Dear Young Therapist: Don't Call People Names

The liberatory potential of psychotherapy is immense. Conversely, without careful thought or reflection, our tools can rapidly become an oppressive force that perpetrates violence rather than forwarding the potential of humanity. We can do so much damage to fellow human beings through carelessly (or willingly) referring to patients as categories of diagnostic representation. Individual and institutional violence can be perpetrated against our patients when we collapse our understandings of the complexities of our human experience into a label. It is so easy to lose sight of the dangers of misusing our power and position.

It is important to deeply consider the way in which we speak and think about the fellow human beings who we are privileged to share a portion of life with us.

In 1974 David Hawkins wrote an essay about the dialogue of I, Thou, and It. Extending his writing from education to psychotherapy, we might think of our work as a dialogue and interplay with these three points of an interconnected triangle. The I is therapist, Thou is patient, and It is the complex tableau of sexuality, race, culture, ethnicity, gender, family, theories of change and psychopathology, and scores of other factors.

I think a good psychotherapist is a reflective psychotherapist: one who constantly reflects and learns from what has happened and what is happening; who is continuously open to incorporating the experience and ways of knowing of their patients; who reflects on the interplay of I, Thou, and it; who constantly cultivates space for a voice that has not been heard to be heard. As an invitation to this reflective dialogue, I ask myself a lot of questions. Here are a few that are often in my mind:

• What are the effects of labeling people transgenders, schizophrenics, borderlines, and narcissists? 
• How are our diagnostic categories reflections of societal values that are rooted in male, European, middle/upper middle class, heterosexual centric values? Does it matter? Why or why not?
• In what ways do we knowingly and unknowing remain ignorant of our implicit biases? How is are practice and impacted by knowing or not knowing (and believing or not believing) in implicit biases?
• Do our interventions and theoretical orientations reflect our personal needs or the needs of our
  patients? How? Does it matter? Why or why not?
• How do we help others make sense of a punishing world where the experience of the other is often demeaned, denied, or dismissed? How does our practice change if we do not acknowledge or agree with notions of microaggressions and institutional racism?
• Are we willing to examine how we demean, deny, or dismiss the experiences of others?
• Are we awarded special power by society as licensed therapists to categorize, describe, and label people? 
• Do our patients have the power to name, describe, and understand their own experience? 
• Do we share the power to name and understand experience? Do we keep the power for ourselves?
• How does our theoretical understandings dictate our use and understanding of power?
• Are we aware of how our position in society influence our ability to perceive our uses of power?
• In what ways are our interventions designed to force people to conform to our expectations?
• How do our answers and understandings of these questions (and the ones not asked) influence, limit, and expand our abilities to be helpful for any given patient?

What questions have I forgotten to ask? What questions don't I know to ask?

The other day I came across a disturbing trio of blog posts (here, here, and here). This blogger's posts are problematic on a variety of levels. Most notable is an apparent lack of awareness of how easily a therapist can abuse their position of power by enforcing their own personal heuristic of understanding a particular phenomena as the only heuristic of understanding a phenomena. The blogger appears to have no interest or ability to engage in any form of reflection that allows the experience of the other to be heard.

The final line of my of my previous letter to a young therapist is a good place to end once again.

Can you let a person sing their song and make meaning of it without encumbering them with your notions of what music should be?

Be reflective in your practice, young therapist. Keep asking questions. Keep listening to the other. Keep learning how to get out of the way to let the voice not yet heard be heard. Dare to let the tools of psychotherapy to bring liberation. Do not become a tool of control and colonization.

Dear Young Therapist: Consider Your De Rigueur Requirements | The Post-Doctoral Tie Incident

image credit: Nicholas Ruiz. Bow Tie #10. Assembled November 2011.
 Acetaminophen pills, multiple adhesives, plastic knife. Forest Hills, Queens, New York.

The man interviewing me for a postdoctoral fellowship unwrapped the aluminum foil encasing his dry turkey sandwich and proceeded to stuff it into his mouth.

