letters

Hurray for the ?Decade of Behavior?

THE FEBRUARY MONITOR?S announcement of the launching of the 'Decade of Behavior' was good news, for two reasons.

The most important reason, as the story noted, is that behavior holds the key to finding remedies for the world?s problems because those problems are mainly problems of behavior. Unfortunately, however, psychology has an image problem that frustrates its application. People tend to prefer common-sense explanations to those provided by the tools of science. The development of a public education program on the scientific character of psychology and the demonstration of its practical value should be item #1 on our agenda.

The second reason for welcoming the 'Decade of Behavior' is that the recognition that the science of human betterment is the science of behavior carries the potential for bringing coherence to our discipline. In recent years new technologies have produced new specialties, with subject matters and vocabularies so diverse that psychology has no unifying theme. And important segments of the discipline have lost sight of psychology?s subject matter. For example, some versions of biological and cognitive psychology neglect behavior and define their missions as a search for understanding of the nervous system or the mind. For psychology, the emphasis should be the reverse. For it, the mind and the nervous system play ancillary roles. Mind is a just concept that is knowable only through its behavioral manifestations. The nervous system is merely a machine for implementing action. The rediscovery of those truths would do much to bring our splintered discipline together as an enterprise devoted to the scientific study of behavior.

Gregory A. Kimble, PhD
Durham, N.C.

AS APA LAUNCHES ITS 'Decade of Behavior,' please consider the following suggestions. First, let?s keep studying our own behavior as psychologists, including underlying ideologies and presumptions that shape our professional activity. Experimenter bias is something we all learned about in grad school. I fear that APA tends to underestimate the impact of this variable as we strive to take public positions on complex social issues while perhaps lacking conclusive data.

Second, let?s be creative in our coalition building. The list of organizations APA plans to work with sounds good but incomplete. Let?s add to the government agencies, academia and foundations mentioned in the February article some other groups that may shape a great deal of people?s behavior. I?m thinking of religious organizations, civic groups and natural community networks.

Third, I would suggest that we look carefully at values. Many behavior-based problems, at their core, may ultimately be value-driven. Education and promotion may have little impact if people?s overall value systems are left untouched.

Finally, I would suggest that psychologists enter this new decade with both enthusiasm and humility. While psychological data can tell us much about ourselves, it does have limitations. Our research, if done well, can tell us how we are. However, I don?t think that research alone can really tell us how we ought to be. For this, we need to join psychological research with contributions from other sources of wisdom, such as religious teachings, literature and ethics.

The decade of behavior is a great idea. Let?s make it work by having a realistic and inclusive game plan.

Grant Lee, PhD
Arcadia, Calif.

Expert testimony

IN THE FEBRUARY PAGE 1 article concerning a judge?s failure to consider psychologist Michael McCloskey?s testimony that the crime of an apparent young thug?s erasure of a police officer by 'accidentally' throwing a bucket of plaster on him, I agree with the judge. Let us agree that the hood did not know very much about the cognition of a falling object, thrown randomly seven stories off a building in New York. Is there not a moral dimension here? As well as the common-sense idea that if you throw something off a rooftop, it is very likely to hit somebody below. Don?t we have here a total failure of impulse control? Or, maybe he is just plain stupid. Apparently all cognitive psychologists think that everyone has the IQ of a college sophomore, on whom most cognitive research is conducted.

This is not a matter for APA to get into. The case of antisocial personality disorder, in a really dumb act of 'youthful defiance,' as Scott Sleek so euphemistically describes it, has killed someone whose job is to protect us from this sort of impulse-control-challenged moron. Let the court put him away.

Stanley A. Rudin, PhD
Las Cruces, N.M.

APA?s SUPPORT OF OBSCURE expert testimony in the Gil case makes the entire mental health profession look ridiculous to the public, the judiciary and to any rational thinker. Gil was engaged in provocative, disorderly and dangerous behavior; Gil was not performing a physics experiment. The trial judge properly recognized this distinction and disallowed testimony about Gil?s knowledge of the laws of physics as irrelevant, thus allowing the jury to focus on the consequences of Gil?s willful, reckless acts. Because Gill knew what we all know?that a heavy object deliberately thrown off a roof could kill someone standing below?Gil was properly found responsible for the consequence of his behavior.

In the Gil case, the judge and jury recognized that basic common sense is all that is required in order to know that tossing a large object at or near a crowd of people seven stories below could kill somebody. The laws of common sense apply whether the perpetrator is a high school dropout or a Nobel Laureate in physics. In my opinion, the Gil case serves as a model for the appropriate restriction or irrelevant expert testimony from American courts.

Larry H. Pastor
Washington, D.C.

IN RESPONSE TO DIANA Salerno?s notions that expert witness testimony is too complex for juries, I offer the following contrary opinions. While it is surely useful to present evidence in a coherent manner, overly simplistic data that caters to the lack of training and education of a skewed selection of the juror pool merely reinforces the continuation of a flawed jury system. Many of us idealize the historical reference to a jury trial by our 'peers,' but in fact, the majority of jurors are poor, undereducated, unemployed and have the 'luxury' of being paid about $10 per diem for their time. It is no surprise that such jurors attention spans simulate those with ADD and that they expediently disregard complex evidence because of a lack of understanding. I have long advocated a formal system of education, in which we would train jurors in a wide variety of areas, e.g., law, forensic evidence, pathology, etc., so that they could understand what are necessarily complex issues. The voir dire process is full of adversarial corruption and results at times in 'stacked' juries that, for example, favor the death penalty. While prosecutors and defense attorneys may favor the current system, depending on the nature of their particular cases, we really need professionally trained jurors who are paid commensurate with their training and interest in such a profession. Am I a minority of one?

