Army's "Spiritual Fitness" Test

[professorpan]

http://www.truth-out.org/armys-fitness- ... -fire66577

Army's "Spiritual Fitness" Test Comes Under Fire

Test Was Designed by Psychologist Who Inspired CIA's Torture Program

An experimental, Army mental-health, fitness initiative designed by the same psychologist whose work heavily influenced the psychological aspects of the Bush administration's torture program is under fire by civil rights groups and hundreds of active-duty soldiers. They say it unconstitutionally requires enlistees to believe in God or a "higher power" in order to be deemed "spiritually fit" to serve in the Army.

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million "holistic fitness program" unveiled in late 2009 and aimed at reducing the number of suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) cases, which have reached epidemic proportions over the past year due to multiple deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the substandard care soldiers have received when they return from combat. The Army states that it can accomplish its goal by teaching its service members how to be psychologically resilient and resist "catastrophizing" traumatic events. Defense Department documents obtained by Truthout state CSF is Army Chief of Staff George Casey's "third highest priority."

CSF is comprised of the Soldier Fitness Tracker and Global Assessment Tool, which measures soldiers' "resilience" in five core areas: emotional, physical, family, social and spiritual. Soldiers fill out an online survey made up of more than 100 questions, and if the results fall into a red area, they are required to participate in remedial courses in a classroom or online setting to strengthen their resilience in the disciplines in which they received low scores. The test is administered every two years. More than 800,000 Army soldiers have taken it thus far.

But for the thousands of "Foxhole Atheists" like 27-year-old Sgt. Justin Griffith, the spiritual component of the test contains questions written predominantly for soldiers who believe in God or another deity, meaning nonbelievers are guaranteed to score poorly and will be forced to participate in exercises that use religious imagery to "train" soldiers up to a satisfactory level of spirituality.

Griffith, who is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, took the test last month and scored well on the emotional, family and social components. But after completing the spiritual portion of the exam, which required him to respond to statements such as, "I am a spiritual person, my life has lasting meaning, I believe that in some way my life is closely connected to all humanity and all the world," he was found to be spiritually unfit because he responded by choosing the "not like me at all" box.

His test results advised him, "spiritual fitness" is an area "of possible difficulty for you."

"You may lack a sense of meaning and purpose in your life," Griffith's test said. "At times, it is hard for you to make sense of what is happening to you and others around you. You may not feel connected to something larger than yourself. You may question your beliefs, principles and values. There are things to do to provide more meaning and purpose in your life. Improving your spiritual fitness should be an important goal."

In an interview, Griffith, who was not speaking on behalf of the Army, said he was "deeply offended" by the spiritual questions he was forced to answer.

"It seems like my destiny is all messed up and that I am unfit to serve in the United States Army, if you believe the results of this test," said Griffith, who has served in the Army for five years. "When I think of the word spirituality I go to the root of the word: spirit. I don't believe in that."

Lt. Greg Bowling agreed that the test "asks rather intrusive questions about soldiers' spirituality - coming perilously close to violating the 1st Amendment."

"There was no option to avoid the questions, leaving our atheist soldiers to wonder if their beliefs are tolerated in today's increasingly religious Army," he said.

According to a copy of the test, the Army maintains that the "spiritual dimension questions ... pertain to the domain of the human spirit: they are not 'religious' in nature. The Comprehensive Fitness Program defines spiritual fitness as strengthening a set of beliefs, principles, or values that sustain a person beyond family, institutional and societal sources of support."

Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, the director of the CSF program, has said, "The spiritual strength domain is not related to religiosity, at least not in terms of how we measure it."

"It measures a person's core values and beliefs concerning their meaning and purpose in life," she said. "It's not religious, although a person's religion can still affect those things. Spiritual training is entirely optional, unlike the other domains. Every time you say the S-P-I-R word you're going to get sued. So that part is not mandatory. The assessment is mandatory though and junior soldiers will be required to take exercises to strengthen their other four domains."

But despite the verbal gymnastics Cornum seems to engage in over the meaning of "spiritual" and "religious," it has been established that the spiritual component of CSF is deeply rooted in religious doctrine.

A press release issued by Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in January 2010 said renowned "Psychology of Religion" expert Dr. Kenneth Pargament was tapped to develop the spiritual portion of the test in consultation with Army chaplains, BGSU ROTC cadets, graduate students and officials at West Point.

