On August 26

On this day in ...

... 1962 (50 years ago today), the BBC reported: "Abortion mother returns home." Thus began a story about "Miss Sherri," the host of the Phoenix edition of the then-popular children's TV show, Romper Room. She was Sherri Chessen Finkbine, 30, who "decided to terminate her fifth pregnancy after discovering that tranquilizers she had taken in the first few weeks of her pregnancy contained the drug Thalidomide," a demonstrated cause of birth defects. Finkbine's decision, The New York Times recalled in a 1992 article, "sparked such intense public condemnation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation stationed agents at her home." The highest court ruled against her in her home state of Arizona, where the law forbade abortion for any reason other than saving the mother's life. (It would be another decade before criminal abortion statutes were outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973).) She and her husband, a high school teacher, thus flew to Sweden, where, after mental health testing, she obtained a legal abortion (the fetus was determined to have just one arm and no legs). (credit for image from Connecticut newspaper depicting the couple in Sweden, amid news of Soviet bomb tests and Marilyn Monroe's death) They began their return trip on this day a half-century ago. Subsequently, according to the BBC, the couple's other 4 children were harassed, and both of them were removed from their jobs. After having another 2 children, they eventually divorced.

(Prior August 26 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Look on! Peru & The Milk of Sorrow

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy productions)

'To speak about experiences associated with extreme violence, the sexual violence, it is not an easy thing. Suffering and fear, lived silently, with shame, “as if it was a fault of one”. It creates a fingerprint that generates other pains associated with the fact of being a woman in a context of arbitrariness and mistreatment. I share the idea that the task of opening spaces, to think, is the only way of facilitating the dialogue on a topic that brings so much pain, and this film was conceived as a search of healing'.

–  Claudia Llosa interview in Filmmaker available here.

(credit)

La Teta Asustada – released in English as The Milk of Sorrow – is a 2009 film directed by Claudia Llosa (below left). It was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival.
Set primarily in the outskirts of Lima, Peru, the film infuses magical realism with conventional narrative to tell the story of Fausta (played by Magaly Solier), a young woman from the province Huanta, in the region of Ayacucho. The film begins with her mother singing about the rape and killings in the Quechua language. After her death Fausta must live with her uncle and his family and earn money so that she can bury her mother.

(credit)

Fausta suffers from a rare disease passed down from the breast milk of her mother. A physical manifestation of transgenerational trauma, the disease is passed on by women who have been raped or abused during the period of state terrorism in Peru, 1980-2000. Between these years, Peru was in a state of conflict, with groups including the Shining Path, state forces, and the group MRTA committing crimes including forced disappearances, torture, kidnappings and rape. According to this UNIFEM report (p. 5) on transitional justice by Julissa Mantilla Falcón, an attorney and law professor in Peru:

'Impunity surrounded these cases and the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission found no evidence of criminal prosecutions against perpetrators of sexual abuses. Moreover, men rarely allows their wives or daughters to report the sexual violence'.

A beautiful movie, in which music plays an integral part.

(Cross-posted at Human Rights Film Diary blog)

On May 2

On this day in ...
... 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered judgment in Regina v. Swain, to this day among its leading constitutional decisions. A common law rule, codified by statute, long had permitted indefinite detention of criminal defendants found not guilty by reason of mental incapacity. By a 6-to-1 vote, the court held that this law violated § 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees life, liberty and security of person. An account of criminal justice reforms consequent to this judgment is here.

(Prior May 2 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On December 3

On this day in ...
... 1895, in Vienna, Austria, was born the youngest of 6 children of Sigmund Freud (prior post), who would revolutionize psychoanalysis. Anna Freud (right) herself would become a noted psychoanalyst, with a focus on child patients, having taken up that vocation in her 20s without 1st obtaining a medical degree (she had been, for a short time, a schoolteacher). In 1938, following payment of ransom to Nazi captors, she helped install her parents in exile in London, where her father died the next year. Among her significant works was War and Children (1943), co-authored with another psychoanalyst, Dorothy T. Burlingham. The New York Times wrote that, "based on case studies of the effects of World War II bombing on British children," the book "upset preconceived notions of children's reactions." Anna Freud established the Hampstead Therapy Clinic and served as its director until her death in London in 1982.

