Posts Tagged ‘mental health’

Police Psychology | The Principle of Relativity (or something like that)

Posted: March 20, 2015 in Motives and Opportunity
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The Principle of Relativity (or something like that)

 

jet plane

Objects moving at the same speed may not notice they are traveling at a different pace than the people around them.

I like to teach that scientific principles and theories have mental health correlates that we should pay attention to in both police psychology and all denominations of the mental health field. Scientific theory is highly dependent on observation (both inside and outside of experiments) and many of the principles can apply across situation observed in nature. Since many people have problems with science, let me put the concept in a simpler form.

If you and I are flying in a plane, and you choose to toss me a ball, even though we are traveling at 560 miles an hour through the air, the ball will go directly to me as if there was no motion at all. Essentially, because we are moving at the same speed, there is no motion between us and we can act as we regularly would despite being in a plane going 560 or more miles per hour. Now scientists will argue whether this is covered in Newton’s laws, Einstein’s theory of relativity, or even Aristotle’s or Galileo’s theories on motion explains this, but I extend to you that if I toss you a chocolate donut or a bagel with cream cheese in a plane going 560 miles an hour, you will still catch it easily unless I throw it badly. Name it what you want, but bodies that are moving the same speed do not feel motion unless there is something moving at a different speed, such as the wind if you were standing on the wing of the airplane.

I find human interaction is regulated by this same principle. When an officer is assigned to a special unit, such as sex crimes or emergency service, they are moving at a speed that the rest of the world may be a step or two behind. The same happens in business when working on a fast-paced project. It is easy to communicate with other people in the unit or on the project, but it will be more difficult to communicate to people outside of the unit or project. We often find when a spouse comes home and the pace may be slower or just focused elsewhere, they may get very irritable, or impatient. Trying to get a lead on a murder suspect that is time-sensitive is a different pace than waiting for your 7-year old to pick out pants to wear to school or coming home to an indecisive spouse trying to make a decision about dinner that night. Tempo is important in writing, in sports, in speaking well, in holding attention of people, and in life in general. Many people can adjust what they are thinking about, but don’t have a clue about adjusting to the tempo of life from work to home. The other problem occurs when someone comes home and ratchets down to zero, with really no sense of the pace in their house. When you lose tempo, just as in a song, no one can make music together.

Managing the Tempos of Life

Metronome

Adjusting your tempo to fit that of others is important to maintaining the relationships in your life.

I have been trained in music. When I come across a tempo problem, I pull out the old metronome, a tool for staying on the beat. Actually, now I have a metronome on my cell phone that I use. I explain “tempo” describing from the airplane to the song. Then I ask them to give me examples at the different beats per minute on the metronome. What part of life goes at 140 beats per minute, what goes at 40 beats per minute? There is no normal so don’t worry about that. Our lives are regulated by beats per minutes from heart rates, to music, to our mental health. I explore that with the officers I see to get them to realize that the pace of their special unit may be different then their spouse and kids, or their social life. The key is for them to adjust, not to try to push everyone else at their pace.

Tempo is an important concept in your life, and it is a mental health concept as well, that can help you evaluate how to manage your time. Whether you call it relativity, or a law of motion is not as important as getting the person to attend to the natural pace of parts of their life. And if you can do this successfully, you will have a much happier and healthier life. 

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Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP

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Book Review: Counseling Crime Victims

Posted: February 20, 2015 in Books
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“Here is the gold standard.”  If I read that pathetic claim on the back of one more book cover, I fear going on an armed rampage through the publishing houses of New York.  Has the hysteria of the world gotten so bad that we won’t give consideration to anything new unless we claim on the back cover that it is the best, most outstanding, or “the new gold standard?”  It makes you want to puke.  And damn if when I start to open Laurence Miller’s Counseling Crime Victims:  Practical Strategies for Mental Health Professionals (Springer, New York, NY, 2008) right on the back cover it claims to set the new gold standard.  I know this guy, digitally at least.  How could he allow the publisher to make such a disgusting claim?  I expect more from you Dr. Miller, except no way around it, this book is so good that it does set a new gold standard.

COunceling Crime Victims

Book review of “Counseling Crime Victims: Practical Strategies for Mental Health Professionals” by Laurence Miller.