Cornum's claims that soldiers are not required to participate in remedial training if they score poorly on the spiritual portion of the test were not articulated to Griffith and other soldiers, who told Truthout they feared they would be disciplined by their superior officers if they didn't act on the recommendations they received after taking the exam. In fact, nowhere on the test does it state that such training is voluntary.

Moreover, Cornum's attempts to replace the word "religious" with "spiritual" as a way to avoid a lawsuit was not lost on one civil rights organization.

Last week, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) sent a letter to Secretary of the Army John McHugh and General Casey, the Army's chief of staff, demanding that the Army immediately cease and desist administering the "spiritual" portion of the CSF test. (Full disclosure: MRFF founder and President, Mikey Weinstein, is a member of Truthout's board of advisers.)

"The purpose of the [spiritual component of the test] though couched in general and vague language, is to strengthen a solder's religious conviction," says the December 30, 2010, letter signed by Caroline Mitchell, an attorney with the law firm Jones Day, who is representing MRFF. "Soldiers who hold deep religious convictions routinely pass the spirituality component of this test while atheists and nontheists do not. The Army cannot avoid the conclusion that this test is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by simply substituting the word 'spiritual' for 'religious.'"

"The majority of the spiritual statements soldiers are asked to rate are rooted in religious doctrine, premised on a common dogmatic belief regarding the meaning of life and the interconnectedness of living beings," the letter further states. "The statements in the tests and remedial materials repeatedly promote the importance of being a believer of something over electing to be a nonbeliever. Moreover, the images that accompany portions of the CSF Training Modules make clear the religious aspects of the spirituality training."

Mitchell says the Establishment Clause of the Constitution prohibits such religious testing.

"And it's not just the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment which is being blatantly violated here," Weinstein said. "Clause 3 of Article 6 of the body of our nation's Constitution specifically prohibits any type of 'religious test' being used in connection with any government service. Thus, this 'spirituality' portion of the Army's CSF test completely savages this bedrock Constitutional prohibition."

Weinstein said MRFF currently represents more than 200 Army soldiers who are "vehemently objecting to this clearly transparent 'religious test', the majority of them practicing Christians themselves."

He said he does not expect the Army to stop administering the spirituality portion of the test. Weinstein and his legal team intend to pursue legal remedies if they are rebuffed, he said.

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The Freedom From Religion Foundation has also sent a letter to McHugh calling on the Army to stop assessing soldiers' spiritual fitness.

Additionally, Jones Day filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last week on behalf of Griffith and MRFF, seeking a wide range of documents related to the development of the spiritual portion of CSF. Truthout is also a party to the FOIA request.

A Defense Department spokesperson did not return calls or emails for comment.

"Dr. Happy"

CSF is based entirely on the work of Dr. Martin Seligman, a member of the Defense Health Board, a federal advisory committee to the secretary of defense, and chairman of the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, who the Army calls "Dr. Happy."

Seligman, who once told a colleague that psychologists can rise to the level of a "rock star" and "have fame and money," is the author of "Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment." The Penn Resiliency Program, upon which the Army's CSF is based, "teaches cognitive-behavioral and social problem-solving skills and is based in part on cognitive-behavioral theories of depression by Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis" and Seligman.

Despite his "happy" reputation, in some circles, Seligman is best known for developing the theory of "Learned Helplessness" at the University of Pennsylvania more than four decades ago. As psychologist and torture expert Dr. Jeffrey Kaye noted in a report published in Truthout last year, Seligman and psychologist Dr. Steven Maier developed the concept of Learned Helplessness after they "exposed dogs to a situation where they were faced with inescapable electrical shocks."

"Within a short period of time, the dogs could not be induced to escape the situation, even when provided with a previously taught escape route," Kaye wrote. "Drs. Seligman and Maier theorized that the dogs had 'learned' their condition was helpless. The experimental model was extended to a human model for the induction of clinical depression and other psychological conditions."

Seligman's work in this area influenced psychologists under contract to the CIA and Defense Department, who applied the theory to "war on terror" detainees in custody of the US government, according to a report published in 2009 by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In May of 2002, the timeframe in which the CIA began to use brutal torture techniques against several high-value detainees, Seligman gave a three-hour lecture at the Navy's Survival Evasion Resistance Escape school in San Diego. Audience members included the two psychologists - Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell - who have been called the architects of the Bush administration's torture program.

