Opinionated Much?

Just when I get worried that I've been too opinionated, an angel gives me a quote like this:

"Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all." --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I have no idea who Georg is (will Google him later) but I do thank him. 

Draw, Podna!

Or not.

Some of you may know we have a new gun law here in Georgia. Basically, it says you can carry a gun anywhere, with or without a permit, concealed or 'open carry'. And of course, as you have read in the news, some folk have been exercising that right -- resulting in at least one arrest, but I digress.

The topic came up among colleagues recently, who are all bestirred about exactly what the law says about our ability to prohibit guns in our offices, and several have expressed the felt need for legal consultation before doing anything. There was also some discussion about what to do if a client doesn't like it.

Here's my take on it.

I have always expressly forbidden weapons of any kind, legal or otherwise, permitted or not. No pepper spray, no nunchucks, no knives, no throwing stars, no guns, no clubs. This is a clearly stated, up-front policy: New clients sign a form stating that they have read and understood this. So new clients who do not wish to abide by this policy can go find another therapist. Easy peasy. But I've never had a problem with it. Everybody's reaction, from day one some thirty-three years ago, has always been, "Ok, cool, no problem." Even my gang-banger, whose posse used to stand guard downstairs during his sessions.

I don't anticipate that any of my existing clients will have a problem with it either, if only because (a) they've already agreed to my policy, and (b) because there's no political struggle for them to win here, no point for them to make. After all, I'm a good ol' girl myself, with a gun and a carry permit of my own, and I don't bring my gun to the office! Also, it's not a policy in isolation of other operating procedures I have in place -- all of which I follow as well. I expect 24 hours' notice of cancellations, for example, and in return I let you know the minute I know I'm not going to be able to be there for your appointment. If you no-show, I charge you; if I double-book, the next one is on the house. You can't show up drunk and expect to get a session, but then again, I don't show up drunk to work with you, either.  

There was also a flurry of worry about how to terminate appropriately with a client who violated the policy. Again, I am not concerned about that, because if a client brings a gun into my office or repeatedly shows up drunk, doesn't pay their bill, whatever -- they have already clearly stated by their behaviors that they do not respect me or the terms of our contract. They are in breach of contract and I'm no longer obligated, not to find them another therapist, and not to see them three more times to wind up their treatment. And that is not abandonment, because they knew in advance of the fact that such behavior would terminate our work together. Therefore, by doing so, they are in effect leaving the therapy, same as if they'd walked in the door and said, "I quit." I'm not going to schedule my usual three termination sessions in such a case, knowing they're going to bring in a gun and endanger me, my coworkers, and our other clients in that manner. Now that would be unethical.

I would, because it is a therapeutic issue, a profound statement about how they feel about me/their mother and about their therapy, attempt to analyze it at the time that it occurs. But if we couldn't resolve the issue, then we would be at an impasse which would make any future therapeutic progress impossible anyway. 

Again, this is not about the gun, but about the process. If a client could not come to treatment sober, I would not refer them to another therapist because it would undermine the basic message I wish to send, which is that you can't do outpatient therapy while you are using. You need inpatient first, then come to therapy. Nor would I schedule three termination sessions in such a case, without some assurance that the person would be able to show up clean and sober for same. To do so would send the message that I don't really mean what I say -- that it's ok to show up drunk when I say it's ok. Same points could be made in the case of nonpayment.

So I will continue to forbid weapons -- all weapons, but especially guns because of the irrevocable lethality. The only exception is on-duty cops, who are required by the Job to carry, as has always been the case in my practice. By my reading of the law, it is legal for me to do so as a private person on private property which I have control of by means of my lease of the space. You think I can't? You can take it up with my attorney.

But it's my rule, and it stands. 
 

Girls Find Science Boring Says Scottish Expert

Say what?

