Friday, November 6, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Inside Dope on Health Care Reform Timetable: Predictions of a DC Health Policy Wonk
Optimistic Scenario:
Committee approval between now and July 31st
Floor votes: First week in August
Conference committee staff work during August
Conference agreement by September 30
Final floor votes by October 31.
Committee approval by July 31
Floor votes by August 15
Conference agreement by October 1
Final floor votes by Thanksgiving
Pessimistic Scenario:
No committee approval before August recess
Committee votes in September-October
Floor votes in November
Conference agreement on scaled down bill by Xmas
Our source thought there will be plenty of opportunities for input during implementation in 2010. Many of the detailed issues, he said, will be left to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to decide.
Medicine may well fall into the implementation
stage.
"Words are the healers of the sick temper"
What a curious creature is man! With what a variety of faculties he is endowed! Yet how easily he is disturbed and put out of order!This captures the wonder of my work as a psychoanalyst as well as any 26 words I can imagine.
If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick. [Ben Jonson, 1598]
What a curious creature is man! With what a variety of powers and faculties is he endued! Yet how easily is he disturbed and put out of order! [James Boswell, 1763]
Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it: poor creatures that we are! [Charles Dickens, 1844]
The bow too tensely strung is easily broken. [Publilius Syrus, 1st century BC]
Everybody in the world has the sensation of being tied down hand and foot -- Everyone has his own private bloodsucker. [Ugo Betti, 1953]
[Will Ladislaw] was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet. [George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book II, Chapter 19, 1871-1872]
As every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860]
Psychiatry's chief contribution to philosophy is the discovery that the toilet is the seat of the soul. [Alexander Chase, 1966]
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart? [Shakespeare, Macbeth]
Do you not know, Prometheus, that words are healers of the sick temper? [Aeschylus, c. 478 BC]
Once read thy own breast right, and thou hast done with fears. [Matthew Arnold, 1852]
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness. [Dostoevski, 1876]
All cases are unique, and very similar to others. [T. S. Eliot, 1949]
To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles -- is this not to master the future? [Maurice Maeterlinck, 1896]
All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution. [Anais Nin, 1932]
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1949]
Man is tied to the weight of his own past, and even by a great therapeutic labor little more can be accomplished than a shifting of the burden. [Philip Rieff, 1959]
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. [George Santayana, 1913]
Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; 'tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured. [Seneca, 1st century AD]
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. [Sigmund Freud, 1917]
Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill. [Sigmund Freud, 1924]
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts . . . [William Shakespeare, As you like it, II, vii, 139]
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall disolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such things as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. [William Shakespeare, The tempest, IV, i, 148]
So, if I dream I have you, I have you. For, all our joys are but fantastical. [John Donne, Elegies, No. 10, "The dream"]
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The American Psychoanalytic Association and Torture--no Moral Ambiguity
For those of us in the mental health field, one of the more shocking aspects of the Department of Justice memos regarding “enhanced interrogation” released by the Obama Administration last weekend was the description of the central role of a psychologist (or psychologists) in justifying the techniques used—waterboarding, isolation, humiliation, etc. It appears that the psychologist's “expert opinion” was used to maintain the position that no prolonged mental harm was caused by these techniques, and therefore, by the then current (reinvented) definition of torture, they could not, (again, by definition) constitute torture.
The DOJ memos reveal that a psychologist was present when an al Queda subject was interrogated.
Then follows a morally astounding section of the memos that argues that though waterboarding clearly constitutes a threat of imminent death, as long as the technique is not intended to cause prolonged mental harm, it is not torture because of the alleged intention of the interrogators.
So the psychologist involved comes in handy in two ways. He or she states that based on his or her expert opinion, waterboarding does not cause prolonged mental harm. A story on National Public Radio yesterday (April 21) added the background that the basis for this claim came from a study of volunteers in the American military undergoing the same procedures for training purposes (the SERE experience) which showed that these soldier/volunteers suffered no long term mental harm. But you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to figure out that being a volunteer undergoing certain awful experiences administered by your colleagues is a really different experience from being an “enemy combatant”, helpless and confined and completely unable to control your present or your future. Also you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to know that it takes a long time to evaluate the presence of long term effects. Duh.
The other role for the psychologist in the interrogations was to play some role in the peculiar and disturbing dance around the issue of “intent to torture”. This too boggles the mind. What was their intent then? Why does the intent of the interrogator change the assessment of the effect of the technique on the person questioned. If I run you over and kill you you’re just as dead if it were an accident or intentional. Perhaps my punishment would differ, based on my intent, but the ill effect you suffered would be the same.
All the major mental health organizations now have statements opposing torture. The American Psychoanalytic Association unambiguously and unambivalently opposes torture in all its forms. I hope that no mental health colleague will ever again engage in the moral shell game these memos reveal.
In 2008, the American Psychoanalytic Association approved this position statement on torture:
As an organization of psychoanalysts who have devoted their lives to helping people undo the effects of trauma in their lives, APsaA strongly protests all torture, including any governmentally administered and governmentally approved torture of people who are detained. Torture degrades those tortured and those torturing. The effects of that physical and moral degradation, we know, are transmitted to the families and offspring of both victims and perpetrators. APsaA also strongly condemns the participation or oversight by any mental health or medical personnel in any and all aspects of torture. Such actions are contrary to the basic ethical principles fundamental to the helping professions.POSITION STATEMENT
The American Psychoanalytic Association joins with other mental health and medical professional organizations in strongly condemning the use of torture.
Psychoanalysis and gay rights--40 years of change
In their broadly quoted “news” story of the early 1960’s, the Times relied upon the expert opinion of a psychoanalyst. The April 12 2009 piece also relied heavily on quotes from this psychoanalyst, who argued, among other long since abandoned ideas, that viewing homosexuality as an illness can be very helpful (now we know that view causes great pain, and even the loss of life especially in vulnerable young people), that homosexuals are inherently emotionally unstable (huh), that homosexual relationships suffer more from jealousy and personality clashes than heterosexual relationship (really??).
The Times notes that “the article’s language, from sources and reporter alike, is outdated at best, derogatory at worst, and many of its assumptions and assertions are long discredited” I'll say.
My colleague Ethan Grumbach, Chair of our Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, writing on behalf of the American Psychoanalytic Association, wrote this letter to the editor of the Times on April 13:
Deviates’ and ‘Inverts’ (Sunday, April 12) references the study of gay men by Dr. Irving Bieber, a psychoanalyst who believed that homosexuality was an illness that could be treated or prevented. Like New York City, psychoanalysts have come a long way- in their case, by the fact of having discredited Bieber's view. Today, The American Psychoanalytic Association, 3,300 members strong, ardently supports gay marriage and opposes and deplores public or private discrimination against male and female homosexually oriented individuals. Social justice is paramount to psychoanalysts in all aspects of human life- regardless of sexual orientation.
At the American Psychoanalytic Association we are particularly proud of a series of position statements we have approved over the last decade addressing issues such as gay marriage, gay adoption, and gays in the military. Please take a look.