"Do you mind if I eat? Not that you really have a choice. I'm doing the interview and have the power in this situation."

He continued to masticate and fill his office up with the seasonally incongruent smell of Thanksgiving. This was going to be a fun filled interview.

"I'd like to ask you why you aren't wearing a tie today for your interview. Before you answer, I want you to know that as a psychologist I think everything has a meaning. I hope you have thought about the meaning of why you didn't wear a tie. If you haven't, then you aren't what we are looking for in a post-doctoral fellow. We'll end the interview here and I'll wish you good day."

I had a variety of inside-thoughts that I considered sharing. They included:

• Asshole. 
• Drop dead. 
• Who the hell do you think you are? I just had fucking brain surgery, a post-operative infection, and joint damage from an adverse reaction to the antibiotics that treated my infection. 
• Your turkey sandwich is making me want to throw up. 
• I'm scared because I can't find a job. 
• Do you know who the fuck I am? 
• Am I going to fail as a psychologist?

I took a middle course and smiled politely. I noticed the air flowing in and out of my nose. I watched as my agitated thoughts floated like clouds in the wind from the center of my awareness, to the edges of my mind, and then off into places where I can no longer notice them.

Dog Meat With a Side of White Savior Complex

Could you imagine eating a dog or cat for dinner? I couldn't. I couldn't imagine eating any living creature. For personal reasons, I've been a vegetarian for the past 20 years.

Even among people who do eat meat, I'm hard pressed to think of someone who would eat a dog or a cat. I suspect in a country where we have many different sorts of people, there is likely one or two in modern America who would enjoy dining on a grilled dog fillet. Those people, however, are way outside the norm. As a society, we've largely decided on some animals as a source of food (cows, chickens, hogs) and other animals as pets (dogs, cats).

I know this hasn't always been the case. In her book Being with Animals, Barbara J. King wrote extensively about how early humans would eat dogs. It was likely our making meals of dogs that helped domesticate them into the furry companions many of us now enjoy. The most aggressive dogs, King wrote, would be the first to be bashed in the head and cooked for dinner. Those who were cutest, sweetest, and most affectionate were allowed to live, follow us around, reproduce, and become part of our communities.

Dogs are no longer regularly consumed as food in the Western world (though they are consumed as subjects of animal research). In other parts of the world, eating dogs has been part of traditional cuisines and indigenous medical practices throughout history. There are many regions in which dogs are still consumed for food or health.

While most Americans would look askance at people eating dogs, there are those people who do eat odd food in our society. Maybe a rural southerner who eats squirrel, an African American family that eats hog jowls or chitterlings, or perhaps a recent Chinese immigrant who eats chicken feet. We all know that those people is code for people who aren't White or otherwise fail to fit in with the middle class upwardly mobile depiction of what America is.

Maybe we don't all know that.

There is some minor tolerance in our culture for White middle class Americans to eat food that falls outside the norm--food those people eat. White folks can safely venture into an ethnic restaurant and have a culinary adventure. An exotic evening eating that strange food that those people eat.




Our judgements about what people eat for food are an interesting phenomena to explore. Whether it be moussaka or dog, what we consider acceptable and unacceptable foods reveal a complex set of social, cultural, and societal values and preferences.

A few days ago I came across a tweet that caught my eye about dog meat. It was a call to send a post card to President Park Geun-hye of South Korea. There is a long history of eating dog meat for nourishment and health in some segments of Korean society (see here for an excellent article about dog meat trade in another Asian country).

Puppies and kittens are adorable creatures. Why wouldn't I want to immediately send off a postcard to President Park Geun-hye? She should ban this practice immediately because--well, why? Because I am a white man that thinks dogs are pets and not food? Does she--or anyone in South Korea for that matter care what I think? Why would my viewpoints on what appropriate foods are matter?

