Traumatic Memories, Well-Founded Fears, and Credibility

Judy Eidelson

Each year, more than 40,000 people come to America seeking refuge from persecution. While it is U.S. policy to provide asylum to refugees who have a “well-founded fear” of persecution in their home countries, most of these claims will be denied by the Department of Homeland Security.

The outcome of these cases often hinges on the perceived credibility of the asylum seeker’s testimony. This is perfectly understandable. But as a psychologist working in this area, I am struck by its perverse consequence: trauma survivors are often denied asylum precisely because they show the signs of the traumas they have experienced.

The standards adopted by immigration courts seem oblivious to the large body of research documenting the psychological effects of torture and violence. In particular, we know that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is not only an anxiety disorder, but also a disorder of memory.

Kant’s Comments on our Current Wars

Floyd Rudmin

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, East Prussia, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad. Kant is considered to be one of the greatest philosophers in the history of Western Civilization. He was also an opponent of perpetual war. Possibly influential in Kant’s thinking about war was the fact that his family were Pietists, which were a Lutheran sect similar to Quakers.

The European wars of Kant’s era included the Russo-Swedish War (1741–1743), the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the Seven Years War (1754–1763), the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), the Partitions of Poland (1772–1775), the American War of Independence (1775–1783), another Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790), the French Revolution (1789–1799), the Russo-Persian War (1796), and at the very end of his life, the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1797–1815).

PsySR Statement on APA Convention and Manchester Grand Hyatt

PsySR Urges the American Psychological Association to Change Course and Not Hold Events at the Manchester Grand Hyatt

BACKGROUND

The 2010 annual convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) will be held in August in San Diego, California, and the Manchester Grand Hyatt has been designated as the convention’s primary headquarters hotel.

Last year the hotel’s owner Doug Manchester contributed $125,000 to qualify Proposition 8 for the November 2008 ballot, an initiative that abolished the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. In response, a coalition of LGBT and labor groups instituted a boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt. This boycott has now entered its second year, and many organizations, in support of the boycott, have moved their scheduled meetings out of the hotel to other locations.

PsySR Statement Opposing U.S. Military Escalation in Afghanistan

In response to President Obama’s early December announcement, PsySR has issued the following statement opposing the proposed U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan. Highlighting key psychological and human rights considerations, we instead call for a heightened focus on development and diplomacy.

In Afghanistan, Escalate Development and Diplomacy, Not War

In a national address on December 1st, 2009, President Barack Obama detailed his strategy to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and to thereby escalate the war.

As an organization committed to the application of psychological knowledge and expertise in promoting peace, social justice, human rights, and sustainability, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) received this news with great concern. While acknowledging the President’s careful thought and deliberation, we believe that his decision is ill-advised and counter-productive because it fails to adequately recognize the following key considerations:

Universal Environmental Rights: In Honor of the 2009 UN Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change

Diane Perlman

As thousands from around the world gather this week in Copenhagen for the UN 2009 Climate Change Conference, we also mark the 61st anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt in the aftermath of World War II.

This is therefore an opportune time to consider whether our world today calls for amending the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and whether it is appropriate to elevate our basic needs for survival to the level of universal human rights.

Below is a draft proposal to amend the UDHR in honor of Copenhagen. Suggestions for improvements to the text, endorsements, or strategies for its use are most welcome in the comments section.

The “Ethical Interrogation”: The Myth of Michael Gelles and the al-Qahtani Interrogation

Stephen Soldz

Several public accounts of abusive interrogations at Guantanamo have praised psychologist Dr. Michael Gelles for his opposition to these abuses. Similarly, the American Psychological Association (APA) has repeatedly pointed to actions of Dr. Gelles to instantiate their claim that psychologists played a crucial role in opposing abuses and protecting detainees. Gelles also has been a regular public presence, discussing the errors at Guantanamo while advocating for the APA’s “policy of participation” in interrogations. The APA policy encourages psychologists to aid interrogations to keep them “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” But a recently released Defense Department document challenges Dr. Gelles’s role as an exemplar of psychological ethics in interrogations.

