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Study weighs evidence of psychological treatments deemed ‘harmful,’ substantiating negative effects of ‘Scared Straight’ and critical incident stress debriefing
LAWRENCE — The history of psychology is littered with unfortunate examples of treatments that caused more harm than benefit to patients. Now, a team of psychologists at the University of Kansas has parsed data behind these potentially harmful treatments and published new research in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice.
KU adds early childhood graduate certificate program to its early childhood education/special education graduate offerings
OVERLAND PARK — A new early childhood unified graduate certificate program and the existing master’s in early childhood unified at the University of Kansas prepare early educators to address the needs of each and every child, including those with, and at risk for, developmental delays and disabilities, an area in which there is an urgent need for skilled professionals. Both programs also prepare students to fulfill the requirements for recommendation to obtain a teaching license in early childhood unified (birth through kindergarten) education from the state of Kansas.
Award-winning author to give Self Graduate Fellowship Symposium Lecture
LAWRENCE — Ibram X. Kendi will be the Self Graduate Fellowship’s featured symposium speaker this fall in an event rescheduled from March 2020. Kendi is a New York Times bestselling author, professor of history and international relations, and the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He will present “How to be an Antiracist: A conversation with Ibram X. Kendi” at 3:30 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Lied Center of Kansas
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Study weighs evidence of psychological treatments deemed ‘harmful,’ substantiating negative effects of ‘Scared Straight’ and critical incident stress debriefing
LAWRENCE — The history of psychology is littered with unfortunate examples of treatments that caused more harm than benefit to patients. For instance, in the mid-20th century lobotomies were a common practice to treat mental illness, with poor results. More recently, so-called conversion therapy was targeted at the LGBTQ community in an attempt to change their sexual orientation — a practice that according to the Human Rights Campaign “can lead to depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness and suicide.”
In 2007, the late Scott Lilienfeld, a prominent researcher in psychology, published work outlining other contemporary treatments in psychology that evidence suggested could be potentially harmful for patients. But how thorough was that evidence of harm? What do people seeking treatment need to know?
Now, a team of psychologists at the University of Kansas has parsed the data behind these potentially harmful treatments to determine as clearly as possible if the evidence is convincing. Among these were the DARE program designed to urge young people to abstain from drug use; “scared straight” programs to show young people the consequence of crime; boot camps for conduct disorder; and “critical incident stress debriefing” (also known as psychological debriefing) common after first responders deal with a violent incident.
Their research has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice.
“Psychologists have traditionally been concerned about whether some therapies are better than others, but we haven’t considered as much as we should whether some therapies hurt people unintentionally,” said lead author Alex Williams, program director of psychology at the KU Edwards Campus. “In 2007 the famous psychologist Scott Lilienfeld published a paper in which he put together a list of therapies that were intended to help people, but seemed from the scientific evidence to actually cause harm. We were curious — using new metascientific, statistical metrics, how credible is evidence these therapies hurt people? If therapies hurt people, we want to stop using them. But maybe they do actually help people, and that’s worth knowing, too.”
Williams’ co-authors are Yevgeny Botanov of Pennsylvania State University, Robyn Kilshaw of the University of Utah, Ryan Wong of the University of Victoria and John Kitchener Sakaluk of Western University. The team — several of whom once were doctoral students in psychology at KU together — looked at the data underpinning more than 70 different research studies on these interventions and extracted from them over 560 statistical evaluations of the interventions.
“There’s an appreciable difference in terms of methodology — different approaches to reviews and secondary data analysis,” Sakaluk said. “Lilienfeld’s paper falls into what’s described as a narrative review where a researcher sits down and makes their own subjective read of the literature. Although these forms of reviews can be informative, there are other forms of reviews that are more formalized and rely on certain kinds of systematic procedures to say, ‘Here’s how I arrived at this conclusion — it’s not just based on the power of my own critical thinking ability.’ In our case, we’re going in and repurposing that statistical information to compute and aggregate these metrics in different clusters for each therapy. Lilienfeld observed some very interesting and important patterns, but it’s mostly from the armchair, whereas we get into the muck of the reported summary data and then we’re abstracting from that summary data.”
The team found many of the treatments cited by Lilienfeld haven’t produced enough data to evaluate their potential harm — for example, boot camp interventions. Meanwhile, other potentially harmful treatments showed ambiguous results.
“Harm for both DARE and grief counseling appeared unlikely,” the authors wrote. They noted, though, that while their evaluation suggested grief counseling may benefit patients, DARE lacks evidence it benefits students.
However, two treatments were affirmed by the researchers as likely to be harmful as Lilienfeld asserted.
The authors found, “The plausible extent of harm for CISD [Critical Incident Stress Debriefing] and Scared Straight interventions … appeared more consistent, and under pessimistic effect selection specifically, could be substantial.”