Five months earlier, Seligman hosted a meeting at his house that was attended by Mitchell, along with the CIA's then-Director of Behavioral Science Research, Kirk Hubbard, and an Israeli intelligence agent. Seligman has claimed he was totally unaware his theory on Learned Helplessness was being used against detainees after 9/11 and denied ever engaging in discussions about the Bush administration's torture program with Mitchell, Jessen, or any other government official.

"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.

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, notably 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."


This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

[Simulist]

They say it unconstitutionally requires enlistees to believe in God or a "higher power" in order to be deemed "spiritually fit" to serve in the Army.

Here's a more accurate "spiritual fitness test" for the Army:

(1) Determine who actually wants to go kill for the United States Army, and then

(2) FAIL that person.

(That'll be $31 million please.)

[KudZu LoTek]

[Allegro]

.
For a bit of background material wrt professorpan’s original OP in this thread, see this thread “Underground” Group of Cadets Say Air Force Academy Controlled by Evangelicals | Origin: t r u t h o u t.

[brainpanhandler]

Excerpted from September 2010 Harper's -

The war on unhappiness:
Goodbye Freud, hello positive thinking
By Gary Greenberg

......


Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association and the inventor of positive psychology, is giving us the good news. “The question of what really makes us happy is actually quite simple,” Seligman says. “From the Buddha to Tony Robbins, there have been about two hundred suggestions about what makes people lastingly happier.”1

Seligman has spent the past twenty years developing positive psychology. At the beginning, he was content to reorient psychology away from Freud’s focus on pathology and toward a “science of happiness,” but he recently decided that his goals were too modest. “I had thought that positive psychology was about happiness, but it is not,” he says. “Positive psychology is about well-being,” which is “what people choose to do when they are not oppressed, when they choose freely.” Well-being comprises not only the positive emotion we call happiness, but also meaning (“using what’s best inside you to belong to and serve something bigger than you are”), positive relationships, and “achievement, mastery, and competence.” Well-being on a wide scale results in a state Seligman calls “human flourishing.”

Seligman established his reputation with a series of experiments he conducted in the late 1960s. He subjected dogs to electric shocks. Some of the dogs could turn off the shocks by pressing a lever, and others could not. Most of the leverless dogs soon gave up trying to escape their lot. When they were later given the opportunity to turn off the shocks, they never even tried; at the first jolt, they simply whined and curled up in a ball. They had, he concluded, learned to be helpless.

More curious about the dogs than about the people who tortured them, Seligman still drew from his work some lessons for humanity. He theorized that people, confronted with unrelenting difficulties beyond their control, developed the core belief that they were helpless, so any subsequent hardship felt to them insurmountable. Learned helplessness, he claimed, was one of those core beliefs that could cause depression. Seligman and Beck worked together at the University of Pennsylvania, and unlearning helplessness became a key goal of cognitive therapy.

Seligman wasn’t a therapist for very long. “I’m a better talker than I am a listener,” he says. But he practiced long enough to discover that “even when I did good work and I got rid of almost all of [a patient’s] sadness and all of her anxieties and all of her anger, I thought I got a happy person, but I never did. What I got was an empty person.” Seligman blamed his difficulties on Freud. Psychoanalytically based therapies—preoccupied with what was worst in us, in thrall to misery, and reaching only toward “common unhappiness”—had sickened rather than healed patients; positive psychology, as the antidote to Freud, would be the panacea.

Seligman is thrilled about a recent development that, he predicts, will help us all flourish. In August 2008, “the top people in the Army sent their colonel in charge of returning warriors to visit me.” She told him that the current situation—“unprecedented post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, divorce, substance abuse, anxiety”—was unacceptable, especially to Army brass worried that their “legacy” would be “more homeless veterans begging in Washington.” And she posed a challenge: “What is psychology going to do about that?” (It wasn’t the first time Seligman was asked to serve his country. In 2002, he delivered a talk on learned helplessness to the CIA. In the audience were two psychologists who helped the CIA enhance its interrogation protocols with methods including, among other infamies, treating prisoners like dogs. Seligman denies that he intended to help the CIA refine its torture protocols; he claims he thought that he was helping the CIA train American troops to “resist torture and evade successful interrogation.”)

