Interesting UK blog: Positive Affect as Coercive Strategy [relevent to BPS, DWP, CFS]

[Esther12]

Taster:

The growth and influence of discourses of positive affect in systems of governance and ‘technologies of the self’ has been widely observed.[2] ‘Strengths based discourse’ is a significant policy imperative in health and welfare reform[3] and underpins ‘the application of behavioural science and psychology to public policy’ via the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) or ‘nudge unit’. Positive affect plays an important supporting role in policy preoccupations with how best to manage the intersection of long term conditions and long term unemployment, exemplified in the shift from rest cure, (signified by the sick note), to work cure, (signified by the fit note).

[2] Berlant Lauren (2006) Cruel Optimism, Differences 17.5: 21-36; and New Formations (2008) (longer version); (2007) Slow Death, Critical Inquiry 33: 754-780; Howell A & Veronka J (2012) The Politics of Resilience & recovery in mental health care

[3] Friedli L (2012) What we’ve tried hasn’t worked: the politics of asset based public health, Critical Public Health

http://centreformedicalhumanities.o...coercive-strategy-the-case-of-workfare/#_edn2

I thought it was worth reading, but for busy people, I've pulled out the bits I thought may be of most interest:

Central themes include positive affect as ‘health asset’ and potent form of personal capital – in other words, positive affect as a substitute for income and security: ‘cruel optimism’ indeed.
These developments mean that positive psychology is now as significant a feature of conditionality in the lives of those who are poor as going to church once was, and they share a common evangelical language: ‘something within the spirit of individuals living within deprived communities that needs healed’ (SCDC 2011, 3). Unfortunately, the compulsions of positive affect are not confined to Sundays.

I am shy and have difficulty speaking to people and I will not do play acting in front of a group of people I am very uncomfortable with…. I was told I would be sanctioned if I didn’t take part, so I said I would get up, but I am not speaking…. After that, we had to fill out yet another ‘benefits of being assertive’ sheet.[7]

‘he was determined to change my ‘being’ which was apparently what is preventing me from getting a job …. The main point which was hammered home time and again was that if we believed we could get a job, then it would happen. It was simply our mindset that was the barrier and he seemed intent on us all having mini epiphanies there and then. ‘[8]

The choice was to accept psych eval, or go straight to MWA… [9]

The rise of psychological coercion, ‘positive affect as coercive strategy’, and the recruitment of psychology/psychologists into monitoring, modifying and/or punishing people who claim social security benefits raises important ethical questions about psychological authority ( being ‘nasty in a nice way’ – as one person on Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) put it). It also invites reflection on the rarity of challenges to the authority of psychology, (Whitehead’s ‘emerging cartel of psychocrats’), given its central role in the legitimising and implementation of workfare .[10] So our first question concerns the relationship between psychology and psychologists and the field of medical humanities – critical or otherwise.

[7] K Day, What?! You’re Telling Me You Lost My Dunce Work? The Joy of the JobCentre Programme blog, 20 August 2013.

[8] Izzy Koksal, Adventures at A4E, Izzy Koksal blog, 13 April 2012

[9] Email to Boycott Workfare. MWA is mandatory unpaid work activity

[10] Whitehead M, Jones R and Pykett J. (2011) Governing irrationality, or a more than rational government? Reflections on the rescientisation of decision making in British public policy. Environment and Planning A 43: 2819-2837.


Also, this sounds familiar:

The consistent failure of Work Programme interventions to improve work outcomes has resulted in a much greater focus on psychological or ‘soft outcomes’ – motivation, confidence, ‘job-seeking behaviour’, ‘a positive change in attitude to work’ – said to ‘move people closer to work’.[14]

[14] Rahim et al (2012) Evaluation of SVLTU DWP Research Summary (emphasis added)

Efforts to achieve these soft outcomes – the right affect – are evident in the course content of mandatory training programmes run by major workfare contractors like A4e and Ingeus. The A4e Engage Module states: ‘to appreciate the importance of mindset to employers’ : students will learn how to develop the right mindset which will appeal to employers. Other elements of this module are assertiveness, confidence, benefits of work, motivation, enhance your mood.

It’s worth reiterating here what these and other supported job search activities involve. They are mandatory: refusal to participate can and does result in sanctions, plunging people into absolute poverty. Sanctions are a significant factor in the escalating use of food banks. These activities may involve tasks experienced as humiliating and pointless by job seekers. There is no evidence that these interventions increase the likelihood of gaining decent paid work. In perpetuating notions of psychological failure, they shift attention from market failure and the growth of in-work poverty. They contribute to the wider role of psychology in the validation of an increasingly narrow range of attributes – self efficacy, aspiration, optimism, positive thinking, assertiveness – with no reference to the contested nature of these terms or their ideological underpinnings and the processes through which they acquire social value and economic reward.