(Prior December 3 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Read On! Trauma Psychology In The Wake of the Khmer Rouge

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading)

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia held at the end of last month an initial hearing in Case 002, which involves surviving members of the Khmer Rouge Standing Committee (below, at right).
The case focuses on the way in which Committee implemented the revolution, ensured compliance, and eliminated dissent by oppressing the people through physical abuse, forced labor, interrogation, torture, and execution.
Less salient from reading the Closing Order (i.e., indictment) is the role of psychological dominance in this effort.
The defilement of Khmer religion, Khmer art, Khmer familial relations, and the Khmer social class structure undermined deeply held societal assumptions. The Khmer Rouge also destabilized the mass psychology that was secure in those realities. The psychology of the people was thus altered in damaging and enduring ways during the short period of time in which the Khmer Rouge reigned (1975-1979).
In societies that experience war and genocide, trauma significantly impacts the people's psychological well-being. Well-established statistics demonstrate a higher prevalence of trauma-related mental health disorders in post-conflict societies. (See, for example, the work of Berkeley's Human Rights Center and IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Phuong Pham, featured here). The ripple effects of this damage are often incalculable.
With Dr. Daryn Reicherter, of Stanford University's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and Youk Chhang, founder and director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, I've just completed editing a book on trauma psychology and the Khmer Rouge (cover at left). This book, entitled Cambodia's Hidden Scars: Trauma Psychology in the Wake of the Khmer Rouge, considers the mental health implications of the Khmer Rouge era among the Cambodia populace. (It's available in pdf here.)
The book engages this issue in three parts:
► Part I draws on the expertise of several experts on psychology and Cambodia to consider trauma's effects on human psychology. It offers a statistical and theoretical overview of the mental health consequences at the individual and societal levels, examines the multi-generational effects of severe trauma, and demonstrates the way in which such effects continue to impact the nation and its development. Specialists in trauma mental health, including principals from the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization in Cambodia, discuss the increased rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression, among other major mental health disorders, in the country. Contributors also reveal the staggering burden of such a high prevalence of societal mental illness on a post-conflict society.
► Part II features the work of legal experts, including IntLawGrrls Jaya Ramji-Nogales and Anne Heindel. This Part explores the interplay between trauma psychology and the ECCC. In particular, it looks at the psychological effects of the work of the Court on participants, witnesses, and civil parties, and examines the concept of justice as it relates to trauma psychology. Several submissions are critical of the Court's reaction to the psychological state of the survivors. Jaya's contribution (co-authored with her student Toni Holness) discusses the way in which reparations can offer a form of accountability for the mental health of survivors. Other contributors propose ways in which the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia can better accommodate victims and witnesses to avoid re-traumatization and ensure a meaningful experience with justice.
► Part III examines the resources available (or not) for interventions and for the treatment of mental suffering in Cambodia. It assesses the public and private mental health system in Cambodia as it relates to the treatment of trauma-related mental health. This is accomplished through a series of inclusive studies extracting the opinions of mental health providers and administrators struggling to meet the incredible need in a complicated and highly burdened system. The book closes with a set of recommendations for addressing the widespread mental health issues within the society.
We welcome your thoughts...

On July 8

On this day in ...
... 1926 (85 years ago today), Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (left) was born, the 1st among triplet girls, in Zurich, Switzerland. Following World War II, when she worked on behalf of refugees, she earned her medical degree in 1957, and then went to the United States to study and work. (photo credit) In 1965 she became an instructor at the medical school of the University of Chicago, where she remained throughout her career as a researcher and writer in psychiatry -- a field she chose when she was barred from studying pediatrics on account of pregnancy. Kübler-Ross , who died in 2004, is best known for her book On Death and Dying (1969), which articulated the Kübler-Ross model of 5 stages of grief, and for her active support of the hospice care movement.

(Prior July 8 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

One Guantánamo Hearing That Did Take Place in New York

(Many thanks to IntlawGrrls for inviting me to contribute this guest post)

Earlier this month, in an unassuming Manhattan state supreme courtroom, I had the privilege to present oral argument at the first U.S. court hearing on whether a psychologist’s participation in abusive interrogations can violate professional standards of conduct. The Center for Justice & Accountability and the New York Civil Liberties Union represent New York psychologist Dr. Steven Reisner (left) in this proceeding against the New York Department of Education’s Office of Professional Discipline (OPD) for its failure to investigate his fellow New York psychologist Dr. John Leso for his role in the abusive interrogation program at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Psychologists, like other medical professionals, assume the obligation to do no harm. But in response to the reported roles that psychologists have played in the interrogation of detainees taken into U.S. custody since September 11, seemingly bedrock principles of law and professional standards have become the subject of debate. While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association moved swiftly to endorse codes prohibiting their members from participating in abusive interrogations, the American Psychological Association has proved more ambivalent, claiming that psychologists are in “a unique position to assist in ensuring that such processes are safe and ethical for all participants.” But even so, the American Psychological Association has clarified its position that

Any direct or indirect participation in any act of torture or other forms of cruel, degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment by psychologists is strictly prohibited. There are no exceptions. Such acts as waterboarding, sexual humiliation, stress positions and exploitation of phobias are clear violations of APA's no torture/no abuse policy.

