Doing Harm

"Doing Harm pries opens the black box on a critical chapter in the recent history of psychology: the enmeshment of field and some of its practitioners in the "war on terror", and the ensuing reckoning over "do no harm" ethics during times of threat. Focusing on key episodes, decisions, and developments within the American Psychological Association over two tumultuous decades, Eidelson exposes the challenges that professional organizations face whenever powerful government agencies turn to them for contributions to ethically fraught endeavors that endanger human rights. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, it became clear that the White House, the DoD, and the CIA were prepared to ignore well-established international laws and human rights standards in prosecuting the so-called war on terror. It was less immediately obvious, however, that members of Eidelson's own profession, fellow psychologists, would embrace and participate in this effort at overseas CIA black sites, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and beyond. Nor was it initially so clear that, through acts of commission and omission, an enterprise built on abuse and torture would garner support from the APA leadership. Rather than joining other human rights groups in seeking to constrain the US government's far-reaching pursuit of security and retribution through means that dehumanized prisoners and diminished the country's moral standing, the APA chose a very different direction. Doing Harm explains how and why, by recounting an ongoing struggle-one that has pitted APA leaders set on building and preserving strong ties to the military-intelligence establishment against dissident voices committed to prioritizing do no harm principles and distressed by the APA's repeated failures to do so. Following the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, influential figures and forces continue to defend the involvement of health professionals in harsh military-intelligence operations-and they seek to ensure that similar roles will be available in the future. At the same time, across both major political parties the failure to hold perpetrators of torture accountable increases the chances that similar consequential policy choices will be faced once again-with uncertain outcomes and possibly much sooner than we imagine. Doing Harm shows that we must understand the past in order to chart a different direction."--