Article archive / December 2022
Originally published: . Volume 13, No. 12. Source pages: 2.
by J. Nelson Archimedes recommended to me that I make sure readers know I’m going to be taking some sick leave. He has long been aware that I tend to keep raising the bar, and believes I must overcome this by making a public commitment to cut back on my efforts with the Psychology Times.
I have little choice but to comply since I’ve reached the end of some type of tether. Working at the keyboard of my computer is torture. I wind up with a paralyzed shoulder and right arm that eventually doesn’t work much at all. The situation also gives me the opportunity to take stock of the good and the bad of this newspaper.
The Psychology Times is starting its 14th year in January and now has over 100 Louisiana Press Association awards. I started it in 2009 to increase the information flow and free speech in the community and it has been an adequate intervention. We have over 1400 people on our list and the Times is circulated all over the nation.
Even so, real community change often seems far away.
Benjamin Franklin said, "You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on."
Just this month, the state psychology board is pushing through its regulation of assistants, a move that’s sole purpose was to create a revenue stream because the board could not stick to its budget and control its use of personnel.
Besides being the wrong solution to the wrong problem, these unnecessary new requirements fall primarily and unfairly on entrepreneurial psychologists who use assistants. The board has written regulations to pile red tape on top of a fee, neither of which are needed for protection of the public.
Last year, out of some misguided sense of loyalty, leaders in the Louisiana Psychological Association sided with the board instead of with the independent psychologists. Young psychologists were recruited to vote for the state board's inappropriate legislative move, rather than educate them to the complexity of the situation. They were essentially told the board would go belly up when no such outcome was ever likely.
Whether the bill was the correct solution to a properly and adequately defined problem was lost in the foggy thinking and strange group dynamics. Welcome to the hive mind.
The newest rules include an expansion of the complaints committee into the realm of assistants and supervisory behavior of Psychologists. This when we are already suffering from overzealous, expensive law-enforcement and overreach in the complaints committee of the state board.
Knowledge about these problems is the consciousness raising that the Psychology Times was designed to do for our community.
Given the amount of censorship and propaganda that is now part of our culture, I believe I’m right to say that those reading the Times are more informed about the nuances of these community dynamics than those that do not. And for that I am proud and grateful.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.