Gijsbert Stoet, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow, told his audience at the British Education Studies Association conference recently that 'effort is wasted trying to bridge gender divides in education when innate differences meant that boys and girls would always be drawn to different subjects and careers', according to an article on the tes connect website. “Do we really care that only 5 per cent of the programmers are women? Well, actually, I don’t care who programs my computers," he is quoted as saying.

Stoet works for the University of Glasgow’s Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change. Anyone else besides me find that ironic?

What about the menz, he wants to know: Apparently to him this is a zero-sum game -- any help given to girls to get them into STEM takes away from help supposedly needed by boys. And of course, if you have a choice between helping boys and helping girls, well. Helping boys is obviously more important, right?

For any of you ladies who think you are living in a post-feminist world, here's evidence that a stone-age mentality is still alive and well among people who have the power to influence your future.

What a Wonderful World!

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and nature preservationist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. In the background: Upper and lower Yosemite Falls. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's kind of a depressing world we live in. Every day the news is full of bad news--oil spills, murdered children, plane crashes, political chicanery, terrorism, disappearing species. Or we have direct exposure: You see a stray dog hit and killed in the road, or you are haunted by childhood memories of domestic violence or alcoholism. Someone you know is killed in Afghanistan. Or maybe the thrushes that have nested in your woods every summer since you bought the place back when your kids were little didn't come back this spring. And it is easy to despair. 

"I'm just one person! What can I do?"
This is the question a client asked me the other day. And my answer was, "A lot! You can do a lot!"

Theodore Roosevelt said it best: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." People with great resources (money, some sort of public platform from which to reach millions) can do a lot. The rest of us, not so much. But we can always do something, and in relative terms, it counts for much. 

The point as I see it is to be a good steward of your little corner of the world, to leave it just a little bit better than you found it.

Vote. Write a letter to your congressional representative, or your senator. Attend a school-board or city-council meeting. Write a letter to the editor. Demonstrate. Boycott. Raise money for a good cause.

Spay your cat and keep her up. It seems like a small thing, but it does wonders for her health and happiness: Cats allowed to run free are subject to all kinds of bad outcomes, ranging from injuries in fights to infectious diseases to being hit and killed by cars. In her lifetime, you could save as many as 300 birds' lives. That is no small thing! And by not allowing her to reproduce, think how many homeless kitties you've prevented in succeeding generations. 

If you can't afford a dog yourself, volunteer at your local shelter. Your efforts will make the animals' lives healthier and happier while they're there, and every hour you donate increases their odds of survival. Adopt (don't buy) one yourself, if you can. You may not be single-handedly solving the homeless dog population problem yourself, but your action means everything to that one dog. Everything.

Adopt a child. If you can't afford that, get qualified as a foster parent by your local Department of Family and Children Services. Or become a CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocate) volunteer. Informally, offer a hand to that overwhelmed parent in the supermarket or in your neighborhood. Or pick up the phone and report a child at risk. You could be saving a life.

I used to carry a hot pink key-chain fob that said, "Woman On a Mission." Quite naturally, people would periodically ask me what the mission was. When I was a child protective services caseworker, I told everybody I was out to change the world, one child at a time. When my practice was predominantly women survivors of domestic abuse, it was "changing the world, one woman at a time." I knew I couldn't change the world, but I believed that my work could be world-changing for the one woman or child in my office, at least for the one hour. You're no different: You, too, can change the world for another living being.

Start a blog. They're free here at Blogger.com and via WordPress. Both will walk you through the set-up process, so you don't even have to be very computer-savvy. Perhaps you know more than you give yourself credit for, and you can share your experience, strength and hope with others. All it will take is a little of your time.

Recycle. Pull your weeds the old-fashioned way instead of poisoning them. Don't use pesticides. You'll help save birds, butterflies, and bees, and our soil and streams will be just that tiny bit much cleaner for your effort. If you have property, plant some milkweed.

