Thanks Jeff,

So if I were a new patient… I could not be reasonably certain my new shrink has not at some time in the past worked in a torture chamber? In fact an APA certificate / membership on the wall might mean they did.

On a related topic, the ACLU has a couple of new documents up relating to the Abu Ghraib Torture and Abuse Photographs:

Government Petition for Cert to Supreme Court (42 page PDF)
Government Petition for Cert to Supreme Court Appendix (216 page PDF)

The Nuremberg Code.

Set of research ethics principles for human experimentation:

http://tinyurl.com/mrzfxb

Thanks so much for presenting this, Jeff Kaye. I am flabbergasted about this. For a decade or so, I was involved in mental health research and planning and developed an appreciation of psychologists as a result. What has happened to them, or at least the ones in the APA who just can’t bring themselves to oppose torture? What in the world is so important that basic human rights and dignity are to be trashed, and in the ugliest of ways? A job in a nursing home? Jail? Gitmo? C’mon, gimme a break.

And how in the heck can the psychology profession be served by this bizarre wink-winking/nudge-nudging on torture?

I do hope the psychiatric social workers are holding the line on this. A long time ago they joined with the psychologists and defeated a move on the part of psychiatrists to make menopause a psychiatric diagnosis. Really.

(An aside, for I do not understand, but how in the world are “national security interests” served by torture?}

Again, thank you for bringing this to the forefront. It is deeply disturbing.

Keep after the bums till they abide by the Convention Against Torture and the rest of the Geneva Convention…why it is not a huge scandal in the U.S. that a professional organization like this is abrogating all the lessons learned by WWII and the prosectution of Nazi and Japanese torturers is a crime in and of itself.

Gee, remember the good old days when the U.S. held the moral high ground against torture and human rights violations? Boy, those were the days…

I do remember after WW2 how horrified everyone was to find out that the Japanese and Germans had tortured our troops and others. Now……yawn.

Well, at least odds are your therapist was not a torturer… but isn’t that an incredibly sad thing to say. And we have APA’s terrible policy to thank for that (along, btw, with a failure of state licensing agencies to care about this issue).

Re #6 &7: torture degrades a nation’s moral fiber, more than anything else. That’s a major reason we need accountablity, investigations, and prosecutions.

Just curious, but what is the AMA’s stand on those doctors who are also involved with “practicing” medicine at GITMO and other detainee centers? I’ve read reports that some MDs have signed off on punitive blood draws; summarily ordered forced feedings;administered physicals with less than professional care for the “patient;” and have failed to accurately ascertain the probable cause of death in those cases wherein detainees sustained mortal “wounds” due to alleged torture and interrogation techniques. Does the AMA remain silent or vigorously opposed to the APA’s referendum? Mental health and medical practitioners who voluntarily subscribe to and willfully enforce unethical standards of care as mandated by their employers are not only breaking the Hippocratic oath but international law as well as the most important one: the universal morality that governs our humanity. In its deliberate stonewalling of the members referendum, the APA has become another Menace-ster of Justice.

Can’t we just get back to “Do no harm”?

My goodness, all the hue and cry about APA being a conservative political organization just as the AMA is, only you add to it the feminist political agenda absent in the AMA. For years APA has dodged the politically unsavory issue of women’s violence against men, though the data are perfectly clear. So, of course APA has dodged the issue of torture. I understand if this does not resonate with the readers here, but the data are the data.

The AMA has the better position… on paper, but apparently is uninterested in pursuing accountability for proven participation of medical personnel in torture. An article as nurse.com caught this dilemma in an article last June, quoting both Steven Miles, MD (who did a Book Salon here at FDL about a month ago) and Nathaniel Raymond of Physicians for Human Rights.

As for aardvark’s notice of the lack of seeming interest in this subject here, I wouldn’t make too much from the reaction to one article. But I’d be lying if I didn’t feel that the subject as a whole has flagged in both interest and attention in the blogosphere and press as a whole (Marcy Wheeler and some here at FDL excluded, and a few others, like Greenwald, Horton, etc.).

I have been saying for a long time that letting the anti-torture struggle languish to follow the “domestic” agenda was a huge mistake. It was necessary to make the linkage between them, because it’s the same dehumanizing attitude by the elites that run this country that connects the two different supposed realms of public interest. Additionally, the torture issue goes to the heart of the workings of the national security state, which has usurped the core power structures of the society. These conservatives and hawkish Democrats are pro-war, pro-Empire, and have no intention of unleashing the forces for progressivism in this country, as they fear the growth of such a movement, which would ultimately turn against the militarist agenda.