As reported by Bill Dedman, Phillipe Sands, and Jane Mayer, Gelles objected to the “harsh” interrogation tactics being used at Guantanamo. In particular, he strenuously objected to the plans to “reverse engineer” the tactics used by the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program to inculcate strategies for resistance to torture in US service members at high risk for capture.

Fort Hood: A Harbinger of Things to Come?

Bryant Welch

The Army knew that Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan was shouting political and religious harangues to patients during his therapy sessions at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

When that happens in a psychiatric setting, it is time to radio Houston that we have a problem.

Instead of admitting the serious break down in Army quality control, each day the Army provides a new explanation of why blame for the Fort Hood shootings should be laid at the feet of Muslim terrorists and not the US military.

This problem the military has in confronting psychiatric problems is longstanding.

Unless there is a dramatic change in the military’s use of mental health expertise there will be more Fort Hoods as our troops return from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious psychiatric disorders.

Revisiting Afghanistan from a Different Perspective

Latika Mangrulkar

Bhabani Sen Gupta is an award-winning Bengali novelist, a former foreign policy consultant to Indian Prime Minister Inder Gujral in the late nineties, an advocate of non-nuclear proliferation policy in India, and a socio-political commentator (see www.freshquest2009.blogspot.com).

Over the past several months, it has been my honor to assist Mr. Sen Gupta in updating his socio-political narrative “Pakistan’s Truth” (1996), a humanistic story of the two “estranged neighbors,” India and Pakistan, who must learn to co-exist. Through our correspondence, we have also shared and discussed our thoughts and concerns on the unfolding events in Afghanistan and the sub-continent. Here I offer the key points of agreement that have emerged.

A Call for Change in APA’s Position on the Boycott at the Manchester Grand Hyatt

Brad Olson and Roy Eidelson

This open letter calls for the immediate reconsideration of the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) current plan to use the Manchester Grand Hyatt as a headquarters hotel for the 2010 Annual Convention in San Diego. In particular, we respond here to what we view as a highly troubling September 26, 2009 letter sent by APA president-elect Carol Goodheart to APA Council members.

In November 2008, California’s Proposition 8 abolished same-sex marriage in the state, setting back our nation’s progress toward equality for all. Prior to the vote, Doug Manchester, owner of the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, contributed $125,000 to help fund the campaign – a campaign that relied on deceptive ads, appeals to prejudice, and fear-mongering to ultimately overturn equal rights for same-sex couples in California.

Following Manchester’s contribution, local GLBT and labor rights supporters united as a coalition and called for a boycott of Manchester’s Hyatt. This boycott has now entered its second year, and it continues to grow. In September of 2009, the Courage Campaign and Equality California signed on to the boycott effort, joining Californians Against Hate and Unite Here (see Say No to Doug Manchester).

Spreading Hysteria about Swine Flu “Hysteria”: Public Health Preparedness in the Face of Uncertainty

Stephen Soldz

Public health is bedeviled by the public’s lack of understanding of uncertainty. Public health policy deals with potential future events. Decisions about policy have to be made with often inadequate data. If, as often happens, bad scenarios don’t unfold, policy-makers may well make decisions that turn out to be wrong in the sense that preventive efforts were taken that proved to be unneeded.

We see this in the case of the current H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Skeptics are using the initial concerns about worst case scenarios , which turned out to be wrong when more data were available, to encourage skepticism about current plans to cope with a looming pandemic. We see this reasoning in a recent Alternet article by Joshua Holland — H1N1 Just Isn’t That Scary: Why There’s No Reason to Go Overboard with Swine Flu Hysteria — which claims that swine flu fears are more dangerous than the swine flu itself. [Holland's article received a furious rebuttal -- More crappy flu journalism, this time Alternet -- from a blogger named "revere" at Effect Measure with which I strongly concur. My comments complement revere's.]