New York’s Department of Education and its Office of Professional Discipline find no such prohibition in the state’s professional ethics standards since they reject, at the outset, that such conduct constitutes the practice of psychology at all.
Dr. Reisner and CJA filed a professional misconduct complaint against Dr. Leso last July, alleging that while Dr. Leso served as a clinical psychologist at Guantánamo, he recommended a series of escalating physically and psychologically abusive interrogation tactics to be used on detainees and personally supervised and participated in interrogations where his tactics were used. The OPD declined jurisdiction, claiming that Dr. Leso’s alleged conduct at Guantánamo did not qualify as the practice of psychology as defined by New York law. To wit, if Dr. Leso intended to harm detainees on behalf of an institutional client (the Department of Defense) then they were not his patients. Because they were not his patients, his conduct in relation to them was not subject to professional standards. Thus, the complaint did not trigger an otherwise mandatory investigation. At the hearing, the Attorney General, arguing on behalf of the Department of Education, claimed that rejecting the complaint was correct, since Dr. Leso apparently was asked to use psychology as a weapon, an act that the Attorney General maintains is not contemplated by the legal definition of the profession.

Such arguments turn the healing nature of psychology completely on its head. By the same logic, if a school psychologist had recommended similar abuses to be applied to children, if a nursing home psychologist had done the same to elderly inmates, or if a prison or locked-ward psychologist had done the same to incarcerated inmates, these psychologists, too, would be subject to no professional standards or regulation whatsoever. In other words, the implication of the Attorney General’s position is that the intent to harm should immunize Dr. Leso and other licensed psychologists working in institutional settings from the professional ethics standards all New York psychologists are bound to uphold. Noting the controversial character of the case, the court queried whether it had any authority to rule differently, such determinations having been entrusted to the Department of Education and its Office of Professional Discipline.
Indeed, New York’s Department of Education, like the licensing authorities in other states and throughout the world, has been entrusted with the obligation to ensure that licensed professionals abide by professional standards of ethics, and they must not be allowed to shirk that responsibility. Although this case may seem controversial, New York’s is not the first licensing authority to face questions like those raised by our complaint. Similar authorities in South Africa, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay have held doctors accountable under professional ethics standards for participation in torture and other human rights abuses. Professional ethics standards are designed not only to protect the public but also to protect health care professionals themselves from pressure to harm people in their care, to protect the very integrity of the profession. The complaint against Dr. Leso alleges that while he was acting on the authority of a New York license to practice psychology, he lost his ethical bearings in the context of abusive interrogations at Guantánamo. Whether New York will correct those bearings remains to be seen.
To learn more about the case, please click here. To learn more about intelligence ethics (including sources for this blog post), please click here.

On March 4

On this day in ...
... 1891 (120 years ago today), a daughter, Lois, was born in Brooklyn to a surgeon and his wife. After earning a college degree in fine arts, she worked at a YMCA, taught school, and, after marriage to a World War I soldier named Bill Wilson, as an occupational therapist. Lois Wilson (right) miscarried a number of pregnancies during what would be a childless marriage. (photo credit) Her husband drank -- until, that is, as Bill W., he cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous. Meanwhile she -- Lois W. -- founded Al-Anon, a support group for relatives of alcoholics. She died in 1988 -- 17 years after her husband -- at age 97.

(Prior March 4 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On October 27

On this day in ...
... 1885 (125 years ago today), Sigrid Hjertén (left) was born in Sundsvall, Sweden. Following university studies in the teaching of art, Hjertén, then in her mid-20s, met an art student (her future husband) who persuaded her that she had a future in painting. The 2 subsequently studied with Henri Matisse in Paris. Hjertén painted for 3 decades and "is considered a major figure in Swedish modernism." (credit for 1916 painting by her, at right) Her career ended when, suffering from schizophrenia, she was lobotomized. Hjertén died in Stockholm in 1948, at age 62.

(Prior October 27 posts are here, here, and here.)

