Asperger's Conversations

Asperger grads love Russia, Asia, South America...New York

Just talking with a graduate of Keene State College today who had participated in our Peer Mentoring Program.  He's thinking of moving to China to teach english and I shared my views on Asperger folks moving overseas...nearly all have had positive experiences!  And I'm wondering why that is so...it seems that many folks overseas are tolerant of more "quirky" types of folks...perhaps chalking up their differences to cultural rather than more "personal" differences.  Put simply, many of my Asperger college students or grads have felt welcomed in their host countries.  I've recently heard that about students visiting New York City as well, where I was visiting myself this past week: Of course New York is such a diverse place...just walking down Broadway in lower Manhattan you can hear scores of languages within minutes.  I often encourage my recent grads with AS to consider moving there:  no need to drive, lots of diversity, lots of folks who might share one's special interests...Heaven!

Psychologists and Torture: The word is out

Along with several of my colleagues at Keene State College I tendered my resignation from the American Psychological Association as a result of past inaction in responding to psychologists involved in torture and unlawful interrogations in GITMO and elsewhere.  I've written about the group of brave psychologists who have lead the movement to expose this to the world and now all this hard work has come to fruition with the recently released  government report on torture (including waterboarding) and today'sfront page story in the NY Times.

I'll continue to Tweet about this and other issues on my Twitter account but Stephen Soldz's blog continues to be my favorite source of information.  My hat is off to all the psychologists of conscience who have persevered to bring this information to light.  This is an important moment in the field of Psychology -much akin to acknowledging Psychology's role in massive discrimination in the early 20th century based on flawed IQ testing.  This group forced a referendum (which recently passed) that forces APA to ban psychologists involvement in these types of unlawful interrogations.  And let's hope the APA shows some serious follow through on this edict.

Today's Times covers the release of the report and points out top-down incompetence in carefully studying the torture issue.  We now know that psychologists support the use of methods which have no empirical support for extracting information from prisoners and that high level government officials, including former President Bush and his cabinet members, failed to access full information about torture procedures before approving their use.

From Today's Times' article:

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

If military psychologists don't know any better than to participate in  non empirically based and brutal methods such as waterboarding, then it's imperative that regular folks who know better speak out and demand some changes.  And they have.

My  big point today:  Regular folks can make a difference if they work hard on studying an issue and persisting in bringing information to the public.  My hat's off to Drs. Reisner, Soldz, and others who have doggedly pursued this issue.