Where Did AAS Go Wrong

Where Did AAS Go Wrong

David Lester

            Back in the 1970s, the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) was a small organization. Founded by Ed Shneidman and others, AAS was an organization for researchers into suicidal behavior and those working at suicide prevention centers (mainly telephone crisis counselors and administrators) to meet and discuss new ideas. It was administered by Julie Perlman who was not a suicidologist, and she ran the organization well.

            The conferences were fun and exciting. Thomas Szasz was invited to argue against preventing suicide and was engaged in heated debate. Derek Humphry, author of Final Exit, was invited.

            Then a decision was made to increase the membership of AAS. The more members, it was thought, the more income and the greater the influence. The first group to be invited consisted of survivors, that is, those who had lost a loved-one to suicide. On the whole, the survivors were not interest in research or improving our ability to understand and prevent suicide. Participating in AAS was part of the grieving process for them, a chance to share powerful emotions with others. For some, it became almost a new career path.

            As I see it, the goals of AAS should be to improve our understanding of suicide and to improve the ways we can prevent suicide. Survivors were not involved in this. There were exceptions, of course. For example, I worked with Donna Barnes and Denise Pazur, both of whom lost sons to suicide, and we published several scholarly articles together. These were exceptions.[1]

            The next decision was to encourage attempted suicides to join AAS. Again, these individuals typically have no interest in research, but rather in finding others with whom to share their experiences and to obtain therapeutic benefit. This is manifest in that most attempted suicides and survivors do not want AAS’s scholarly journal (Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior) and were offered a reduced membership fee.

            The results over the years has been to marginalize the researchers. When I used to attend, colleagues joked that research sessions were getting scheduled earlier and earlier so as to get them out of the way, andnd the President of AAS has less often been a leading researcher.

            A look at the listserve maintained by AAS for members and others who are interested illustrates the problem. Occasionally, a research issue is discussed, and published papers suggested on particular issues. Counselors request possible referrals to experts for counselling suicidal individuals in their home towns. But other issues flood the listserve too.

            A mention of an article on rising suicide in white males (who also constitute the major proportion of suicides in the USA) prompted posts about how white males dominate the political and business arenas. These posts did nothing to further our understanding of suicide but rather fed into a social-political agenda of those posting, appropriate in some arenas, but not at AAS. One post claimed that minorities by ethnicity and gender felt marginalized by AAS. I doubt that any researcher or crisis counsellor feels marginalized by AAS because of ethnicity, gender or any other attribute. The most recent president of AAS was criticized for using a war analogy in his presidential address (a war on suicide), which was deemed politically incorrect, and he subsequently resigned.

            AAS has thus become less effective in its goals of understanding suicide than in the past, although researchers still continue to attend.

            There is, of course, an alternative, the International Academy of Suicide Research which was founded by myself and Rene Diekstra, initially under the auspices of IASP, with an initial conference sponsored by Diego de Leo in Padua, Italy. However, some complain these days that those researchers favouring a physiological approach (focusing on the central nervous system) dominate IASR.

            What might be useful would be conferences designed to address a specific issue with invitations sent only to those interested in the issue. For example, back in the 1970s, I attended a conference in Philadelphia, closed to others who were not invited, on the topic of predicting suicide. About 20 of us sat in a room, gave talks and discussed relevant issues about prediction. The talks were published as The Prediction of Suicide in 1974 edited by Aaron Beck, Harvey Resnick and Daniel Lettieri. The same might be achieved by edited books on particular issues. Presently, I am editing a book on Understanding Suicidal Ideation with eight invited contributors which might serve such a purpose. Indeed, I hope in my concluding chapter to suggest avenues where research into suicidal ideation might go in the future

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[1] Of course, some of the researchers are also survivors.

My Professors

My Professors

David Lester

Cambridge University

            Part 1 of my Cambridge University degree was in Physics and Mathematics, and I switched to psychology in January of my second year.[1] I knew nothing about psychology, and so I got a book, from around 1920 from the local public library to see what I had let myself in for. I had been assigned to Alan Welford as Director of Studies, and he wrote to me to stop reading that book. He advised me to read books by Hans Eysenck instead. I was puzzled. A mathematics book from the 1920s would still be useful. Why not a psychology book from the 1920s?

Alan Welford

            I knew Welford’s specialty was aging, but I never took a course from him. We met weekly to discuss my progress, but I don’t recall what we talked about or that he set me any assignments. He left soon after my three years at Cambridge to go to a university in Australia.

            When I look him up now, I realize that he was a notable figure. He, along with others, started the Ergonomic Society which received a Royal Charter and a scholarly journal Ergonomics. The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia gives an annual Alan Welford Award, and Ergonomics publishes an annual Alan Welford Memorial Lecture. This seems to be a pattern in my life in that I often failed to realize how good and occasionally famous my teachers were.