Last December, Seligman continues, he delivered his answer directly to Army Chief of Staff George Casey, at the Pentagon. Seligman told Casey that the $5 billion to $10 billion the military was spending annually on treatments like CBT was insufficient—not because more therapy was needed but because the treatment was too late. “The reaction of human beings under very high adversity is bell-shaped,” Seligman says he explained to Casey. “On the extreme left, you have people who collapse, in the vast middle you’ve got people who are resilient, and then you’ve got a large number of people who show post-traumatic growth—people who a year later are stronger emotionally and physically than they were before. Your job, in my view, is to move the whole distribution toward growth and resilience.” Casey, according to Seligman, acted immediately. “He ordered that from this moment forward, positive psychology and resilience will be measured and taught throughout the United States Army. He said, ‘We’re going to create an Army that is just as psychologically fit as it is physically fit’”—and that will, thanks to soldiers’ not-exactly-freely-chosen participation, become a 1.1-million-person experiment. This “big demonstration” will allow the Army to find out whether, for instance, soldiers who learn optimism will heal faster when they are wounded on the battlefield. And it will give Seligman the opportunity to assess whether positive psychology can actually create a state of human flourishing.

My colleagues applaud upon hearing this news, as they did earlier in the day when Seligman first told the story and as they will later on when he repeats it again nearly word for word. Louder applause comes when Seligman points out the long-term implications of his collaboration with the Department of Defense on our professional culture. He reminds us that the National Institutes of Health have been our major patrons, but “NIH’s agenda is to cure pathology,” whereas “DOD’s agenda is creating strong human beings. I think we will see in the next decade a rival institution to NIH which will be about the creation of strength and not just the remediation of pathology.”

Seligman is cheered by our enthusiasm. “I believe this may be an inflection point in all of psychology and psychotherapy,” he says, “so your applause is very meaningful to me.” Indeed, the implications of this inflection go beyond our profession: in another applause line, Seligman tells us that while General Casey understands the necessity of “a highly resilient, psychologically fit force” for the “persistent warfare that looks like it’s the lot of our nation for the next decade,” he also sees “comprehensive soldier fitness” as a “model for civilians.” Seligman tells us he’s been following the news from the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, which is just now drawing to a close. “I think cleaning up the earth is probably a good thing to do,” he says, “but it’s actually second on my list. First on my list would be human well-being.” Because “the downstream effects of human flourishing are almost everything we want,” we can afford to go Seligman’s dogs one better—thriving on the shocks that come our way rather than merely learning to escape them.

In case the audience is feeling skittish, Seligman wants to reassure us that there is historical precedent for a politics of well-being aided by professional consultants. “Florence of the 1450s is one of the great examples” of a society dedicated to “human flourishing.” When Cosimo the Great—“he wasn’t called the Great for nothing” —was confronted with the question of what to do with the Medici wealth, he decided, “ ‘We will invest our surplus in beauty.’ They gave us what we, two hundred years later, call the Renaissance.” We are, Seligman says, at least those of us in the United States, the European Union, and Australia, living in a “Florentine moment.”

If thinking makes it so, perhaps it shouldn’t matter that Seligman’s math is off by three hundred years, or that Cosimo the Great ruled in the sixteenth century, not the fifteenth, or that Florence wasn’t exactly free from oppression, or that its closest resemblance to us may be that it was a plutocracy riven by religious strife. To those who might quibble over such matters as this—he cites his historian daughter, for whom “history is just one damn thing after another,” as an example of such negative thinkers—Seligman says, “You have to be blinded by ideology not to think we’ve made progress.” As neo-Florentines we won’t “do sculpture” like the Medicis; rather “the monument that we can build is well-being. We can be the agents of massive human flourishing.” The crowd of therapists, freed at last from the yoke of pathology, rises to its feet.

“I am very glad I am away from [America], and even more that I don’t have to live there,” Freud wrote to his daughter upon his return to Vienna. To hear him tell it, he hadn’t brought the plague so much as contracted it. He was seasick on the Atlantic. The New World food inflamed his colitis. He endured harsh weather and bone-shaking carriage roads and the humiliation of being out-hiked by an American colleague in the “utter wildness,” as he called it, of the Adirondacks. He went so far as to blame the trip for leading to the deterioration of his handwriting, and he never returned to our shores. Even Freud’s first biographer, Ernest Jones, had to acknowledge that Freud’s grudge “had nothing to do with America itself.”

