Playing Politics With Your Mind

IN THE WAKE of the 1961 Berlin Wall crisis, two psychologists, Sibylle Escalona and Milton Schwebel, conducted separate surveys among children aged 10 through 18. Though the surveys differed in size and methodology, they reported the same finding: a perceived fear about the possibility of nuclear war and the expectation among many children that the bomb is destined to go off.

Twenty years have gone by, accompanied by a sea change in public opinion, and still psychiatrists and psychologists are asking about the effect of the bomb on the thinking of children. Still, they are distributing questionnaires. And still they are coming to the same conclusions--children are worried about nuclear war.

The idea--so obvious it seems silly, but nonetheless the subject of a ponderous literature indeed--has captured the imagination of the public which has been increasingly besieged with the results of surveys and questionnaires about the psychological impact of the arms race. It's quite clear the interest on the part of many of the psychiatrists doing the besieging: if the word is out that children are scared about nukes then so much the better in their effort to get us to sign on to the nuke freeze or other disarmament efforts. Their appeal is made directly to our consciences Children are held to see through the "nonsense" of the arms race, and understanding their minds, the reasoning goes, allows us to see more clearly the folly of the ceaseless weapons buildup.

The political agenda is certainly reasonable, but there is another issue beyond the relative merits of this or that type of weapons freeze. The psychiatrists may be onto a social and scientific problem of some importance, but the conclusions they seek to make far outstrip the research thus far. Further, their insights into the psychological impact of the arms race are being somewhat obscured by the researchers' politics and their tendency to make ironclad moral judgments about the issue.

PSYCHIATRISTS are only one part of the group of medical professionals who have provided much of the intellectual backbone for the nuclear freeze movement. Leading members of the medical community, like the former dean of Harvard's School of Public Health, Howard H. Hiatt, have urged doctors to become active politically in the fight to curb the arms race. The activity in vogue is to try to imagine the physical impact of a nuclear war; the idea is to show that a nuclear exchange would be so destructive that hospitals and physicians would not be able to take care of all the victims. A recent study by Harvard Medical School Professor Herbert L. Abrams concluded that less than half the U.S. population would be able to survive the heat and blast of a fullscale nuclear war, and the exchange would destroy 80 percent of all the medical resources for treating the injured.

The reasoning spelled out by the concerned psychiatrists follows a similar line. That want to examine the effect of nuclear weaponry on our psyches, particularly the psyches of children, the generation whose futures nukes are ostensibly threatening. As with their medical colleagues, they believe demonstating the damaging effects of the nuclear threat will serve to galvanize political actions against armaments. This line of research is not new--witness the studies in the early '60s by Escalona and Schwebel--but as with their colleagues, it experienced a resurgence in the late '70s along with the rise of a grassroots antinuclear movement.

In 1977, the American Psychiatric Association created a task force to examine "the psychosocial impacts of nuclear developments." Under the guidance of two Medical School doctors. John E. Mack and William R. Beardslee, the group distributed questionnaires to more than 1000 students in public and private high schools in Boston, Los Angeles and Baltimore over the course of three years. Their task, according to an article they wrote for the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, "to assess the attitudes of children and adolescents toward nuclear war, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants."

As the doctor saw it, the findings were grim: "Quantitative analysis revealed that there was no uniformity of political opinion among these young people, and indeed very few had taken an active position on the issue. Most became aware of the nuclear threat through the media or school classes rather than conversations with parents or friends. Many (about 40 percents across the three samples) had become aware of it by the time they were 12. The responses to questions about the effect of the nuclear threat on thinking about the future, on civil defense, and on survival reflected a profound disease and uncertainty about the future and a considerable amount of general pessimism. For example, in the 1980 sample, when the question was asked, 'Will there be a nuclear war?' the majority of respondents thought it was possible, and a substantial minority thought it likely."

Surveys since have echoed these initial findings. In 1982, at a "Day of Dialogue" sponsored by Educators for Social Responsibility, thousands of questionnaires similar to the Mack-Beardslee questioning were distributed to high school students. In the same year, a Newton North High School senior received responses from 950 of his schoolmates on a similar questionnaire. More than 700 students in Akron, Ohio filled in questionnaires on the subject distributed by a city physician. And a California pediatrician administered a survey to nearly 1000 junior and high school students, "embedding" the nuclear war question among 20 items in an effort to hide his agenda.

Researchers like Mack stress the need for more study of the issue, but all these surveys and a number of others have given rise to some preliminary conclusions. While they're not sure to what extent or how much it is affecting children, they say the threat of nuclear war has got them worried, and, as Mack testified before a congressional committee in 1983, this worry "has increased in the period 1975-83, as the nuclear arms competition has appeared to become increasingly out of control."

OR has it?

This was the question posed this summer by Harvard's Dr. Robert E. Coles when, in an address to scientists at Los Alamos, he questioned the terror his colleagues say children are supposed to feel because of the nuclear age. Other investigators too have questioned the findings of Mack and his colleagues; at the same congressional hearing during which Mack was raising his fears, a Tufts researcher ridiculed the the importance implicity placed on the nuclear quesetion to the exclusion of other childhood worries. But certainly no psychiatrist as prominent as Coles had yet broken to publicly with the concensus of many of his colleagues, and the publicity that accompanied this shot was commensurate to the challenge it represented.

