One could very well argue over whether or not psychology, psychiatry, and the other mental practices have a soul; and if they do, what is its character. Clever cartoonists could have a field day with the topic "The Soul of Psychiatry".
The following article has much valuable information regarding the history of the involvement of psychiatry, psychology, etc with big government and the military in the USA since world war two.
We disagree with some of the premises, since psychology and psychiatry were used by the military and big government extensively before World War Two. Two glaring examples come from Germany, where there were the various programs of the Nazis, before and during the war, and before them, General Bismark's WWI effort to try to get men to kill more easily. (Internet users should do a search on the Christmas truce, which, needless to say, horrified the generals.)
(Note that many histories of psychiatry on the internet in English only focus on American Institutions and events, ignoring significant events and oganizations in other parts of the world, such as Europe, where Psychiatry was first developed)
Thus there is an argument to be made regarding the soul of psychiatry and the rest of the mental practices: Were they evil from the beginning, or did they get that way recently? The long term usage to the purposes of war over the past century argues to the former case. The soul of psychiatry was lost long ago.
That said, here is an extended snippet:
Psychologists, Guantánamo, and Torture: A Profession Struggles to Save Its Soul
by Stephen Soldz
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 2, 2006
For years, the varied mental health professions in the United States have been fighting turf wars. Psychiatrists tried to keep psychologists from being able to conduct therapy or, more recently, from prescribing psychotropic medications. Psychologists fought for rights to conduct these treatments. Psychologists, in turn, fought the attempts of their Masters-level colleagues for professional recognition. Social workers, mental health counselors, and psychoanalysts each fight for recognition against opposition from others.
These battles are fought out through traditional legislative lobbying and pressure. They are, however, also fought through showing one group’s value in furthering the interests of the powerful and through organized representatives of each profession maintaining access to non-legislative corridors of power. Thus, keeping in favor with the powerful and not alienating them can be a central aspect of a profession’s strategy of advancement.
In this decades-long struggle, the profession of psychology has tried to distinguish itself in various ways. One of these ways is through emphasizing its scientific character. Thus, representatives of organized psychology have been at pains to demonstrate the value of the “science of psychology” to the powerful in industry and in government, including the military and the national security establishment. In addition, psychology’s value to the education establishment has been emphasized, as has its value in industrial relations and marketing. World War II provided many opportunities for psychology to demonstrate its value to the war effort including through the screening of soldiers, the development of propaganda techniques to motivate the home front and to undermine enemy morale, the use of human factors engineering to improve airplanes, and the treatment of psychological casualties from the war.
The post-World War II development of a militarized national security state provided many further opportunities for psychology to garner attention to its contributions to the art of propaganda and the development of useable high-tech weapons through human factors engineering, among numerous others.
One particularly disturbing area where psychologists were attempting to demonstrate their value was in the development of sophisticated techniques of interrogation that could obtain information from unwilling captives through the application of behavior modification techniques based on psychological science.
Historian Alfred W. McCoy has shed light in this area in his recent book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, and in numerous articles and interviews. He documents the decades-long CIA effort to utilized psychological expertise to develop forms of torture that could break down the personality of detainees, rendering them, it was hoped, incapable of withholding desired information. Many of these technique were utilized during the Vietnam conflict and in the various brutal U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin American in the 1970s and 1980s.
Such applications of psychological knowledge posed thorny issues for organized psychology, always on the lookout for new ways of demonstrating psychology’s value to the powerful. While their morally objectionable quality made direct endorsement impossible, to straightforwardly condemn these applications would run the risk of alienating precisely those decision-makers who might be impressed with the potential contributions of psychology as a science and as a profession. Thus, silence about such abuses of psychology is what one would expect from the American Psychological Association, the country’s largest representative of organized psychology and silence is what was observed.
The Global War on Terror, launched after 9-11, provided yet another opportunity to experiment with these behavioral science-based torture techniques. The establishment of a detention center at Guantánamo for those detained during the Afghanistan war and other battles in the “Global War on Terrorism” provided a particularly favorable environment. A total institution was created whose inmates, the detainees, have, at least in the administration’s opinion, absolutely no rights and where all aspects of their daily life can be monitored and controlled. The administration’s legal doctrine emphasized that essentially anything short of direct murder was legally acceptable.
Various “behavioral scientists” from psychology and psychiatry were brought in to help the development of this total institution devoted to complete destruction of the personality. In 2005, it was revealed by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and theNew York Times that mental health professionals were serving as consultants on Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, BSCT (colloquially referred to as "biscuit" teams) at Guantánamo, designed to advise interrogators. These teams consult in every aspect of interrogation. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer told Democracy Now!, one psychiatrist determined that a particular inmate would be allowed seven toilet paper squares a day, while another inmate who was afraid of the dark was deliberately kept almost totally in the dark. Another consultant behavioral scientist, psychologist James Mitchell, recommended that interrogators treat a detainee in such a way as to generate a form of helplessness known as “learned helplessness.”
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