But I wonder if Jones was wrong. Even if Freud could not have anticipated the particulars—the therapists-turned-bureaucrats, the gleaming prepackaged stories, the trauma-eating soldiers—he might have deduced that a country dedicated in its infancy to the pursuit of happiness would grow up to make it a compulsion. He might have figured that American ingenuity would soon, maybe within a century, find a way to turn his gloomy appraisal of humanity into a psychology of winners.

Or maybe not. Perhaps in reacting to America this way, Freud was only doing what he insisted all neurotics do: rejecting violently that which arouses the most forbidden desires. As the rest of my colleagues emerge from their rapture and gather up their belongings, I’m thinking of the last patient I saw before I flew to Anaheim. She was telling me that every time she contemplated breaking it off with her junkie husband, she became paralyzed with fear. She described what the dread felt like in her body, what thoughts and fantasies it brought to mind, and soon we were talking about her father, also an addict, whom her mother finally kicked out and who then turned up dead in a snowbank. “I never put that together before. I’m afraid I’ll kill him if I end it,” she said. She gave a little laugh. “Probably only because of how much I want to.”

She gathered her jacket around her like a carapace. After a short silence, she said, “How did you get us there?”

“I didn’t,” I replied. “I didn’t know where we would end up.” It’s an answer I’m regretting now. Not because it pushed away her admiration (which, of course, I crave) or because it was disingenuous (after a quarter century of delivering the talking cure, you have some idea about where these excursions will end up), but because I see now that she was asking me what made me believe it would be worthwhile to have the conversation that we had, rather than all the others we could have had. She was asking after my faith, and I had handed her only my doubt.

I’m wondering now why I’ve always put such faith in doubt itself; or, conversely, what it is about certainty that attracts me so much that I have spent twenty-seven years, thousands of hours, and millions of other people’s dollars to repel it. What reminiscence of my own makes that lust forbidden? What drives me to recoil from the ecstasy of this audience?

Perhaps what plagues me is a private memory, of violence suffered at the hands of people unrestrained by self-doubt. Or a historical one, the recollection that lends these proceedings a faint but unmistakable whiff of Nuremberg. Or something even more deeply buried, what happened when delight in their own capacities got the better of Adam and Eve, the concupiscence and the stain it left. Which may be nothing more than a fairy tale, a fearful pretext for declining the pleasure of equipping myself with the tools of science, enlisting as a soldier of good fortune, and joining my colleagues on the march toward happiness.

Freud never said how certainty got to be his founding taboo, or which painful reminiscence might have made it so, or what might happen if that reminiscence were retrieved. But one of his contemporaries did address this topic. As it happened, Friedrich Nietzsche was the subject of Seligman’s final peroration. His précis of Zarathustra’s Three Metamorphoses is no more accurate than his Florentine history. In it, Nietzsche’s camel “just moans and takes it”; his lion has somehow become a “rebel” who has held sway “since 1776 at least.” And now that the rebel has evidently achieved all he is going to achieve, it is time, Seligman says, for us to become Nietzsche’s “child reborn” (a lion in Seligman’s version), the Übermensch, who values self-assurance and rejects self-doubt, who dismisses poking around in our chimneys as a useless vestige of a benighted past.

“One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean,” Zarathustra instructs the people. And so will our comprehensively fit troops, their families, and eventually the rest of us remain unstained by the terror we witness and unleash. Florence had its Machiavelli; our therapeutic state will have its Seligman, whispering reassurance to our generals about the inexhaustible optimism of their troops. More than perhaps anyone else, Freud would have appreciated the irony of this outcome: the talking cure as battle cry, used to conceal rather than to reveal darkness, and to prepare us to meet the challenge issued by Nietzsche’s prophet: “Man is something that will be overcome,” spake Zarathustra. “What have you done to overcome him?”

Here's a link to Seligman's website:
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn ... ault.aspx#



At the bottom of his homepage there is this:

Dr. Seligman & Positive Psychology featured in TIME Magazine cover story
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn ... /Index.htm

[American Dream]

Psychologist Martin Seligman Responds to Truthout Report on Army "Spiritual Fitness" Test
Martin Seligman | Friday 07 January 2011

This article “Test was designed by Psychologist who inspired CIA’s torture program” may set the record for the sheer number of false statements about me, about positive psychology, and about Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. Apparently the reporter, Jason Leopold, has a checkered past in misreporting.