According to the researchers, therapists need to exercise caution in only using psychological interventions with credible evidence of helping patients. They need to immediately cease using psychological treatments that have real potential to harm patients.
“If nobody was doing these treatments or these interventions, this paper would be less worthwhile,” Botanov said. “The thing about it, in 2007 when Lilienfeld wrote about this, and when we started this project, these were still things that were going on. I mean, Scared Straight, for example, you know, there was a TV show called ‘Scared Straight.’
These treatments are promoted by people on podcasts and on TV shows. You can find them in the world easily. People seeking help are being given these treatments. Also importantly, agencies, funders and governments are paying for the treatments. So, if you ask why we look again at the data and why we do it in a different way, it’s because there’s a need out in the world to show evidence that perhaps we shouldn’t do some of this stuff. Perhaps therapists should just stop using this, and perhaps we could have more informed consumers. That’s one of the main things that drove us.”
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Contact: Hannah Lemon, KU Edwards Campus, 913-897-8755, [email protected], @KUEdwardsCampus
KU adds early childhood graduate certificate program to its early childhood education/special education graduate offerings
OVERLAND PARK — The new early childhood unified graduate certificate program and the existing master’s in early childhood unified at the University of Kansas prepare early educators to address the needs of each and every child, including those with, and at risk for, developmental delays and disabilities, an area in which there is an urgent need for skilled professionals.
Both programs also prepare students to fulfill the requirements for recommendation to obtain a teaching license in early childhood unified (birth through kindergarten) education from the state of Kansas.
Historically, this program has been successful in gaining federal grants to offer financial assistance to qualified students, including those starting this fall.
“Our early childhood unified graduate programs teach a holistic, collaborative approach to supporting each and every child and family in their natural environment,” said Rick Ginsberg, dean of the KU School of Education & Human Sciences.
KU’s master’s and graduate certificate in early childhood unified are nationally accredited programs under the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) Standards through the CAEP Accreditation System. They are offered through the KU Department of Special Education in the School of Education & Human Sciences, which was recently ranked No. 2 among U.S. News & World Report’s Best Public Special Education Programs.
The early childhood unified graduate programs emphasize interdisciplinary approaches, real-world application of skills and team-based processes to inform early educators’ practice and support the development of young children most effectively.
The programs, which are offered at both the KU Lawrence campus and the Edwards Campus in Overland Park, are taught through a blended format of online and in-person classes, meeting once a week in the evening. The required curriculum also includes practicums, one of which may be completed in the student’s current early childhood work setting.
Individuals interested in starting the program in fall 2021 are encouraged to apply by July 20. Contact Kim Huggett at 913-897-8421 for program details, application process and financial assistance information.
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Contact: Michelle Compton-Muñoz, Madison and Lila Self Graduate Programs, 785-864-2434, [email protected], @Selfgraduate
Award-winning author to give Self Graduate Fellowship Symposium Lecture
LAWRENCE — Ibram X. Kendi will be the Self Graduate Fellowship’s featured symposium speaker this fall in an event rescheduled from March 2020. Kendi is a New York Times bestselling author, professor of history and international relations, and the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
Kendi, one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist voices, will present “How to be an Antiracist: A conversation with Ibram X. Kendi” at 3:30 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Lied Center of Kansas. His talk is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. They will be available in September.
Kendi is the author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction. At 34 years old, he was the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He is also the author of “The Black Campus Movement,” which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize.
Joining Kendi on stage will be Kevin Willmott. In addition to being a professor of film & media studies for the University of Kansas, Willmott is an Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter. He is known for work focusing on Black issues including writing and directing “Ninth Street,” “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America” and “Bunker Hill.”
Willmott collaborated with Spike Lee on “BlacKkKlansman,” for which they won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Kendi has published numerous essays in academic journals and periodicals, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Time and The Washington Post. He has received research fellowships, grants and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations and libraries, including the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, UCLA and Duke University. Kendi was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was honored on The Root 100 in 2019, which listed him as the 15th most influential African American between the ages of 25 and 45 and the most influential college professor. In August 2019, Kendi’s third book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list and was hailed by the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” It has been named to several Best Books of 2019 lists, including in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time and NPR.
The Self Graduate Fellowship Symposium Lecture is sponsored by the Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellowship. The mission of the Self Graduate Fellowship is to identify, recruit, and provide development opportunities for exceptional doctoral students in business, economics, engineering, mathematics, biological, biomedical, pharmaceutical and physical sciences who demonstrate the promise to make significant contributions to their fields of study and society as a whole.
The late Madison “Al” and Lila Self launched and permanently endowed the Self Graduate Fellowship in 1989.
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