Psychology

I missed last year’s ISCRAM conference, but was able to go briefly this year. Maybe because of the distance, I was again struck by the level of multidisciplinarity at this conference, and the profound struggle to move into a truly transdisciplinary space. I have enough of a computing background to keep up with the gist of most of the presentations, but I am also increasingly aware of just how sophisticated these folks are at mathematics — some of the math I can follow at a conceptual level, and in other not. At the same time, the computer folks (and even the human factors folks) make a lot of assumptions about human behavior, useability, etc. that just fly in the face of what more general psychology suggests. And then there is the issue of actually conducting research in this arena — it is so damn expensive and time consuming, and we haven’t even begun to really solve the tower of babble problem. I am hoping to figure out a way to get at this in a track for next year.

A few people who are interested in some combination of clinical psychology, disaster studies and/or terroism have contacted me because of posts on this blog about this transdiciplinary area.  For what its worth, here is part of an email I sent to one person who was interested and agreed to share this material (I figure might as well share it with all interested at once).  This is just my personal take on things, no guarantee this will work for you:

…Let me begin to tackle the second question I posed for you, which is about specialization in the areas you have interest in.  First of all, be clear up front that tackling disaster mental health and dealing with counter-terrorism issues are very different problems.  At first, I was hoping to be able to do both, and I think the faculty that I was working with were also hoping that the NCPT would be able to address both (in fact the original name of the center was NCDPT — with the “D” for disasters).  Over time, what we realized is that we could not really address both problems adequately.  Some of the faculty who were more interested in the psychology of terrorism and counter-terrorism formed a new center called CIPERT (www.cipert.org), while faculty and students interested in disater mental health and disaster management stayed with NCPT (even though the title of the center directly says “TERRORISM” and not disasters!).  For me, the relationship between treatment of PTSD and disaster related mental health problems made the most sense, and I was also interested in the logistical aspects of disasters, so staying with the NCPT made the most sense.
 
If I were you (or if I were to start the process all over again), I guess I would try to employ one of three overall strategies when searching for a clinical program that also supports disaster and/or terrorism as research areas:
 
Option 1
1. Look online and in the clinical psychology insider’s guide book for clinical psychology programs that offer a specialization in disaster psychology, military psychology, or terrorism (the program at University of South Dakota is a good example)
 
Option 2
 
1. The Department of Homeland Security has set up about 6 Centers of Excellence at various universities.  Two of these focus on the behavioral sciences (the primary one is at the University of Maryland – Baltimore).
2. See if these schools also offer a clinical degree
3. Talk to them about combining your clinical interests with the activities at the Centers
4.  A list of all of the DHS Centers of Excellence and a brief description of each can be found here: http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/editorial_0498.shtm
 
Option 3
1. Begin examining all of the universities that have some form of a disaster studies or terrorism studies program
2. See if these schools also offer a clinical psychology degree
3. Try to create a customized program that gets at your interests
4. A good example of this would be the University of Denver Graduate School of Professional Psychology, which offers both a PsyD in clinical psychology and an M.A. in International Disaster Psychology — you might be able to take some of the M.A. classes as part of the doctorate.  http://www.du.edu/gspp/about-gspp/what-is-gspp.html
 
Having said all of that, NCPT worked very well for me Palo Alto University is a small, private professional school that offers both a PhD in clinical psychology and a PsyD (the PsyD is offered in conjunction with Stanford University).  As I mentioned, PAU is a feeder school for one of the major VA run PTSD treatment centers, and gaining treatment in PTSD is central to being able to treat disaster related mental health problems — so for me this worked very well.  The NCPT runs the Palo Alto Medical Reserve Corps — a federally funded disaster mental health program, etc.  Also, note that for me the timing worked out well, but as someone just coming into a program, looking at who will likely serve on your dissertation committee and if they will retire before you complete your degree is of critical importance.
 
I hope this helps.  If you want to read more about my experiences trying to put together a customized training program for myself (in the days just after 9/11 when there wasn’t much available), take a look at this: http://www.metaversityproject.org/metaversity/disaster-psychology/.  If you have other questions, let me know and I will do my best to answer them.  It has been a difficult, sometimes lonely journey for me as there are not many people interested in this sub-specialization, so I am hoping to change that by encouraging those who are interested to enter the field.
 
Good luck.

Interests

I study clinical psychology at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Redwood City, California.  My interests have always been broad and I wanted to do more than treat individuals, but also address systemic problems by applying psychology more broadly to social problems.  I’ve been particularly interested in the psychosocial impact of disaster and the application of psychological science to improve the performance of large scale disaster management efforts.

Problem

In 2003 when I went to graduate school there were very few psychology programs that emphasized the relationship between the disaster events (natural or terror related), the application of clinical psychology, and a broader policy perspective.  There was one program in South Dakota, the Disaster Mental Health Institute, but at the time I was looking for something that also addressed terrorism and related international policy issues.  Many of the graduate programs I applied to in clinical psychology just did not seem to understand the interest in public policy or see a direct relationship between their research agendas and the policy implications.  Discussing those interests with faculty members usually felt fruitless — policy interests were seen as ancillary to or a distraction from research — rather than a fundamental part of the research process.

