Good-bye to the American Psychological Association

Nothing very surprising here. The field of psychology, pretending to be science, has become completely politicized.

The once-venerable American Psychological Association has been taken over by radical leftists. Its leaders do not care about distorting evidence and even with producing more mental illness, because they have become ideological zealots.

Now psychology professor Christopher Ferguson, of Stetson University, has resigned the APA with a sane and sensible open letter.

What are his reasons? Begin with the APA’s willingness to distort evidence, especially about the effect that violent video games produce:

Within my own area of research, the APA has grossly distorted the evidence on “violent” video games for decades, despite repeated cautions from scholars (including, at one point, an open letter by over 200 scholars, as well as a statement of concern from the Society of Media Psychology and Technology). This extends to other public policy statements such as on spanking where the nuances of a complicated and controversial field are flattened into a definitive but ideological stance.

And then, APA guidelines seem to be unable to deal with boys and men as boys and men. The systematic misandry, the attack on normal male behaviors seems to have infested the APA. 

 Similarly, recent practice guidelines, most notably the guidelines for Men and Boys but also treatment for PTSD, are not well grounded in science and often conflict with scientific data. I worry specifically that these policy statements may do actual harm to clients, particularly that on Men and Boys which has credibly been accused of disparaging more traditional men, and may actually discourage many men and families from seeking treatment they could benefit from.

It is worth underscoring that the marked effort to feminize men and boys, by telling them to get in touch with their feminine side or to develop their capacity for empathy, is likely to ensure that many men and boys will never set foot in a therapist’s office.

And then, when the nation was consumed by the George Floyd riots, the APA jumped on the politically correct bandwagon and declared that the American mind was irredeemably saturated with racism and that racial violence, of whites against blacks, was our defining national characteristic:

However, adopting a dystopian and data-deficient view of the present is likely to do more harm than good. Informing people that they are always in imminent threat of fatal violence or other forms of serious harm can in itself be traumatizing. In fact, most psychological evidence points to historical declines in both explicit and implicit racism (though that last term is itself controversial). 

So, the APA has been producing more mental illness than it has been curing. A good reason for Ferguson and others to terminate their memberships:

Increasingly, I agree with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff when they suggest society is encouraging people to behave in emotional and cognitive ways that are known to exacerbate mental illness, whether catastrophizing, generalizing, selective abstraction, personalizing, etc. We also give extreme power to outrage and moral grandstanding as well as inaccurate sources of information such as anecdotes and “lived experiences.” Unfortunately, my perception is that the APA is furthering this negative process, not attempting to correct it.

Some of us have been critical of the way therapy is practiced in this country. Obviously, some therapists do a very good job, but still, the truth remains, the professional organization that comprises psychologists has become so completely politicized that it cannot be assumed to have made patients' mental health a priority. 

Only a systematic effort on the part of patients to question their therapists, and to question the culture that therapy has spawned will solve the problem.