We freely sign petitions, fire off emails and tweets, post angry Facebook statuses, and otherwise express our White Western displeasure with how the rest of the world conducts their business. We swoop in to save people (and animals) without really spending much time pondering whether anyone asked to be saved, whether anyone actually needs to be saved, and what our motives are for wanting to play the role of savior. We don't think about the larger constellation that exists in another country--traditions, cultures, values, economics, religions, and every other factor that goes into any given situation.

• Who decides what needs to be changed? 
• Who decides what is right or wrong in this world? 
• What set of values, morals, and assumptions are these decisions based on?

I've wrestled with these questions ever since I was challenged during my dissertation defense by my  chair, Susan Hawes. In the course of questioning me about my research, she commented that what I suggested spoke to moral relativism. We were discussing homonegativity when Susan asked me how I determined what was right or wrong. I felt uncomfortable making a global statement that something was wrong when my judgement was based on my own personal values. I didn't have an answer for Susan then. I still don't.

Eating dogs isn't right for me. It breaks my heart to think of the trusting lovable dogs that are used for food. However, who am I to say that this is any more wrong that eating cows, ducks, or hogs? Are my values and mores superior to those of someone else? How would I begin to decide what was better?

• Are there absolute rights and wrongs in this world? 
• Who determines what those things are? 
• Who gets to decide?
• How do they decide?

On a practical level, I grapple with this issue daily in my work as a psychologist. I'm not sure it's my role to make determinations about what is right or wrong for a person in my role as a psychologist--except where I am required by law.

• Should I stay with my girlfriend?
• Do you think I should look for a new job?
• Why can't I cut my arms and legs if it makes me feel better?
• Is it worth being alive when I'm in so much pain?
• My boyfriend beats me and I kind of like it. Is that wrong?
• Why is god punishing me?
• How can I feel better?
• Why am I gay?

So many questions for which I have no answers. I often drive my patients crazy because of my refusal to answer with anything but more questions. On the other hand, I often also drive my patients crazy when I'm directive and hold too firmly to an idea about how I think they should be in this world.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There's more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
--Indigo Girls

On a legal level, I am charged with protecting my patients from suicide, intervening if my clients are planning a homicide, and notifying authorities about children, elders, and people with disabilities who are being physically or sexually abused. The field has developed taxonomies of behaviors that are considered abnormal or aberrant. Protocol based therapies exist to ameliorate a variety of unwanted symptoms ranging for negative self worth, to erectile dysfunction, to vaginismus, to test taking anxiety.

Without thought, I can impose my viewpoint on how a person ought to function or behave through the theories and interventions of my profession. Is that moral? Is that right? 

Do any of us have the moral authority to sit in judgement of another culture or an individual? We inflict so much damage upon other people when we use our own values to judge another from culture that has a different set of values.

Do we have the right to demand a culture act in a way that suits our wishes and desires? Is it useful for us to send postcards and sign petitions asking Korean people who eat dog meat, and have done so for centuries, to stop? Did they ask for our opinion or help?

What makes us think we are any more right than they are?

Are we helping them or our we helping ourselves?

In sending a postcard have we built capacity for the people of South Korea to build their own animal rights movement? Does sending a postcard to the president of South Korea give us the sense we've done something so we can feel a release of energy and pat ourselves on the back? Do we save the animals even if it means we destroy a culture and tradition?

• Are we that important that we can make those sorts of decisions?
• Do we best help people by making them change?
• Do we help by sharing the tools, resources, and experiences of our world so cultures and societies can build their own change movements?
• Are there some moral outrages that are so outrageous that intervention is required? 
• How do we decide what outrages merit this level of intervention? 
• Have these interventions ever worked? 
• Are their other options? 

Questions, and more questions, and questions as yet unformulated.
No answers please.
--Martha Crawford

After the page break are highlights from Twitter.

Wants of Few/Needs of Many

via Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Here is an interesting question: Why should the wants of the few outweigh the rights of the many?

I've been thinking about this evocative image on and off for most of the day. The message is deceptively clear--so deceptive in fact that I almost passed right on by without any additional thought.