* I had nothing to do with the CIA torture program, and I am strongly opposed to torture.
* I did not design the survey used by Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.
* All my time and work on Comprehensive Soldier Fitness is donated free.
* The “spirituality” items on the survey are not about religion and I have been told that they were vetted by government lawyers so as not to violate the first amendment. Here are the items:

41. SPIRITUALITY I believe there is a purpose for my life. 
42. SPIRITUALITY I am a spiritual person. 
43. SPIRITUALITY My life has a lasting meaning. 
44. SPIRITUALITY I believe that in some way my life is closely connected to all humanity and all the world. 
45. SPIRITUALITY The job I am doing in the military has lasting meaning.

* The results are completely confidential. No one but the survey taker ever sees them.
* There are no required courses in spiritual fitness. The survey taker has the option of taking such courses if he or she wants to.

Here is what the Army said:

BACKGROUND. Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a holistic program designed to give all members of the Army community* the knowledge, thinking skills, and behaviors that will optimize the ability and likelihood to "thrive" in their lives, as well as their ability to successfully cope with life's challenges and adversity. The program does so by training specific skill sets along the five domains of human health and fitness (Physical, Social, Emotional, Spiritual, and Family). Integrating CSF results in greater "resilience", which is the sum of each individual's assets and resources in these dimensions.

Though CSF is largely focused on training skill sets (and how and when to apply them), it does delve into root causes of emotion, thought and action; what psychologists refer to as "meta-cognition". CSF is a programmatic first step towards teaching members of the Army community to understand how and why they think a certain way. Once people begin to understand this, they are best postured to change their thoughts and actions to strategies more adaptive, and more likely to result in desirable outcomes, towards "thriving".

Additionally, CSF uses a "strengths-based" training approach. Here, the program recognizes two important factors. First, that the best outcomes are realized if existing personal strengths are leveraged. Second, that "one-size-fits-all" training is both inappropriate and inefficient. Because some people are more resilient than others when first introduced to the CSF program, the education and training should be tailored to the individual. This increases interest at all levels, and greater likelihood of success.

The CSF program is not medical or psychological treatment. The program focuses on the ninety plus percent of the force that is fundamentally "well", but at widely varying levels of fitness in each domain. With this in mind, CSF's maximal benefit will be realized when incorporated early, and development of fitness is continuous.

People who are optimally fit will have the courage to take advantage of more opportunities, as well as the decision making, and communication skills to maximize the chance of success with these opportunities. And because attempting more DOES mean there is more risk of failure, internalizing the knowledge, skills and behaviors, making them part of doing business, will allow those individuals to weather the setbacks and disappointments better as well.

Conversely, when facing uncertainty and adversity, these same skills help to put the problems into appropriate perspective, find meaning in their lives, reduce rumination and catastrophic thinking, and focus on finding solutions.

Lastly, the CSF program recognizes that developing human resilience is a life-long process. There is no "end state" for a person's resilience; they can always improve. Therefore, the need to develop human resilience is enduring, and CSF will continue to morph as the Army community's resilience develops and its needs change.

SPIRITUAL FITNESS. Comprehensive Soldier Fitness defines spiritual fitness as a strong set of beliefs, principles, or values that sustains a person beyond family, institutional, and societal sources of strength. Beliefs, principles, or values are inherently intrinsic properties – they are, quite simply, within the person and derived by the person. Nevertheless, nowhere in CSF’s definition of spiritual fitness, its program literature, policy statements, training material, or web pages does it state that one must – or even should – believe in a deity, endorse religion, or in any way state that a soldier is unfit to serve if they lack spiritual fitness.

Rather, feedback provided to Soldiers after they complete the Global Assessment Tool merely suggests that those who score low within the spiritual fitness domain would benefit from completing training designed to develop their spiritual fitness. Department of the Army policy states that Soldiers are not required to participate in spiritual training associated with the CSF program. To be clear, spiritual training is completely optional, and unit leadership shall not coerce Soldiers to participate in spiritual training.

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness provides this feedback to Soldiers because the peer-reviewed scientific literature shows that spiritual fitness is a protective factor for a host of negative psychological health and behavioral outcomes. For example, Canadian researchers found that spiritual people had decreased odds of attempting suicide. Likewise, spiritual fitness has been related to quality of life, coping, and mental health.

The spiritual fitness questions on the Global Assessment Tool have been repeatedly tested for scientific efficacy. Likewise, the spiritual fitness questions were reviewed by a panel of attorneys, and all legally objectionable questions were removed from the version of the Global Assessment Tool that all Soldiers are required to complete annually.

