I have argued (railed?) against the Orwellian misuse of language and the psychpathologizing of victimhood on campuses susceptible to the siren song of postmodern Social Justice. In particular, it angers me that voicing opinions and exposing facts inimicable to a person's worldview is conflated with danger and harm. Speech is not dangerous or violent or harmful. By equating information and ideas incompatible with yours to harm, postmodernists are on the slippery slope ending in the extinction of freedom of speech.
Likewise, the insistence that any psychological aversion to a difference of opinion evokes PTSD is absurd. PTSD is real but the pretense that hearing an idea you don't like causes a PTSD reaction is absurd. These people are seeking a heckler's veto in order to privilege their own world view over everyone elses.
Routledge is making a different, and I think important, point. By repurposing psychological harm as a means to suppress free speech, social justice postmodernists are obscuring the fact that there are real people with real psychological issues that need addressing. By making it necessary to sort the sheep from the goats, such assistance is delayed, misapplied or even abandoned.
Go to the self-help section of any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore and you will be overwhelmed by the wide range of books that have little or no basis in psychological science. Non-scientific self-help psychology is often relatively harmless, as much of it is focused more on casual self-improvement than on real mental-health vulnerabilities. But it isn’t just the popular-psychology world that advances an empirically unsupported psychology. It turns out that many of the therapies people receive for conditions such as depression, panic attacks, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are based more on tradition than evidence, even though evidence-based treatments are available. As psychology professor Scott Lilienfeld wrote in an academic article on this problem, “In some domains of clinical practice, there is an indifference to scientific research, in others an outright antipathy.”And anyone of us who grew up in the shadow of the Soviet Union or comparable regime recollects how often psychology was a preferred instrument for suppressing human rights. Easier and often more convenient to diagnose and commit an opponent as psychologically unstable than to actually convict them of a non-crime. It was especially convenient when applied to former regime supporters who had strayed from ideological purity. The history of psychology as a tool against freedom is too common, too recent, and too extensive to ignore.
Academics in the field of clinical psychology, the discipline focused on mental-illness diagnosis and treatment, are responding by advocating for more mental-health professionals to learn and properly use evidence-based treatments. This is good news for those in need of mental-health services. And it isn’t just clinical psychologists. There is a growing movement across subfields of psychology to both improve the quality of research and speak out against popular but scientifically unsupported psychological interventions and applications.
There is, however, an abuse of psychology going on that many within the field seem unwilling to challenge: Psychology is being inappropriately used for ideological purposes on college campuses.
Consider the recent example of the chief diversity officer at the University of Connecticut sending out a campus-wide email regarding a potential upcoming speaking event by Ben Shapiro, a well-known conservative commentator. The email stated,
We understand that even the thought of an individual coming to campus with the views that Mr. Shapiro expresses can be concerning and even hurtful and that’s why we wanted to make you aware as soon as we were informed. In the meantime, please utilize the many campus resources available to you should you want to talk through your feelings about this issue, including my office, the Cultural Centers, the Dean of Students Office, and CMHS, if necessary. [“CMHS” stands for Counseling and Mental Health Services.The UConn chief diversity officer doesn’t even get credit for originality, as this was not the first time a university administrator resorted to this tactic in response to a Ben Shapiro event. Last fall, the executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California–Berkeley sent out a similar campus-wide announcement in which he not only advertised counseling services because Shapiro was speaking, but encouraged students, faculty, and staff to utilize them, the implication being that members of the campus community should feel mentally destabilized by a conservative giving a talk that no one was even required to attend. Ponder that for a moment.
The misuse of psychology for ideological purposes is part of a broader campaign to purge campuses of ideas and speech that do not conform to a progressive worldview.
Go to the self-help section of any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore and you will be overwhelmed by the wide range of books that have little or no basis in psychological science. Non-scientific self-help psychology is often relatively harmless, as much of it is focused more on casual self-improvement than on real mental-health vulnerabilities. But it isn’t just the popular-psychology world that advances an empirically unsupported psychology. It turns out that many of the therapies people receive for conditions such as depression, panic attacks, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are based more on tradition than evidence, even though evidence-based treatments are available. As psychology professor Scott Lilienfeld wrote in an academic article on this problem, “In some domains of clinical practice, there is an indifference to scientific research, in others an outright antipathy.”
Academics in the field of clinical psychology, the discipline focused on mental-illness diagnosis and treatment, are responding by advocating for more mental-health professionals to learn and properly use evidence-based treatments. This is good news for those in need of mental-health services. And it isn’t just clinical psychologists. There is a growing movement across subfields of psychology to both improve the quality of research and speak out against popular but scientifically unsupported psychological interventions and applications.
There is, however, an abuse of psychology going on that many within the field seem unwilling to challenge: Psychology is being inappropriately used for ideological purposes on college campuses.
Consider the recent example of the chief diversity officer at the University of Connecticut sending out a campus-wide email regarding a potential upcoming speaking event by Ben Shapiro, a well-known conservative commentator. The email stated,
We understand that even the thought of an individual coming to campus with the views that Mr. Shapiro expresses can be concerning and even hurtful and that’s why we wanted to make you aware as soon as we were informed. In the meantime, please utilize the many campus resources available to you should you want to talk through your feelings about this issue, including my office, the Cultural Centers, the Dean of Students Office, and CMHS, if necessary. [“CMHS” stands for Counseling and Mental Health Services.]
The UConn chief diversity officer doesn’t even get credit for originality, as this was not the first time a university administrator resorted to this tactic in response to a Ben Shapiro event. Last fall, the executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California–Berkeley sent out a similar campus-wide announcement in which he not only advertised counseling services because Shapiro was speaking, but encouraged students, faculty, and staff to utilize them, the implication being that members of the campus community should feel mentally destabilized by a conservative giving a talk that no one was even required to attend. Ponder that for a moment.
The problem goes beyond the promotion of counseling and related interventions and services in response to specific campus events. Ideologically motivated faculty, administrators, and activists have been declaring ideas or speech they disagree with as threats to the mental health of students. The ideological nature of this misuse of psychology is demonstrated by its asymmetry. Typically, only conservative ideas or those that challenge popular liberal views are treated as mental-health threats. University life is full of classes, campus talks, art exhibits, activist campaigns, and social events that favor a liberal worldview and challenge or even explicitly derogate beliefs held by other groups such as religious conservatives. Curiously, Berkeley doesn’t send out announcements advocating counseling services in response to progressive campus speakers. It is worth noting that it isn’t just white conservative Christians, but also racial- and ethnic-minority Christians, Muslims, and member of other religious groups who are likely to find the progressive ideas and social causes that dominate campus culture to be in opposition to their deeply held traditions and beliefs. Thus, the common claim that colleges are simply trying to protect minority students is not only patronizing, it is often inaccurate. Much of the time, colleges are protecting certain beliefs more than they are protecting certain people.
[snip]
The students who are truly struggling with psychopathology don’t need protection from different viewpoints. They need mental illness to be treated as the serious and nonpartisan issue that it is. Academic psychologists are doing a good job of speaking out about all the bad psychology happening outside of the college campus. They need to direct their attention closer to home and demand a more scientifically guided, less ideologically motivated use of psychology on campus. It’s time to stop playing political games with mental health.
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