Psychological Theories Persecute Developing Children and Crush Mental Health

Karen Kilbane
Bullshit.IST
Published in
12 min readMar 5, 2017

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Christopher May just wrote an essay on Medium entitled, Your Anxiety is a Political Issue. Because psychologists promote an inaccurate understanding of the biology of anxiety, it has indeed become a political issue. Psychological theories grant those with power the right to exploit the anxiety responses of those without. Nowhere is this more clearly observed than with special education students.

I have been a student of student anxiety because I am a general and special education teacher and parent of four; my youngest has Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome). In keeping with Christopher May’s theme, special education students are a population with zero power, quite marginalized, and quite vulnerable to being made extremely anxiety prone in our school systems.

My observations of hundreds and hundreds of children from 3 states, 7 cities, and over 20 schools has led me to shocking conclusions about the validity of psychological theories as translated into educational practices. I did not jump to these conclusions, quite the contrary. I spent 30 of the last 35 years mining psychology for answers with no thought in my mind to question the validity of its premises. Then an incident occurred which destroyed my faith in the foundational premises of psychology.

Sadly, students in general and special education are often guinea pigs for the latest iteration of our plethora of psychological theories. Special education students, particularly those who cannot verbally defend themselves, are mercilessly targeted for the behavior plan flavor of the month. These exploitative behavior plans are wreaking havoc on students’ mental health.

Our solution to the deteriorating mental health of both our special and general education students? Keep adding ever more of the same kinds of psychological practices year after year with slight differences in how we describe them.

Every two to four years or so, brand new emotional/behavioral/social/psychological kits with posters, books, and handouts are unleashed on every school district. (For lots of money taken from other under-served areas!!) School officials are convinced by sales reps, this time, this new kit, these new bells and whistles, will solve increasingly worsening mental health problems.

Old kits go into storage, and students gear up to endure yet another round of forcibly becoming even more ‘emotionally intelligent,’ ‘behaviorally appropriate,’ and ‘socially acceptable’ than last year.

Anyone with a brain can see each new kit is just a new way to regurgitate the same old same old. Each new kit, however, comes with ever more sparkly, colorful, and/or trendy materials to make up for the lack of substantively different information. With further analysis, one can see how the same old same old also incorporates incredibly outdated interpretations for how thoughts, emotions, and behaviors integrate.

From my 4th child’s school I have just received the dreaded news that yes, another psychological program/kit is about to be rolled out. This is my daughter with Trisomy 21 and she has enough of a cognitive load to manage her academics. She does not need to learn and memorize yet another batch of buzzwords from some psychological theorist who has yet again mischaracterized her personal and private emotional cues and how they integrate with her thoughts and behaviors.

You see, the only constant I have observed in 3 states, 7 cities, and over 20 schools is the lack of consistency for how psychological theories are actually interpreted and translated into practice. Each teacher does it completely uniquely because psychological theories do not accurately solve for individual differences in teachers or students, one of many big red flag screaming at us to re-evaluate them.

The lack of consistency did not jump out at me as a red flag until, finally, it did. You might remember, questioning psychological assumptions and theories was never my intention AT ALL. My bulldog tenacity for problem solving caused me to work incredibly hard to figure out teaching solutions with the aid of psychological theories. At one time or another I have recruited every available psychological theory to inform my teaching practices. When 30 years of dogged determination did nothing to further my cause, I wanted to bury my head in the sand and work at a bookstore by a beach. I decided the problem must be with me. Clearly I was not fit to teach.

Then one day I observed a student with special needs problem solve, a student I had closely observed and taught for 6 years in a row. Towards the end of class he looked me in the eye and calmly said, “I’m uncomfortable.” He paused to think through his options. Then he said, “I’m going back to my homeroom,” and ran back to his homeroom.

What I had just observed was a student who had made sense of internal and external information in the ways he was able to interpret and handle that information with his incredibly unique and differently wired cognitive and physical abilities. Our class that day, for the first time, was held outside. There was no clock on the wall, no hallway sounds to cue when class was over. It was unusually hot. My student got overheated, recognized his discomfort, thought about how to alleviate his discomfort, then ran to his homeroom to cool off. Seems reasonable.

