SCRF 2022: Author-Illustrator Vashti Harrison Explores The Visual World Of Storytelling With Children

(MENAFN– Dubai PR Network)

SCRF 2022: Author-illustrator Vashti Harrison Explores the Visual World of Storytelling with Children

The talented young American, who has illustrated non-fiction, biographies apart from picture story books, gave tips on drawing and writing to her young fans at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival 

Sharjah, May 19, 2022: Ideas are everywhere and you just have to be open to seeing them, remarked American author-illustrator Vashti Harrison as she showed her young audience at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival (SCRF) 2022 how she drew Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. on the skin of half a green apple. The 13th edition of SCRF, running in Expo Centre Sharjah until May 22, has the theme ‘Create Creativity’. 

“I just do that all the time because that is what creativity is,” she told a crowd of middle schoolers who observed and listened in fascination as she showed them how to draw captivating images and read out to them from her biographies of famous people written specifically for young readers. Harrison, whose Hello, Star and Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History are among her numerous New York Times best-sellers, also gave them tips and tricks to put into their artwork.

“When I work with books, I always start with sketches and they are messy,” she explained how her art takes colour and shape. She felt it important to share that it doesn’t all go in one step, and uses tools ranging from computer, iPad, Photoshop, paper and pencils to get the final product. Harrison, who has also illustrated picture books debunking racial stereotyping such as Hair Love by Oscar-winning director and footballer Mathew A. Cherry and Sulwe by actress Lupita Nyong of Star Wars fame, told them how she imagines everything that goes into a page from a few crisp verbal instructions.

The African-American artist with Caribbean Indian roots demonstrated how she could convert black and white outlines of people into colour images of her dad Ted and mom Chandra. She then went on to show them how to draw a girl’s picture, using a lot of ‘lazy Cs’ and a couple of Ss and 3s towards the end for hair curls.

Regarding the hurdles in the path of writers, Harrison pointed out that there is no one way to be an artist, and“you try out different things and learn from mistakes”. Rejections do not lessen your value as an artist or invalidate your work, she noted. She said she was lucky she had supportive people in her life, even if they didn’t always understand what she was doing. But what had been important was that she get over her fear – of mistakes – and continue to work hard, Harrison pointed out.

In reply to the volley of questions from her fans, she said that her favourite book to draw was Hello, Star while the book she enjoyed writing the most was Little Dreamers: Visionary Women from Around the World even though it was the most challenging since she had to teach herself history and science to be able to do it. Her dream project, she answered a student, is to turn her works into animated movies and television shows. 

“What inspires me to draw now is sharing my work with young people, and I love talking to young artists,” Harrison noted. The popularity of the young author was evident when her books sold out in a matter of minutes during the book signing ceremony at the end of her session. 

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For Baltimore sculptor, medium of clay becomes an instrument of healing

<img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-109080" data-attachment-id="109080" data-permalink="https://thecatholicspirit.com/news/nation-and-world/for-baltimore-sculptor-medium-of-clay-becomes-an-instrument-of-healing/attachment/sculptor-art-healing/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/thecatholicspirit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/SCULPTOR-ART-HEALING.jpg?fit=550%2C370&ssl=1" data-orig-size="550,370" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="SCULPTOR-ART-HEALING" data-image-description="

Wayman Scott IV, a parishioner of the Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Md., works on his Pietà sculpture, which features African American figures.

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Wayman Scott IV, a parishioner of the Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Md., works on his Pietà sculpture, which features African American figures. CNS photo/Kevin J. Parks, Catholic Review

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Wayman Scott IV, a parishioner of the Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Md., works on his Pietà sculpture, which features African American figures. CNS photo/Kevin J. Parks, Catholic Review

Wayman Scott IV couldn’t sleep.

Even as a professional grief counselor at Gilchrist Hospice whose job is to help others grapple with loss, the 43-year-old husband and father was reeling from news of the murder of the daughter of one of his colleagues.

“I knew the agony I felt was 10 times worse for my friend,” remembered Scott, a parishioner of the Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Maryland, and an up-and-coming African American artist.

In his anguish, Scott drove to Baltimore Clayworks, where he had been working on a sculpture similar to Michelangelo’s famous Pietà showing Mary cradling her lifeless son. Scott had already largely finished the image of Christ and the body of Mary, but hadn’t started on Mary’s face.

Through tears in an empty studio late at night, Scott pressed fingers into clay. With the loss of his friend’s daughter consuming his mind, he steadily transformed a lump of earth into the countenance of a mourning mother.

Unlike the Italian Renaissance sculptor’s serene Mary, Scott’s depiction shows a woman with her mouth open in a scream. The African American figure’s brow is furrowed as she gazes heavenward, away from the dreadlocked Jesus she clutches with both arms.

Scott said he normally has difficulty sculpting without looking at some representative figure.

