Seligman's Brainwashing Is Not Just for Captive KIPPsters Anymore

Jason Leopold has a great piece up at Truthout on the former CIA torture advisor and KIPP compliance guru, Martin Seligman, aka "Dr. Happy." 

Seems that Seligman has leveraged his research on brainwashing poor schoolchildren into full-time happy scholars into a $30+ million dollar no-bid contract to pass the happiness bug to GIs who are coming back after multiple tours of duty with PTSD and worse.  

Hey, if it can work in Philly to make children love their poverty and their abusive schooling, why can't it work in Kabul to make GIs unaffected by putting their comrades' pieces into bodybags?  According to Seligman, "we're after creating an indomitable Army."

Now when GIs are done with being indomitable in the theaters of war, they can roll all that positivity into the Troops to Teachers movement--and the cycle can begin all over again.

. . . ."Learned Optimism"

Seligman, a past president of the American Psychological Association (APA), began consulting with General Casey in September 2008 about applying the research he and his colleagues have conducted over the past decade to the benefits of his theories on "Learned Optimism" to all of the Army's active-duty soldiers. Seligman then met with Cornum in December 2008 to discuss creating the foundation for CSF as a way to decrease PTSD.

"Psychology has given us this whole language of pathology, so that a soldier in tears after seeing someone killed thinks, 'Something's wrong with me; I have post-traumatic stress,' or PTSD," Seligman said in August 2009. "The idea here is to give people a new vocabulary, to speak in terms of resilience. Most people who experience trauma don't end up with PTSD; many experience post-traumatic growth."

According to a report published in December 2009 in the APA Monitor, Seligman believes that positive thinking methods taught to schoolchildren who "were [conditioned] to think more realistically and flexibly about the problems they encounter every day" can also be taught to Army soldiers and the results will be the same.

Seligman said he is basing his theory on a series of 19 studies he conducted, which found that teachers who "emphasized the importance of slowing the problem-solving process down by helping students identify their goals, gather information and develop several possible ways to achieve those goals," increased students' optimism levels over the course of two years "and their risk for depression was cut in half."

But unlike studies conducted on schoolchildren, there is no research that exists that shows applying those same conditioning methods to the Army's active-duty soldiers will reduce PTSD. Seligman, however, seems to be aware that is the case. That may explain why he has referred to Army soldiers as his personal guinea pigs.

"This is the largest study - 1.1 million soldiers - psychology has ever been involved in and it will yield definitive data about whether or not [resiliency and psychological fitness training] works," Seligman said about the CSF program.

"We're after creating an indomitable Army," Seligman said.

Positive Psychology's Critics

While positive psychology, a term coined by Seligman, has its supporters who swear by its benefits, the movement also has its fair share of critics. Bryant Welch, who also served as APA president, said, "personally, I have not been able to find a meaningful distinction between [positive psychology] and Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking. Both emphasize substituting positive thoughts for unhappy or negative ones."

"And yet the US military has bought into this untested notion to the tune of [$125] million," Welch said. "This money, of course, could have been used to provide real mental health care to our troops. Instead, it is being used to tell military personnel that they can (and, thus, presumably should) overcome whatever happens to them on the battlefield with the dubious tools of Positive Psychology."

PTSD "is is not a mental state that can be treated by suggesting to the patient that he or she simply re-frame how they think about the situation, as Dr. Seligman suggests," Welch added.

Other notable critics include authors Chris Hedges and Barbara Ehrenreich, both of who say the practice has thrived in the corporate world where the refusal to consider negative outcomes resulted in the current economic crisis.

Hedges, author of the book "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," wrote, "positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness and provides the psychological tools for enforcing corporate conformity, is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis."

"Positive psychology is a quack science that throws a smoke screen over corporate domination, abuse and greed," Hedges said. "Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction."

Hedges added that "academics who preach [the benefits of positive psychology] are awash in corporate grants."

Indeed, Seligman's CV shows he has received tens of millions of dollars in foundation cash to conduct positive psychology research.

According to a report published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "People credit a large part of positive psychology's success to the solid reputations of the field's leaders - and Seligman's ability to get science-supporting agencies interested."

"The National Institute of Mental Health has given more than $226-million in grants to positive-psychology researchers in the past 10 years, beginning with just under $4-million in 1999 and reaching more than nine times that amount in 2008," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Seligman has equated his work for the Army to assisting the "second largest corporation in the world."

Multimillion-Dollar Contract

Seligman's biggest payday came last year, when the Positive Psychology Center received a three-year, $31 million, no-bid, sole-source Army contract to continue developing the program. 

According to Defense Department documents, "the contract action was accomplished using other than competitive procedure because there is only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirement[s]. Services can only be provided from the original source as this is a follow-on requirement for the continued provision of highly specialized services."