On July 3

On this day in ...
... 1860 (150 years ago today), a daughter was born to a couple in Hartford, Connecticut. The husband left when the girl was an infant, and she and her mother and brother, impoverished, often found themselves living with paternal aunts, among them the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. At 18 the girl, who'd received a combination of formal and self-education, enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. A few years later she married, gave birth to her only child, and suffered post-partum, an event that led to her writing of The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a short story constructed as journal entries by a "hysterical" woman locked away by her husband. The author later separated from and eventually divorced her husband. She remarried, to a 1st cousin, in 1900, and took the name of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (above left). (photo credit) An author, human rights advocate, social reformer, suffragist, and feminist, she died by suicide in 1935, a few years after learning she had terminal breast cancer.

(Prior July 3 posts are here, here, and here.)

Guest Bloggers: Michele Bratcher Goodwin & Patricia Y. Jones

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Michele Bratcher Goodwin (right) and Dr. Patricia Y. Jones (left) as guest bloggers. Beginning today, they contribute an interdisciplinary conversation (here are Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) on intercountry adoptions.
► Michele, the Everett Fraser Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota, holds joint appointments at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her courses include Biotechnology Law, Genetic Property and the Law, Health Law Policy, Health Law Regulations, Law and Education, Legal Ethics, Mental Health Law, and Torts. She is a leading voice in the debates on socioeconomics and race in medicine, having founded the country's 1st center for studying race and bioethics.
Michele's served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, and was honored with a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Griffith University in Australia. Prior to law teaching Michele -- who earned her J.D. degree at Boston College Law school and holds B.A. and LL.M. degrees from the University of Wisconsin -- was a Gilder-Lehrman postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.
Notable among Michele's many publications is her scholarship on organ transplant policy. Urging a broader reconciliation of the legal treatments of women with differing social statuses, she's helped redefine evaluation of reproductive technology policy. In addition to the forthcoming book Biotechnology and Bioethics, she's the author of Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Human Body Parts (2006), published in Portuguese translation in 2008. The new collection she edited, Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010) (right), contains essays by Michele and others, among them IntLawGrrl Naomi Cahn, guest/alumna Michelle Olbermann, and my California-Davis colleague Lisa C. Ikemoto. Michele also co-edited Imagining, Writing, (Re)Reading the Black Body (2009).
Among her many professional achievements, Michele is the former Secretary General of the International Academy of Law & Mental Health and Past Chair of the Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care of the American Association of Law Schools. She's received the Black Pearl Award and the Chicago History Museum’s Pioneering Women Award, and been commissioned a Kentucky Colonel.
► Patricia, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Chicago, has over twenty five years of experience as a clinician and administrator of mental health programs. She's a member of the Steering Committee of Psychologists for Social Responsibility.
Her vocational experience encompasses an array of clinical settings: public and private, profit and not-for-profit, and academic institutions. Consistent is her focus on access to and development of appropriate mental health care for children and their families. She has specific interests in applied psychological practice with culturally diverse populations, in interpersonal violence with concomitant post-traumatic stress disorders, and in child abuse. Patricia provides consultation and/or clinical supervision to administrative and program staff who serve a diverse population within a wide variety of social service organizations; especially, to Child Protective Services across the United States.

Patricia earned her B.S. degree in Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Heartfelt welcome!

On December 28

On this day in ...
... 1816, Elizabeth Parsons Ware was born. Twenty-three years later, "at her parents' insistence," she married, and as Elizabeth Packard (left) gave birth to 6 children. But after she began questioning her husband's beliefs on matters of religion, child rearing, family finances, and slavery, he had her committed to a state mental asylum. It released 3 years later; in response, her husband confined her to a boarded-up room in the house, prompting the filing of a petition for writ of habeas corpus. In the 1864 trial of Packard v. Packard -- recently treated in a book, a play, and a law review article -- jurors found her sane after just 7 minutes of deliberation. Subsequently the founder of the Anti-Insane Asylum Society and advocate for reform of the mental health system, Packard died in 1897.

(Prior December 28 posts are here and here.)

On December 13

On this day in ...
... 1818, Mary Todd was born in Lexington, Kentucky. Her mother died when she was 7, and life with her stepmother and 15 half-siblings was difficult, so that she went away to a boarding school, where "learned to speak French fluently, studied dance, drama, music and social graces." As a young woman she lived in Springfield, Illinois, with her sister, the daughter-in-law of a former governor. There she met and married an attorney 10 years her senior; as Mary Todd Lincoln (right) she would become the 1st Lady of the United States, during the Civil War years. Her adult life was marked by tragedy -- not only the assassination of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, but also the early deaths of 3 of the couple's 4 sons. In 1875 Todd Lincoln's remaining son committed his mother to an asylum. That contested event is among the subjects of The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (2008). This book by Communications Professor A. Cheree Carlson is summarized in this Legal History Blog post, which also mentions an unrelated case, stating that the other woman and

Lincoln were both committed by male guardians to psychiatric hospitals against their will; juries eventually ruled that they were not insane and released them from their confinement.