“I don’t know whose face this is,” he said, gesturing to Mary’s anguished visage in his miniature Pietà. “I almost find this to be a miracle because it just came to me in the middle of the night in my pain.”

For Scott, art is a way to cope with the challenges of life. In his hands, the medium of clay becomes an instrument of healing.

Click on any image for gallery

Scott was a third grader at Phelps Luck Elementary School in Columbia, Maryland, when his teacher asked students to make clay figures. As Scott set to work, his classmates began gathering to watch. Dazzled by the realistic triceratops that took shape in Scott’s hands, they asked him to make something for them.

“For me, it was just natural,” he remembered. “I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t make a face or a dog or a dinosaur if they wanted.”

Scott cultivated his talent, taking fine arts courses at Towson University while completing a degree in political science. He felt called to youth ministry as a young adult, spending several years as the youth minister of St. John in Columbia, his home parish.

Experiences of grief had a way of continually shaping the direction of the young man’s life.

While Scott was at Towson, his mother, Carolyn Jean Scott, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A Fulbright Scholar who specialized in African American history, Carolyn Scott saw her health decline steadily until her death in 2017. Her son was so devastated he gave up his art.

The loss of his mother, together with the murder of a young man who gave a presentation on a drug-prevention program at St. John and the suicide of a friend led Scott to devote his life to helping others cope with loss.

After completing necessary certifications, he first worked as a chaplain at Gilchrist before taking on his current role as a grief counselor there.

While counseling a dying man at Gilchrist — who also happened to be an artist — Scott found himself challenged for abandoning art. The man had been impressed with Scott’s elaborate cake sculptures he had made for various events at Gilchrist, and he insisted that Scott take up sculpting with clay again.

“When a dying man very firmly tells you to do something, you tend to listen,” Scott remembered.

Father Robert Albright, a former Catholic chaplain at Towson University who prepared Scott to receive the sacrament of confirmation, said his friend has a concern for justice.

“He’s a man of faith — always humble, always joyful,” Father Albright told the Catholic Review, the news outlet of the Baltimore Archdiocese.

The priest recalled how in college, Scott shared how as a Black man he had to be extra cautious about simple things such as obeying traffic rules.

“I think he has a need to excel and rise above the problems of the caste system into which Black people are born,” Father Albright said.

Much of Scott’s work honors his African American heritage. His Pietà symbolically draws attention to young Black men who lost their lives during encounters with police. Scott said he will soon craft a life-size version of the sculpture, an ambitious undertaking that will involve firing huge pieces of the figure in a large, gas-powered kiln at Baltimore Clayworks.

Kevin Rohde, artist and children’s program manager at Baltimore Clayworks, said it is perilous to work with clay on the scale Scott intends.

“It has to get cooked to 2,100 degrees (Fahrenheit), so there’s some stress that goes on in that process,” said Rohde, an art instructor at Towson University and a parishioner of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez in Woodstock, Maryland. There’s a real possibility work could be destroyed in the process.

Rohde called Scott “up to the challenge.”

Scott’s sculptures have a realistic quality to them, Rohde said.

“Anyone can make a human figure that comes out looking inorganic, with almost a stiffness or rigidity,” he explained. “Wayman’s work takes it to the next level. It has that something within that you can see — just a spirit and a life to it.”

Rohde said Scott’s art, which includes depictions of St. Cecilia and Frederick Douglass, is characterized by honesty.

“He doesn’t conceal the tool marks on the figures he’s sculpting,” Rohde said.

Using $1,500 he received as the 2021 awardee of the Mary E. Nyburg Fund for Artist Development, Scott is planning to create a ceramics project at an East Baltimore public school where children come from neglected parts of the city plagued with violence. Many of them have lost loved ones to COVID-19 or have been displaced during neighborhood redevelopment, Scott said.

“If we’re going to heal the city, I don’t see how that happens without creative arts,” he insisted. “I want to create something permanent for them — to show them that although change has been forced on them at tender age, you still have the power to build something new.”

Matysek is managing editor of the Catholic Review, news outlet of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

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Bad therapy

In 2000, Jeane Newmaker took her adopted 10-year-old daughter Candace to an ‘attachment therapy’ retreat designed to increase their emotional bond. While there, Candace underwent an intervention that’s supposed to replicate the birthing process. Therapists wrapped her in a flannel sheet and covered her with pillows to simulate a womb or birth canal. Then they instructed her to fight her way out while four adults (weighing nearly 700 lbs in total) tried to stop her. Candace complained and screamed for help and air, unable to escape from the sheet. After 70 minutes of struggling, pleading that she was dying, and vomiting and excreting inside the sheet, Candace died of suffocation. This tragic case highlights an important but often overlooked aspect of psychological interventions designed to help people – sometimes they can be harmful, or even fatal.

