Complexes from complex complexes

    I just finished reading “Are Prisons Obsolete?” by Angela Davis and found notes from a few weeks ago on statements that Tom Ricks made on Fresh Air and it got me thinking. First off, these two people might have the most opposite histories you can imagine. Some highlights from Ms. Davis’ past are: ties to the Black Panthers, was nominated twice to run as the vice presidential candidate the communist party, the 3rd woman ever on the FBI’s most wanted list for reasons related to the kidnapping and murdering of a superior court judge, and, you know, a professorship at U.C. Santa Cruze. Tom Ricks on the other hand is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist specializing in military reporting for the Wall Street Journal. He grew up in Scarsdale, NY (my home town) and Afghanistan (not my home town) and is currently a member of a defense policy think tank.
    I can hear you asking, where the poop do these two people’s thoughts and ideologies cross, and how on earth could this be related to psychology? I’ll tell you! It’s all about their ideas on the need to reform massive coercion based systems into humanistic systems to actually meet the goals they say they’re reaching for! Ha!
    Angela Davis makes a very strong case for illustrating how modern prisons are essentially based off a 100+ year old idea that wasn’t very good to start with and in its continuing incarnations really serves to continue racism, classism and misogyny with its main aim to control minorities and provide cheep labor. Tom Ricks argued that a main problem with the military is that it was currently using strategies based on English and French colonial strategies used to put down uprisings, but maintain the dependence on mother country also for easy control.
     What’s the problem with both? Control. As both systems currently stand in opposition to helping people learn better ways to meet their needs. In essence they perpetuate and increase the dissidence that people feel by not listening to the needs they are expressing causing more crime, hatred, and violence instead of making the world a safer place.
       Interestingly, both thinkers have very similar solutions to these problems, at least from a humanistic psych perspective. Tom Ricks related an change in style where officers used active listening (he described this psych skill set to a T with out using the words) with the locals which resulted in the people being heard, and a much more successful campaign towards helping them reclaim their country and be less dependent on the U.S. military.
    Angela Davis argues that abolishing prisons and using large scale active listening to focus on the social ills that cause crime and solving them work better. Controlling criminal behavior in a cell block does nothing. Going for “reparation instead of retribution” helping violent offenders meet their needs for better social integration, allowing them to make amends, grow and continue on with their life to help the their communities grow which is the core of humanism.
     All of this was pretty glib, but really, its pretty powerful to me that both these people, probably without formal training in humanism, have independently come to see it as the answers to such different problems with such different scales.

Dx's and Rx's for kids...

Children Labled as "Bipolar" up 4000%

     Articles like this one on diagnosing (Dx) and the changes that come from it are often unsettling to me. For every one true case of childhood bi-polar, conduct disorder, ADHD, and the other “hot” childhood psych disorders, there seem to be thousands of others who just the same label without merit.
     This article hints at that it helped many doctors prescribe meds for the children (I’m hoping they mean psychiatrists, and not just general practitioners). That’s truly disturbing as well. Psychotropic meds aren’t like Advil. These drugs have major, long lasting side effects and, unless there’s a true chemical imbalance, can be very harmful.  There’s often many other causes for why some acts the way they do, besides poor brain chemistry.
     I can’t tell you how many charts I’ve looked at that have a wrong Dx, a mutually exclusive Dx, or a list so long of Dxs that it took up half a page.  This often happens so that people can get reimbursed for treatment. Insurance companies don’t like paying for preventative psych services, or psych services that will take a long time.
     It often seems like they’re much more willing to pay lots of money for extremely strong meds that lead to other health problems to deal with underlying issues, rather than spending a little more at the beginning to help the person learn to cope and eventually get off the meds. So essentially mopping up the water on the floor and turning off the running faucet at the same time as opposed to just putting lots of paper towels down.

How to get your [co-worker, neighbor family member, pet, significant other] to do what you want – Part 3

I’m a drug dealer. You’re a drug dealer. The fix we give is so good people will work hard for it, people will literally clamor over each other for it, some commit crimes for a fix, and babies die without it. What’s the fix? Attention.

In part one and two I talked about planned ignoring, and positive reinforcement, here’s how to tie them together via selective attention, a very powerful tool.

Part of being social animals means we all crave attention and praise. Sure the level varies from person to person. We all know people who want it all the time.  They’re the ones always trying to be in the spot light, and all but the most reclusive hermits want at least a little attention.

This is part of what makes therapy such a unique experience for people. In theory, therapists are expert attention payers, we listen, processes and respond to you. It’s often very Fight Club-esc, “…They really listen to you instead of just...Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.”

Since attention and praise is so powerful, giving out a little extra here and there can work wonders in shaping someone’s behavior in all kinds of environments. Stopping a kvetch? Easy. Constant complaining is one way of scoring some attention, although it also usually repels people shortly after. Now remember, you’re the person who handing out their fix, so give it out on your terms.

You- ::look them in the eye and give your full attention:: “Hi Bob! What’d you do this weekend?”

Bob- “Ehh, nothing really, it was too short, now back to the grind of data entry for our terrible boss, I think she knows how looking at the screen gives me migraines…”
You- ::go back to doing paper work as soon as the complaining starts::

Bob- “Yeah, but no migraines this weekend, just nice and quite with the wife and kids.”
You – ::look them in the eye and give your full attention when hearing the little positive things:: “Sounds Nice! How are the little one’s doing?”

If you keep going like this, pretty soon Bob’s behavior will change to get the most attention possible. Just keep giving Bob a fix of attention when he’s acting positively and don’t pay him any mind when he’s not.