Perhaps I stopped and lingered on the image a little more because I was getting ready to see the new incarnation of Start Trek Into Darkness later in the afternoon. Any self-respecting fan knows the famous line uttered by Spock in various versions of the show (see here, here, and here).

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few--or the one.

Of course our Captain Kirk messes this all with up with his dedication to love and friendship:

Sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.

I got to thinking about this image and it began to reveal its complexity.  Here is a list of things that I thought about while looking at this picture:

• What I perceive as a right might be perceived by another as a want.
• What I perceive as a want might be perceived by another as a right
• My rights might infringe upon another person's rights.
• My rights might infringe upon another person's wants.
• My wants might infringe upon another person's rights.
• My wants might infringe upon another person's wants. 
• Another person's rights might infringe on my rights
• Another person's rights might infringe upon my wants.
• Another person's wants might infringe upon my rights
• Another person's wants might infringe upon my wants.
• Who gets to decide what a right is?
• Who doesn't get to decide what a right is?
• Who gets to decide what a want is?
• Who doesn't get to decide what a want is?
• What is a want?
• What is a right?

Pick any controversial issues facing our society today and pose these questions. You'll end up with more questions than answers. In our polarized society I think we shy away (or just plain avoid) asking these sorts of questions. We are replacing critical thinking with epistemologies and ontologies of personal revelation.

I know I have no answers here. Only questions. 

What do you think?

A Call to Action/Shine Brightly

This  morning I came across a video produced by the Family Research Counsel. I found it to be a particularly repugnant piece of propaganda and live tweeted my responses to the video. I felt that in good conscious, I couldn't let out-right falsehoods go unchallenged. I strongly encourage you to watch the video for yourself.

Interested in encouraging these folks to move from hate toward compassion? Consider an e-mail, tweet, phone call, or letter. Share with them the importance of love, compassion, and acceptance of all of our humanity. Tony Perkins, near the 26:50 mark, says that it is important to be "letting your light shine before men in such a way that they can see your good works." Show them all your good lights. Shine bright. Our futures--your futures--depend on it.

Rev. John Rankin
Theological Educational Institute
P.O. Box 297
West Simsbury, CT 06092
tei@teii.org
860-408-1599

Jeff Buchanan (or here)
Executive Vice President
Exodus International
1-888-264-0877

Joe Dallas
email here
17632 Irvine Blvd.
Suite #220
Tustin, California 92780
714-508-6953

Tony Perkins
Peter Sprigg
Chris Gacek
(email here)
Family Research Counsel
801 G Street, NW
Washington, D.C., 20001
203-393-2100 (p)
202-393-2134 (f)

Redeemed Lives
Rev. Mario Bergner
(email here)
P.O Box 451
Ipswich, MA 01938
978-356-0404

Massachusetts Family Institute
(email)
(web)
781-569-0400

Liberty Legal Foundation
Kelly Shackelford
9040 Executive Park Drive
Suite 200
Knoxville, TN 37923
324-208-9953
(web)
(email)

Carol M. Swain
Vanderbilt University Law School
131-21St Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37203
615-322-1001 (o)
615-310-8617 (c)
615-322-6631 (f)
(web)
(email)

Rep Vicky Hartzler
(web)
(email)
1023 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-2876 (o)
202-225-0148 (f)

Alliance Defense Fund
Austin R. Nimocks
15100 N. 90th Street
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
1-800-835-5233
(web)

Mass Resistance
P.O. Box 1612
Waltham, MA 02454
781-890-6001
(web)

Julie Harren Hamilton, Ph.D., LMFT
P.O. Box 1382
West Palm Beach, FL 33402
561-312-7041
(email)
(web)

(read my letter to Dr. Hamilton here)

The Seven Blunders of Man

I recently followed a link on Twitter to a blog called Lists of Note. This was a list worth repeating.

Shortly before his assassination, Mohandas Gandhi gave his grandson Arun Gandhi a piece of paper with a list of seven blunders that human society commits. Gandhi saw this list as the source of violence in the world.

What do you think? More importantly, how might things change if you made a commitment to working toward these things?