Speaking of water, use less. If you can afford it, buy shade-grown organic coffee. If you can't, cut your consumption. Don't eat chocolate produced by companies that exploit children, use slave labor, or rape the environment. If you can't afford Rain Forest Alliance-certified chocolate, give it up. Or eat less. Buy locally-produced food-stuffs when you can.

Say something nice to somebody today. Do somebody a favor. Or just smile at them. It may not seem like a big thing to you, but it could be the highlight of their day.

My first ethics text, If Everybody Did, by Jo Ann Stover, asks children to consider their actions in the light of this question: What if everybody did that? When you are taking one tiny step toward improving your world even one tiny little bit, ask yourself that. What if everybody did? 

What a wonderful world it would be!

The Circle of Life, or

Red-Shouldered hawk portrait (Photo credit: San Diego Shooter)

Hawks Gotta Eat, Too.

 I was out on the deck one day last Spring, brushing the dog and catching some rays, and watching the nuthatches take possession of the owl box from a squirrel. It was a quiet day, so when I heard the doves suddenly fly up in alarm one yard over, I looked to see what was up. A hawk had apparently caught one of them. He flew up into a tree, paused for a moment to get a better grip and took off, presumably for his own family's nest with dinner for his mate & nestlings.  

It seemed significant to me, somehow. There it was, new life beginning for the nuthatches, a life ending for the dove, and maybe for its babies if it already had any at this point, and life, presumably, continuing for the hawk and his family. 

When one of us dies, it doesn't (usually) contribute to the continuing life of another being--these days, we tend to do that while we're living, with dying for another being the exception rather than the rule. But the other part, the suddenness and the unpredictability, that fits with our experience. 

We are here, until we are not. 

That particular afternoon it could just have easily been the other dove that the hawk caught, or one of the nuthatches. Or the nuthatches could have lost their standoff with the squirrel whose box that has been all winter. Or the dog or I could have been hit by a falling limb. 

We are here. Until we are not.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

I read an article a while back about physicians' arrogance and how it results in poor patient care. And as I read, I thought that much of it translated well to the field of psychology.

Psychologists, as a rule, are an arrogant bunch.

I was lucky to be therapized, supervised, taught, and mentored into the profession primarily by psychologists who understood respect. But I had some bad experiences, too, with arrogant supervisors that left me so scarred it took years to recover. And I'm not the only one -- I once had a prospective supervisee burst into tears when I told her I never yelled at students. Apparently she'd been yelled at through most of her grad-school career and was expecting more of the same from her practica.

We as a profession have a tendency to believe that we know it all now that we have that 'terminal' degree, and to fail to take seriously those coming up behind us. We stop being teachable. In our arrogance, we can fail to take our duties to our clients seriously, as well, resulting in everything from poor service to egregious ethical lapses. In that vein, I have seen:

• A psychologist disrupting a psychometrist's testing sessions to ask questions, obtain items from the testing room, and even to introduce another patient -- because it would have been an inconvenience to wait
• A psychologist deleting critical safety recommendation from an intern's report
• A psychologist stating he didn't need to read the new manual for a radically revised test, then disagreeing with the intern about conclusions based on new norms
• A psychologist using cheap photocopies of test materials and cutting corners in administration  because s/he wasn't getting paid what s/he thought s/he was worth to do the work right

In these cases confidentiality was violated, tests were invalidated, a staff member was assaulted, a client failed a placement, and countless inaccurate conclusions went out in reports. The seriousness of these consequences would be hard to overestimate.


Arrogance can produce abuse or neglect of student interns and staff as well as of patients. I have either experienced myself or witnessed:

• Staff psychologists and professors sexually harassing students, interns, and nursing staff
• Staff psychologists attempting to influence interns' communications with site visitors from certifying bodies
• Senior psychologist telling junior psychologist, who was asking for help with staff management problems on her unit, "Buck up, Bucko!" 
• Psychologist telling intern, "[Expletive deleted] rolls downhill. And you're downhill."
• The psychologist leading a supervision group being dismissive of supervisees' input, actively discouraging such participation as "taking over my group"
• Clinical faculty blowing off supervision appointments and seminar meetings required to meet state licensing standards and then threatening interns who complain

Needless to say, not a lot of learning can occur in such an atmosphere, and that translates into obvious gaps in the care of those students' patients down through the decades over the course of their careers. Over and above the gaps in the learning of facts and skills, such an atmosphere sets an example for students that says that patient appointments are not important to respect, patient and staff input is not valuable, rules and regulations can be bent as long as nobody knows about it, and nobody should ever report anything untoward.

