavioral health communities.” The spokesman said the CSF “continues to move forward” despite these concerns.

The Army’s own description of the CSF sounds like psychobabble: “Conceptually, while CSF is largely focused on training skill sets, it also delves into root causes of emotion, thought and action—what psychologists refer to as ‘meta-cognition’. With this in mind, CSF serves as a programmatic first step towards training members of the Army community to understand how and why they think a certain way. Once people begin to understand this, they are best postured to change their thoughts and actions to strategies that are positive, adaptive and desirable for both the person and the Army.”

Even in the face of declines in non-military funding, some scientific fields have resisted militarization. In 2009 the American Anthropological Association declared that a program to embed anthropologists with troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and other war zones violated the profession’s code of ethics, which one article described as “a sort of Hippocratic oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm.”

But as I pointed out in a column last year, neuroscience is chasing after defense dollars. In 2009 the National Academy of Sciences published a 136-page report, “Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications,” that advised brain scientists on how to get on board the military gravy train. The authors included two leading brain scientists: Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute and Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, both former members of The President’s Council on Bioethics. Potential applications of neuroscience include drugs and electromagnetic devices that can boost or degrade soldiers’ capacities.

The APA is capable of taking a stand. In 2007, after reports that psychologists were helping the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency refine their interrogation techniques, the APA condemned the involvement of its members in “planning, designing, assisting in or participating in any activities including interrogations which involve the use of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” But the APA leadership should be ashamed by its uncritical promotion of the CSF program. The association should encourage a debate among its members over whether the CSF represents a genuinely beneficial, ethical program or just another sordid example of what Eisenhower called the “the power of money.”

Alas, Horgan in the last paragraph get’s taken in by APA’s putative “anti-torture” resolution that led Mark Benjamin at the time to wonder Will psychologists still abet torture?

April 19th, 2011

Update on Larry James trial

Courthouse News provides an update on latest developments in the attempt to force the Ohio psychology licensing board to take seriously complaints against former Guantanamo BSCT psychologist Larry James:

Doctors Demand State Board Take Action Against Gitmo Psychologist

By Kyle Anne Uniss

COLUMBUS, Ohio (CN) – Two doctors, a minister and a disabled veteran sued the Ohio Board of Psychology, claiming it failed to act on their detailed complaint against a psychologist, an Army colonel who “was responsible for the abuse and exploitation of detainees as a senior psychologist at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, in violation of Ohio law and Board ethics rules.”

The plaintiffs seek writ of mandamus to compel the State Board to take “formal action” against Dr. Larry C. James, a board-licensed psychologist and Dean of Wright State University’s School of Professional Psychology.

James is not listed as a defendant.

The plaintiffs say he worked at the Guantanamo prison in 2003 and in 2007-2008. At Guantanamo, James was an Army colonel who led the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, which included psychiatrists and psychologists who “played a role in the exploitation, abuse, and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, subsequently misrepresented that experience, and improperly disclosed confidential patient information,” according to the complaint.

James led the team from January to May 2003, and against from June 2007 through May or June 2008, according to the complaint in Franklin County Court.

The plaintiffs are Dr. Trudy Bond, a practicing psychologist from Toledo; Michael Reese, an Army veteran, member of Disable American Veterans, and a former counselor for people with disabilities; the Rev. Colin Bossen, a Unitarian minister from Cleveland Heights; and Dr. Josephine Setzler, director of an Ohio chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The plaintiffs say they filed a 50-page complaint against James with the Board on July 7, 2010. They ask that if the board does not take “formal action” against james, that it be compelled “to provide clearly articulated reasons grounded in fact or law for any decision, and to show that it investigated meaningfully and/or carried out a formal proceeding in good faith.”

The plaintiffs say the July 7, 2010 “Board Complaint” alleges violations of 18 Ohio laws and Board ethics rules.

They accuse James of “publishing confidential patient history in his 2008 memoir and … misleading the public and the Board about his role.”

They claim that after James left Guantanamo, he continued to commit “grave breeches of confidentiality through statements he made in his book,” “Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib.” They say that James published this book in 2008, “while his application for an Ohio license was pending before the Board.”

According to the lawsuit: “The Board Complaint documents that while Dr. James was chief psychologist and alleged commanding officer of the BSCT [Behavioral Science Consultation Team], men and boys detained in the prison were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted.

“The Board Complaint alleges that Dr. James participated in, ordered, supervised, ratified, facilitated, acquiesced in, and/or failed to prevent, stop, report or punish this and other types of abuse at the prison.

The Board Complaint provides specific exampled of this misconduct, including an incident drawn from Dr. James’s own admission in which he watched behind a one-way mirror and drank coffee as an interrogator and three guards wrestled a man to the floor forcing him to wear lipstick, a wig, and women’s underwear. The Board Complaint alleges that Dr. James did not report the incident and documents Dr. James’s admission that he did not reprimand or disciplines the interrogator and guards.”

The plaintiffs say that their Board Complaint alleged, inter alia, that James and members “under his command and control … advised and trained interrogators, meeting with them to review interrogation plans designed to isolate detainees and foster dependence on their interrogators so as to enhance and exploit their disorientation, shock and fear;

“observed, monitored and retained at least de facto authority to end many, if not all, interrogations, many of which involved treatment rising to the level of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;

“assessed and evaluated detainee behavior and suggested abusive interrogation techniques …

“The U.S. government had previously recognized such techniques as illegal, and U.S. government officials have since reaffirmed that some of these techniques constitute torture.” (Citations omitted.)

“The Board Complaint is further supported by a report submitted by psychologist and attorney Dr. Bryant Welch, an expert in psychological ethics,” the legal complaint adds. “Dr. Welch concludes that if the allegations contained in the Board Complaint are factually true, the conduct described constitutes the most serious and far-reaching ethical breaches he has ever encountered in his career as a psychologist.”

The plaintiffs say the Ohio Board of Psychology responded to their complaint with a “cursory letter” of Jan. 31, stating that “It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action on this matter.”

The plaintiff’s say that’s an abuse of the Board’s discretion of “a 50-page complaint with over 1,000 pages of credible documentation, including government reports and Dr. James’s own admissions,” and that the Board “must proceed pursuant to its duty to protect the public from psychologists who abuse their professional knowledge and skills to cause harm.” The plaintiffs are represented by Terry Lodge of Toledo and Deborah Popowski and Tyler Giannini of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

April 19th, 2011