“The A.P.A. secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program,” the report’s authors conclude.
.. It is more than ironic that the bulk of the research in psychology demonstrates that punishment and pain do little to change behavior and in fact set up an emotional spiral that damages the perpetrator and the victim in a variety of ways.
Mentally Ill in a High-Stakes Job
I have been treated for depression for many years. When my state medical board found out (I reported it myself after taking a brief medical leave of absence), they chose to publicly discipline me simply for getting sick. In my case, there have never been any allegations of misconduct, incompetence, or practicing while impaired. Overall, this has been the most humiliating experience of my life. The professional damage is staggering and irreversible. […] So, my advice to you would be to NEVER EVER EVER admit to your licensing board anything that could even remotely be considered mental illness. Until the professional stigma of mental illness is squarely addressed by organized medicine, your honesty will only get you in trouble.
.. Lori Shaw, dean of students and professor at University of Dayton School of Law, wrote in her advice to law students getting ready for the bar that “treatment is viewed as a plus, not a minus. Taking responsibility for your life evidences strength of character.”
The Long Marriage of Mindfulness and Money
In a recent Harvard Business Review piece, the executive coach David Brendel wrote, “Mindfulness is close to taking on cult status in the business world. But as with any rapidly growing movement—regardless of its potential benefits—there is good reason here for caution.” Brendel’s fear is that meditation might make executives too mellow and compassionate; he described one client who asked for assurance that she could embrace Buddhist meditation and still fire people. Brendel expressed hope that “mindfulness culture” will remain focussed on “optimizing work performance,” so that people can achieve “genuine happiness and fulfillment.”
.. For well over a century, business-minded Americans have been transforming Hindu and Buddhist contemplative practices into an unlikely prosperity gospel.
.. “With business meditation, we have a practice that is extrapolated from Buddhism and secularized so that all of the theological underpinnings are swept away,” Catherine Albanese, the author of “A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion,” says. “So we have Buddhism stood on its head. Mindfulness meditation has been brought into the service of a totally different perspective and world view.” By now, that’s part of a venerable American tradition.
Humanistic Psychology Changed American Culture, Before Baby Boomers
The conventional story, beloved especially on the right, is that this cultural shift took place in the 1960s. First there was the Greatest Generation, whose members were modest and self-sacrificing, but then along came the baby boomers who were narcissistic and relativistic.
As I found while researching a book, this story line doesn’t really fit the facts. The big shift in American culture did not happen around the time of Woodstock and the Age of Aquarius. It happened in the late 1940s, and it was the members of the Greatest Generation that led the shift.
.. Humanistic psychology led to the self-esteem movement and much else, reshaping the atmosphere in schools, human-resources departments and across American society.
In short, American popular culture pivoted. Once the dominant view was that the self is to be distrusted but external institutions are to be trusted. Then the dominant view was that the self is to be trusted and external constraints are to be distrusted.