Returning to the sister with whom she'd lived decades earlier, Mary Todd Lincoln died in 1882, at age 63, in the same Springfield home where she'd married. She's buried in that city as well, next to her husband.


(Prior December 13 posts are here and here.)

On November 4

On this day in ...
... 1899 (110 years ago today), a publishing house based in Leipzig, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, released 600 copies of Die Traumdeutung (though publishers gave the book a publication year of 1900). The copies took 8 years to sell; for his efforts, the author received the equivalent of $209. The book -- known in English as The Interpretation of Dreams -- would become a landmark in the sciences of the mind. (image credit) Its author? Dr. Sigmund Freud, "the father of psychoanalysis" and also the progenitor of that time-honored question,

'What does a woman want?'

'Grrls know.

(Prior November 4 posts are here and here.)

On October 10

On this day in ...

... 1886, it is said, the tailless black and white costume that looks well on most anyone made its American début at a ball in the posh New York resort town of Tuxedo Park. The birth of the tuxedo is given a delightfully spurious consequences in this parody blog:

Penguins sue for copyright infringement.

... 2008 (today), is marked World Mental Health Day. It's a day set aside to confront widespread global reluctance to acknowledge, prevent, and treat disorders of the mind. Such disorders themselves are widespread, according to the World Health Organization, whose

statistics for 2002 show that 154 million people globally suffer from depression, only one form of mental illness.
Mental, neurological and behavioural disorders are common in all countries around the world, causing immense suffering and staggering economic and social costs. People with disorders are often subjected to social isolation, poor quality of life and higher death rates.

Among the NGOs devoted to the education effort is the 60-year-old World Federation for Mental Health (logo above right).

On September 10

On this day in ...
... 2003 (5 years ago today), Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was stabbed fatally while shopping in Stockholm. She died the next day. Lindh (left), 46, an immensely popular politician, had been expected eventually to become Sweden's Prime Minister. A man was convicted of Lindh's murder; however, in 2004 his life sentence was overturned, and the assailant was committed to a mental institution. (credit for AP photo by Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
... 1971, a day after guards "forcefully suppress[ed] a scuffle" and transferred 2 prisoners to isolation cells in an overcrowded state penitentiary just south of Buffalo, New York, the riot at Attica prison (below) escalated:

[V]iolence boiled over when a group of inmates managed to leave their cells and force their way into the prison’s nerve center, where they beat several guards with pieces of pipe, lengths of chain, and baseball bats, fatally injuring one of them.
More than one thousand strong, the inmates quickly took control of the prison and set fire to several of its buildings. By the time the state police was summoned and managed to recapture part of the facility that afternoon, the inmates had regrouped in one of the yards and were holding 40 hostages in a ring of wooden benches.

The uprising would end days later with more bloodshed. Nearly 3 decades later, litigation ended with a federal court approving a settlement of $8 million "to compensate more than 500 inmates and relatives for the abuse that the prisoners suffered."

... and counting ...

(Occasional sobering thoughts.)
Amid news:
► that 1 in 5 servicemembers "returning from Iraq or Afghanistan suffers symptoms of depression or post-traumatic stress," but that "barely half are seeking treatment";
► that "due to Iraq's lack of state capacity, the primary responsibility for taking care of refugees has fallen on militia leaders who, naturally, use that situation to consolidate their power"; and
► that "[f]ighting between security forces and Shi'ite militiamen" in March drove "civilian deaths in Iraq to their highest level" since August 2007;
we proceed with a count Iraq/Afghanistan casualties in the 4 weeks since we last reported.
According to Iraq Body Count, between 82,987 and 90,521 Iraqi women, children, and men had died in the conflict -- an increase of between 747 and 770 deaths in the last 4 weeks. Regarding servicemembers: by the U.S. Defense Department's figures, as of Sunday 4,045 American servicemembers had been killed in Iraq. Total coalition fatalities: 4,354 persons. That's 56 servicemember deaths in 4 weeks, all but 1 of them Americans. (Without explanation, the site appears to have stopped listing how many servicemembers were wounded.) Military casualties in the conflict in Afghanistan stand at 494 Americans and 305 other coalition servicemembers, an increase of 7 and 12, respectively, in the last 4 weeks.