Dr. Seligman is a nationally known psychologist who gained his reputation from experiments applying electrical shocks to dogs. He discovered that when electric shocks are applied to a dog over periods of time the dog begins to act helpless. He coined the phrase "learned helplessness" to describe the post-torture condition of the animals. One can, of course, see why the architects of the US torture techniques felt this body of knowledge might be useful for their objectives.
Dr. Seligman reports that he asked the CIA officials whether the training was being used for torture, but they reportedly replied that his lack of security clearance made it impossible for them to tell him. Apparently reassured by this answer, Dr. Seligman went ahead with his instruction on learned helplessness and what he learned from applying electric shocks to dogs.
The Future
With the current number of suicides and cases of post traumatic stress disorder reaching all time highs the pressure has increased on the military to address the mental health needs of the troops. One would expect that to help address that problem the military would turn to experts in the treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, the primary severe mental health problem requiring treatment. Instead, the military has once again turned to Dr. Seligman.
In August of 2009, in an announcement carried by the New York Times, Dr. Seligman reported that the military has developed a $119 million program to train 1.1 million American troops in the techniques of "Positive Psychology" aka the Psychology of Optimism. "Positive Psychology" was developed by Dr. Seligman. While Positive Psychology has developed some following in the mental health field, personally, I have not been able to find a meaningful distinction between it and Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking. Both emphasize substituting positive thoughts for unhappy or negative ones.
In announcing the new military program, Dr. Seligman explained his view of the connection between Positive Psychology and military trauma.
"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.. 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."
It is difficult for me to understand how anyone familiar with post traumatic stress disorder in the military could make such a statement. PTSD, once referred to as "shell shock," occurs in veterans who have experienced the horrors of war to such intensity that they psychologically crack. PTSD is the illness depicted in the movies when crazed ex-veterans go on shooting rampages. Unfortunately, these movies are accurate depictions of many very real tragedies for military veterans.
In PTSD, victims are subjected to such overwhelming and horrible emotional trauma that they are unable to regain stability with typical psychological coping mechanisms. Instead, the rattled mind is driven into uncontrollable and rapidly changing, emotionally painful states. The mind oscillates from a full blown, emotional re-experiencing of the trauma to a complete numbing of all emotions, as if the mind were trying to protect itself from being re-traumatized by holding all feelings at bay. Night terrors, panic attacks, depression, and cognitive confusion occur in chaotic fashion to helpless victims.
When one understands and fully appreciates this inner world of the post traumatic stress victim, it is easier to understand why a veteran can go "berserk" killing his family and then taking his own life. It 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.
And yet the US military has bought into this untested notion to the tune of $119 million. 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.
Once again the military is returning to the same pattern I saw in the panel presentation at the time of the first Persian Gulf War. As Seligman's comments indicate, the military is developing a program for our veterans that are based on the same "kids are tough," "they can do it," and "through adversity to the stars just like Wolfgang Mozart" that the Armed Services subcommittee heard during the first Persian Gulf War.
Few who know the military culture think, as Dr. Seligman implies, that the problem with PTSD is that there are too many military personnel diagnosing themselves with PTSD. The problem is just the opposite. Too many members of our armed services are going through traumas that are undiagnosed by themselves or anybody else.
Telling trauma victims that they need to learn to "cope" with these traumas or, as the Positive Psychology approach suggests, find opportunities for "growth" in them, is effective for a military commander trying to drag one last drop of blood out of a soldier. It is not good, however, for the soldier or the society to which the soldier returns. In fact, it simply adds to the already excessive emotional burden the soldiers are carrying.
Conclusion
Our troops have been through enough.
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