            I applied to only two Universities in America for graduate study in 1964, and one was in human factors at Berkeley. They offered me a place and a promise of financial support, but I turned them down. In retrospect, that application must have been influenced by Welford.

Hans Eysenck

            A mention of Hans Eysenck in America led to raised eyebrows and signs of disapproval. He published a great deal and, if someone criticized his work or ideas, he would immediately have a reply in the journal. He published in many fields (intelligence, personality, and learning theory) and had ideas which became unpopular. For example, he believed that intelligence was determined in part by genetics. And he hated psychoanalysis.

            But I have always liked Eysenck. Those books I read by him encouraged me to think that my change of topics was a good move. Sense and Nonsense in Psychology, Fact and Fiction in Psychology, and Uses and Abuses of Psychology were all very interesting reads. I came not to share his ideas, although I have used his three dimensions of personality in my work (extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism), and I have even proposed a physiological basis for them (which remains unnoticed). But I liked his spirit and energy.

            He was the editor of Personality and Individual Differences for many years and probably made decisions to accept or reject many articles himself without other reviewers. He accepted many of my papers in my early years, which is another reason for me to like him.

            On one occasion, he accepted a paper of mine on personality and blood types, but he mentioned that he had a paper related to mine and asked whether I might cite it. I immediately wrote back and apologized for not citing it, and I added mention of it to my paper. He wanted as many citations as possible and, in these days of ResearchGate and Google Scholar, I cannot blame him.

Alan Watson

            After the chair of the Department of Experimental Psychology, there were three senior people, readers in Cambridge terminology. Alan Watson was one of the two really brilliant people I have met. He did not finish his PhD. He said that he widened the mazes in which he ran his rats, and the results changed drastically. This disillusioned him, and he stopped working on his dissertation. In his lectures, he organized the material into a beautiful story as he pieced the results of different studies on learning together (mainly in rats), and he did it without notes.

Richard Gregory

            The second senior person was Richard Gregory, also without a PhD, but again who was very clever. Looking him up, I find that was honored by the Queen with the CBE. His topic was perception, and the book I admired was Eye and Brain. He was able to explain aspects of perception with simple demonstrations rather than experiments, such as why the world appears to remain stable when you move your eyes. He used to joke that his major ideas came from reading, in German, old scholarly journals from the late 1800s and re-discovering those ideas. (Perhaps it was not a joke.) I remember that he re-discovered a sea creature in the Mediterranean with one light receptor that scanned the visual field, much as television cameras did. He also disagreed vehemently with the ideas of the American psychologist J. J. Gibson, and I found Gibson’s ideas boring and Gregory’s exciting.

            He left Cambridge soon after I did and ended his career at the University of Bristol University, His Wikipedia page is impressive! It turns out that he studied and wrote a book on the first blind personal to have his sight restored, which I read at the time. That individual died by suicide after a year or so. My first brush with suicide.

Alice Heim

            Alice did have a PhD. She supervised what we call in America my senior thesis. It was on an intelligence test (the Shaw Blocks Test) which does not penalize creativity. She published my research as a one-page note in Psychological Reports in 1964, which started me on my 1,000 notes in Psychological Reports and Perceptual and Motor Skills. Blame it on Alice!

            I kept in touch with her and, when I went back to Cambridge to be examined for my PhD in social and political science, I stayed at her house. She was very old but working on a book on memory loss in old age (Where did I put my spectacles?). She has over 30 articles in PsycInfo and a book which I liked, Intelligence and Personality, in which she argued that intelligence was better viewed as a personality trait.

The Others

            Oliver Zangwill was the chair of the department, a neuropsychologist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. I knew him only because he interviewed me when I switched from physics to psychology and approved the switch. I also attended his lectures (I attended every lecture given by the department in my 1½ years there). He never looked at the audience (of about 40 of us), and students at back would hold up lighted matches to see if he would notice them. He never did.

            Lawrence Weiskrantz was American and the third senior person in the department. PsycInfo indicates that he was still publishing as of 2017. His Wikipedia page is impressive too, with many discoveries and honors. He too left Cambridge and ended up at Oxford University. However, for me, he gave the first lecture I had in the department, and he was s physiological psychologist. His lecture left me wondering whether I had made the right choice to switch. My notes from that lecture contained the word emigdala, and it was a year before I found out that he was referring to the amygdala.

            The department was a Department of Experimental Psychology: learning perception and physiological psychology primarily. But one day in the department’s library, I saw a book Clues to Suicide by Edwin Shneidman and Norman Farberow. I browsed through it and, at the end, there are 33 pairs of suicide notes, one genuine and one simulated. I should have tested myself to see how many I could distinguish correctly, but I did not. It seemed to me to be obvious which were the genuine ones, and some moved me to tears. Serendipity indeed!

