{"id":46449,"date":"2014-05-23T15:29:55","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T19:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=46449"},"modified":"2014-05-23T15:36:15","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T19:36:15","slug":"its-effectiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2014\/05\/23\/its-effectiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"its effectiveness…"},"content":{"rendered":"
The signature novel of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage<\/font><\/strong>, was written by a young man who wasn’t even born when it was fought and had never seen combat. It’s the story of a young recruit who was marching into his first battle obsessed that he would run – would be a coward. He made it through the first skirmish successfully. Afterwards, he was reveling in his courage when there was a sudden counter-attack – and the next thing he knew, he was running from the battle terrified. He was only able to return to his unit later when he had a non-combat injury that was misinterpreted by his friends as a war wound, his red badge of courage. In a subsequent battle, he fought heroically.<\/div>\n

There are a lot of words like Courage<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, Bravery<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, Cowardice<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, or Heroism<\/font><\/strong><\/em> that we use as nouns, but are really closer to adverbs describing actions rather than some intrinsic entity – some person-place-or-thing<\/em> [as nouns were described by our elementary school teachers]. I’m not trying to be a grammarian here. I’m aiming at talking about another word, Resiliency<\/font><\/strong><\/em>. We all know that in the face of a given traumatic event, some people leave the experience perhaps shaken, but otherwise intact. Yet others may have lifelong symptoms called post-traumatic stress disorder. In the past, this difference might be described as weak<\/font><\/strong><\/em> versus strong<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, but hopefully we’re beyond that at this point in history. So there’s a new word, Resiliency<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, that’s in vogue to describe this difference. Again, it’s a word that can only be defined in terms of behavior, action. It’s not really a noun of the kind sweet old Ms. Bell taught me about. Those with Resiliency <\/font><\/strong><\/em>don’t get traumatized and those without Resiliency <\/font><\/strong><\/em>do get traumatized. In rhetoric, that’s called a tautology – a word that is its own definition. <\/p>\n

Can you teach Courage<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, Bravery<\/font><\/strong><\/em>, or Heroism<\/font><\/strong><\/em>? We sure spend a lot of time trying. It’s called Basic Training, or Ranger School, or Special Forces Training. These are not simply didactic courses but rather rely on experiential learning. People are taught through repeated experience how to maintain control of rational thought in the face of grave danger and uncertainty; how to be simultaneously hypervigilant and emotionally detached when presented with the fog of war<\/em>. Can you teach Resiliency<\/font><\/strong><\/em>? I expect you can teach people to be less prone to being traumatized. But the hallmark of a traumatic experience is to be unexpectedly<\/em> faced with a dire situation that one has no tools<\/em> to deal with, and in the face of rapidly escalating and overwhelming emotion, the mind shuts down, dissociates, whatever you want to call that process the films try to show by putting vasoline on the lens, changing the lighting to eerie<\/em>, and garbling the sound. I expect there’s a limit on how much of that can actually be taught. <\/p>\n

I originally encountered this term from students when teaching about PTSD. I couldn’t see the relevance since I was talking about patients who already had PTSD, but I went to the literature to see what they were reading. That was a few years back, but most of what I found was more wishful that "evidence-based." Read this Wikipedia<\/a> article to see what I mean. I don’t question the phenomena being described. I just don’t see how the long known observation relates to the topic of what to do with the thought.<\/p>\n

Now I see Resiliency<\/font><\/strong><\/em> in a new context, as part of the RAISE ETP<\/font><\/strong><\/em> Project [Recovery After an Initial Schizophrenia Episode]:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They are referring to a specific structuralized program called Individual Resiliency Training<\/a> [IRT] outlined in the linked document [974 pages]. This was apparently created for this program specifically, and is the part that’s new, supplementing the traditional triad of education, medication, and vocational counselling already widely used. It sounds like a good idea. But we don’t yet know if it is value-added, since the results of the RAISE ETP<\/font><\/strong><\/em> Project are not yet available. And since this program may soon go live on a major scale through SAMHSA Block Grant funding, it’s something we need to know already.<\/p>\n

I’m in favor of everything about the RAISE ETP<\/font><\/strong><\/em> [Recovery After an Initial Schizophrenia Episode, Early Treatment Program] if it’s implementing something that’s helpful to these patients. And IRT is the innovative addition, though I doubt that many of you have clicked open this 974 page document and read it since the last paragraph. I’ve only scanned it, but it raises some questions in my mind on the first pass. I’m going to read more of it before rendering an opinion, but I hope that any of you who have experience with psychotic illness will have a look too. There’s a multimillion dollar investment riding on it…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The signature novel of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, was written by a young man who wasn’t even born when it was fought and had never seen combat. It’s the story of a young recruit who was marching into his first battle obsessed that he would run – would be a coward. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46449"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46470,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46449\/revisions\/46470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}