I started on an easy saunter through this book figuring I’d skim most of it, but frankly I started finding I was making a paralinguistic cue every two or three minutes, mostly nasal hums and head shaking, as I read many phrases that explained some interesting material about crime victims.  I knew most of the stuff, but frankly I had gotten a little lazy as my familiarity was reduced by the lack of incidence in my practice.  I don’t treat that many victims except after terrorist acts.  There were sections like “PTSD in the Elderly” where I just didn’t have that many elderly clients so it was pretty new stuff, and research that explained what I practiced but never knew the science behind.  Dr. Miller is thorough as hell and after the first half hour I had figured this was a book I was going to keep permanently as a reference for speeches I give, programs I was developing, or court cases that I was hired on.  I felt like I had found a nice shiny piece of jewelry – okay, I’ll admit, a gold standard.

Dr. Miller has done all the work for you.  There are tons of research studies, tons of useful information, tons of practical advice on how to organize you approach to crime victims in crimes from sexual assault, to domestic violence, to homicides, even to terrorist acts.  He talks about what the people go through when they are a victim of a criminal act and what types of approaches work for each of the victims, at least in theory.  The section on school violence and bullying was particularly useful to me as I was busy preparing for a civil trial where the parent’s frustration with the school in not handling a bullying incident was central to the trials actions.  This was a profoundly useful book and the research really makes you stand up and shout “so that’s why we do it that way.”

If there is a criticism of this extremely thorough treatise it would have to do with style more than material.  It is the same criticism I have for most academic material that speak about therapy.  To make therapy material fully accessible to the largest number of readers, you must tell people what to say when they sit across from a patient, not just how to think about the treatment.  Actually tell them what to say.  Essential, more anecdotal stories intermixed with the research gets the obsessive minds of most therapists fantasizing about what they would say in that situation and then they start the rehearsal process for a patient in their future.  Adler, Meichenbaum, Erikson, and especially Albert Ellis integrated the narrative with research to an art form.  Dr. Miller’s book was not that type of book and Springer is not that type of publisher, but that would make it the most accessible to everyone.

Take this criticism with a grain of salt because Dr. Miller’s Counseling Crime Victimsis extremely effective just as it is, and it will occupy a central spot on my bookshelf as I expect to be referring to it a lot to remind me of what I know, what I have forgotten, and highlight some new ways to think about a doing therapy with a crime victim.  You really might want to check this book out if you have a therapy practice.  It is really a golden find, so to speak.

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Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP

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Interview: The Terrorist Hunter with Kathleen Puckett

Posted: January 29, 2015 in Public Information Bureau
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Hunting the American Terrorist

Hunting the American Terrorist

I was particularly interested in the lone terrorist because I was in Phoenix this January visiting friends when Jared Loughner shot and killed six people, injuring 19, in nearby Tucson.  There has to be a way for mental health professionals to see this coming.   I wanted to look into the phenomenon of the lone terrorist for this blog and decided to start with a person who is part of The Society and has defined the lone terrorist, Dr. Kathleen Puckett. Here are some interview questions I asked.

Gary:  How did you get into this study of the lone terrorist?

Kathleen:  I was working for the FBI and they had hit a dead end with trying to locate the Unabomber so they decided to give up on the profilers and called my partner and I in to start a new task force and take a fresh look at the situation.  The Unabomber went underground for almost six years and didn’t kill anyone so he was not fitting the patterns of a serial killer.  The people working on the case said he was either in prison or dead, but then he showed up again.

Gary:  That sounds like a pretty daunting task.  How did you approach the project at that point?

Kathleen:  We figured that everything they were doing up to that point was leading them no place so we had to go in and do things differently.  We got carte blanche from the Director of the FBI, and we went back and looked at all the scenes, all the victims and everyone involved.  What we realized were the victims were totally unrelated and symbolic of something or some institution.

Gary:     The Unabomber was given up by his brother, was your investigation successful?

Kathleen:  We had thousands of leads that we were looking into and Kaczynski was on the list.  We would have gotten to him, it just steered us there quicker when we got the leads from his relative.  As soon as we saw the writings, it just popped in us.

Gary:  What else did you do to study the lone terrorist?  I saw you on a TV show for McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing?   Did you study others?