Candace Newmaker’s death is a shocking and obviously recognisable example of an alleged treatment causing immense harm. However, there are innumerable psychological treatments on offer, many of which are not so obviously harmful but that can also carry risks. Consider that, before her rebirthing treatment, Candace underwent other forms of attachment therapy, such as ‘holding therapy’ wherein her mother Jeane held her for an extended, uncomfortable period and restricted her movements. Candace was also pinned under her mother during a session of so-called ‘compression therapy’. Throughout these different psychological treatments, her mother licked her to induce rage. These strange interventions are perhaps harmful too, but less strikingly so than the rebirthing procedure. Yet they all continue to be practised in some US states and elsewhere around the world.

Assessing whether a psychological treatment causes harm can be surprisingly difficult, and intuition is an unreliable guide. Take the popular school programme Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) founded in Los Angeles in 1983. The idea of DARE, consistent with the wider ‘war on drugs’ in the United States, is straightforward: uniformed police officers visit classrooms to warn children and teens about the dangers of drug and alcohol use, thereby reducing underage use of alcohol and illicit substances, or so it is hoped. On the surface, DARE appears to be potentially beneficial and unlikely to harm. However, in 2001, the US surgeon general deemed DARE ineffective. Decades after it was developed, and despite millions of dollars spent annually on its implementation, the data indicated that DARE was no better than doing nothing.

Or was it worse than that? Was DARE potentially leading to an increase in alcohol and drug use among children and teens? The history of interventions such as rebirthing and DARE highlights important questions that should concern anyone involved in therapy, clients and therapists alike: how do we know if a certain treatment or intervention helps people as proclaimed, or if it is ineffective, even potentially harmful? And whom do we trust to make these judgments?

In the US, one might assume a government agency is responsible for the oversight of psychological interventions such as mental health treatments or larger intervention programmes. After all, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates numerous products including food, tobacco, some supplements, pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, medical devices and cosmetics. Yet the FDA has no oversight over psychological interventions, and neither does any other agency. And while every state and territory in the US has licensing boards to oversee mental health practice and safeguard the wellbeing of the public, these boards rarely prohibit types of treatment or interventions; instead, they focus on unethical therapist behaviour, such as sexual relationships with clients and the false claiming of qualifications.

Nor are clients protected from given forms of therapy or large-scale interventions by state or federal law. A notable exception is that about half of US states have banned ‘conversion therapy’ or ‘reparative therapy’ for minors, which attempts to change their sexual orientation. But we know of no other psychological interventions that are so widely banned by law. Importantly, Candace Newmaker is not the only victim of attachment therapies such as rebirthing and, since her death, only two states have outlawed the practice. Without a governing body or lawful regulations, the people providing psychological interventions and the people receiving those interventions are left to figure out on their own whether there is any potential for harm.

Negative experiences from mainstream mental health care are seen among many ethnoracial minority clients

Unfortunately, history is replete with popular mental health interventions that turned out to be harmful, or even deadly. In hindsight, it may seem all too easy to disregard trepanning (ie, curing ‘madness’ by drilling holes in the skull to release evil spirits), leeches and electric eels as ridiculous ‘treatments’, but harmful treatments – however abhorrent or ridiculous they seem now – have a way of sticking around. For instance, lobotomies were used in the late 20th century for decades after their barbaric nature was recognised; similarly bloodlettings, which likely contributed to the death of George Washington, continue to be used in some parts of the world today. But harmful therapies are not limited to these centuries-old treatments.

Although viscerally harmful treatments such as rebirthing are mercifully rare nowadays, less dramatic but still significant harms arising from psychological practices are more widespread. You might imagine that more conventional forms of modern therapy as delivered by a psychologist, counsellor or clinical social worker cannot be harmful because the treatments involve ‘just talking’. Regrettably, this is not the case. For instance, a survey published in 2018 of more than 14,000 clients who’d undergone therapy with a qualified professional in the NHS in England and Wales found that 5 per cent reported experiencing unspecified lasting harmful effects from the experience; similar effects were reported by 14 per cent of clients in a survey published in 2021 (other studies suggest these ill effects are likely to include worsening symptoms and relationship problems). An extensive literature also documents negative experiences from mainstream mental health care among many ethnoracial minority clients (eg, overdiagnosis of severe mental illness among Black Americans) that likely reflects both prejudices and cultural insensitivities.

It is important to state that, globally, most psychotherapies are helpful and not harmful. Meta-analyses (which, in short, combine data across numerous clinical trials to calculate the ‘average’ treatment effect) have consistently shown that receiving any bona fide psychotherapy (that is, a therapy with a clear rationale that is grounded in psychological science) more often leads to beneficial effects compared with not receiving any therapy. For instance, a meta-analysis published in 2021 showed that receiving any bona fide therapy compared with no treatment more than halves the chances of psychological deterioration in children. However, these are averaged effects, and the devil is in the details – for many psychological interventions, the cost-benefit ratio is less clear.