Non-compliance
There are a number of personal testimonies of people being referred to a psychologist for non-compliant behaviour e.g. asking to record interviews with job centre advisors or raising questions:

‘ I have been claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance for about 8 weeks. I haven’t sworn or shouted at anyone. I have had 3 advisor interviews already; yesterday my adviser asked me to see their psychologist. I did not consent. I have been told that I shouldn’t look into things too deeply… and that I am asking too many questions…. They were concerned that there might be ‘some undiagnosed mental illness’ which they said they were unqualified to identify’ (email to Boycott Workfare)

Increasing positive affect
In addition to mandatory training informed by positive psychology, claimants are subjected to a wide range of strengths based interventions, including on-line psychometric testing ( ‘failure to comply may result in loss of benefits’).[17] As Cromby and Willis have noted, not only was the Values in Action (VIA) ‘Inventory of Signature Strengths’ test recently imposed on claimants known to have failed validation, every aspect of its use contravened the British Psychological Society’s ethical code.[18]

The messages in the course handout for the A4e (mandatory) ‘Healthy Attitudes for Living’ course take these themes a step further, intended, perhaps, to counter any residual yearnings in the ‘job seeker’ for either justice or security.

‘Sometimes life’s just plain unfair. Bad things happen to the nicest of people. On top of being unfair, life’s unpredictable and uncertain a great deal of the time. And really, that’s just the way life is…. ’

‘Life’s unfair to pretty much everyone from time to time. If you can accept the cold hard reality of injustice and uncertainty, you’re far more likely to bounce back when life slaps you in the face. You’re also less likely to be anxious about making decisions and taking risks. But remember, you can still strive to play fair yourself ‘
- A4e Healthy Attitudes for Living

The reminder that ‘you can still play fair yourself’ delegates the role of ‘playing fair’ to people in situations of poverty and unpaid labour and of course also tends to pre-empt reflection on structural injustice.[19]

This general conspiracy of optimism, normative cheerfulness and resilience in the face of adversity, is part of a larger problem of the denial of pain,[20] companion to denial of the problem of neoliberal economics. Positive affect as it is now deployed constitutes a more and more arduous and demeaning array of tasks whose insufficient performance is a sanctionable offence. Working on these deficits becomes the full time unpaid labour of millions of people, which, together with mandatory job search activities, ensures that these days, people who are poor have both no money and no time.

Conclusion
In thinking about positive affect as psychological coercion, we have felt that the whole area of workfare is under-theorised. Perhaps partly because a surprising range of people subscribe to the view that both positive affect and work are deeply desirable, cures for many ills and sources of meaning: conferring agency and dignity.[21]

The level of professional silence on these questions is a matter of serious concern: the failure of the British Psychological Society, for example, to engage with the issue of workfare. When a profession gains social value (and lucrative contracts) from instilling the very attributes admired – insisted upon – by neoliberal economics and the Cabinet Office, it must necessarily avert its gaze from those plunged into absolute poverty by sanctions applied for various defects of behaviour, character and attitude. Issues of complicity are very pressing. But a shared analysis of power is a riposte to bogus and restricted agency: join the resistance.

[17] The Skwawkbox, DWP: Fake Psych ‘Test’ Training Given by Unqualified ‘Experts, The Skwawkbox blog, 4 July 2013.

[18] Cromby J & Willis MEH (2013) Nudging into subjectification: Governmentality and psychometrics Critical Social Policy

[19] This delegation resonates with Mel Y Chen’s description of compassion: ‘an affective obligation separated from justice.’

[20] Nussbaum M (2012) Who is the happy warrior? Philosophy, happiness research, and public policy International Review of Economics, 2012, vol. 59, issue 4, pages 335-361

[21] There is a wider debate to be had about discourses of positive affect that have their roots in resistance – notably in resistance to the imposition of psychiatric labels and diagnostic categories. It’s an important question: what distinguishes the stories that form part of these traditions (making political meaning out of adversity) from the ‘recovery stories’ appropriated and expropriated by mental health and other institutions? Howell A and Veronka J The Politics of Resilience & recovery in mental health care


I might stick this related BBC news article here too (not least because this one is about America, and that last blog left me feeling rather ashamed of British society and culture... I'll try to spread that around a bit):

American Dream breeds shame and blame for job seekers
By Debbie Siegelbaum BBC News, Washington

Out-of-work Americans tend to blame themselves for their predicament

Continue reading the main story
Related Stories

• Obama: US must fix 'unequal economy'
• The long search for a job in the US Watch
• US income inequality at record high

Decades ago, the American dream inspired employees, offering the promise of the good life. But now, with jobs disappearing, that dream has become a nightmare for the unemployed who see their joblessness as a personal - and shameful - failure.