In 2009, several months after receiving the green light from Casey to develop the CSF program, the Army paid Seligman's Positive Psychology Center $1 million to begin training hundreds of drill sergeants to become Master Resilience Trainers (MRTs), "certified experts who will advise commanders in the field and design and facilitate unit-level resilience training across the Army."

More than 2,000 MRTs have been trained since CSF was rolled out in October 2009. The Army intends to certify thousands more MRTs.

The Defense Department's justification for the no-bid contract said Seligman's program "possesses unique capabilities, in that, [it is] the only established, broadly effective, evidence-based, train the trainer program currently available which meets the Army's minimum needs."

Seligman's program was "explicitly designed to train trainers (teachers) in how to impart resiliency and whole life fitness skills to others (their students)," the contracting documents state. "Other existent programs are designed to simply teach resiliency directly to participants. The long-term outcomes of [Seligman's program] have been examined in over 15 well documented studies."

"Without the Army's Resiliency Master Trainer Program [as taught by Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania] the exacerbated effects of multiple wars and other stressors result in a weakened corps and this directly impacts the Army's readiness and ultimately compromises the national security of our nation ... This program is vitally important to our forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan."

The contracting documents go on to say that "market research ... mostly through a thorough web search and networking with subject matter experts both within the Army, across services and in [academia] into other "positive psychology" programs was conducted between August and October 2008 before the Army decided to award the contract to Seligman because his program met the Army's immediate needs.

Cornum said in July 2009 that similar resiliency tests used by the University of Pennsylvania for the general public would be "militarized" by the Army.

A Difficult Challenge

But according to Griffith, the atheist Army sergeant, the Army did not do enough to remove the religious connotatitions from the spiritual section of the test.

Even Seligman's colleagues acknowledge that attempting to separate spirituality from religion is a challenge.

"Mapping the conceptual distinctions between what we refer to as 'religion' and what we refer to as 'spirituality' can be difficult," wrote Ben Dean in an article published on the University of Pennsylvania's Authentic Happiness web site.

Griffith said there's a simple solution: "Scrap [the] spiritual aspect altogether."

KIPP, PTSD, and the Melting Planet: Think Positive

If there is anyone around to write the history of this era a hundred years from now, a seminal figure in that history will be Dr. Martin Seligman, long-time expert in learned helplessness and more recently the guru of a virulent form of corporate groupthink called positive psychology, or learned optimism. Used jointly as they are in the KIPP school cults and the KIPP imitators, learned helplessness and learned optimism form a potent one-two psychological punch in the neo-eugenic effort to create total compliance organizations among the poor, the brown, the homeless, the immigrant.

Rather than treating the poverty that is the initiator of the many gaps between poor children and children in the leafy suburbs, these "no excuses" testing camps seek to alter the psychologies of children while making them oblivious to their sociological realities. What results is a form of psychological sterilization that, in the end, programs children to "keep on the sunny side" and to view their own shortcomings as a result of personal failure to work hard enough and be nice enough. It is the cheapest and most morally-bankrupt form of social engineering, preferring to subject children to psychological programming rather than doing the expensive and time-consuming work of addressing poverty and all the attendant maladies that go with it. New Age Eugenics.

And so I was fascinated to see the following at HuffPo by Dr. Bryan Welch, who examines the use of Seligman's monstrous treatments for soldiers coming back from war. I suppose the next logical mass application of learned optimism brainwashing will be to treat those who worry about global warming and the end of human civilization. Don't worry, be happy:

With the President's announcement last Tuesday night, over one hundred thousand American troops will soon be in harm's way in Afghanistan. Estimates are that thirty thousand of them will come home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the same psychological condition that plagued Johnny.

This makes returning veterans a ticking time bomb for serious mental illness with a very real danger of violence to themselves, their loved ones, and the general public.

As a psychologist who has treated many serious cases of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, it was a jaw dropping experience to learn that under a new $119 million military program these young men and women who have sacrificed so much will have their PTSD addressed with a superficial, psychological treatment based loosely on Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, known in this generation's iteration as "positive psychology" or the "psychology of optimism.

There is no evidence that the techniques of positive psychology can prevent or ameliorate the effects of PTSD. When its adherents' attempt to extrapolate simplistic studies done on normal junior high students to military combat troops struggling with military traumas they are misleading the military, the public, and, most importantly, the troops.

I discussed this program briefly in a column three weeks ago in the context of the Fort Hood Massacre.

Ironically, Dr. Martin Seligman was the first to announce both this new military "resiliency program" and his own significant role in the development of the $119 million military program. Seligman has previously acknowledged that he consulted to the CIA to give a seminar to the individuals who later developed the actual torture techniques. The seminar was based on Seligman's work administering electric shock to dogs until they developed a chronic state of helplessness and compliance. (Seligman contends he thought his seminar was being used to prevent torture and argues that he personally is opposed to torture despite his research.)