Inadequate supervision of students and staff (when the arrogant psychologist just can't be bothered) translates into patient abuse going unchecked, and in patient neglect. Patients in turn are inadequately supervised or under- or mis-treated, resulting in self-injuries, untreated medical issues, assaults, suicide attempts, elopements, and deaths. I am not just speaking theoretically here, either: These things have actually taken place.

Then there's the arrogant dismissal of patients' needs and lived experiences. We have

• A psychologist commenting in reference to a severely mentally ill patient s/he deems hopeless, "I can heal the sick but I can't raise the dead!" 
• A center director considering it taken as read that a person with schizophrenia (most of the center's caseload) is incapable of participating in hir own treatment planning
• Psychologists failing to advocate appropriately for minor clients or to support self-advocacy in adults
• Psychologist making fun of a client's parenting style
• Psychologist blaming dead victim of domestic violence (parent of a child client) for getting into/not leaving the relationship

This sort of attitude trickles down to other staff, students, and even clerical employees, with the bizarre end result that one clinic I worked at was actually cited in an audit for -- wait for it! -- not providing mental health care.  I am not making this up.


The experience of stigma is, by the way, a known health risk. By copping an attitude that we are better than our clients (because we are thinner or healthier or more fit, better-educated or more financially well-off -- any measure seems to be fair game these days), not only are we not being helpful, we're actively making our clients' mental and physical health worse. We're putting tremendous pressure on our students and staff, who are, after all, exposed to our prejudices many more hours each week than are our clients, and we're setting terrible examples for them.

Obviously parents from different cultures, with differing parenting styles and victims of domestic violence and their children are not getting good therapy from such therapists. But there's a ripple effect. A respectful therapist working with members of such groups is going to be reluctant to be forthcoming in a team treatment setting or in clinical supervision, where the sharing of information is normally considered necessary to good treatment, lest their patient become a target. 

And then there's

• Psychologists using patients to house-sit
• Psychologist using client to help pack up office at retirement
• Psychologist having intern come in to clean the office on the intern's off days
• Psychologists using students and patients to buttle parties in their homes, and
• Faculty using students to babysit.

A patient is not a servant. Neither is a grad student. And it is the height of arrogance to presume so.

I think part of the problem is that we live in a cultural climate of general disrespect. We are always attuned to matters of class and rank, to where we stand in the pecking order -- and woe betide anyone on the rungs below. And then of course there are some people who just seem, as individuals, to be particularly arrogant/disrespectful. We've all known at least a few: No one, it seems, is safe from their disdain or their verbal abuse.

Plus, with some psychologists, there's a tendency to overvalue the doctorate, to demand respect for themselves while believing it somehow frees them from the obligation to show respect for others who might be just as smart, just as knowledgeable, but who for one reason or another, lack the diploma. They seem blissfully unaware that there is often no difference in intelligence or drive between them and the therapist with a masters--or, for that matter, the parapro with the high school diploma. To a degree (if you'll pardon the pun) the difference is often only a matter of privilege: The "I'm-a-doctor-and-don't-you-ever-forget-it" crowd as often as not are people who were born on third base but think they hit a triple.

And speaking of triples, sometimes you get the triple-whammy -- a psychologist who is (1) not only a product of hir culture but who also is (2) particularly self-important and who (3) takes too much credit for the achievement of a degree which is in itself overvalued*. . . and you have someone who is especially bad for morale, disruptive to the work of the unit/practice/facility/team, and who is potentially downright dangerous to patients.