To better understand how upwards of one in 20 clients could be harmed from psychotherapy, or whether programmes like DARE are harmful, it’s important first to determine what we mean by harm, and to distinguish among the different forms that harm can take in these contexts.

One not so obvious form of harm is an ‘opportunity cost’ – even if somebody undergoes a treatment that does not make their symptoms worse, but is merely ineffective, then in a sense they have been harmed because they’ve missed out on a treatment that could have helped. Some opportunity costs will be difficult if not impossible to avoid because it’s so hard to predict who will benefit from different forms of therapy. However, some therapies have opportunity costs that are eminently knowable. DARE, as assessed by the US surgeon general, would fall into this category: it absorbed exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money and student time that could have been used for an effective substance-use intervention instead.

Teaching people to punch when angered leads to more anger and punching

A more obvious form of harm is when a treatment causes short-term deterioration in clients, with no prospect of any long-term benefit, and sometimes the chance of longer-term harm. A clear example is ‘cathartic interventions’ that promise relief by directing people to express difficult emotions in a purge-like manner, such as punching pillows when angry and yelling as loudly as possible when distressed. Such practices date to the times of Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s and ‘primal scream therapy’ in the 1970s, and lend themselves to the rising popularity of ‘smash rooms’ in which people pay to ‘therapeutically’ destroy items such as televisions and toasters with a hammer. Despite their popular appeal, copious research indicates that, as a means of dealing with difficult emotions, these approaches have the opposite of the intended therapeutic effect, actually increasing anger and distress. Simply put, teaching people to punch when angered leads to more anger and punching. Furthermore, most often the therapists providing these treatments are unaware of their harmful effects. This is also likely the case for therapists who recommend mindfulness interventions to their clients without reservation, failing to consider that, in a minority of users, mindfulness can cause adverse events such as anxiety, depression and unpleasant dissociation.

Similarly, some therapists, including celebrated pioneers, have been seemingly ignorant of the harms caused by conversion therapy, such as depression, low self-esteem and impaired sexual function. For example, Albert Ellis reported using rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) – a forerunner to modern cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – to change a man’s sexual orientation:

In this case of a 35-year-old male who entered therapy because he was severely troubled by a fixed pattern of homosexuality, a swift frontal attack was made by the therapist on the basic assumptions or philosophies illogically underlying the client’s symptoms. In the course of this attack, the client was shown, by the therapist’s rigorously unmasking and then inducing the client himself to contradict and act against his irrational beliefs, that his homosexual pattern of behaviour and his other neurotic symptoms were not hopelessly ingrained, and that he himself could control his own destiny by changing his assumptions … As he began to change the fundamental irrational beliefs that motivated his homosexual and neurotic behaviour, the client’s symptoms almost automatically began to disappear and he was able to change from a fixed, exclusive homosexual to a virtually 100 per cent heterosexually oriented individual.

‘Virtually’ indeed. Similarly, in A New Guide to Rational Living (1975), the revised edition of his bestseller, Ellis wrote:

Jack M, a compulsive or obligatory homosexual, came to therapy at the age of 25 … After 10 years of highly promiscuous homosexual behaviour, including one arrest and a recent attempt to blackmail him at the school for boys at which he taught, Jack decided he’d better attempt to ‘go straight’. And he came to see me (AE) with the knowledge that I, unlike a good many therapists, strongly felt that compulsive homosexuals definitely could change … His sexual interest in males considerably diminished and he felt sure that whatever interest he had, he could control, or occasionally act out uncompulsively.

Ellis’s REBT has helped untold numbers of clients, but his promulgation of conversion therapy was wrong then and wrong today. Perhaps Ellis realised this: the far-fetched story of Jack M was removed from later editions of his influential book.

So, psychological harm can take many different forms, and it’s not always obvious, even to the most talented therapists. Thankfully, clinical researchers have highlighted the problems with purging emotions in a cathartic manner, and they continue to study other forms of potentially harmful interventions. An influential figure in this field until his untimely death in 2020, the US psychologist Scott Lilienfeld reviewed this research and outlined numerous potentially harmful psychological and behavioural interventions, which included attachment therapies such as rebirthing. Unfortunately, since the publication of Lilienfeld’s landmark paper in 2007, seemingly little has changed in clinical practice; most of the interventions he outlined are still employed today.

Harmful treatments persist, ironically, in part because the same research processes that can identify safe and effective interventions can also mask the harmful ones. DARE, for example, has been tested repeatedly in forms of randomised controlled trials, the gold standard for health intervention research. These trials have often provided a range of outcomes that could be taken to indicate either that the intervention helps, is ineffective, or is harmful. When the scientific literature on an intervention grows sufficiently large, it becomes all too easy for biased individuals to focus on studies that confirm what they want to see, and all too difficult for more objective investigators to separate high-quality trials from the more cringeworthy studies.

