[from Mary Powers 950825]
David Goldstein:
Obviously Bill hates the fact that your client has been put on
Prozac. In principle I agree with him (especially since the main
reason for it is the time constraint of the school year), but
practically, if it gives him the boost necessary to get a handle
on his problem, well that is the state of the art, however
inadequate it may be. You are in applications, not research.
I've had a similar situation this year, trying to get over asthma
attacks by taking Prednisone. This screws up hormone control
systems big time, by taking over their functions, which causes
them to begin to shut down. I think Prozac does the same thing
with brain chemicals. An evil, perhaps a necessary one,
certainly one that is poorly understood. My experience with
Prednisone, of having the attacks recur when I got off the
medication _until I withdrew by tapering off much more slowly
than any doctor had recommended_, leads me to suggest the same
with the boy. I don't know what the tapering off procedure is
with Prozac, but I suggest that when the time comes to get him
off it, to reduce the dose much more slowly and over a much
longer period than the standard practice. This is, I think, what
PCT has to say about almost any medication - to keep in mind that
you are affecting a control system, artificially supplying an
input, and the part of the system that ordinarily supplies that
input is going to slow down and even cease to function if you are
"helping" it. So you have to remove the helping very slowly, to
give the natural input a chance to build up to normal levels.
Ed Ford:
I know you've been dismayed and upset by comments on your
program, and I hope you recognize that everyone is very impressed
with it, but have reservations about how it's described. _That_
it works is not in doubt. Exactly _how_ it works is the issue
here. This is the difference between applications and theory.
The anecdotal evidence of success reported by you and your
colleagues is very encouraging, and is more than enough
supporting data when judged by the standards current in
educational fields. But PCT as a theory has far more exacting
standards than the behavioral sciences have required for
themselves, and the first question is "what is really going on
here?", because the PCT aspects of what you are teaching are not
immediately obvious, and seem to be intermixed with procedures
and concepts from other approaches. It's like taking three or
four prescriptions and wondering which one is doing the job.
We're not saying that what you are doing is wrong; we're trying
to understand it in terms of PCT, and there are aspects of it
that may turn out to be understandable in terms of PCT, but that
at the moment seem contradictory. So we are questioning both
your practices and PCT principles, with the aim of finding
consistency and reliability, and above all, understanding. The
outcome, we hope, will be to improve your program and increase
its use.
We watched the news from Albuquerque in horror last night,
reporting on the reinstitution of paddling in a New Mexico school
district near here. That's really going to take care of their
discipline problem. The parts that got me were the dismay and
fear of some children interviewed, and the barely suppressed glee
on the part of the principal at the prospect of being able to
whack the kids who are giving him trouble. Whatever criticisms
have come your way, believe me, we know that what you do is a
thousand percent better than that.
Mary P.