Stephen J. Cummings, PhD
Seattle

Disability as diversity

I WAS QUITE EXCITED TO SEE the February article 'Disability as diversity: a guide for class discussion.' I?d like to highlight an aspect of the disability experience that I feel was missed by the authors: the experience of work.

People with disabilities do not have the same experience of work as the ?average? individual in this country. Often they are told that they will never work, that they cannot work. The simple fact is that people with mental illness can and do work. This information needs to be a part of any curriculum revision that teachers make to highlight disability issues for their students.

Work gives us critical pieces of our daily lives. Work gives us social contact. It offers a chance to experience feelings of mastery, motivation and accomplishment. It broadens our horizons beyond our home life, exposing us to new places and things. Work gives us an opportunity to set goals and strive to see them accomplished. Perhaps what is most important, work offers each person a chance to earn money. Money to move from dependence to independence.

People with mental illness use the ADA to negotiate for reasonable accommodations that enable them to work. To work! Precisely what providers or society told them they would not be able to do! Using the classroom to highlight the importance of work for individuals with mental illness may produce scholars, researchers, and practitioners for tomorrow to continue the existing efforts and give everyone that chance.

Charles Keller
Philadelphia

THE ARTICLE ON DISABILITY as diversity was a welcome piece to read. I am a disabled veteran of 29 years and a social worker in private practice, and this information is overdue. I did notice, though, throughout the discussion in the article, disability was never spoken of in terms of being a loss. Any disability as defined by ADA or as defined by individuals or their family is a loss and the application of the loss information and resources to these difficulties goes a long way to accomplish healing.

I hope that the task force will include this as an integral part of what must be minimally looked at in these situations. The tools regarding coping with physical loss are certainly to be applied liberally in these cases as well. They provide healing that leads to empowerment and maximization of any person?s specific situation.

The other thing that seemed to be missing from the suggested class-discussion format was a consideration of the disability periodicals and the wide range of information and products that they keep people abreast of as individuals struggle with their personal challenges. There is quite a wide range of political views contained in these, periodicals. Along with these there is also a growing group of instructional videos that tell peoples? stories, and the themes covered can be very informative and enlightening.

Thanks again for the work of the task force.

Rick Ritter
Brookings, S.D.

Re-evaluating internships

IT?S TIME FOR CLINICAL graduate programs to re-evaluate the role and nature of internship training for their students, especially with the question of 'supply and demand' being so much on everyone?s mind.

With the internship frenzy having passed, and the anxiety ebbed, I wonder if the meaning and importance of the internship experience has changed over the last many years. Fielding questions from student supervisees over the last few weeks, concerning how one should choose the absolute 'best possible' internship, I?ve become convinced that the internship needs to be considered differently from in years past. Formerly, the internship was the singular most important professional experience before entering the real, workaday world of the psychologist, meant not only to teach hands-on skills, but also to professionalize the student to the role. Nowadays, when graduate training includes multiple externships, and many students work (for pay) as therapists, evaluators, teachers and researchers long before the formal end of classes, the internship has become only one of many professionalization experiences.

Although it may be the first full-time experience for many students, it no longer holds the unique place in clinical training that it once did. In fact, my recommendation to many students was that they use the required time to expand their clinical training in some new way and treat it

as more of an extended and extensive placement, not the great do-all and end-all of their graduate training as they are still being told in their schools.

Neil Berger, PhD
White Plains, N.Y.

A misguided battle

I ALSO AM CHAGRINED BY psychiatry?s decision to end the publishing enterprise with APA. However, when APA engages in efforts to keep lesser qualified individuals from practicing psychotherapy and engaging in psychological assessment, we donot expect to win friends among these lesser qualified practitioners.

Psychiatrists, too, have the right to keep lesser trained individuals from infringing upon practice traditionally reserved to MDs. Psychiatry abandoned the practice of psychotherapy to a biological model of psychopathology, and psychology has profited from the results. The temptation would be very great to abandon psychotherapy to the higher reimbursement avenue of medication management. Of course the pharmaceutical industry sees a greater distribution network.

If a practitioner with a non-medical, dental or allied medical professional degree that does not normally prescribe medication were to acquire that practice, how could APA rightly argue that lesser trained individuals could not effectively practice psychotherapy and assessment? The push to prescription privileges for psychologists is misguided, expensive and ultimately a battle whose endpoint could be disasterous.

When a psychologist is implicated in the death of a patient because the psychologist was not aware of a side effect, drug interaction or mitigating circumstance, how much will psychology suffer?

Can we hope to duplicate that offered in a medical or dental curriculum? How many private practitioners would be willing to go through the extra time and effort as well as expense to receive the necessary training? Will patients suffer repercussions from MDs secondary to being prescribed medications from psychologists?

Michael A. Nicholas, PhD
Paducah, Ky.

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