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Knowledge without character
• Commerce without morality
• Science without humanity
• Worship without sacrifice
• Politics without principles

Could you turn your child out onto the streets?

This short video clip made me particularly sad. Hearing parents turn their children out of the house because of their sexuality or saying they wished their children were dead is just so painful. I don't know how anyone can turn their back on a child. To turn one's family out into the cold world, to repudiate them, to shun them, seems to be such an utter failure of compassion and humanity.

The biggest failure here, I think, is a cultural failure. We are loosing our ability to express disappointment and anger in a connected relational way. Our either/or mentality (aka George W. Bush saying you are with us or you are against us) has narrowed the possibility of dialogue.

What do you think? Is there a time you could imagine turning your child out? Do you think there is a way you can stay connected in dialogue with someone who are angry with?

The Human Face of Same Sex Marriage

I recently became involved in a discussion on Facebook about same sex marriage. I generally avoid these sorts of situations. Discussions such as the one I got myself involved in generally become banal and rather frustrating. They usually don't end up very well. Sure, the back and forth is interesting, for a while. In the end the narrative is always the same: one side blames the other for being (circle one: ignorant, uneducated, defensive, stupid) while the other side generally resorts to accusing the other as (circle one: ignorant, uneducated, defensive, stupid). Facts are provided. Facts are disputed. Both parties, in the end, become something akin to a dog, tied to a stake, running around in circles tearing up all the grass.

The end of the conversation went something like this:

The Map is not the Territory: On Scientology, Intelligence, and Critical Thinking

Regular readers of my random ramblings no doubt note that I'm a lover of diversity. I also strive to be respectful of a variety of beliefs. There are limits. I've apparently found one of mine.

"Everything in moderation including moderation" --Oscar Wilde

My clinical psychology practice is in the heart of Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts. It's hard to spin around on Massachusetts Avenue without knocking over another psychologist. There are a lot of us concentrated along red brick sidewalks. This dense grouping of psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists apparently makes the square a good place for the occasional protest by anti-psychiatry and anti-psychology forces within Scientology.

I've been working in Cambridge for the better part of eight years now. From time to time the folks from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights New England canvass the streets and put leaflets on the windshields of the cars lining the streets. I recently got this flyer pictured on the left when I was parked in front of a senior citizen housing complex.

I'm all for having full throated and complex discussions about all sorts of different ideas. The neighborhood around my office is populated by communists, cults, political protesters (the Falun Gong folks have put on some amazing street performances/protests), and of course there is the endless supply of people wanting me to save the whales, children, environment, etc.

Most of what is presented in Harvard Square is one sided. The information from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights is no different. I actually enjoy encountering this sort of material--and enjoy when a young (or old) client brings it with them into an appointment. Almost every autumn, for example, a teen comes into my office with their latest discovery from the LaRouche youth movement.  Together we look at the information with a critical eye. We think of ways to get different viewpoints. We think of ways to fact check. I create a space where the teen can come to their own opinion, in their own way, in their own time. 

This sort of dialogue has had transformative and far reaching effects. A young person (or any person, really) starts looking at their own life with a critical eye: they explore, fact check, try out different viewpoints, and eventually find a more expansive understanding of their inner (and outer) lives.

Sometimes however, the one sided nature of the debate turns nasty. Sometimes it's even dangerous.

There are important issues to consider with the over use of psychiatric medications (look here to check out Robert Whitaker's blog Mad in America and here to check out Daniel Carlat's blog for two excellent places to start your own research). The "Whistleblowers of Elderly Psychiatric Abuse", however, really got me frosted the other morning.

What frosted me about the flyers left in front of the senior housing is that it preys on fear and peddles that fear on a vulnerable population. The claims made in the flyer, in some ways, are not outlandish. There are serious concerns that patients and doctors need to sort out together about the use of psychiatric medications.  Likewise, there are also serious concerns to consider when a patient is contemplating electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

To explore ECT more, click here to check out the Mayo Clinic's information page about the procedure,  here to read another overview, or here.