Victor Tan Chen studies some of the unluckiest people in the US.

The sociology fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, researches car workers in cities like Detroit, hard-hit by the economic downturn and by long-term trends in the US industrial base.

"But they used to be the luckiest men in America," Chen says.

Decades ago, car workers lived the quintessential American Dream: they pursued stable, well-paying, union-backed jobs, often straight out of high school. They were able to build a middle-class life and provide the promise of something better to their children.

Times have changed.

Now jobs are scarce, and people feel shame in being unprepared for the current labour market.

"Unemployed auto workers, factory workers, they have a lot of regrets about the past," he said.

"A lot of workers are internalising, 'You succeed on your own merits and your own abilities, and if you fail, you're to blame'," Chen says.

He isn't alone in seeing this pattern.

Experts tell the BBC that job seekers in the US are now, more than ever, blaming themselves for being out of work, due in part to misconceptions about what it takes to succeed in America.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26669971

 

[Sean]

It is what I call the optimism ideology, a particularly insidious and malignant version of blame the victim.

 

[Valentijn]

Why are they spending funds pursuing "soft targets" such as supposedly getting the unemployed closer to work, if it's having no effect in actually getting them employment? Getting someone to (supposedly) 99.9% almost-employed is still UNemployed, and therefore having no actual financial benefit for anyone, and is ultimately showing that this approach is a failure.

Either the people running these programs are stupid and wasteful, or it's one more arbitrary hurdle used as a pretext to deny benefits to those who are deserving of them.

 

[A.B.]

Forced optimism is a form of denial of reality. Losing touch with reality inevitably leads to disaster.

Either the people running these programs are stupid and wasteful.

They are believers in an ideology they love so much that they fail to see its shortcomings.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

A.B.
see Ian Duncan Smith, a man so out of touch, o lying, he will inevitably degenerate into mass murder if not stopped.
it is ideology gone mad.
History shows the results of what occurs when groups go down this route and it's never pretty.

 

[barbc56]

@Esther12

This is all very interesting. Thanks for posting this.

We are all so ingrained with this notion that we sometimes don't even realize it. It's so easy to fall back on this type of thinking.

I just saw your video with Barbara Ehrenreich on another thread and I think it would be apt on this thread but will let you make that decision.

I have read several of her books, my favorite being Nickel and Dimed and a friend just gave me a copy of Bright Sided which as you probably already know, deals with this very issue.

I have said many a time, if I could only think myself out of this DD, I would have been well a long time ago.Barb

 

[Esther12]

We are all so ingrained with this notion that we sometimes don't even realize it. It's so easy to fall back on this type of thinking.

Yeah - I can find myself being instinctively unfair to others in this way, even though I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about how unreasonable it is!

 

[Wildcat]

.
'Positive Psychology' - apparently the most popular course at Harvard University!

.
.
.
“…Positive psychology "treatment" on soldiers or veterans will no doubt train them to suppress their reactions to the brutal acts they were charged with committing on a day-to-day basis in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. To some extent, Seligman's work would have to assist soldiers' or veterans' under mental duress in finding a way to suppress what I will call their "empathy gene." Reasonably, they would be taught to move on without atoning for whatever they had done in war that has seriously disturbed them….”
.


.
‘No-Bid Military Contract Winner Martin Seligman and His Response to Allegations on His Connection to Torture’

.
Page 1: http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/No-Bid-Military-Contract-W-by-Kevin-Gosztola-101018-272.html
.
Page 2: http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/No-Bid-Military-Contract-W-by-Kevin-Gosztola-101018-272.html
.
Page 3: http://www.opednews.com/articles/3/No-Bid-Military-Contract-W-by-Kevin-Gosztola-101018-272.html
.
.

 

[Sean]

Yeah - I can find myself being instinctively unfair to others in this way, even though I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about how unreasonable it is!

It is a salutary lesson to catch yourself doing to others something that you despise being done to yourself. Just shows the power of social conditioning to make hypocrites of us all.

 

[alex3619]

Question: can you train ordinary people to become mass murderers and assassins using positive psychology, so they actually feel good about what they do?

 

[alex3619]

I hold the ENTIRE medical profession (except for the few loud voices who are crying out) as collectively responsible for most of this. Not to blame, but they have the power to stop it, and they don't. Its passive permission to abuse.

Individual doctors, psychs etc have less responsibility, but some subset of them also have blame.