Brandeis University

            Alan Welford and I had never heard of Brandeis University, and we had no idea that it was primarily a Jewish university. But they offered me a fellowship ($3,000 a year) to live on and free tuition. I was not given the Wien Fellowship for foreign students (that went to John Benjafield from Canada), but instead a Charles Revson Fellowship. Revson was the CEO of Revlon Cosmetics, and so I always urged people to buy Revlon to support my fellowship.

            I applied to Brandeis because they had sent a flier to the Cambridge psychology department. We looked up the faculty, and we had heard of none of them, including Maslow. The department had 12 faculty, 4 in humanistic psychology, 4 in clinical psychology and 4 in experimental psychology, and the rumor was that the three groups never spoke to one another!

Jerome Wodinsky

            Jerry was the as brilliant as Alan Watson at Cambridge. He taught learning and, because he did not offer a graduate course, I audited his undergraduate curse. From a few notes on the back of an envelope, he would produce a brilliant lecture. Jerry was unusual in that he hung out with the graduate students. He would have coffee with us in the cafeteria (the Castle). I remember him once teasing an elderly graduate student saying, “Fred, how many Israeli soldiers would it take to defeat the Viet Cong? A thousand? Two thousand?” He drove a convertible and had it fill with snow one winter because he forgot to put the roof back up. He was the only faculty member we called by his first name.

            Jerry published occasionally but had lots of unpublished studies. His scholarly and academic life seemed always to be in a muddle. He hadn’t even got his grades in from his previous job at the New School.

Ricardo Morant

            Rick was the chair of the department, and his field was perception. One summer, we worked with him on a project in Boston to teach illiterates to read. He told us to call him Rick, but I never could. (The project seemed to be failure on the tests we gave pre and post the teaching, but I remember one elderly man signing his name for the first time in his life, and we all had tears. And one woman told us that, for the first time in her life, she could tell the number of the bus approaching the bus stop and didn’t have to ask someone else what the number was.)

            Morant was good to me. In my fights with the faculty of the department, he would call me into his office, sit me down and look for a solution (or a way around) the problem. I used to threaten to quit, saying I could get a PhD from Cambridge and didn’t need them (which I eventually did, getting my second PhD). My major fight was with my first advisor who was threatened by the fact that I was publishing many articles while still a graduate student. He had a rule passed saying that graduate students would have to get each article approved by the faculty before submission. My argument was that I had published more than he had, and so he needed approval too. Rick’s solution was to have a friend who had just earned her PhD (Denise Thum) approve my articles. Denise ok’d the first paper I showed her without reading it, and then I stopped showing them to her.

            MA degrees were given as consolation prizes when the department threw you out, but I wanted to earn an honest MA. The rules said that one could submit published papers for an MA, so I submitted my paper in Psychological Bulletin on the fear of death along with a few others. When the university asked Rick to sign the form, he was astounded. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said. “We would have given you an MA.” But he made up a title and contents, and I was awarded the MA. I was the only graduate student to do that.

Marianne Simmel

            Marianne was the granddaughter of Georg Simmel, the German sociologist. Marianne was a warm person, and I remained friends with her after she retired, often visiting her at her home on Cape Cod. Her main interest was phantom pain, and she re-worked the data from a couple of studies that she had conducted into paper after paper. She shepherded two students to their PhDs (John Benjafield and Claire Golomb), quite an achievement in that department where few students finished their studies.

            I remember her also for two things she said to me. In England, I had been the top student until my BA when, instead of getting a first, I got an upper second. or 2-1. (They awarded only one first in psychology that year. I have checked on him, and he’s never published!). With a 2-1, I could have stayed at Cambridge for my PhD. (With a 2-2 or lower, one had to go to a provincial [red brick] university.) Now that I wasn’t perfect, all I wanted at Brandeis was to pass. After one qualifying exam, Marianne said to me, “You passed, David, but you should have done better.” I acknowledged her criticism but, back in the graduate student lounge, rejoiced that I had passed.

            The second thing that Marianne said to me? I commented once that Maslow had only one good idea in his life. Marianne said to me, “David, if you have one good idea in your life, you will be very happy.” I’m still waiting for that one good idea!

            Which brings me, at last to Maslow.

Abraham Maslow

            Although we had not heard of Maslow at Cambridge, I quickly learned how famous he was. He refused to teach graduate students because, he said, they were too arrogant, and so I audited an undergraduate course with him. He taught the course on utopias with a historian, Frank Manuel. Manual was a noisy energetic teacher, often hitting the table with his trouser leg. (Manual had only one leg, and so one trouser leg was free.) In fact, Manual dominated the seminar, and Maslow was content to let him do so.

            Because I had been in that course, Abe asked me to be his TA for his undergraduate course on eupsychia. On one occasion, the students told Abe he was talking too much and that he was to remain quiet during discussions until they asked him a question. He let them do this for a few classes, and then took over again.