What is peculiar about this significant allocation of funds is that it apparently was done with limited, if any, input from the military experts in the treatment of PTSD. Obviously, in the post- Viet Nam era the Department Of Defense has had a lot of experience with PTSD. According to my sources who have discussed this matter with higher-ups in the DOD Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, the military professionals experienced in the prevention and treatment of PTSD were not meaningfully consulted on the program and were blindsided by its adoption.

Instead, the upper echelon in the Pentagon, without the consultation, support, and agreement of military mental health professionals, decided to divert potential mental health treatment funds to what is a pseudo-treatment when applied to treatment and prevention of PTSD. Upon investigation it appears that this "treatment" is designed more to manipulate troops into denying their need for care than to actually treat them.

The comments made by both the military and civilian architects of the program are appalling in their suggestion that the problem of PTSD is overemphasized and receiving too much attention from the public.

Army General William Casey, "There is a perception out there that everyone who goes into combat gets post-traumatic stress. That's just not true. In fact, science tells us just the opposite; the majority of people who go to combat have post-traumatic growth. They're confronted by something very difficult, and they are stronger as a result." Casey's language here sounds like it has come verbatim from positive psychology advocates.

Seligman reflects a similar although in many ways more shocking attitude implying that many of the reported cases of PTSD are just a function of the soldiers' expectations that if troops see traumatic events they conclude they must have PTSD, the implication being that the PTSD is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Johnny lying in the jungles of South Viet Nam had not labeled his predicament as PTSD he would not have succumbed to it.

"Psychology has given us this whole language of pathology, so that a soldier in tears after seeing someone killed thinks, 'Something's wrong with me; I have post-traumatic stress,' " or P.T.S.D., Dr. Seligman said. "The idea here is to give people a new vocabulary, to speak in terms of resilience. Most people who experience trauma don't end up with P.T.S.D.; many experience post-traumatic growth."

A "new vocabulary" is not what Johnny needed. When the mind is overwhelmed by emotional trauma, as it often is in combat where troops see comrades blown to bits, it is not fixed by mind control techniques that replace negative thoughts with positive ones as the positive thinking model implies.

To the contrary, had I told Johnny to change the way he thought about things I would have been denying him any form of human understanding and contact which can only occur in a reality-based acknowledgment of one's predicament. No, this does not mean Johnny should spend a lifetime wallowing in self pity. But it does mean that reality had to be acknowledged. There had to be at least one person in his life who could acknowledge with him that what had happened to him was "catastrophic."

This same principle is true with troops preparing for combat. A mind that accepts exhortations to "look at things differently" is neither independent nor resilient. It is compliant and vulnerable to exercising bad judgment or no judgment at all. That is the primary lesson we should have learned from Abu Grahib.

Telling people that a psychologist has found the way to "authentic happiness" as the positive psychology movement has done holds the same appeal as Norman Vincent Peale's power of positive thinking did for an earlier generation. Dressing it in psychological accoutrements by contending it is scientifically based is the new bottle for the old wine. While some people may receive a temporary boost from thinking positively, using it either as a preventive or treatment for PTSD, is at best naïve and at worst dishonest.

So what is really going on here? In truth, the military has once again retained the positive psychologists, this time to help it use limited mental health resources to try to suck one last measure of devotion from a bone weary combat force many of whom have already been through multiple deployments. It is doing this under the guise of trying to prevent depression and PTSD.

The effects of repeated deployments - particularly with short "dwell times" at home stations between them are cumulative, General Casey has acknowledged. "All our studies show that the more times you deploy with little time between deployments, the more susceptible you are to having mental fitness challenges," the General said.

In this regard it is telling that the new program will not be implemented by trained mental health professionals. Instead, it will be administered by drill sergeants. As Seligman conveniently notes, ''They [the drill sergeants] are the teachers in the army,''

These "teachers" are trained in 90 minute weekly classrooms. Here is a sample of what they learn to do to build "resilience" in our troops:

In one role-playing exercise, Sgt. First Class James Cole of Fort Riley, Kansas and a classmate acted out Sergeant Cole's thinking in response to an order late in the day to have his exhausted men do one last difficult assignment.

"Why is he tasking us again for this job?" the classmate asked. "It's not fair."

"Well, maybe," Sergeant Cole responded. "Or maybe he's hitting us because he knows we're more reliable."

Is this to help the soldiers be more resilient or is it to make them more compliant and to gripe less. If it is the latter, why can't we just say that?

Of course, the reason is that we prefer to deceive and manipulate than to confront the truth about the excessive demands we are making on our troops and pony up the added resources we need if we are going to remain a nation at war.

Once again, the military is making use of the same dark side of psychology to achieve questionable ends and to deceive. Once again some psychologists are all-too-willing handmaiden. Once again, our troops suffer.

John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and John Kerry--this one deserves your attention.

Bryant Welch, J.D., Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and attorney. He is the author of State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (St Martin's Press, 2008.)