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Read the whole piece at:While U.S. military psychiatrists are prescribing increasing amounts of chill pills, America’s psychologists are teaching soldiers how to think more positively about their tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever else they are next ordered to kill the bad guys and win the hearts and minds of everyone else.
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While positive psychology makes some sense for teenagers who are catastrophizing their first relationship breakup to the point of becoming suicidal, how much sense does it make to teach soldiers who are trying to stay alive in a war zone to put a positive spin on everything? Moreover, wouldn’t soldiers like their officers to consider worst-case scenarios before ordering them into combat? And wouldn’t soldiers like politicians to take seriously worst-case scenarios before embarking on a war? The healthy option to negative thinking is not positive thinking but critical thinking. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bright-sided and astute critic of the dark side of positive thinking and positive psychology, points out:
It’s easy to see positive thinking as a uniquely American form of naïveté, but it is neither uniquely American nor endearingly naïve. In vastly different settings, positive thinking has been a tool of political repression worldwide. . . . In the Soviet Union, as in the Eastern European states and North Korea, the censors required upbeat art, books, and films, meaning upbeat heroes, plots about fulfilling production quotas, and endings promising a glorious revolutionary future. . . .The penalties for negative thinking were real. Not to be positive and optimistic was to be ‘defeatist’. . . . Accusing someone of spreading defeatism condemned him to several years in Stalinist camps.
While the U.S. military has only recently become excited about positive psychology techniques, it has, for the last decade, increasingly used psychiatric drugs to keep soldiers going. One in six service members is now taking at least one psychiatric drug, according to the Navy Times (“Medicating the Military,” March 17, 2010), with many soldiers taking “drug cocktail” combinations. Soldiers and military healthcare providers reportthat psychiatric drugs are “being prescribed, consumed, shared and traded in combat zones.” While soldiers’ increasing use of antidepressants is troubling enough (as the Food and Drug Administration now requires warnings on antidepressants about their increasing the risk of “suicidality” in children, teenagers, and young adults), what’s as or even more worrisome is the increase of other psychiatric drugs. In the last decade, antipsychotic drug use in the U.S. military has increased more than 200 percent, and anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills have increased 170 percent. These kinds of drugs impair motor skills, reduce reaction times, and generally make one more sluggish -- or what soldiers call “stupid,” as the Navy Times notes.
Comments (28)
The drugs are needed more and more because the soldiers are not as easily brainwashed as the old hard core God and country lock step soldiers were. The sheep are beginning to awaken and drugs are the only vehicle the government has to try to stay in power and control. Same with the kids. The school system doesn't know how to handle this new breed of free thinkers so puts labels on them and feeds them paxil and (what's that one for ADD?)...anyway, things are changing and they are changing fast. We all better look around and see what is right before our eyes. JMO
serving a bad and unfair purpose is creating the major psycological problems.if us army had to defent usa ,the problems could have been eliminated.
gear venus the only and trully reason ,we exist on earth face ,is to fight eachother to the end of time.
Why they cant think of d side effects of those drugs that was given to a n0ne sick soldier?
They must divide the budget for medicati0n n0t to over use those drugs, lot of sick people who needs m0re drugs.... n0t those soldier who were already physically fit and juz need s0me focus in a battle!
Madeleine Smith, a 28-year-old newscaster, was just one casualty of the ghoulish experiments conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s under Ewen Cameron at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute.
The experiments were part of the infamous “MK ULTRA” program conducted under the aegis of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and 1960s, exposed in media and United States Congressional hearings in the 1970s. Patients were brutalized and maimed with drugs, shocks and lobotomies as Cameron sought a means to “depattern” and “re-program” the human mind. Canadian survivors still able to seek reparation finally obtained some compensation from the U.S. government in 1988.
Naomi Klein in Shock Therapy says same techniques are used to this day in Guantanamo and other black sites.
No, but I read A wild sheep chase
if u have no soldiers capable to fight ,return home and stay there.if u think that hi soph guns can win every war ,u r wrong as usually.u r in the middle of a new vietnam ,cause ur useless generals forgot the basical principal of the war.if u need a ground ,only infanty can keep it.no airplanes or missiles or satelittes.only the infantry and ofcourse the one with clean mind not the jankies.
killing moe people u can only make ur enemies number to increase.
yes for the useless generals of ur army and ur sold to their supporters politicains is chess.but i f u r a leader of some men and see them killed forthe next chees move,u 'd think a little diff.if u the brother of a dead fo nothing soldier or a wife ,or child or or or ,try to explaine ur chess games.make sure u run very very fast
A profit of drugs...etc..
OF WHO?? You?
Hahahahahaha
Juz ask,
Why r u so affected of this army wars of ur country?
U cant do anything to change the system....
We r all juz viewers of this war scene!
So cøol...
I'll send a beer over there!
Hahahaha
I am not sure what you mean by the statement 'positive thinking is false and delusional'
Excerpt:
The first one was conducted in August 2004, on the eve of a Republican National Convention, on 808 randomly-selected residents of New York State. It found that 49 percent of New York City residents and 41 percent of New York state citizens believe individuals within the US government "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act". The margin of error for this poll was 3.5 percent.
The second major Zogby poll on 9/11 was conducted in May 2006. It was a telephone interview of 1,200 randomly-selected adults from across the United States, consisting of 81 questions, with a 2.9 percent margin of error. Some of the questions asked include the following:
"Some people believe that the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks, saying there has been a cover-up. Others say that the 9/11 Commission was a bi-partisan group of honest and well-respected people and that there is no reason they would want to cover-up anything. Who are you more likely to agree with?"
Responses: 48% No Cover-up / 42% Cover-up / 10% Not sure
Mike, recorded history only goes back, what, 12,000 years? How can you say that war has always been a part of the human experience? No one knows that.