What Keeps the APA from Healing?

Many readers, especially those in early career or student roles, may wonder what APA has to heal from. It has to heal from moral injury—the traumatic awareness that it repeatedly violated its own ethical principles and mission. It failed to intervene to stop psychologists from creating enhanced interrogation techniques that amount to torture, applying them, and consulting to others who were applying them. For several years, its officials ranged from unresponsive to hostile toward those who brought attention to these ethical transgressions. If you have not heard about this, it is because the series of events has been both passively ignored by educational programs and actively suppressed by a variety of psychologists who evidently, and I believe wrongly, think it is better that this part of APA’s past be buried. The events being ignored and suppressed began with two psychologists creating so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that met international definitions of torture, and the DOJ proclaiming them legal under some circumstances, including if there were a health professional present. Since most other health professions refused to participate, psychologists ended up being the sole profession supporting interrogators using so-called enhanced interrogation. Had psychologists also refused to participate, perhaps torture would have ended sooner. This is a sobering thought. In a variety of attempts to rewrite history, this part of a long series of events is being deleted from stories being told about the APA and torture.

The attempt to suppress the story of APA and torture has been so vigorous and so vigilant that it has led a journal for an APA division to decide to retract a peer reviewed and accepted paper that would have encouraged ethics teachers to teach about the multiple ethical dilemmas in this series of events. The use of this approach might have changed the tendency of academic institutions to ignore the torture scandal, and perhaps that is why the paper was targeted. The decision to retract seems to me to be another violation—this time of academic freedom. The article has so far not been retracted, and is still available, but the plan to retract has been confirmed—perhaps the publishers, though, will reconsider, if enough pressure is brought to bear.

The strategy employed by those who would delete torture from APA’s history, and thus block APA from healing, seems to be to ignore psychologists’ participation in torture, but to complain bitterly about the process by which the story was uncovered. In order to support their approach, one strategy seems to be to search assiduously for things that can arguably be seen as errors in reporting on the story—no matter how minute—and focus on those things, rather than on torture. Another is to complain bitterly about the impact felt by those who had to answer for their violations of ethical codes and international law. The only pain that seems to matter to those who engage in these strategies is the disruption felt by those who have to answer for enabling torture to occur. The harm done to those who were tortured seems to be totally absent from their narrative.

A well known poet and writer, Mourid Barghouti, explained this very well. Here is a quote from his work:

“It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from ‘Secondly.’ … Start your story with 'Secondly,' and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with 'Secondly,' and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victims….Start with 'Secondly,' and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British.”

In the case of the APA torture problem, start with secondly and you obscure the fact that there are people who were tortured because psychologists played an enabling role. Start with secondly, and those who enabled torture to happen are the victims of those who tried to be sure it would never happen again.

So who could possibly benefit from starting with secondly? As far as I can tell, the only people who are likely to believe they will benefit are those who think they will gain money or power by suppressing this history, and/or by being free to repeat it. But they are supported by thousands of passive bystander psychologists who, like many who have experienced trauma, will try multiple ways to avoid dealing with it, in the hope that the pain will go away. There are, for some bystanders, economic motivations as well. They don’t want psychology associated with torture, because they think it is bad for business. The cost of being complicit with efforts to ignore the pain caused by psychologists enabling torture is great. APA, like any organization that has caused grave harm, would benefit from directly and openly confronting the harm caused, apologizing openly, making amends, and telling the world what it is doing to make sure it will never happen again. Some in APA are trying to make that happen. Others are trying to block it from happening.

Who loses if healing is blocked? Students, early career psychologists, APA, and the field of psychology, along with those who decide they can no longer trust any of us.

If you are a student, learn about these events and demand that APA own up to its role in enabling torture, so that healing can take place. Attempts to start the story with secondly are not helping.