            One another occasion, the students asked him to clarify a point. He had said that people were inflexible in one lecture but that they were inflexible in another lecture. Abe said that child rearing shaped us in many ways. He said that, if he had been born in Germany, he might have come to accept many fascist views. But in many ways, especially as far as genetics and physiological processes were concerned, we were inflexible. For example, he said, one day when his wife was out, he tried to breast feed his infant daughter. He held her to his nipple but, not only didn’t it feel good to him, but also she didn’t get any milk.

            There was panic in the students. They did not know how to respond. Was this funny? Or was it serious? They kept looking at one another, but no one laughed, so they concluded that it was serious, and they all bent over to write notes. For myself, in the corner at the back, I clapped my hand over my mouth trying to mask my laughter. If one student had laughed, they all would have joined in. An example of the social comparison process. I couldn’t wait to get to the graduate student lounge and tell the others the story.

            Abe was on my dissertation committee. My original thesis advisor had thrown me out after I had complained about the rule he had passed about graduate students publishing. I then turned to James Klee who agree to be in charge of my already-written thesis. John Senden and Abe were on the committee, along with Irving Zola, a sociologist. Senden wanted changes in my dissertation, but I made a plea. I said that, in published articles, one had to lie. You pretended that you knew your hypothesis before you ran the study, and you left out parts that were in conflict with your hypothesis. Since your PhD dissertation was unpublished, you could be honest and detail the false steps you made and the wrong turnings you made on the journey. Zola was delighted. “David,” he said. “Don’t change a word.” In fact, one chapter moved to an appendix, and that was all.

            When I went in to Abe’s office, he was lying on his couch, and I sat in his chair. “David, I would never write a thesis like this,” he said. I had a mild anxiety attack. “But who am I to tell you how to write your thesis. I think you will be a good psychologist. Are you happy with your thesis?” I said that I was. “Well then, I am too,” and he signed it. Abe was one of the few psychologists who lived according to his theoretical ideas.

George Kelly

            I was lucky that George Kelly, another leading personality theorist, retired from Ohio State University, and came to Brandeis. I took his graduate student seminar which was, of course, on his theory of personal constructs. I admire his theory, but I do not believe that it is correct. Nonetheless, I have incorporated some of the ideas in the theory in my own subself theory of personality, especially the idea of having propositions and corollaries in a theory.

            Kelly was strict in his professional and personal views. One story was that he had the junior faculty over to his home, and my hated original advisor made the mistake of lighting a cigarette before realizing that there were no ash trays anywhere in the room. When he came to Brandeis, Kelly brought a graduate student who liked his theory with him (Jack Adams-Webber). In the seminar, Jack and a few others who clearly liked the theory sat quietly, while others challenged the theory. At an early meeting of the seminar, Kelly said that he did want his disciples to hear the criticisms and that he wanted to split the seminar into two seminars – those for him and those against him. Those for him objected. They said they wanted to hear the criticism and Kelly’s response to them. So we stayed together. So much for Kelly’s idea of constructive alternativism!

            My thesis consisted of several studies on suicide, and I used Kelly’s RES Test in one of those studies, but I did not want Kelly on my committee.

My Dissertation

            My entering group of eight graduate students was the last group at Brandeis to be allowed to choose their own topic for their dissertation rather than being assigned to work on a professor’s research. Although I was running rats for fun on research into exploratory behavior (and later received a NIMH small grant for the research), I chose suicide, the influence of that serendipitous event at Cambridge.

            Morant suggested we get Edwin Shneidman to be the outside reader on my committee, an idea I vetoed. I had had two interactions with Ed. Once he called the department and asked to speak to me. I was astounded. He told me that he liked my research on suicide but that I needed clinical experience. My wife at the time and I later visited Ed at his NIMH office (where he ran a section on suicide research). He started by focusing on my wife. What did she study? Perception, and he took off his glasses. The meeting went on in that tone, until he said, “Ok, kiddies. That’s all.” He loaded me with reprints of his work and sent us on our way.

            At conferences, Ed always knew that I did not like him. He could have helped me in many ways in my career, but never offered to do so. When Antoon Leenaars proposed a festschrift for Ed, Ed rejected the idea of having me write a chapter. If my chapter had been included, it would have been the only one which took Ed’s ideas and enlarged on them. In the chapters that were included, the authors talked of their own research, not Ed’s. I published my chapter in a journal and sent a copy to Ed, noting that it had been written for his festschrift. As he lay dying, bedridden at home, I talked to him a couple of times on the telephone. After all, his book had shaped by scholarly career, and his ideas and research were ground-breaking. Sometimes I can forgive, He admitted that he had been wrong to reject my chapter.

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[1] The BA program takes three years.