Leaving propaganda on cars surrounding a senior housing complex is just too much. Of course many senior citizens are perfectly capable of doing their own critical thinking. Some however, are not. Some just get scared, aren't equipped to have a good dialogue with their physician, and are left to suffer needlessly.

Rather than leave the propaganda behind anonymously, why not really engage people in a multi-sided dialogue about psychiatry, medication, mental health treatment, and health care decision making?

On a lightly related issue, the folks leaving the anti-psychiatry propaganda also left behind a coupon to visit the local Scientology church. To have your IQ, personality, and aptitude testing.

I have to admit, I'm curious about this one. Much ink has been spilled about what constitutes "intelligence." No one really has an answer for it. The best we have is our performance on specific tasks that are statistically compared to the performance of large populations of people who take the same test.

"The map is not the territory" -- Alfred Korzybski

I wonder how long this is going to take us all to figure out? In the end, I think that's what this somewhat rambling blog post brings me. Whether we are talking about psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, religion, or intelligence, we collectively seem intent on thinking one group or another has direct access to a final statement of what reality is. In the end the best any of us can ever do is have access to our own perceptions to a set of beliefs or ideas.

Madness. Religion. Intelligence. We've created many different abstractions to understand these phenomena. They are all just that: abstractions or reactions we derive from our perceptions. None of them, on their own, are representative of reality.

I think this makes our world so much more interesting and exciting. It also makes it possible for us to all look together at one thing and marvel and all the different ways we experience and understand the phenomena around us.

The Safe Emergency of Therapeutic Situations: Fritz Perls and Gloria (and me)

Recently I wrote about Carl Rogers. While putting together that blog post, I rediscovered the "Gloria" tapes that every psychotherapist-in-training has likely had some exposure. The tapes were therapy demonstrations filmed in 1965. "Gloria," a young recently divorced women, volunteered to meet with Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Albert Ellis.

I haven't watched this tapes in years--the last time was perhaps sometime in the late 1990s. They are fun for me to watch. It is also interesting to see a lot of myself--both my history and my current practice--embedded within the words of these three men.

Let's start off with Fritz Perls. Along with his wife Lara, he founded the school of Gestalt psychotherapy. It's not a theory I think a lot about anymore--that's probably because the theory itself sits deep in my bones and works behind everything I have learned. In the early 90s I started hanging out at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, took several workshops, worked individually with a gestalt therapist for several years, and later participated in a gestalt therapy group for several additional years.

I'm indebted to this early teachers--Jody Telfair, Barbara Fields, Karen Fleming, Mary Ward, and Jackie Lowe Stevenson. There have been many teachers since then but none so central as these.

On to the show. Here is part one of the the full Gloria tape with Fritz Perls.

A friendly sort, eh? Before judgement sets it, put Perls in his time. This was 1965. It was a time of great social change and liberatory movements. Confrontation was in, as was, apparently, smoking.

Journey Into Self

"The question they examine is, what is it like to be oneself? What are other people like when they are themselves? All of us are pretty good at carrying the secret of our own loneliness. Now these people will try to discover the secret of being together."

This clip, the documentary called Journey Into Self, is a fascinating view showing us the brilliance that was Carl Rogers as well as the transformative power of group psychotherapy. Get some popcorn and enjoy.



For more about Carl Rogers, check out my blog post here.

Rape, Injustice "Facts," and a Call to Better Scholarship

Those of you who regularly pay attention to me on Twitter know that I go a little crazy over items presented as "facts" that are either not referenced or not verifiable. I've seen way too many examples of blatant misinformation spread as well as generally smart people who become misinformed vectors spreading about even more misinformation.

Take for example the Twitter entity known as InjusticeFacts. They describe themselves as "an open, circulating database of facts that deal with the injustices which plague our world." In general, I think the idea is great. There are copious amounts of horrible injustices that happen in the world. Many of us have no idea that they are occurring. Consciousness raising is an important tool of social change, and I'm glad Injustice Facts is doing some of that work.

