Psychiatry, the practice of treating mental disease or disorders, is the only medical specialty in which there are no generally accepted professional guidelines. Pick you practitioner and he picks your treatment. The custom is, caveat emptor: let the client beware.
The American Psychiatric Association is about to publish a 3000-page, four-volume, $250 book called Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders, which attempts to bring some order into the disorderly world of disorders. The impending publication has stirred up a heated controversy among those who have a direct interest in this subject.
The crux of the argument is whether psychiatry is a science or an art. Those who claim it is a science say that the book should be published because enough is known about the workings of the mind to develop guidelines for repairing it when it does not function properly.
Those who say psychiatry is an art claim that our knowledge about the mind and human behavior is too limited to enunciate guidelines, and dangerous to practitioners who do so. Claiming that a supposedly authoritative work would restrict their professional freedom and expose them to malpractice claims, some therapists even circulated a petition drive to force the APA to suppress the opus altogether.
The APA compromise is to include disclaimers saying that the book is not official APA policy. The only propositions on which all agree are that we don’t have all the answers and that any treatment requires a great deal of personal interaction between patient and professional.
With this type of disarray in the professional world, and with consensus so far from reality, we should all be able to agree that psychiatric/psychological treatment should not be forced on anyone, but should be used only when freely chosen, and then only on a one-on-one basis. That may sound simple, but let’s look at situations where behavior modification is forced on unwilling subjects – even in group therapy – by people who pretend to have all the answers.
Take, for example, the group psychology and New Age sessions that have become chic in the corporate world. Some companies decide that their employees should be put through psychological seminars for behavior modification or to induce changed attitudes.
In a recent article, the famous business writer Peter Drucker called such employer-ordered treatment “morally indefensible” and an unlawful attempt “to change the employee’s personality.” He concluded that they are, putting it bluntly, “brainwashing.”
He called this treatment an “abuse of power” because the employee is forced or intimidated into taking the treatment for fear of losing his job. He also said that the public confessions about personal behavior typically induced in the group sessions are an “invasion of privacy” and often do lasting psychological damage, and that an employer has no right to compel an employee to lie down on a couch.
Now, let’s move a step farther away from the psychiatrist’s couch, from the workplace to the public school classroom, and see what is going on there in the weird world of teaching behavior, attitude, and personality to children. One of the leading gurus of the education world, Benjamin Bloom, laid down the goal when he said that the purpose of education and the schools should be “to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students.”
When parents began to complain to their Congressmen about this perversion of the public schools’ purpose, Congress responded by passing the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment. The statute, which passed Congress almost unanimously in 1978, forbids schools to subject students to psychological examination or treatment which requires the pupil to reveal information concerning “political affiliations,” “sex behavior and attitudes,” “mental and psychological problems potentially embarrassing to the student or his family,” or “critical appraisals” of behavior and attitudes of family members, without “the prior written consent of the parent.”
One of the sponsors of this bill, then-Senator Sam Hayakawa, who had been a university president before he was elected to the Senate, described the problem. He said that the public schools have accepted the “heresy that rejects the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills” and instead “regards the fundamental task of education as therapy.”
He further warned that inquiring into the schoolchild’s attitudes and beliefs, and psychic and emotional problems, is a “serious invasion of privacy.” Yet this psychological/psychiatric methodology is prevalent in public schools today at all elves, kindergarten through 12th grades.
This public school group therapy comes, like Baskin-Robbins’ ice cream, in dozens of different flavors: dug ed, sex ed, death ed, incest ed, stress ed, family life ed, AIDS ed, global ed, New Age ed, decision-making ed, gifted-and-talented ed, etc. The curricula are privacy-invading, emotionally disturbing, morally offensive, values changing, and experimental, and have no place in the public school classroom.
