Gongol.com Archives: March 2021
March 23, 2021
Why doesn't the American Psychological Association accredit online doctoral programs?
Seriously, why is there no industry-accredited path into the profession of psychology via online programs? Everyone knows the last year has taken a massive toll on mental health, and yet this obvious reform to expand service capacity hasn't been enacted to help. ■ For example: Iowa's current law requires licensed psychologists to possess a doctoral degree from a program that is accredited by the APA, the Canadian equivalent, or "designated by the ASPPB" -- but the ASPPB stopped its designation program in 2018. So that really leaves the APA, which explicitly says "there are no APA-accredited programs available that ONLY use online methods of instruction". ■ The distinction between programs based upon the mode of course delivery certainly seems like an artifact of a bygone era now. Almost every college became an online school when the first Covid-19 shutdowns began a year ago. Even Harvard Medical School went online for its entire first-year cohort. Any lingering prejudice against online learning ought to have gone right out the window with the events of last twelve months. ■ This matters in particular for psychology because the need has never been as broad (nor, likely, as deep) for accessible and affordable mental health care. Virtually everything about the pandemic has exacted a mental-health toll. It's gigantic: The CDC has been surveying Americans and concludes that 40% of American adults have symptoms of anxiety disorder or depression right now. That's an astonishingly high figure. ■ The brain is an organ, just like the heart or the lungs or even the spleen. We ought to treat it not as something that awaits some kind of acute crisis for treatment, but as something deserving of ongoing clinical care. Getting mental-wellness checkups ought to be as routine (and as free of stigma) as going to the dentist for a semiannual cleaning. But it's clear that we have far too few practitioners available. The shortage was obvious well before the pandemic, and demand is (or at least ought to be) much higher now. We can't have rates of depression and anxiety effectively quadruple and not recognize that an urgent problem is upon us. ■ Social distancing requirements and other measures to protect people's physical health launched online sessions with mental-health care providers straight into the mainstream. It is past time for organizations that have the legal authority to act as gatekeepers to the professions to act in the public interest and acknowledge that if telemedicine is good enough for patients and if online classes are good enough for Harvard Med, then it's certainly time to drop the pretense that there is a mode of education for psychological professionals that is arbitrarily deemed beneath their dignity. We aren't going to get over the mental-health toll of Covid-19 without some help. So, as a matter of public health and in the public interest, why aren't we training more of that help?
China's government turns to genocidal whataboutism
This isn't like economic development, where a lower-income country may get some global leniency for producing extra pollution as it industrializes and pulls its population out of poverty. China's government isn't entitled to a free pass for what it's doing in Xinjiang. Nor for what it's doing in Hong Kong, which may be less explicitly genocidal but remains a vast insult to human rights. Of course, nations ought to try to do the right thing and be above reproach -- but it's the refuge of the truly awful government to claim that criticism is invalid unless the critic is without historical stain.
Yakov Smirnoff is actually Ukrainian
This might not mean much to Millennials and Zoomers, but for a Gen Xer, this is a geographical realignment on par with finding out that Eminem is really from Windsor, Ontario. Also: He has a Ph.D. now. What a country, indeed.