Our own research team (the present authors, along with the PhD students Robyn Kilshaw at the University of Utah and Ryan Wong at University of Victoria in Canada) has tried to address this problem for some potentially harmful treatments. Using methods we wrote about for Aeon previously, we studied the credibility of all the available research evidence for the psychological interventions Lilienfeld reviewed in his 2007 paper, leading us to analyse 70-plus randomised controlled trials. As we recently reported in the journal Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, the results for each treatment were often ambiguous – unfortunately, we found more cringe than quality. For example, the statistical analyses for many trials were often reported so sparsely that we could not independently verify their accuracy. Across the board, the clinical trials for all the treatments we examined also exhibited signs of having insufficient numbers of participants, making it impossible to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness. Worryingly, we also found that the claimed statistical support for treatments in the clinical trials was consistently and implausibly positive, given the trials’ modest sample sizes.

It’s unethical to continue practising CISD without some new compelling evidence that it helps first responders

These methodological patterns are beyond concerning; many of these treatments (eg, boot camps for conduct disorders; expressive-experiential psychotherapies) have existed for decades, yet uniformly lack evidence from which one can solidly conclude whether they work. However, despite the limitations of this literature, we were able to extract some signal from the noise for four treatments. The news was not all bad: there was robust evidence that grief therapy – a treatment for individuals following loss of a loved one – can help those who receive it, and we found no evidence that it harmed them. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about the other three interventions for which sufficiently robust evidence allowed for firmer conclusions:

Critical incident stress debriefing (CISD)/psychological debriefing

CISD and similar interventions are a popular option for first responders such as police officers and firefighters. The treatment is meant to forestall potential mental health problems, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), by intervening in the immediate aftermath of a severely stressful event. Our statistical analysis found that, in a best-case scenario, CISD provides no benefit, while in the worst-case it increases PTSD symptoms. Because most people do not develop PTSD following a traumatic event, it might be that harm arises from compelling people to discuss and re-experience the traumatic moments in a setting in which they are uncomfortable, which interferes with the natural healing process. We consider it unethical to continue practising CISD without some new compelling evidence that it helps first responders. (For example, we would be interested in the results of a large, preregistered randomised control trial of a modified form of CISD that is more congruent with existing psychological research on healing from trauma.)

Scared Straight

Scared Straight is a psychoeducational programme that was first popularised by a 1978 documentary of the same name, and then reintroduced to modern audiences via the TV series Beyond Scared Straight (2011-15), which ran on the A&E cable network in the US. Scared Straight and similar interventions expose adolescents who have been found guilty of committing a crime to a real prison and real-life prisoners. The intention is that the prisoners will scare the adolescents onto the ‘straight and narrow’, including using threats of physical and sexual assault. Our statistical analysis suggested that, in a best-case scenario, Scared Straight has a tiny harmful effect. You read that right – the most optimistic interpretation of the data is that Scared Straight interventions hurt teenagers. Conversely, in a worst-case scenario, Scared Straight meaningfully increases the odds that adolescents who complete the programme will reoffend (perhaps via increased socialising with the other teenagers on the programme; reinforcement of antisocial behaviour via ‘tough love’, or a myriad other possibilities). Again, as with CISD, our analysis indicates that Scared Straight-type programmes should cease.

DARE

What about DARE? We found that, in a best-case scenario, DARE has a negligible beneficial effect; in a worst-case scenario, it has a similarly tiny or negligible harmful effect. In other words, our statistical results indicate that DARE is a poster child for opportunity costs: children who participate in DARE are unlikely to be helped or harmed by it (maybe because ‘information-only’ interventions do little to inspire motivation and behaviour change), and so the time and money spent on DARE could be better spent on anything that is actually of benefit.

Our analyses were limited by the substantial problems in the clinical trials that we’ve noted. Additionally, they were constrained by the lack of availability of clinical trials for any given treatment. For instance, we could not assess some of the interventions Lilienfeld chronicled, including the attachment treatments that killed Candace Newmaker, because no one has yet had the gall (thankfully) to test such interventions in rigorous clinical trials. However, for those treatments, the documented cases of lethal harm should be convincing enough to consider their use as unequivocally unethical. But many other interventions are still poorly researched, and it is an open question whether and for whom they are helpful versus harmful.

It is concerning that all the potentially harmful treatments we’ve discussed, and many more, still maintain a foothold in mental health treatment and are easily available throughout the US and in many other countries. If you are an adult US citizen, in almost any state you can find a licensed provider who will try to change your sexual orientation (laws ban the practice only for minors). If you are still interested in undergoing a questionable attachment therapy, then finding a practitioner is also just a Google search away. Moreover, many of these treatments are touted on podcasts, television shows and films. Unfortunately, the average person seeking a psychological intervention, often desperate for help, cannot be expected to possess knowledge of health statistics and methodologies to understand the potential for benefit or harm. Additionally, many people likely assume that interventions often seen in the popular media – such as Scared Straight, which has spawned five TV movies and a multi-season TV series spanning four decades – are accepted and effective.