Kathleen:  I took to studying the ten biggest lone terrorists in the past years.  Kaczynski, McVeigh and Nichols, Eric Robert Rudolph…

Gary:  The Olympic Bomber?

Kathleen:  Yes.  And a number of other facilities for abortions in the south.  I studied the lone terrorists and found some very common attributes.  First, all had desired to leave a mark on the earth.  They wanted to make an impact.  Their victims were symbolic, not individuals to them. None really resisted arrest, yet they did work for escape.

Gary:  McVeigh was driving away in a car without a license plate?

Kathleen:  But he was driving away.  He would have escaped and probably killed again if the cop didn’t see he lacked a license plate.  He wanted the death penalty.   He didn’t care what the victims thought about the bombing, in fact told them to “get over it” instead of showing empathy.

Gary:  Real psychopathic response.

Kathleen:  More than psychopathic.  The lone terrorist has no social connections.  Not like Bin Laden who is the most well known terrorist with a purpose, these people have no social connections.  In fact, many of them were turned down by radical right wing groups because the groups felt they were crazy.  I remember McVeigh was look for friends and tried to join with the Michigan Militia and they thought he was too nuts and didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

Gary:  Interesting.  So these people are really disconnected?  What about the Arizona killer, Loughner?  He was disconnected from everyone.

Kathleen:  But he had a definite target person and he believed the government was controlling the world through the use of grammar.  Notice he was found incompetent to stand trial.  The lone terrorists tend to be able to help in their defense.  They may be crazy, but they are competent and there is sort of a logic to their thinking.  It is a small distinction, but one that need to be made.  Loughner actually knew who his target was in advance.  The lone terrorist doesn’t care who his target is as long as they are symbolic.

Gary:  And what about school shooters.  Can they be seen as lone terrorists?

Kathleen:  Most school shooters identify their targets and even know some of them, so they really don’t fit this pattern.

Gary:  Wow.  It is a whole new way of thinking about terrorism.  I understand you went to an auction of the Unabomber stuff?

Kathleen:  Yea.  He was ordered to give restitution to his victims so they auction off his stuff online.  Do you realize the hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses are now at $20,000 and the auction isn’t over yet?  I guess people collect all kinds of things.

Gary:  Could be a museum of the macabre, also.  Kathleen, where can people get more information on this fascinating distinction?  You have a book somewhere, right?

Kathleen:  Yes.  It’s called Hunting the American Terrorist: The FBI’s War on Homegrown Terror.   I wrote it with Terry Turchie  in 2007.  It is published by History Publishing Company and it is in digital format also.

Gary:  Thank you very much Kathleen.”

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Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

For books by Dr. Gary Aumiller go to www.myherodad.com or www.myheromom.com

 

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Book Review: “Psychological Aspects of Crisis Negotiation”

Posted: January 8, 2015 in Books
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Thomas Strenz

Book Review: An evaluation of Thomas Strenz’s hostage negotiation methodology in “Psychological Aspects of Crisis Negotiation”

What hits you first is the organization of the material.  When I read Psychological Aspects of Crisis Negotiation by Thomas Strenz (Taylor and Francis Publishers, Boca Raton, Fla. 2006), I didn’t expect to see what I saw.  I guess I expected another rehashing of hostage negotiation materials, but what I got was the structure of a thought process that really could be very useful to anyone in operational psychology.  In fact, it was organized more like a manual, than a book of descriptions of hostage situations and outcomes.  For that reason, this is a book you may want to look to adding to your library.

Thomas Strenz has taught hostage negotiations at the FBI academy, and work with the FBI gov.  He was introduced to the Society by Wayman Mullins (quite a name himself in this field) and just fascinated the group with his hostage negotiations mini-seminar.  Reading his book is a little like his seminar, except to see the material in a manual format makes it come more alive and gives the reader confidence that they know where to go for answers if ever they find themselves negotiating for the lives of others.  What Strenz did was simple, but sometimes simplicity alludes writers of material in this field.  He organized material to make it useful even at the scene of a hostage situation.  He also places a great value on the mental health professional in a hostage situation, as the mental health professional helps determine what you are dealing with and how to proceed.   Okay, this is not new, but remember this book is not written by a police psychologist, or anyone else in the mental health field; it is written by a negotiator. (more…)

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