Soldiers are free to disregard the Global Assessment Tool feedback if they feel that it does not apply to them. So, if Soldiers reject the premise of spiritual development, they are free to ignore the recommendations and refuse to participate in spiritual fitness training.

Finally, identifiable scores from the Global Assessment Tools are not provided to anyone other than the owner of the scores. Soldiers cannot be compelled to share their scores with anyone, to include unit leadership, the clergy, family members, or criminal investigators. Finally, Global Assessment Tool scores cannot be used as a means for promotion or selection.

----------

Jason Leopold responds: Dr. Seligman's claims that he did not design the survey would appear to contradict numerous published accounts, some of which describe him as the "brains behind the program," and "the program's developer." Dr. Seligman's CV also states that he has has been an "adviser" to the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) program since 2008. The cornerstone of the CSF program are the surveys taken by soldiers, which is heavily based on "resiliency" surveys from the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, which Dr. Seligman runs. In an email sent to me Thursday evening, Dr. Seligman has requested that Truthout retract its subheadline, stating: "would proof that this headline is false, e.g., from those who did design the test, be sufficient to get you to retract?" In fact, it would. But such proof must come in the form of official documentation from the Army. The law firm Jones Day has filed an Freedom of Information Act request with Army officials on behalf of Truthout in hopes of obtaining documents that will shed further light on the development of this program and the vetting of certain questions by government lawyers.

Contrary to Dr. Seligman's assertions, Army soldiers are not told that the spirituality training is voluntary, according to accounts more than 200 have given to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Nowhere on the surveys does it state that remedial training resulting from low scores is voluntary.

Dr. Seligman also cherry-picks a quote from at least one published peer-reviewed article in an attempt to support the efficacy of the program, particularly, its impact on reducing the number of post-traumatic-stress-disorder cases and suicides.

Indeed, Dr. Seligman asserts in his response: "For example, Canadian researchers found that spiritual people had decreased odds of attempting suicide."

But the full quote from the peer-reviewed article Dr. Seligman relies upon, makes clear that the the authors came to a very different conclusion on the effect of spirituality on suicide attempts (emphasis added): "Identifying oneself as spiritual was associated with decreased odds of suicide attempt (adjusted odds ratio-1 [AOR-1]=0.65, CI: 0.44–0.96) but was not significant after adjusting for social supports." They furthermore warned that "causality of relationships" in this study "cannot be inferred."

Dr. Seligman says my report "may set a record for the sheer number of false statements about me." It should be noted that each and every one of the statements about Dr. Seligman have been made by individuals who have either interviewed him or have worked closely with him such as Bryant Welch, the first executive director for professional practice of the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Seligman also states "I had nothing to do with the CIA torture program, and I am strongly opposed to torture." I included Dr. Seligman's denial in my report. But, as New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer noted during an interview with Democracy Now in 2008, Dr. Seligman is a "very erudite and savvy man" and to date he has not answered key questions about the torture program. Dr. Seligman was featured in "The Dark Side," Mayer's book about the CIA's torture program.

"What did [Dr. Seligman] think he was doing when he went to talk to the CIA at their confab at the [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape] school? How did he know [CIA psychologists and architects of the torture program, James] Mitchell and [Bruce] Jessen were in the audience, unless—did he speak to them? Did he know what their role was, in terms of interrogations? You know, there are a lot of things that would be great to know," Mayer said. "It’s hard to tell, because he keeps shutting down the conversation when it gets interesting."

Finally, I asked Dr. Seligman whether the CSF program received approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB), which would be required for government research, and whether soldiers needed to provide their informed consent to participate, in Dr. Seligman's words, "the largest study psychology has ever been involved."

Dr. Seligman would not respond to my questions about the IRB process or informed consent and referred me to the director of CSF, Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum. I sent queries Thursday afternoon to Brig. Gen. Cornum and Army media relations. I will be writing a follow-up report when I receive a response.

UPDATE: Bryant Welch's affiliation with the American Psychological Association has been updated.


Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/psychologist-m ... -test66646

[Joe Hillshoist]

bumpng

[crikkett]

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."

...Godwin's law fulfilled, that's where I get to stop reading.

My experience is that the intelligent soldier understands that it's better to give the Army what they're looking for than to actually answer truthfully.