Coles is at work on a book about the moral life of children, and a chapter in this book is entitled "Children and the Nuclear Bomb," in which he discusses the results of several years of intense interviews with children about their thoughts on nukes. It is from this manuscript that he developed his widely noted Los Alamos speech. Coles says he interviewed some 100 children, of all ages and social backgrounds, about 25-30 times each; he says he talked to another 200 about five times each, as well as about 35 teachers. This "direct observation," he suggests, is the only way at getting at the context of the matter--at the "comparative significance of this matter as against that one in the child's life." Coles writes that this "overall context needs to be understood, namely, what in a child's life may indeed prompt long and hard worry about a nuclear war, and what may make for indifference in another child."

This sense of proportion is the dominant theme in Coles' manuscript, a rambling and anecdotal account of Coles' interviews, through which he homes in on his belief that, as with many other issues, class separates children on the nuclear question. Coles talks of his discussions with poor Pueblo children in New Mexico, who evince more skepticism for the "Anglo World" than interest in nuclear weapons. He talks of Black children he knows in Roxbury, who mention not nightmares of nuclear blasts, but of "dope and coke and smack and needles and syringes and booze, bottles and bottles of booze, and a future of no work, no work at all..."

While Coles does perceive a tangible fear of the bomb among some of the more well-to-do children he meets, he is generally skeptical about the level of research on the subject. He told his audience in Los Alamos, "Reporters, and some American social scientists for that matter, do quickle interviews with children the morning after they have seen docu-dramas on nuclear war. They are told, 'We're frightened,' and they believe it." Coles added, "You always have to ask, Which people are frightened? All children? Some children? If so, where do they live? In what context does this supposed fear come forth? And who doesn't give a damn about the nuclear bomb?" The questionnaire approach through which most of the work thus far on children and nukes has been handled, Coles thinks, is woefully inadequate.

Curiously enough, the first people to agree with Coles, at least in one sense, are the very psychiatrists he is seeking to discredit. Mack and Beardsice go to pains in discussing their work, to stress it inherent limitations and the potential for "researcher bias;" they point out in the Yale journal: "The questionnaire format did not allow definite answers to many of the questions to which one would want to have answers, such as the relative importance of this issue for young people in comparision with other social and technological problems, or the variation in thinking among young people from different regions of the country." In an interview, Mack repeatedly stresses the need for more research--for better surveys, for more in-depth interviewing, for studies on how families deal with the problem--and begs for caution in "claiming importance for the findings thus far." In other words, here is the acknowledgement of the need for the context of which Coles speaks.

BUT IT IS evident that something more than methodology separates Coles from those he criticizes. What is at issue is how research about children and the bomb is being used, and what conclusions are being drawn from the body of findings out there, preliminary as they may be. Coles' main point is to suggest the self-fulfilling nature of much of the work conducted thus far, and here he takes a cautious line in analyzing the motives of his colleagues. But there is no escaping the unstated implications of his research: psychiatrists have been veering dangerously close to abusing their profession by forcing their own beliefs onto what should be unbiased research.

One difficulty in taking stock of this work is the intrinsic inaccessibility of psychiatry to the layman. Who really knows what can be in the mind of a child? Our understanding of the difficulty of knowing this, knowing this in a real sense, causes us to sympathize with the efforts, however clumsy, to get closer to an understanding of the bomb's psychological impact. The danger is in generalizing from this inadequate research and using this research to further a political agenda which allows its adherents to make often-outrageous moral claims upon the citizenry.

Coles gently hints at this danger in a discussion of the phenomenon of "denial" or "psychic numbing," which appears in much of the literature on psychology and the bomb, and which is cited by leading disarmament advocates like Dr. Helen Caldicott as an explanation for why some people don't seem to be all that fazed by our nuclear arsenals. The implication of this analysis, Coles writes, is that certain people are not facing up to the reality of the nuclear arms race, and have instead "resorted to what are often called 'primitive psychological defense mechanisms,' presumably unworthy of intelligent, thoughtful individuals." You are, in more blunt words, either scared out of your wits by nuclear nightmares, or you are blocking out reality.

Such bully tactics, surprising for such an ostensibly tolerant profession, underlie other literature in the field. They represent variations on the old debating trick of attacking opposing views--Impute the worst motives to those who somehow don't see the light. But what the psychiatrists are doing is more dangerous: they want to impute psychological deficiency to those in the dark about the nuclear peril. In an article on their nuclear task force work, Mack and Beardslee in effect generalize this psychological deficiency as a cultural trait of the U.S. populace: "The fact that there is so little information available about how young people feel about nuclear issues that effect their lives so vitally suggests that we adults have entered into a kind of compact with ourselves not to know. We suspect that the implications of what we are doing to the emotional development of our young are so horrifying that we would prefer to remain ignorant, for the veil of denial is easy enough to tear away once we set out to do it."

The political appeal of the psychiatrists' form of argument is clear enough: the implication is that were we only to clear our minds of the funk brought on by the nuclear age, we could then usher in a solution to all the madness of the arms build-up. Getting the word out that children are worried about nuclear war is supposed to galvanize our consciences towards this end. This message is akin to that offered by other doctors examining the physical effect of nuclear war--all we have to do is understand the horror, and we will change their ways.

But the horror of nuclear weapons is something fully shared by most of us; this is not at question anymore, especially in the wake of massive public education about the subject in the last half-decade. Against this backdrop, and given the inadequacy experts see in current research, the continual hectoring of the population about the psychological impact of nuclear war becomes less an intellectual exercise than an exercise in pushing the freeze, a defensible but separate proposition. What was a legitimate and important research agenda becomes increasingly hostage to a political agenda, because the only thing about investigations of children and the bomb that can be defended now, Coles implies, is the politics of the matter, not the research. And psychiatrists are no better politicians than the rest of us.