The American Psychological Association (APA) is, perhaps, the most deleterious of all professional organizations from a sociocultural perspective, with the arguable exception of teachers’ unions that do the boots-on-the-ground work of softening up the next generation of Americans to social engineering schemes devised in the background by the likes of the APA and others.
Related: Teachers’ Union Head Randi Weingarten KO’ed in Congressional Hearings Over COVID School Closures
I was reminded recently of the social cancer that is the APA in the context of a Tweet offered by the president of the organization, Dr. Thema (pronouns in bio): “Let go of the fear. Let go of the lies. Let go of the control issues. Let go of the manipulation. Let go of the selfishness. Let go of that which has been stolen. Let go of the denial. Let go of the tendency to dehumanize. Let go of the greed. Decolonize.”
Whatever that gibberish means.
The APA’s underreported-upon 2019 treatise on “traditional masculinity,” sometimes termed “toxic masculinity,” has done a great deal to reimagine the clinical practice of psychology on men, with untold effects not just on the individual psychology of the affected men receiving “therapy” but on society as a whole.
Via American Psychological Association, 2019, emphasis added:
For decades, psychology focused on men (particularly white men), to the exclusion of all others. And men still dominate professionally and politically: As of 2018, 95.2 percent of chief operating officers at Fortune 500 companies were men. According to a 2017 analysis by Fortune, in 16 of the top companies, 80 percent of all high-ranking executives were male. Meanwhile, the 115th Congress, which began in 2017, was 81 percent male.
But something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school—especially boys of color.
APA’s new Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men strive to recognize and address these problems in boys and men while remaining sensitive to the field’s androcentric past. Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly…
“Though men benefit from patriarchy*, they are also impinged upon by patriarchy,” says Ronald F. Levant, EdD, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and co-editor of the APA volume “The Psychology of Men and Masculinities.” Levant was APA president in 2005 when the guideline-drafting process began and was instrumental in securing funding and support to get the process started.
*Note that, even while purporting to develop “guidelines” to assist men, the APA is dogmatically required to denounce the Patriarchy™ and the “domination” of the field by white men – AKA Satan incarnate -- throughout the years. These caveats undermine the pretense of “helping” men whom the organization clearly holds in contempt.
The body of the work is the kind of pseudointellectual, feminist tripe one would expect from the APA. A sampling:
The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors. For example, a 2011 study led by Kristen Springer, PhD, of Rutgers University, found that men with the strongest beliefs about masculinity were only half as likely as men with more moderate masculine beliefs to get preventive health care ( Journal of Health and Social Behavior , Vol. 52, No. 2 ). And in 2007, researchers led by James Mahalik, PhD, of Boston College, found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to consider as normal risky health behaviors such as heavy drinking, using tobacco and avoiding vegetables, and to engage in these risky behaviors themselves ( Social Science and Medicine , Vol. 64, No. 11 ).