Obama led the way, with his calls for “moving forward.” Ultimately, the bulk of the Democratic Party has followed, and the result is a near-strategic failure and tactical defeat. If progressives don’t turn around this single-issue strategy soon, then the riled-up conservative base will smell blood and become even more aggressive. This is happening even now. A pro-people, antiwar, progressive platform is what we need, we only lack the leadership to make it work. Accommodating the “blue dogs”, letting generals and admirals off the hook for torture, signing off on the Iraq/Afghan military adventures, is a platform for defeat and demoralization.

Jeff,
I will reread your article carefully.
I am presently reading The CIA Doctors by Colin Ross, MD.
The history of the APA is beyond belief.
I will be back to comment more after I carefully reread your article.

Okay, here we go:
According to the documentation presented in The CIA Doctors,Dr. Ewen Cameron, former president of the World Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the Canadian Psychiatric Association, participated in the CIA directed MKULTRA torture and mind control programs.

He participated in torturing and brainwashing thousands of unwitting Americans and Canadians. He was given funds for these activities through channels set up by the CIA.

MKULTRA was set up after the CIA brought over to North America (and who knows where else) Nazis who had participated in torture of innocents during the Nazi regime. This is documented as Project Paperclip.

The fact that the APA continues to stonewall members who wish to disavow torture as acceptable activity for psychologists is evidence that the APA wishes to continue in these heinous crimes against humanity. This is about Americans.

I have a personal stake in this issue.
When people in Boston began to answer a small advertisement in local papers asking if they had been abused by priests in the area, the scene began to change for the Catholic church. I would suggest that a similar gathering of people who have lost family members to this horrendous “therapy” might have a similar chilling effect of the activities of the APA.

Thank you for bringing this subject to our attention. I will look for your continued work.

Response to both Boston 1775 @15 and Jeff Kaye @13.

Darius Rejali has documented that the work of Ewen Cameron (and Donald Hebb and others) on MKULTRA is not really the basis of most of the torture technique that was adopted and used by the CIA and military starting in 2001. His work really well documents that most techniques don’t flow from science as much as they are justified using recourse to scientific claims. The most damning allegation against psychologists by far is that made by Gerald Gray and others, that psychologists fully cognizant of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiments implemented a program of deliberately creating ‘Lord of the Flies’ conditions among MP’s and intelligence personnel. Together with the advice of the BSCT teams, which is the main source of the psychologist participation, this is an allegation of both specific psychological torture and an allegation of mass torture (which ratchets up from a war crime to a crime against humanity).

Jeff Kaye @ 13. The interest in pressing the torture investigation is being drowned at the moment by the health care debate, but it hardly seems like it is worse than it was in, say, 2007. It was always going to be a long hard struggle, it involves getting a whole society to admit to something horrible, which is hard to do. And with the newest allegations about Blackwater/Xe, it seems that at least some of the fears people have that threats and violence might be used to fight back against exposing the truth of the agenda being carried out during the Bush years are justified. Nevertheless, unless and until the whole thing, from all the torture and abuse of international law in the prisons under U.S. control to the torture and abuse inherent in the current U.S. prison practices, and in the immigration holding prisons comes to light, its corrupting influence on all of our social institutions will continue and accelerate.

Thanks very much for keeping up the fight during the period of loud health care debate. Our society very much needs the health care reform for its financial and bodily well being, but it still needs the torture investigations for its soul.

BTW the UN rapporteur spells his name without the ‘c’.

[Modnote: thank you most kindly, corrections made]

I am learning how psychological/torture practices have evolved since Nazis were brought to North America to work in leading colleges and institutions. I see that the techniques have changed as technology has improved.

Electroconvulsion was extensively used in mental hospitals on post-partum innocents as well as on CIA-produced spies and sex slaves. Various traumas were performed on children and unsuspecting adults in the name of “therapy.”

If people do not understand the post-WWII origins of CIA trauma/MKULTRA programs affecting countless citizens,

If they do no understand that mind control programs have been perfected on loved ones in the military, prisons, universities and hospitals

If they do not connect the ramping up of homeland security with this recent history as well as connecting it to the rise of the third reich,

The APA, World Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association can continue aiding and abetting criminal activity.

These are excellent political points by ondelette @16. Thanks, too, for the correction on Nowak’s name spelling. I had the correct spelling on the copy of the letter forwarded to me, so I don’t know how that happened. Btw, for those interested, his full title and address is Univ.-Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak, LL.M., Professor for International Human Rights, University of Vienna; Director, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights; UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Freyung 6, 1. Hof, Stiege II. 1010 Wien, Austria.