I'm sure that somewhere there's an order to "do something" about the suicides, and this dippy test looks like "something" to Generals. I'm not declaring it right or wrong, just SNAFU.

[brainpanhandler]

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."

...Godwin's law fulfilled, that's where I get to stop reading.

Actually it's a fairly apt comparison. "positive psychology" seeks to brand whistleblowers or anyone unwilling to toe the corporate line as naysayers and malcontents and enemies of happiness. Purge them. Cleanse the corporation of those unwilling to blind themselves and see as instructed.

My experience is that the intelligent soldier understands that it's better to give the Army what they're looking for than to actually answer truthfully.

Better? Really? For whom? Intelligent? Really? Compared to what?

[nathan28]

My experience is that the intelligent soldier understands that it's better to give the Army what they're looking for than to actually answer truthfully.

Better? Really? For whom? Intelligent? Really? Compared to what?

crickett means, if I understand him and what some friends have told me, that you do whatever the fuck your superiors tell you, especially in basic training, without pausing to reflect, question, etc., because it's one of the only ways to stay intact psychologically, especially if you are a critical thinker. You just suspend judgment--you can always reclaim it. We're not talking about Mai Lai here, we're talking about stupid power trips and systemic bullying. I'm not going to say that I "understand", but I once had a supervisor who was best treated in this manner--do whatever it is you need to get them off your back so you can lay low, I think, is what crickett means.

That's pretty far away from the OP, but to bring it back, the idea is to "compartmentalize." You can be an atheist around a bunch of believers, but you have to respect the terms of the non-aggression pact, which may mean filling out the multiple choice test as though you believed in a higher power.

[brainpanhandler]

My experience is that the intelligent soldier understands that it's better to give the Army what they're looking for than to actually answer truthfully.

Better? Really? For whom? Intelligent? Really? Compared to what?

crickett means, if I understand him and what some friends have told me, that you do whatever the fuck your superiors tell you, especially in basic training, without pausing to reflect, question, etc., because it's one of the only ways to stay intact psychologically, especially if you are a critical thinker. You just suspend judgment--you can always reclaim it. We're not talking about Mai Lai here, we're talking about stupid power trips and systemic bullying. I'm not going to say that I "understand", but I once had a supervisor who was best treated in this manner--do whatever it is you need to get them off your back so you can lay low, I think, is what crickett means.

That's pretty far away from the OP, but to bring it back, the idea is to "compartmentalize." You can be an atheist around a bunch of believers, but you have to respect the terms of the non-aggression pact, which may mean filling out the multiple choice test as though you believed in a higher power.

Actually, I got that. I just wouldn't call it intelligent. Id' call it expedient and maybe even a bit cowardly.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

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."

...Godwin's law fulfilled, that's where I get to stop reading.

Actually it's a fairly apt comparison. "positive psychology" seeks to brand whistleblowers or anyone unwilling to toe the corporate line as naysayers and malcontents and enemies of happiness. Purge them. Cleanse the corporation of those unwilling to blind themselves and see as instructed.

A lot of it does have the stench of the old "Strength Through Joy" clinging to it.

Godwin's Law only states that something will inevitably be compared to the Nazis if an internet discussion goes on long enough - it doesn't say that this necessarily weakens or discredits the argument of the person making the comparison.

She told him that the current situation—“unprecedented post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, divorce, substance abuse, anxiety”—was unacceptable, especially to Army brass worried that their “legacy” would be “more homeless veterans begging in Washington.”

If they ended up begging in Georgia or Maine, however, no one would really care. At least, not the Army Brass.

I wonder what happens when a homeless vet ends up begging outside an army recruitment center? It must happen a lot.

[nathan28]

Actually, I got that. I just wouldn't call it intelligent. Id' call it expedient and maybe even a bit cowardly.

Considering that joining the military is largely a matter of expediency for those that do it in the US (it is one of the only institutions in the US to achieve significant racial integration), is that surprising?

[nathan28]

RI: Army suicides hit record mark

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21678030/ns/us_news-military/

[brainpanhandler]

Actually, I got that. I just wouldn't call it intelligent. Id' call it expedient and maybe even a bit cowardly.

Considering that joining the military is largely a matter of expediency for those that do it in the US (it is one of the only institutions in the US to achieve significant racial integration), is that surprising?

Not at all. Nor would I find it surprising to discover that the average joe joining the military is on the dim side of the intelligence bell curve.