Category Archives: Psychology

September 8, 2006 · 1:04 pm

Committing professional suicide? A call to reform the APA


Just came upon a copy of an address given last month at the APA annual convention by Nicholas Cummings, past President of APA. He offers a scathing review of the disconnect between APA and the rest of the sane world. His beef is that APA loses credibility when it tries to speak with authority from opinions rather than evidence. He gives several examples where there has been both a lack of study in areas deemed now politically incorrect and pronouncements of political correct stances without actual evidence (e.g., impact of single parenting on children, why girls who are sexually active are more likely to be depressed and suicidal than those who do not, the efficacy of reparative therapy—helping those who want to change their sexual orientation from gay to straight).

What makes this interesting is that Cummings is not a right wing whacko but an insider and long-time support of APA. He is coauthor of the book, Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The well-Intentioned Path to Harm. I suspect that readers will fall into two camps about the address: those that appreciate his willingness to say what they have wanted to for some time due to marginalization and power of those who run APA; and those who recognize that while he is correct on some accounts, he only wants to blast gay marriage and single mothers.

I can relate to his points. You can find a similar comment I made to a recent president to APA published in the Monitor on Psychology if you go to this link: www.apa.org/monitor/may03/letters.html

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Filed under philosophy of science, Psychology

August 23, 2006 · 3:34 pm

Who’s at fault for atheistic psychology?


Its easy to get into an us vs. them attitude in life. It the Christians against the schemes of the world.

I teach Christians interested in learning biblically authentic ways to help others work through emotional and relationship problems. As we study psychological techniques, many of my students rail against the secularism, the individualism, and the lack of a biblical anthropology found in mainstream psychology. And they are right to do so. But as a result of our critique of psychology, we often end up being zenophobics. We begin to think that those secularists have created our problems. “They” turned from God and developed atheistic, human-centered, evolutionary theories that explain the world apart from God.

What I find most interesting is that the “they” we often refer to is really “us.” Throughout the course of history, God-fearing, faithful, men and women have made decisions that seemed right in their own eyes but had far-reaching, negative results. Start at the beginning of time. Adam and Eve choose their own power over dependency on God. Abram chooses Hagar to fulfill God’s promises but creates the beginnings of the conflict between Jews and Arabs.
Lot’s daughters choose to have children with their drunken father and so start the races of the Moabites and the Ammonites—two enemies of God’s people. In modern history, Rene Descartes (a believer in God) chooses to disbelieve everything he cannot prove. The founding director of theWorcester State Hospital believes that the soul cannot be diseased and so doesn’t believe that the 6 hours of daily Christian education offered in his hospital plays any part of the positive results the patients had. As a result, the hospital stopped the good work of healing minds through the Gospel.

My point: people of faith are usually behind the foolish choices we’ve made. We, not they, have done what was right in our own eyes and so have conceived social dynamics that have later created misery upon misery. So, lets stop whining about how society is going to hell in a handbasket and realize our own active and passive choices have lead to much of our present day problems.

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Filed under History of Psychology, Psychology