My complaint is that Injustice Facts offers up sloppy scholarship. People can provide them "facts" through their website. The organizers of the website then disseminate those facts. Are the facts vetted? Are there references that are made available so we know that the fact is true? 

No. At lest Injustice Facts does not explicitly say they do fact checking. The organization also doesn't not respond to Tweets asking if they fact check.

Arguably, good scholarship involves checking out the veracity of information. Not everyone does that. I think an organization or person who presents things as facts has some responsibility to actually verify whether facts are facts -- or if they are propaganda. We've become too trusting, and have rapidly lost our ability to critically think about the world around us.

Yesterday, someone who  I follow on Twitter re-tweeted this:

InjusticeFacts Injustice Facts 

29 women out of every 100,000 are raped in the U.S. each year, 1.6 women out of every 100,000 are raped in Canada each year.

13 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

My (somewhat snarky) response :

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

.@InjusticeFacts @amandamcneil I usually like my facts with a side of references.

13 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

My twitter follower's response, which has since been deleted by the follower, was "Questioning rape facts. Classy." I of course wasn't questioning rape. Violence is a despicable thing, and a good deal of my work as a psychologist is with women and men who have endured sexual violence. My complaint was about a disembodied fact--without reference, context, or verification--being represented as truth.

The snark probably obscured my message a bit.

I continued (I edited a few auto correct errors from my original tweets):

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

I question our collective lack of critical thinking about information that is presented without reference @amandamcneil @injusticefacts

12 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

Why should I believe stats that aren't verified? That is not questioning rape. Its demanding good scholarship @amandamcneil@injusticefacts

12 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

My twitter follower elected to unfollow me and ignore my responses. A shame, really, as she and I probably agree more than we disagree. I also think, by the way, that it's important to regularly be exposed to people who think differently than me. It makes my world bigger, richer and more diverse.

I've taken it upon myself to do a little fact checking. The UN's statistics for forcible rape in the United States for 2009 was 28.6 per 100,000 people. The count for Canada? 1.5 per 100,000 people. Ms. Magazine has put together a helpful table to demonstrate how difficult it is to get accurate statistics on rape. Scary, sad, and heartbreaking reading.

In this case Injustice Facts were accurate facts (there was a little rounding that happened). To be a more worthwhile source of information, and a trustworthy source of information, a simple addition of a reference would change everything.

It really isn't good enough to say something is true "because I said so." It's poor scholarship, breeds misinformation, and has the potential for great harm.

We need to be critical thinkers. We need to question what we read. We need to search out references to know that the facts we see are accurate and not propaganda. We need to be better scholars.

That is my point. I'm sad my Twitter follower didn't stick around long enough to hear me out.

A Moment of Racism Frozen in Time

I came across this image some time ago and have been thinking a lot about it. I don't know the particulars of the image (perhaps a reader will?). What stands out to me is the horror of the image as well as a reminder of the racism that is inherent in how our criminal justice system metes out "punishment."

What do you think? More importantly, what do you see?

When a spade is not a shovel

from the 11th Hour

My first dissertation chair, Glenda Russell, had a thing about words. She loved them. That was for sure. She also was very interested in the imagery and meanings that were embedded deep within the words. A casual mention once about "black ice" brought us into a long conversation about how many things in our culture that are considered negative or bad utilize dark or black as descriptive words--and how deeply that is often intertwined with overt (or covert) racism. Another time, when I suggested we don't skirt around an issue, a conversation was launched about my un-examined sexism.

Sometimes, it was a bit much. Most of the time, however, it helped me think very deeply about how my choice of language can sometimes reinforce imagery, ideas, and ideologies that I'm not interested in reinforcing.

I found myself channeling Glenda this week. A friend of mine tweeted that we have more serious problems in this world when we can't call a spade a spade. I said we have more serious problems in this world when we forget that a spade isn't always a shovel. Unless of course you actually are referring to a shovel.