Most children, in this country and much of the rest of the world, have been subjected to considerable verbal and psychological violence, and often physical violence, by the age of two—and it may only get worse. The “terrible twos” often means terrible treatment.
Toddlers are routinely yelled at, sworn at, called names, threatened. They are shaken, slapped on the hands or buttocks, sometimes slapped in the face, spanked, sometimes hit with switches, kicked, beaten—and all of these things may happen in what people think of as “good homes.”
Given the level of violence in families, it should not be surprising that in day care and nursery schools, children are heard yelling, “I hate you, I’m going to kill you!” They don’t need to watch TV to learn these messages.
“The man who inflicts violence on women was damaged during childhood. The white person who inflicts violence on people of colour was damaged during childhood. The employer who exploits workers was damaged during childhood.
The individual who endorses the state violence inflicted on indigenous peoples was damaged during childhood. The terrorist, the political leader who wages war and the soldier who kills in our name were all damaged during childhood.
The person who supports structures of violence (such as the military, police, legal and prison systems) was damaged during childhood.
The person who supports structures of exploitation (such as capitalism and imperialism) was damaged during childhood. The person who thoughtlessly participates in destruction of the natural environment was damaged during childhood.”
What do you think of Burrowes’ argument?
Do you have other explanations for this country’s high level of engagement in violence?
Clearly poverty and racism can also damage children but hordes of violent people are reapers rather than victims of those social ills. If we really want to reduce violence in and by our country, we better play closer attention to what we do in our homes.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. . . . A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called games of amusement and amusements of mankind. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
— Henry David Thoreau
Jul 12, 1817-May 6, 1862 Walden (Aug 9, 1854)
Introduction
12 Jul 2017 – I call upon the timeless words of Henry David Thoreau, a 19th Century student of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1889-1888), to open this article on the critical consequences of the socio-cultural context for human health and well-being. It is, perhaps, coincidental today is Thoreau’s birthday; his 200th year anniversary, a reminder of the enduring power of great thoughts and words. Guide me, Sir!
I offer only a few lines of Thoreau’s words as an epigram, insufficient to honor the timelessness of his thoughts, but perhaps sufficient to acknowledge his special sensitivities to the human condition of his age and our age. Thoreau’s entire works deserve reading. The unfolding industrial age in which he lived, was the source of problems paralleling the problems of our unfolding socio-technical age.
I can think of no better guide to justify the thoughts and words of this article. In so many ways, we have forgotten the tragic consequences of the psycho-social contexts of life for the human condition; we have become infatuated with “reductionism,” a wondrous gift of technological progress, but a distraction from the realities of human nature.
No one can deny the sheer wonder and glory of our growing knowledge of the CNS, brain, organs, and genetics. Yet, the magnificence of our knowledge must not detract from our understanding the socio-environmental determinants of our life milieu. Political powers, controlling funding have called for various national initiatives: “Decade of the Brain.” Similar initiatives for increasing awareness of psychosocial topics have too hidden agendas (see documentary: America’s War on Drugs) directed toward arms deals, racial oppression, and disguised foreign relations policies.
Psychosocial Contexts
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), one of psychology’s great thinkers, contended behavior is a function of the interaction of organism and environment (B = O x E). It is the interaction of an organism and its milieu which generates behavior, and the problems of disease and disorder. Nothing exists apart from its inner and outer singular milieu. Although physicists may disagree, nothing exists in a vacuum! Life is connections.
As we become increasingly, and deservedly, awed by reductionist discoveries and revelations, and as we seek insights, answers, and solutions to major human problems within reductionist levels, we are failing to address and resolve the challenges of the psychosocial context of our lives. The psychosocial context is the life context in the behavior equation. The psychosocial context has critical implications and consequences for health and well being. It is a formative cause of problems, a precipitating cause, an exacerbating cause, and a maintaining cause. The psychosocial context requires careful attention and understanding in all of the causal relations.
We may be excessively concerned and pre-occupied with the physical aspects of our being, even to the extent of dividing solutions into medical specialties, sub-specialties, and sub-sub specialties. We journey across limb, organ, cell, gene, atom, and molecular space; this journey has proven miraculous for many diseases and disorders. However, this journey alone cannot address nor resolve the tolls exacted on human health and well being forged and sustained within the psychosocial contexts of our lives.
There are many empirical and theoretical reasons concluding many diseases, disorders, dysfunctions, deviancies, and distress arise from the psychosocial contexts of our life than from our body alone. Indeed, the experiences forged and sustained in the psychosocial contexts shape and generate many of these tragic “D” words as the body and mind become war zones for survival struggles – lives of “quiet desperation.”
Today, humans seek respite and relief from “desperation” in prescription pills, illegal drugs and substances, and/or both. Pills and substances are often temporary palliatives, unable to treat and heal the broader destructive contexts of human life, located in the “isms,” poverty, violence, war, and oppression.
