In the late 1970s, government leaders were desperately seeking remedies for the nation's soaring crime rate. One solution, inspired in part by the tough love message coming from mental health professionals, was to establish military-style boot camps where harsh discipline and strict regimens would set people straight. The first adult camps were established in 1983, and by the end of the decade, at least 15 states had opened or were developing similar camps for either adults or juveniles.
Although initial reports were encouraging, by the mid-1990s troubling stories began to appear about abuse and sadism at the camps. In 1998 five staff members at a boot camp in Arizona -- including the camp nurse -- were indicted in connection with the death of a 16-year-old inmate. At the time of his death, his body was covered with cuts and bruises -- 71 in all. The camp was eventually shut down, and 16 of its staff members were added to the state's registry of child abusers.
The biggest problem with boot camps, however, is that they just don't do the job. Recidivism of 60 percent or more is common -- as high as, or higher than, recidivism rates generated through more benign programs. Experts on learning have long known that harsh discipline mainly teaches people to be harsh themselves -- and to hate their abusers -- but that message is getting through only belatedly to the boot camp advocates. As the head of a National Institutes of Health panel that studied "get tough" programs nationwide summed it up a few months ago: "All the evaluations have shown [the programs] don't work."
4. Most Over-Rated
The Cult of Self-Esteem
Humorist Garrison Keillor is famous for his stories about the fictitious Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average." Statistically speaking, however, all children can't be above average -- unless, that is, they're raised in self-esteem-obsessed America.
Feeling good -- as opposed to behaving well -- came into vogue in the 1960s, driven in part by books like Nathaniel Brandon's Psychology of Self-Esteem. By the 1980s, many schools were spending upwards of three hours a week on counseling and self-esteem classes, and at some schools all students were made "Student of the Month." Curriculum programs such as educational psychologist Michele Borba's Esteem Builders stimulated the development of more than a thousand off-the-shelf exercises like "I Love Me," in which students complete sentences like "I am" with words such as "gifted" or "beautiful" and then memorize the sentences.
But hundreds of studies have failed to show that self-esteem training produces lasting positive results. To put this another way, merely feeling good about yourself doesn't necessarily make you more effective. What's more, recent studies suggest that self-esteem training may be harmful -- that it leads many students to overestimate their abilities, for example. One study even shows that people with high self-esteem are more likely to be violent or racist.
5. Most Likely to Make Good People Feel Bad
Codependency, Enabling and Tough Love
Love and support are generally seen as good things, but in the 1980s, some substance-abuse writers and counselors claimed that the family members of alcoholics "enabled" alcoholism by being too loving. "Tough love," they insisted, was the only solution. What's more, they said, "co- dependent" enablers were themselves almost certainly victims of sexual abuse when they were children. The abuse lowered their self-esteem, which made them more likely to love and support someone unworthy of their attention. Some also insisted that all adult problems were the result of child abuse, and co-dependency was sometimes defined so broadly that almost any act of love or self-sacrifice could fit the definition. Best sellers like Melody Beattie's Codependent No More and Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much thrust these ideas into the public consciousness, where they remain to this day.
Considerable evidence suggests that the codependency idea is dead wrong. In a comprehensive analysis of alcoholism treatment published in 1990, for example, Stanford University psychiatrist Rudolf Moos and his colleagues came to the obvious conclusion that family support helps ex-alcoholics stay sober. Abandoning a substance abuser in the name of "tough love" can sometimes provoke a relapse, and it's certainly hard on family relationships.
As for the child-abuse idea, it too contradicts the evidence. Not everyone who suffers from emotional or behavioral problems as an adult was abused as a child, and not everyone who is abused as a child necessarily develops psychological problems in adulthood.
6. The P.T. Barnum Medal for Mass-Market Potential
Mozart Babies
All parents want the best for their children, which is presumably why millions of moms and dads have played Mozart for their babies over the past decade -- especially the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. In 1993, researchers Frances Rauscher and Gordon Shaw announced that playing this piece for college students temporarily increased their "spatial reasoning ability." To be precise, some of the students were better able to make judgments about how pieces of paper would look after they were folded and cut in certain ways. The researchers suggested that the music of Mozart (but not of other composers) had a positive impact on the brain.
Tags:
b f skinner,
bsss,
crazy ideas,
example doctors,
facilitators,
ideas,
ill patients,
jackson pollock,
mental health,
mental health fields,
mental health professions,
mouth bass,
nonverbal children,
pigeons,
projective tests,
psychoanalysts,
psychology,
schizophrenics,
theories of human nature,
theory,
therapeutic value,
trapdoor,
treatment,
true self,
wide mouth