Same thing works for getting work done on time, or ahead of schedule. Improving organization, phone habits and anything else really. Once you get the basics of this down, you can use Shaping and Chaining to get just the kind of behavior you want from people, even if they’ve never done it before.

Mind, Body, Stim.

According to a new journal article, we move our bodies forwarded when thinking about the future, and lean back when recalling the past is a great. I’m always amazed how strongly thought, stimulation and body are tied together. Thought I shouldn’t be. There are lots of articles about how people’s thoughts that things are harming them make, them ill. Airport security screeners think that honey is a bio weapon and make themselves sick enough to go the hospital. And "ElectroSensitives" get better over night once they're told a radio tower is off, even though it's really been off for a month already....

The reverse is true too. NPR’s Radiolab recently did an excellent show on placebo affect (scroll down on the show panel on the right hand side for the podcast) the final segment, on how even doctors wearing white coats has been shown to help their patients get better is.

Stimulation is also so key, but so few people every think about it explicitly.
ARC’s Snoezelen room does amazing things for people. While it was developed to work with adults on the autism-aspergers spectrum, everyone loves it.

Most people regulate their stimulation level from different senses implicitly. Choosing clothes with a fabric you like (tactile), tapping your foot or spinning a pen (proprioceptive), choosing a scent (olfactory), going for a walk or a run (vestibular). Those are just a few ways we modulate our stim level, and one of the main features of people on the autism-aspergers spectrum is marked difficulty in managing their own stim levels. Have you ever been somewhere and the lighting was to high or too low? The music was too much, or not enough? You felt bored or much too stimulation? Makes you feel gross right?

A Snoezelen room is the exact opposite. The person running the room changes all the aspects of stimulation in the room (and there are toys, and a chair that makes you feel weightless, and different areas and textures and a little alcove and…and…and…) so that you can find exactly the correct amount of stimulation you want and it does amazing things. Your muscles relax, your head clears and often develop this great sense of well being. It’s a lot like waking up from the best nap ever.

Our thoughts, our environment, and our bodies all play off one another. It’s almost comical to me how people organize school, work and sometimes even out own homes in ways that our culture says is appropriate and the “best way” to get things done, and then everyone in there fights against it all day.

Anyone want to help me make the world be more ergonomic?

So Quick To Punish...

One of the major issues I saw while working with people who have intellectual disabilities is how often the people around them, who are there to support them, and help them make the most out of their lives, are so quick to chastise and “correct.”

This seems to be the ruling thought for our penile system, school management and other traditionally institutional systems. They all seem focused on stopping the end disruptive behavior, but seem to invest so few resources in analyzing the precipitating causes. It’s kind of like cleaning up the mess from an over flowing sink, without bothering to turn off the tap.

Does punishment work? Sometimes, but not often. Numerous articles and other work has been written illustrating the failures of the American prison system, a few things get found over and over again, longer, stiffer prison sentences do not reduce crime. What does? Rehabilitation and working on the initial causes that create the problems in the first place.

This works from an economic standpoint as well. Removing drug dealers from the streets doesn’t make drugs go away (unless you get all of the dealers) it just make the drugs that are there more expensive. So what you end up with are addicts going greater lengths to get the cash to buy them. What does remove drugs? Making people not need, or not want them. If there’s no market for drugs, they won’t be profitable and no one will bother to sell them.

Think even closer to home. Think about the last time someone yelled at you. Did it make you think positively of the person? Did it really make you want to change your behavior, or just figure out how to do things so you wouldn’t get yelled at next time?

All behavior is communication, misbehaving is communicating that there is a need that isn’t being addressed. Either there’s a lack of understanding, resources, or ability in being able to meet the need in a better way. Fix that need, replace it with a “better” behavior and there’ll be no more need to yell.

We need a mask for the outer world…?

I was listening to an interview from npr and that statement was made. It caught me off guard. I think most people agree with it, but why? Why do we need a mask? What does it do for us? Keep “us” safe? Safe from what?... Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out… I just re-read mending wall, (go ahead, it only takes a min or two) Why keep ourselves safe from being known…. There is no difference between those who cannot read and those who do not read according to Mark Twain. Is there a difference between the struggles of being unknown, or being known and being rejected? Maybe, at least if you’re known to yourself and others then the “option” of being accepted exists….

How to get your [co-worker, neighbor family member, pet, significant other] to do what you want – Part 2

Planned ignoring, while effective, is not a very fun way of interacting with people. It takes a lot of consistency and fortitude and generally causes headaches before the major results kick in.

The best way to get people to act how you want is by what’s called “Proactive” positive behavioral supports. This is by far the effective and enjoyable way to effect change in people. It’s simple, effective, and makes you feel good too.

So here’s what it all boils down to “Go out of your way to tell people you like what they’re doing.” Yep, that’s it. A few well placed “thank you”s and some pats on the back will make everything great. How does that happen you ask? And why then isn’t everyone great now?

Two things:

First, very few people go out of their way to give compliments and approving statements.

Second, the person shouldn’t be doing something extraordinary, they should just be doing behavior you’d like to see them do again in the future.

Your significant other takes out the trash for you? Give them a compliment. Your child is sitting quietly focused on their homework? Tell them how great they are for doing their math. Your dog has happily greeted you at the door without jumping all over you? Milkbones for everyone!

I know this all seems crazy. I mean, why should people get praise for doing what they’re doing anyway? That’s the “trick” with this stuff, anytime you reward a behavior, you make it more likely for the behavior to occur again.

This usually works pretty quickly, and once you get into the habit of it, you can start getting into the fancier techniques, and getting totally new behaviors you’ve always dreamed of but never thought possible. Some day, you too could have children who clean their rooms on their own, a spouse who interacts with you how you want, or a staff who’s ahead of their work. :-)