The Gulf Oil Spill Meets the Newspeak Dictionary
No crisis should ever be allowed to slip by without calls for greater public expenditure of doubtful worth, and the Gulf oil spill crisis is no exception to this golden rule of bureaucratic opportunism.
In an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine for 11 August, titled “Moving Mental Health into the Disaster-Preparedness Spotlight,” Drs Yun, Lurie and Hughes (the latter a lawyer, it seems) write:
Surveillance systems for mental health and substance abuse must be strengthened through broader intellectual investment in a conceptual framework and technical requirements.
Long experience of bureaucracies has taught me to mistrust language such as this. There is a lot of connotation in it without much denotation: intellectual investments, conceptual frameworks and technical requirements escape from verbiage generators like oil from defective wells, and end up being even more expensive. Personally I am not sure that technical investments, intellectual frameworks and conceptual requirements would not be at least as good, if not better.
Fortunately for modern bureaucracies, connotation — compassion, caring and the like — is a more powerful generator of funds than (say) likelihood of success. The authors say:
Early action to help with the disaster’s emotional impact may decrease long-term behavioral health problems.
On the other hand, it may not, especially as the long-term behavioral health problems (assuming that behavioral health is itself a defensible concept) are themselves only tentatively known: they may be this, according to the writers of the editorial, or that may be that.
They insinuate ideas like any good advertising copywriter. They talk of “psychological first aid,” for example. What is psychological first aid? Bandages for damaged thoughts, for example? A list leaves us little the wiser. It:
… addresses emotional distress, builds coping skills, connects people with support services, and promotes a return to normal routines.
What is it exactly, to address emotional distress? Emotional distress, I conjure thee to depart this body? It sounds to me either like witchcraft or a kind of wallowing in other people’s dismay.
I think this solution is way cheaper for the average person–take a weekend off and go to the country, not Central Park, but up along the Hudson or the Catskills for example. Get out of the air con and away from the artificial world and see some of the real world first hand. Beats the hell out of a shrinks office. oh, and leave the electronics behind!
Greetings:
New tentacles of the Post Traumatic Stress industry octopus.
What these Doctors are really building are piles of pink slips for themselves
and their bureaucratic buddies. Because, brother, we are NOT going to pay for
these scumbags anymore. Let them coordinate, compassionate, network, rework, and rebuild all they want, they are not going to get anything but a boot
up the ass on the way out the door.
Will Obamacare pay for treatment of any of those maladies? You betcha!
Psychology is an art not a science. It helps few, and only after a long time and much
expense. Psychiatry has moved closer to science since all the medications available.
Psychologists are constantly on the prowl to find a reason for being and charging great
sums. Road rage from steroid rage is just one example.
I think I saw similar nonsense in a link to the latest issue of Time magazine. It was about dealing with “The Psychic Toll” of the Oil Spill. The concrete solution seemed to be offering finger-painting exercises to youths for therapy, with counselors standing by to counsel how to finger-paint.
A Rose by Any Other Name…..
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If Dr. Dalrymple was as good a medical practitioner as is his wizardy with words, he must have cured every patient he ever treated.
If all therapists modeled themselves after R. Lee Ermey in the GEICO commercial, mental health would universally improve. Or at least the demand for therapy would dry up, which must be the same thing.
Stop!! I’m at work and it’s hard to keep my laughter from blurting out!
As a licensed therapist with over 4 decades of experience (sadly, too much of it spent in “state” service) I can tell you right off that these two “authors” are looking to build an empire. Someone in government says what a great idea, it gets funded and they look to the folk that came up with the idea in the first place to “brain storm” the initial project.
I’ve seen it happen a number of times in a variety of situations. Good therapy isn’t based on by gosh or by golly, but on solid evidence of what works. What we really need is a psychology of “Life Happens – Deal with it.”
Resiliency is built in to the human psyche by overcoming obstacles, not by a pat on the head and a “There there you poor thing.”
Can I get an “Amen?”
Reading your article was like music to my eyes! Thank you so much!
Abnormally well written writing!!