Creating a Customized Learning Experience

I finally realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get what I wanted at any one institution.  Instead, what I looked for was an educational foundation that could provide some of the research structure I was looking for, while also pursuing related training experiences that would broaden my expertise outside of this setting.  During the interview process for graduate school, I met Dr. Bruce Bongar at Pacific Graduate School who was in the process of setting up a center to study terrorism and mass disaster in collaboration with faculty at Stanford University, the Naval Post Graduate School, and the Palo Alto Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center.  After being accepted there, I heard that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had just set up a graduate fellowship program.  I was able to secure one of these fellowships and my work as a DHS Fellow was a defining process for the first several years of graduate training.

National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism

I began training in clinical psychology and conducting research at the National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism (NCPT) in 2003.  At that time, the NCPT was doing work on the psychology of terrorism and it housed the first Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) that focused exclusively on disaster mental health. 

DHS Fellowship Program

During the first 3 years of graduate training, I was supported by the DHS Fellowship program.  At the first meeting of DHS Fellows and scholars, I was struck by the very small number of behavioral science majors involved in the Fellowship program.   During this meeting I made connections with three other Fellows, and despite the fact that we were studying at different institutions and we met only infrequently after that, those personal connections with others doing national security related work helped to alleviate the feelings of social isolation I felt at my home institution — where most graduate students were focused more exclusively on clinical training.

ANSER Internship

One of the requirements of the DHS Fellowship program was that Fellows had to intern for their first summer at a national laboratory, a federal agency, or with a DHS contractor.  I interned at ANSER, Inc. in Arlington, VA.  Although it would have made sense to place DHS interns in the Homeland Security Institute (HSI) at ANSER, HSI was so new at that time that they weren’t prepared to accept interns without security clearance.  Instead, I worked with an intern advisor from the Joint War Fighting & National Strategies divisions.  While the internship wasn’t particularly well set up for behavioral scientists, it did offer me several months to work without distraction on some interesting ideas.

A Diminished Sense of Place

UC, Riverside

One of the things I have struggled with the most is feeling that I don’t belong any place.  During undergraduate, I was affiliated with a single university, I enjoyed the sense of the campus itself — the library had 78 volumes of José Martí’s work, there were quiet spots on the campus where the trees seemed to dance in the spring, and the bell tower soared above the campus — there is something about structures that are much larger than us that give the sense that the scholarly work one is engaged in is part of a much greater whole.

When I entered graduate school, this sense was gone.  I was shuttling between a small clinical school, several VA hospitals, spending time in the DC area for internship, and occasionally showing up at a University of California campus, Stanford, or some private universities my wife was associated with.  In point of fact, much of the work I was doing was being carried out from my apartment and a couple of local coffee shops rather than at any given campus (the idea of the Penny University is alive and well).  I felt at times that I belonged to all of these institutions and none of them simultaneously.  Each had strengths I was drawing from, but no single institution housed all of the elements I was trying to integrate.  But at the same time, I longed for that feeling of belonging to a specific program, a particular physical space – to come to know, and perhaps even haunt, particular halls of a building.  To have a specific physical structure to contain the intellectual ungrounding and expansion that comes with graduate training. 

ISCRAM Conference

ISCRAM '07, Delft, The Netherlands

For me, some what to my surprise, the answer to the problem of place created by my “instance” of the metaversity was to become even more virtual.  In my third year of graduate school I attended a conference called Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), held that year at the New Jersey Institute of  Technology.  This was a breakthrough moment for me.  For the first time, I was surrounded by people who shared my language, vision, and areas of interest.  They were technologists with a strong interest in supporting human performance in the midst of disaster.  I was a behavioral researcher in training with a strong interest in disasters and technology.  Moreover, the conference started out from its inception as a transdisciplinary event that was designed and managed by others who had not felt their academic needs were being served in more traditional conference settings.  The participants had literally found each other at other conferences and started talking about filling this gap.  At the 2006 ISCRAM, I participated in the PhD student colloquium and met Dr. David Mendonça – a professor who has been examining improvisation in the context of disaster.  His papers and period advice over the years that followed served to orient my own dissertation research.  This single conference deeply impacted my understanding of my own work, situated it in a way that had not felt achievable prior to this point, and also began to provide the social support I need to feel as though I was functioning in a specialized, transdisciplinary department — even though there were no formal relationships between the institutions I was involved with and the laboratories the other attendees were from.

A map of this Metaversity Instance

I am hoping to find a more efficient mapping system that allows for deeper annotation, but for the moment, here is a google map that shows the primary locations where this work has been conducted or where substantial parts of my graduate education have been drawn from.

View this Metaversity instance in a larger map