It often falls upon mental health providers to safeguard against harm, but psychologists, social workers and other kinds of mental health therapists are also subject to human biases, such as confirmation bias – the tendency to seek out evidence to justify one’s existing beliefs. Like all of us, therapists are also often much more swayed by their personal, anecdotal experiences than the scientific literature. The individuals who killed Candace Newmaker and most clinicians who continue to practise ineffective or potentially harmful interventions are not devious individuals looking to harm the public. Rather, these individuals simply, but regretfully, rely on their own perceptions above what has been shown, at scale, scientifically.

The reality is that many healthcare providers lack the scientific training necessary to understand the statistical and methodological nuances of clinical trials. For the typical therapist, many layers of human bias obfuscate the outcomes of the treatments they provide. Most will see their treatments as helpful, even when they are not. Simply put, oftentimes the evidence therapists use to judge the efficacy of their interventions (eg, the client says they are doing better, the client ‘looks better’) are the least reliable indicators for that purpose. Indeed, many apparent gains might not be real, or could be attributable to other factors having nothing to do with the therapy, such as a placebo effect, or a reversion to a more typical state of mental health.

Replacing Scared Straight and CISD with literally no intervention whatsoever would be more beneficial

We urge therapists to remember that good intentions are not sufficient for fulfilling their ethical duty to do good (beneficence) and to do no harm (nonmaleficence). We also remind them – as we, the authors of this essay who are clinicians, remind ourselves in our own practices – how commonly confirmation bias can cause one to make overly optimistic armchair assessments of client improvement. If and when evidence emerges that a treatment they use has the potential to harm, clinicians should reconsider their use of that treatment despite any allegiance they might have to it. We, the authors of this essay who are clinicians, have also taken this lesson to heart, discontinuing our use of potentially harmful therapeutic techniques we were trained in and felt attachment to. Additionally, if evidence of a treatment’s benefit is lacking, yet credible evidence of possible harm exists, these interventions should be subjected to what we call ‘psychological reversal’: for safety, they should be retired. Where possible, these treatments could be replaced with interventions that have actual evidence of benefit, though we want to stress that the evidence from our review suggest that replacing interventions such as Scared Straight and CISD with literally no intervention whatsoever would be more beneficial.

While it is clinicians’ responsibility to not provide harmful interventions, individuals seeking treatment can take steps to protect themselves too. The study we mentioned – that showed 5 per cent of clients reported lasting harmful effects from therapy – also found that it was those clients who were unsure about what type of therapy they’d received who were more likely to say they’d experienced harm. Conversely, those who’d sought more information about a treatment were at less risk. This suggests that putting full faith in a therapist could be problematic. To any readers of this essay undergoing therapy, we want to reassure you again that most clients are still helped by therapy, but we do recommend that you request that your therapist is up to date on treatment research, and also that they are able to present you with evidence that the treatments or interventions they are providing have been rigorously tested. We especially encourage you to challenge your therapist in this way if something about the treatment is atypical, such as if it involves physical contact. Your therapist should have evidence their treatments work and share with you any concerns about potential harms. If your therapist never requires you to complete some sort of assessment of your progress – even a symptom checklist – then we suggest you see this as a red flag.

Fortunately, there is much room for growth in improving safeguards against harmful therapies. Policymakers, funders and government agencies need to be aware that some of the interventions they are fiscally supporting may be ineffective or potentially harmful. They should review the concerns in the scientific literature about an intervention, and consult with clinical scientists and practitioners (including those who are not users of the treatment) before providing it with additional support and resources. At some point, monetary backers have to deploy the stage hook: if evidence consistently shows that a well-intentioned intervention they financially supported either has no effect on clients or actively harms them, they need to exit their funding, stage right. And if the intervention persists? The public may need to give regulatory agencies more powers to ban harmful psychological interventions, to be able to tell those individuals or organisations using such approaches: ‘Don’t you DARE.’

Three Factors Drive Rightwing Violence. We Can’t Solve the Problem Without Addressing All of Them

By some counts, the horrific attack at a Buffalo supermarket was the second terrorist attack, and the 202nd mass shooting, that happened in the United States this year. Given Americans’ easy access to weapons, growing political divisions, racism, and rates of mental illness, there will almost certainly be more. So understanding why this is happening is critical.

In the aftermath of a bloodbath, it is hard to have a nuanced discussion. As has been shown by many scholars, in recent years, our political affiliations have become all-encompassing. We live in partisan bubbles, often geographically defined, and this poses a problem. According to Harvard University political scientist Ryan Enos, “There’s a lot of evidence that any separation between groups has a lot of negative consequences.” We see this in race and religion, he notes, but we also see this in regard to partisanship in the U.S. Our political affiliations have become so entrenched and calcified that it is often possible to guess what will be said in the wake of a tragedy like the recent attack in Buffalo, NY. Specifically, if the perpetrator is white, the right will emphasize mental illness and the left will focus on gun control. The problem is that both sides are right, and we need to be talking about both the psychosocial variables that help explain why someone would want to commit an act of violence, and also the gun control policies that make it possible for this to happen on a horrific scale.