Here’s the problem. My student left 7 minutes before my class was over and did not ask permission to leave, a serious infraction in the 5th grade universe. This sort of ‘behavior’ was expected from this boy who had been put on every behavior plan known to mankind. He had also been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ODD.

But then and there, while watching him run, I realized, this boy doesn’t exist in relationship to my thoughts and predictions, or in relationship to psychological norms for appropriate behaviors, the two cornerstones of all psychological theories. This boy exists in relationship to how he is ABLE to understand and manage information with his one of a kind brain and nervous system.

To oppose and defy me in order for his existence to be diagnosed as oppositional and defiant, this boy would have to know exactly what I am thinking every moment. But this boy cannot think like me or his neurotypical peers. He can only think how he is able to think. He has poor working memory. He doesn’t generalize well. He has a slow processing speed. He cannot handle too many streams of information at once.

This boy could not handle the cognitive load of first thinking through a problem from his own ability to do so, then comparing and contrasting his predictions with his guess for what mine would be. This boy did not have the cognitive capability to oppose or defy my thoughts. He could barely manage his own thoughts. So how is it he has a diagnosis that literally defines his existence in terms of how it manifests in relationship to me and all the adult authorities in his life????

When my student ran away from me, the assumptions upon which the whole field of psychology rest shattered in my brain in a mother lode of an aha moment. I saw the crack in the premises of psychology and have never looked back.

Once I saw the crack, I was able to re-evaluate the so called psychological facts I had memorized for how human brains and bodies integrate. My new, more biologically accurate understanding of my brain mechanics has given me much more useful information for how to interact with others in my personal and professional spheres.

To make a long story longer, after my aha moment, I launched into researching the brain and began to re-evaluate neurological data in different ways than psychological theorists have. Jeff Hawkins’ book, On Intelligence, has become my favorite book in the whole world.

While researching the history of psychology I came to realize most of our working psychological theories come from the early to mid 1900’s from privileged European or American male academics who rarely if ever interacted with children in non clinical environments. There are no Jane Goodalls in the field of psychology, scientists who have observed the same group of children in multiple environments for decades. Psychological theories have been conjured up out of thin patriarchal air, not born out of plain old relentless hours of observation.

I am working with a neuroscientist to publish a book about my ideas that flow from a single theory of the brain we have developed based upon Hawkins’ memory/prediction framework theory of the brain. Even though my ideas are not yet tested or peer reviewed, they have arisen out of 3 decades of observing hundreds of developing children, many of whom I have observed for a decade or more on into adulthood in multiple real life environments.

One of my hypotheses is anxiety performs the same role as pain does. People born without pain sensors suffer gruesome injuries their whole lives and require constant monitoring. Without pain sensors, humans do not have adequate feedback to orient themselves safely in space. Without anxiety, I believe humans would suffer similar gruesome injuries and untold numbers of mishaps.

Unlike psychological theorists, I do not believe our anxiety response, often referred to as the fight or flight response, is an evolutionary left over from primitive times when we had to run away from killer mammals. I believe anxiety is as crucial for modern humans as it was for prehistoric humans and without it we would all die young.

Based upon my observations and research, I have narrowed the anxiety response down to a very observable and understandable dynamic. The brain cues for anxiety when it perceives any sort of prediction violation, no matter how small.

We are not that differentiated in how our body can cue for anxiety or for emotional input for that matter. We can think a million thoughts, store a million memories, and solve a million problems, but we can only feel anxiety and emotions in a handful of ways. So, we will experience anxiety for small inconsequential prediction violations almost the same as we experience it for huge, life threatening prediction violations.

This doesn’t sound too exciting or dramatic. But it is a thrilling discovery if it is correct because it allows us to pinpoint exactly how to understand and manage anxiety, just as we do pain. Pain is a pain in the neck. But we don’t have anxiety about our pain unless we can’t do anything to address it.

And bingo, that is exactly what is happening to our students. We exploit their anxiety responses to get them to do our bidding due to our strange psychological theories as translated into practice, then we punish them if they express anxiety too loudly or aggressively. We hyper-activate student nervous systems then “teach” them how to calm down with the latest faddish emotional intelligence buzzwords.

