APA Involvement of CIA's Torture Program (psychologist, thoughts, people)

[kat949]

New details have emerged on how the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, aided government-sanctioned torture under President George W. Bush. A group of dissident psychologists have just published a 60-page report alleging the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Pentagon to change the APA ethics policy to align it with the operational needs of the CIA’s torture program. Much of the report, "All the President’s Psychologists: The American Psychological Association’s Secret Complicity with the White House and US Intelligence Community in Support of the CIA’s 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program," is based on hundreds of newly released internal APA emails from 2003 to 2006 that show top officials were in direct communication with the CIA. The report also reveals Susan Brandon, a behavioral science researcher working for President Bush, secretly drafted language that the APA inserted into its ethics policy on interrogations. We are joined by two of the report’s co-authors: Dr. Steven Reisner, a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and member of the APA Council of Representatives, and Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Emails Show American Psychological Association Secretly Worked with Bush Admin to Enable Torture

For an organization that runs and publishes DSM books as a guide and standard gold practice to mental health, what are your thoughts?

[Billy_J]

Tons of research money comes from the government - Department of Defense, CIA, DARPA, etc. So not any big surprise to me. Do a little digging and you will find that psychiatrists were involved with giving people LSD in a CIA research project called MKUltra.

Project MKUltra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Actually the legal system is even worse. They can find medical professionals to present ANY viewpoint they need to win a case - just pay the fee and you are good to go!

Not to mention various research projects which suddenly find something is "good for you" like tobacco.

As they say, money is the root of all evil!

[Utopian Slums]

I'm totally not surprising. So many in the APA are in research as opposed to clinical practice. And I don't even think anything like this is forbidden in their code of ethics.

Just another thing that gives psychology a bad name.

[Kin Atoms]

If I can recall, when this became public, many were outraged and the APA took strong actions to remove themselves from this situation.

Any large organization can attract questionable persons who's quackery over-rides the elementary tenets of health and well-being for the other members within the field. I don't find the organization deplorable as much as their response to extricate themselves from the quandary provided a bump in the historical road. It's similar to Terman's work being used in the eugenics movement, which became the foundation for the perfect race, established in Germany in 1939.