There isn’t much known about the Buffalo shooter at this point, but reporting suggests that he was recently held for a mental health evaluation after making “generalized threats” at his high school. Understanding the relationship between mental illness and domestic terrorism is critical. We are part of a research team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that is seeking to understand how and why people radicalize, commit acts of violence, and deradicalize. The former violent extremists we’ve interviewed—including jihadis, white-identity violent extremists, and others—have complicated stories to tell about their paths into and out of extremism. Some have histories of debilitating mental illness, and they have clear diagnoses reflecting their struggles; others don’t have debilitating histories, and because they haven’t had sustained contact with mental health professionals, they lack the kinds of diagnoses that researchers can use to look for patterns and trends.

Nearly all the formers we’ve interviewed cite underlying social and emotional difficulties; they talk about experiences of racism and persecution (whether real or imagined); they mention poverty and drugs and childhood trauma; they tell stories about exposure to extremist content; and they talk about the meaning and community that they found in their respective extremist movements. All of these factors are at least as important as intellectual endorsement of the specific theories or conspiracies or beliefs that they came to endorse to justify their violence. Debilitating mental illness (one that interferes with daily functioning and demands professional help) may not be part of every extremist’s story, but a struggle with mental health is common among the former extremists we’ve interviewed.

Mental health is only part of the story. Terrorists (even lone actors) adopt and adapt ideologies endorsed by a group, a network, or a movement. These ideologies might be loosely held, and might be adopted to provide a gloss of significance to an act of pure, hateful savagery. Terrorists are increasingly justifying violence with ideologies that combine “far right” views (such as white supremacy) and violent “far left” ones (such as radical environmentalism), and their rationalizations may shift over time. The rationale that the Buffalo shooter used to justify his violence—his wish to “protect” the white race from a perceived threat posed by other races—is a common theme among the network of violent white supremacists we’ve studied. Rationales for political violence often mask deeper fears, such as the fear of being outclassed, outnumbered, or humiliated by some “other.” To be clear, such fears—couched by white supremacists in terms of “white genocide” or the “great replacement” conspiracy theories—are no justification for heinous acts of hate. But by studying why people endorse such conspiracy theories, we may be able to find effective ways to stop this kind of violence before it starts.

This type of research has yielded surprising results. as Karen Stenner have shown that diversity—racial, ethnic, gender, and even moral—is most aversive to those who are innately authoritarian, a latent trait shared by around 30 percent of the population. This is not unique to America; authoritarianism is found all over the world. When a society becomes more diverse or multicultural than such authoritarians can bear, they are prone to becoming overtly racist and even violent. According to polls carried out by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape and his research team, an estimated 21 million people hold two radical beliefs, which, when held together, are defined by the researchers as “insurrectionist”: they believe the election was stolen and that violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to power. Interestingly, 10 percent of the 21 million who hold both these views are Democrats. The strongest driver for subscribing to these views is the unfounded fear that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”

These fears are based on perception, not reality, and are no justification for heinous acts of hate. Understanding what really motivated the Buffalo shooter won’t undo his actions, heal a community, or make families whole. But it does offer a chance to help those engaged in the work of preventing these acts before they occur.

That said, there is one final piece to this particular story: guns.

The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was 180 pages long: 81 were dedicated to discussions of race, ideology, and motivation; and 99 were dedicated to a discussion of plans, weaponry, and gear. The U.S. has a long and complicated history with guns, with a robust gun culture that can be found in both online and offline spaces. More than half of the document was focused on explaining why he made specific choices about his weapons (20 pages), helmet (24 pages), and body armor (38 pages) and suggests an intimate familiarity with the gear he was discussing. Additionally, the manifesto notes that the shooter radicalized on 4chan, and that he started in the /k/ community (one focused on weapons, where “guns are the primary topic”) before transitioning to /pol/ (a politically incorrect community renowned for its racism) where he “learned the truth” about the threat to white Americans. Thus a gun community was the gateway from which he transitioned to ideologically extremist content.

Moreover, the Buffalo shooter notes that he chose to use a gun because (1) “they work” and “there are very few weapons that are easier to use and more effective at killing than firearms” and (2) he imagined that his attack would be followed by a call for gun reform that would rally sympathetic Americans to violence in order to protect their rights. Finally, he writes in multiple instances about laws related to gun control: he writes about circumventing these laws in order to secure the firearm he wanted; he writes about exploiting local gun laws to increase his likelihood of success; and he writes about manipulating the U.S. debate on firearms in order to recruit more people to his agenda.