Psychological theories require children to appear a certain way to authorities. When students do not behave within a psychologically normal range, educators are taught to shape the behaviors with a cat and mouse game of intermittently giving and holding rewards. The thing is, to play this game, the student has to know exactly how the teacher thinks and predicts. Otherwise the student cannot manufacture the desired behaviors. Requiring students to somehow magically know how each individual teacher in their school thinks in order to behave in compliance with each teacher’s unique expectations and in relation to assumed behavioral norms is pretty easy for some types of brains. But many types of brains are incapable of this sort of thinking. These diverse thinkers know they cannot figure out how to remain in compliance because they have no idea how their teachers think. They know they will be constantly punished or deprived of a reward and exist in a constant state of anxiety because of it. We force these kids to exist in school with unrelenting and unmanageable amounts of anxiety.

Anxiety can be as uncomfortable and distressing as physical pain. And our psychological theories as translated into educational practices exploit this fact to get students to do our bidding. Everyone knows humans will do anything to avoid feeling terrible pain. What if humans will also do anything to escape unrelenting anxiety?

And what if a human’s attempt to escape unrelenting anxiety has been mischaracterized by psychologists as mental illness. What if a majority of mental illnesses are really adaptations to escape unmanageable anxiety. What if society, alienation, and stress are not the root cause of mental illness but the theories designed to prevent mental illness are?

Our brain cares about two main things, making predictions for what to do next and alerting us to potential prediction violations. Our brain is set up to manage any number of harsh or hostile environments. Our brain rests in a dark skull. It cannot sense anything itself. Our brain can be sliced open without anesthesia because it has no pain sensors. It cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or feel sensation. The brain reads patterns fed to it by our sense organs to make its predictive decisions. The brain’s job is to make predictions for what to do next according to the constant stream of information it receives from its own organs and from the external environment. Every movement or thought we have relies upon a predictive decision from the brain for it to engage. Predictions are the engine that drives every active ability a human is capable of.

To the brain, prediction violations are a matter of life or death, and anxiety is meant to cause as much distress and alarm as pain. Observing children respond with anxiety to prediction violation is very easy to do. Jeff Hawkins has even observed this dynamic as it occurs in the neocortex.

So what does it all mean?

If I am right, which remains to be seen, it would mean emotions and behaviors never exist in isolation and cannot be segregated out for discussion or manipulation. It would mean thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and behaviors all serve the brain’s requirement to come up with a constant stream of predictions for what to do next and they exist in relationship to one another as an integrated whole.

It would mean emotions and behaviors are highly customized, personal, and private. It would mean requiring students to dissect their own emotions or behaviors to discuss them out of context from the prediction they accompanied is not only biologically confusing, it is also highly violating and embarrassing. It would mean we would talk to students about their predictions and prediction strategies, not their emotions or behaviors. Emotions are interpreted uniquely by the person experiencing them and are not meant to be put up for public commentary or evaluation. This is as violating as having one’s naked body commented upon by a teacher or classmates.

Daniel Goleman, father of the latest emotional intelligence fad, is a suburban white academic whose most traumatizing moment was the day he didn’t study for a calculus test, true story. This guy has made stuff up about emotions that make no logical or biological sense, but we are desperate. We take his made up ideas as scientifically verified facts because we so want his ideas to be true. We want Goleman to be this year’s savior of the children, to reduce their mental anguish and decrease the likelihood they will develop a mental illness.

What if requiring out students to think about and discuss their emotional responses in artificial and insipid ways actually causes them mental anguish as opposed to alleviating it because emotional responses are so customized, private, and personal? What if behaviors plans, instead of helping students succeed, cause them untold amounts of anxiety and mental anguish?

What if small changes in how we understand and apply neurological research in our schools could mean 1 in 5 individuals would no longer suffer a mental illness. What if respecting the privacy of a child’s emotions and behaviors could reduce anxiety enough to mean 1 in 5 individuals would no longer suffer a mental illness? Do we have the courage to replace long held, cherished psychological beliefs with new interpretations of neurological data old and new?

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My students with special needs have led me to develop a hypothesis for a brain-compatible theory of personality. Reach me at karenkilbane1234@gmail.com