To both ondelette @16 and boston1776 @15, the origins of the use of torture in a given society or by a particular agency are complex, and similar to the spread of other cultural practices, as Rejali so ably describes. The problem with narrating one specific part of that history is to neglect some other part. I give primary emphasis to the MKULTRA/CIA/KUBARK model of torture because, one, like the SERE techniques, even more so, it was designed by psychologists and psychiatrists. Two, it is the kind of torture that is going forth under the Obama administration under the auspices of the Army Field Manual, which uses CIA emphasis on isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and manipulation of fears (augmented by psychoactive drugs). This is most dangerous as it has been given the stamp of legitimacy by the bulk of the press, and even blogosphere.

The Cameron story is very dramatic, and represents a kind of apotheosis of the CIA MKULTRA program. Some of the victims of it did go public and even sued the government, ultimately settling out of court, as the process was so stressful, and government dirty tricks and threats were not absent. (I know the latter from talking personally to one of the primary individuals involved in the suit.)

Some of the confusion over the derivation of torture tactics can be seen in the ways in which FBI, CIA, and SERE interrogation tactics interacted over the past eight years. In addition, torture techniques have other derivations in the U.S., from the prison system, from jails, and psychiatric hospitals, as ondelette notes.

You really should read Rejali next. I say this knowing that it took me quite a while to go through his book (Torture and Democracy) because there are parts that, of necessity perhaps, are very dry.

The history of psychologists close association with the military is also at the root of the tactics you are ascribing to the Nazis and to the CIA. Most of the psychological techniques have their origin in studies to find a cure for shell shock, what is now known as PTSD, because, starting with the wars of the 1850’s (which first developed mass death and casualties from new industrial revolution weapons), through the 1890’s and into the 20th century, governments realized that fully treating all the psych disabilities that ensued from such war would bankrupt them, and failure to do so would anger the population. The first was the discovery that a seizure caused by insulin shock seemed to alleviate some symptoms of PTSD, at least temporarily. That caused the search for ways to cause seizure or shock, and led to electroconvulsive shock therapy, the ‘water cure’ and other treatments. That’s why the ties to the military are so deep in the APA to this day.

The other thread running, which contributed immensely to the practices of SERE, came from law enforcement. Two tactics, the ‘third degree’ which evolved into sleep deprivation techniques, and the penitentiary, in which it was believed that solitude and meditation would rehabilitate criminals, which evolved into the extreme isolation/sensory deprivation techniques. For all the clean bill the FBI has had in the torture scandals with their persuasive interrogations, they still use third degree tactics extensively.

These techniques were well under way before the Nazis, and it was, as Rejali documents, the Milice, under the Vichy government, that actually excelled in torture, quite eclipsing the Gestapo.

Ya, sorry that I keep harping the the post WWII recent history. I hate to even write about how much was learned from Jesuits and information learned from records of the Spanish Inquisition.

I thank you for pointing me to Rejali.

I hope we get a chance to continue tracking these crimes against humanity as well as finding ways to truly help trauma victims.

I will be looking at the KUBARK and SERE models.

Are you of the same mindset as Colin Ross – that trauma as a cause for many psychological problems is deliberately ignored because the APA has been USING trauma so extensively for nefarious purposes?

A friend is working her way through his Trauma Model. Then it will be my turn. What I have heard from her is compelling.

Again, please return with more.

The inability to face (until recently) the effects of trauma has a long and contradictory history. Trauma did not always result from wars. In the early 19th century, the effects of trauma on early victims of railway accidents was not understood. Patients were said to result from “railway neurosis”, and often seen as malingering.

On the other side of the coin, it was believed in the 19th century that all severe psychopathology must result from some kind of physical effect, including trauma. This led Freud, for instance, to initially believe that psychological problems arose from some early sexual trauma, usually parental seduction. When he later abandoned his “seduction theory” for a theory based on internal repression of fantasies and instinctual impulse, he tended to downplay the effects of trauma (though not totally, as his division of neuroses in his nosology into traumatic and psychoneuroses demonstrates).

Post-traumatic stress disorder did not become an official diagnosis until the 1970s. In my clinical experience, PTSD is one of the more undiagnosed conditions in clinics and hospital settings. The reason is partly political (it’s much harder to treat, and there’s no simply medication regimen), and partly social-psychological. The effects of trauma include distancing defenses, denial, and avoidance, which tends to make the origin of a person’s distress less accessible to the enquiring doctor or clinician. Additionally, the effects upon the treater of exposure to the feelings of helplessness and horror that accompany trauma are also experienced as something to be avoided (naturally so). As a result, unless you’re trained, the medical professional’s defenses collude with the patient’s defenses, and the trauma itself goes undiagnosed and untreated.

Bringing this back to your question, I’d have to say that the neglect of trauma has far greater or more complex origins than simply the use of trauma research and treatment for nefarious purposes. The latter has certainly impacted the field, but I don’t think it can be seen as a primary cause. Otherwise, how could we explain the neglect of the topic by medicine in other ways and in other times?