The path forward from here is complicated. It is critical that we reject simplistic explanations, whether they focus on access to mental-health care, or the spread of dangerous political ideologies, or access to guns. There is no single variable that explains why this terrible massacre occurred, and so there will be no single answer. But this doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can do. A mental-health crisis among adolescents and the shortage of mental-health practitioners has been widely covered in the media. Our research team has found that there are especially few clinicians trained and willing to work with individuals who subscribe to violence-endorsing ideologies. We need to support policy decisions that will increase the availability of mental-health clinicians, especially those willing to work with this potentially dangerous community. We also need to both improve digital literacy (which might have prevented the Buffalo shooter from believing the false narratives he found online) and reject the mainstreaming of heinous ideologies like that of replacement theory. And finally, we need to advocate for the kinds of gun control policies that are already supported by more than half of America. Preventing future terrorist attacks of all kinds will require policy changes on all these fronts.

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The potential for political violence lies with normal people harboring extreme racist attitudes

On May 15, a young white man carrying a semi-automatic rifle opened fire outside a supermarket in a predominantly Black eastside neighborhood of Buffalo. The rifle barrel had the N-word written on it along with the number 14, a well-known white supremacist slogan.

Payton Gendron killed three outside the grocery store and wounded another. Then he went inside. When it was over, 10 people were dead, including a security guard with whom he had exchanged fire. Of the 13 people shot, 11 were Black. Gendron, clad in body armor, live-streamed the shooting on Twitch. (Twitch has since deleted the video).

Gendron, 18, is from a rural town 200 miles from Buffalo. There he assembled and posted online a 180-page manifesto. According to CNN, he wrote about “his perceptions of the dwindling size of the White population and claims of ethnic and cultural replacement of Whites,” and “attributes the internet for most of his beliefs and describes himself as a fascist, a White supremacist and an anti-Semite.”

Mass shooting equation

The public discourse around these tragedies follows a predictable pattern. News reports and commentary discuss how extremism was cultivated in online spaces. Once down the extremism rabbit hole, they took advantage of lax or questionable gun laws to arm themselves. They methodically identified a location where the target would be congregating, and then decided to execute as many as they could.

This is the extremism + guns = mass shooting equation.

It is correct.

To a degree.

The set of beliefs up to and including the belief that terrorism is an appropriate plan of action is clearly extreme. There is a spectrum of racist practices. Gendron was on the far end of that. No doubt.

He’s an extremist.

There is no doubt that readily available firearms are a powerful means by which extremists terrorize minority populations.

If they live in a state with no waiting period for gun purchases, the ink on the manifesto may not have dried by the time they commit mass murder. The potential for carnage, moreover, is exponentially greater if the extremist uses a rapid-fire weapon, like a semi-automatic rifle.

Clearly, the extremism + guns = mass shooting equation is right.

But we’re missing the forest for the trees.

Extreme normal people

The trees are deciphering a shooter’s manifesto. The trees are the patchwork of gun sale and ownership laws and their loopholes in the US. The trees are the quality of the numerous research papers dedicated to understanding how someone becomes radicalized online.

But we need to zoom out for the forest.

If we could look down on the American population from 30,000 feet, we would see large swaths of everyday white Americans grappling with changes in their status vis-a-vis Black people and people of color:

Racial minorities, especially Black Americans, have been pushing for more visibility in the media and more representation in institutions.

The behaviors of people of color, again especially Black Americans, have always been under scrutiny. Increasingly, the behaviors of white Americans are being scrutinized.

For the first time, possibly, since the Great Depression, white Americans are experiencing economic distress, like Black people.

These very real trends amount to a loss of privilege and status. Gone are the days when being white was the most fungible currency. White Americans are more than ever on equal terms with people of color.

This should be celebrated.

But for many white Americans, it generates deep feelings of precarity – a sense that they must do something before all is lost.

With that precarity, and sense of loss, we get a series of problematic behaviors. It would be unwise to assume those behaviors are only random acts of violence. Instead, it’s a collection of opinions and behaviors amounting to a culture of normal people who are extreme.

They are, as Jonathan Metzl argues, literally “dying of whiteness.”

They refuse to support universal health care even though they need it because they see it as a benefit to Black people and people of color.

They support deportation, voter suppression and book burning.

They fill the ranks of the Oathkeepers and other citizen-militia groups.

They are election deniers so devoted they became J6 insurrectionists.

They go to school board meetings and howl at educators to keep “CRT” out of classrooms even if there is no such thing being taught.

They vote for candidates who have no legislative or political experience but pander to their identity as aggrieved white people.

I could go on.

These are accountants, Uber drivers, custodians, lawyers and software engineers. They are normal people with extreme racist attitudes.

So even if we were able to repeal the Second Amendment and find a way to erase all the conspiracy theories and hate speech from the internet, they would find ways of acting out their racist aggression.

Is it really surprising that out of the millions of people in this culture, a Payton Gendron would eventually wake up one morning, write the N-word on the barrel of his rifle and kill 10 Black people with it?

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