American Psychological Association Hit With New Torture Allegations

sciencehabit writes: Did the American Psychological Association (APA) collude with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to enable the torture of detainees in the War on Terror? The answer won't be known until June, when an independent investigation is due to conclude. But at least one thing was made clear in a report from an independent group of psychologists based on e-mail exchanges between APA and CIA officials from 2003 to 2006: The world's largest professional organization for psychologists has maintained a surprisingly cozy relationship with the defense and intelligence community.

Comments

Psychology is a fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

What most people don't realize is psychology is a fraud. A long time ago it wasn't accepted as legitimate for good reason. It's not based on science and has always been a fraud of the people. While historically they've come up with new solutions each time an old solutions were revealed as fraudulent it has been the case that the new solutions have been worse than the old solutions with no actual benefits. The technique were not humane back in the day and the solutions only made things worse. Unfortunately not much has changed.

Now a genuine "profession" it's still a fraud. For example behavior therapy does little more than get people to change there behavior. It doesn't fix the underlying problem. If I'm in pain and you cause more pain I'm going to say my pain is gone just to get you to stop. Yet this is the kind of thing that goes on and is sold as a “treatment”. People who voluntarily or otherwise seek treatment eventually give up and shut up.

Drugs often do little to help relieve symptoms. Rather they change things in dangerous and almost always damaging ways. Some drugs for instance cause people to lose the ability to “think” for instance-even after they stop taking the drugs. For a while (recently) many psychologists were telling patients that the law required them to be on these medications even that were doing horrible damage (Aspergers).

Other good recent examples involve behavior therapies. The psychologist will cause the victim (“patient”) more pain until the patient eventually gives up and realizes the only way out is to give in and pretend that they are “cured”. For various reasons this works. Think conversion therapy- where it related to gay people. Largely revealed to be a fraud.

The American Psychological Association has removed some sexual orientations from there list of mental disorders, but not others. I wonder why that is. I can tell you. It's not a matter of science. It's a matter of politics. They add and remove mental disorders based on a vote. The main book in the industry is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (ie the American Psychological Association). You could be labeled mentally disturbed tomorrow purely based on a vote by psychologists.

The psychologists who study this stuff are often doing so under scientifically / mathematically unsound conditions. If you have a population of people with “disorder” X and its illegal to have “disorder” X or is otherwise socially unacceptable then that population is going to hide. Psychologists will then only be able to look / study the prison population for which they've for one reason or another have been able to identify a subset of said group. That subset does not necessarily represent the group as a whole though and it is likely that other problems resulted in incarceration. They will then conclude “disorder” X results in legal problems which means its a mental disorder based on the criteria for what they accept as a mental disorder (anything that causes a problem). Essentially they can turn anything into a mental disorder for which they can use for profit and political gain (studying a prison population is just an example). There is a reason homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders while other sexual orientations were not. It became socially unacceptable because this population spoke up. Obviously only a small fraction of homosexuals ever raped anybody or ended up in jail as a result of laws criminalizing homosexuality. Sexual orientations which make up a smaller percentage of the population have little chance of changing public perception. At least not ones that are more severely stigmatized.

I'm having a hard time seeing the problem

[Karmashock]

yes, torture is wrong... However, if I am interrogating someone, I not inherently torturing them. What is more, if I use a psychologist to help me interrogate people better, I am further not torturing someone.

Look, the DoD funds a lot of scientific research in the US. Robotics, physics, computer science, atomic physics, biological research, medicine, etc.

Why is it right for all those scientists to help the DoD but not psychologists? If a psychologist knows how to break a hardened terrorist in a shorter amount of time without inflicting lasting harm on the person... then why would I not do it?

These are people it should be noted that in most cases we would have killed outright in the field if we didn't think they had value in interrogation.

A lot of this anti interrogation stuff is just going to encourage the CIA to do two things:

1. You're going to see more black sites in proxy countries that will keep the whole thing secret and even if it does come out we'll just say they were in a Polish jail or something.

2. We'll just kill them outright rather than bothering to interrogate them.

With the interrogation, we get the potential of learning more about what is going on so that we can be more effective at shutting down terror cells. And there is a potential that the person can be released to live an otherwise peaceful life.

You side against interrogation entirely and both of those things go out the window.

Choose.