There can be no doubt pills and substances alter behavior via neurochemistry and anatomical structure. However, seeking solutions to the determinants of problems requires solutions appropriate to the level generating them and their consequences. Tragically, psychosocial contexts, though obvious, are too often ignored. These are big problems! Too often local, national, and international leaders yield to the preferences to the wealthy, powerful, and positioned. The result is the medicalization of society and human existence; the abuse of power is history’s story!
Many noble minds and hearts sought to awaken humanity to the psychosocial sources of their problems (e.g., Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy), but those in power, continue to dominate, “tossing bones of solace” to reaching hands. Today the world is gifted by many new heroic stalwarts, who are advancing peace and social justice (e.g., Mairead McGuire, Michael Knox, Antonio de Rosa, Glenn Paige, and numerous others). The struggle, however, is endless, and requires a person become a social and political activist. As has been suggested by many, today’s situation requires us to merge personal, occupational, and civic lives; there must be a fusion or a gathering of “self.”
FIGURE 1: PSYCHO-SOCIAL CONTEXTS FOR HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
There are so many more items that should be included, as the “interaction” of the contexts foster yet new contexts and complexity. Amidst this challenging “matrix,” it is easy to become pessimistic, to give up on solutions, and to accept forces and fates as destiny. Do not!
As the struggles appear overwhelming, find inspiration and hope from those about you, especially at local levels, making contributions to peace, justice, and dignity. They are the new heroes our times.
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Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 17 July 2017.
Dearborn School, Roxbury, MA, May 1957. City of Boston Archives. Photographer: R. T. Lonergan, Jr. In the public domain.
By Kathie MM
My first full-time job was as a long-term substitute teacher of special needs children (labeled “mentally retarded” in those days) at the Dearborn School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1963-1964. It was also my first immersion in the United States’ longest-running wars—the wars against people of color and the poor.
The racism at the Dearborn was not universal but it was pervasive, virulent, hostile, destructive.
I loved my students, ages 6-9 with a wide range of challenges, mostly poverty-related. They were so eager for and responsive to kindness, respect, encouragement, affection. I tried to promote their active engagement in learning, having them help each other in the process–serving as peer leaders, and collaborating to master assignments–much like what Bel Kaufman advocated in Up the Down Staircase and I later did in the college seminars I taught.
The teacher in the next classroom was appalled at my “naivety,” my failure to exercise constant control, my inability to see that “those children” were the enemy, the threat to the stablished social order, the disrupters of peace and safety, the dangerous advance troops of a neighborhood whose complexion was becoming darker.
She let everyone including the children know she saw them as stupid, dirty, disobedient, trouble-making, and unworthy of her efforts. A lesson unlikelyto be forgotten.
Millions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into “The War on Poverty”–a war the country is losing royally, because there’s no commitment in the ruling class to eliminating poverty. What gain can they see for themselves from removing barriers to equality and social justice for those they tread down?
It is “The War on the Poor” that occupies the White power structure, and they seem to be winning that war and their War on Color, terrifying millions of otherwise decent people into supporting programs destituting many while generating obscene profits for the few.
Evidence of their success is documented in the work of Jonathon Kozol, who published Death at an early age in 1964, exposing the destructiveness of the school system in which I was teaching. His later books, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2006) and Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools(2012) illustrate clearly the nature of the lambs being sacrificed to the gods of profit and prejudice.
In a world where you can be anything, be kind. Eastern Bank, #joinusforgood, posted with permission.
by Kathie MM
Big banks (the ones that claim to be too big to fail) are a big—very, very big cause for concern. The charges directed at them:
They reap profits by exploiting (not educating, not rehabilitating, not treating) men and women languishing in for-profit prisons, victims of the slow wheels of injustice that grind people up because they’re poor, powerless, and/or black/Hispanic/immigrant.
But today I want to throw a little salt on the flames by talking about different type of bank—a bank that tries to put its money and talents where its mouth is—supporting progressive agendas.
I am referring to Eastern Bank, the bank that handles the Engaging Peace account.
On average, since 1999, the bank has donated 10% of its net income to local charities, for a total of over 100 million.
This includes 7 million to nonprofits in 2016. Their 2017 Targeted Grant opportunity focuses on immigrants.
Quoting MA Congressman Joe Kennedy, they say, ““A great nation does not wall itself in. A confident nation does not close its door to the people that need her protection most. A tolerant nation does not target children who have only known her streets or retaliate against communities that protect their neighbors. And a nation built on the sweat and sacrifice of generations of immigrant families does not take that patriotism for granted.”
In keeping with their social justice orientation, Eastern Bank has regularly received awards for its success as one of the “Best Places to Work for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equality” and has been recognized as a “Leader in Diversity” for its workforce diversity initiative.”
Eastern Bank, it seems, is amodel for what a bank can do when its leaders actually want to make the world a better place. What a revolutionary idea!
Dearborn School, Roxbury, MA, May 1957. City of Boston Archives. Photographer: R. T. Lonergan, Jr. In the public domain.