Get people like that at the top of the office heap, and they tend to run off the folks who aren't like them and hire more who are, until the whole culture of the institution, be it a huge psychiatric hospital or tiny private practice, will be disrespectful. And when that happens, patients beware!

I don't know what we can do about it, other than shout out,

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Find out what it means to me!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

*Trust me, it's not all that special -- there are thousands of us in the state of Georgia alone.

Poor Trayvon

Well, the George Zimmerman verdict is out, and I suppose every Blogger worth her salt will have to have something to say about it today.

I'm not a lawyer, so I don't have an opinion about the evidence or the jury, or the conduct of either the prosecution or the defense, or even about the Stand Your Ground law. Well, yeah, I do have something to say about that, but it's not a legal opinion, strictly speaking.

These kinds of laws spring from a state of mind peculiar to regions that historically were made up of scattered, rural, generally agricultural or herding societies who did have to protect their own land/livestock/homes/families because there was no law close enough around to do it. Pro-actively, the successful men in these societies projected an über-male, physically over-bearing persona in order to cause potential criminals to steer off for other parts where presumably they might find easier pickings. It was a matter of honor to be able to protect your boundaries, to be able to project that sort of image, and by extension if somebody messed with you or your stuff, well, then, your honor was at stake until you could even up the score. 

I can't say anything psychological specifically about George Zimmerman because I have not evaluated him, and I don't have access to anybody else's evaluation of him. Heck, I haven't even watched the non-stop coverage of the trial. But I can say, as a disinterested citizen observer, that George appears to the naked eye to be a bit like the fence-rider of old, ever on the lookout for rustlers who, if you will remember your US history, along with horse thieves back in the day could be hung on sight by whoever caught them in the act. This is, I suspect, partly why it looked so much like it was Trayvon rather than George who was on trial this past week. Indeed, I could not help but notice, some commentators persisted in referring to it as "the Trayvon Martin trial". The mentality is still that pervasive.

We don't need those kinds of laws any more, but they and the personalities they serve persevere. As does the gun violence that goes with them. 

If you see yourself as a victim, which, weirdly, an increasing number of white males in this country do, or if you merely fantasize yourself engaging in various make-my-day type heroics, you may find like-minded folk in the gun and prepper communities (there's a lot of overlap between the two). Stand-your-ground laws were written for you. And so you may end up going about your daily business locked and loaded, spoiling for a fight. You don't even have to be part of a neighborhood watch or other, similar, organization. You can self-appoint. Your real-world perceptions are filtered through the movies running through your head, which in turn are heavily influenced by the paranoid poppycock you read on prepper and gun websites and in their magazines and newsletters, to the detriment of your grip on reality. You would be what the American Rifle Association calls an Armed Citizen. They even have a monthly column called "The Armed Citizen" in which they congratulate each other for shooting alleged criminals. 

But I digress. 

Anyway, one day you find yourself in a situation which seems to you to call for a violent response. Instead of the dozen other things you could do, or not do, in this situation, you draw your weapon. You're not reluctant. You're not saddened by it. You are justified. This is, after all, the fulfillment of a long-cherished fantasy. You genuinely don't 'get' why anybody else would be horrified at what you've done.

This would happen even if there were no stand-your-ground laws, but at least then there might be some justice for your victim afterwards.

But I am not a lawyer, so no, my only real opinion is from my point of view as a mother, and that is that justice was not done here. It seems to me that part of the whole point of the USA is that a person -- most especially a child -- should be able to walk the streets of his or her community in peace and safety. And anyone who violates that is in violation of some law. Be it written or ethical or moral, he is in violation. He has violated the peace of the community, and the safety of all of its citizens. He has violated the faith and trust that we have in our neighbors.  

I don't see how Trayvon's parents can have any peace at all until we as a nation stand up and say this.