Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Kim Neely, and this is the trauma informed SLP.
This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves.
Welcome to another one in our Dehumanization series. Woohoo. Pew pew pew. I guess it's a pretty sad topic, but an important one, good one we need to go through. So I will offer this brief trigger warning. As usual. If you feel any particular level of discomfort in your body while you're listening to this, if your muscles start feeling tight, if your chest starts feeling tight, if it gets a little hard to breathe, or if you're just feeling overall upset or challenged by anything, please do take a break and do what you need to do to calm yourself. Get yourself in a healthier emotional state. I definitely don't want anything in my podcast to become either traumatizing or retraumatizing for anyone out there. That said, given the topic, I will be including some quotes that include the rhetoric of dehumanization, particularly in scientific writing. Some of this is very hard to listen to. A few of the quotes are actually hard for me to read, and in fact, some of those quotes were so difficult for me to read that I actually left in during editing. I left in a portion where I curse a little bit under my breath. I use the D word and the capital G word just to let you know if you happen to be triggered by that kind of language. I left it in, though, to be transparent, and I want to model being okay with my own emotional vulnerability and my own need to process emotions so that you, my listeners, you can feel free to regulate right along with me as you need to. Okay? So if that's you take a break if you need to, no big deal. And if you're just having a really challenging day and you decide this probably isn't the right material for you to listen to today, that is also fine. You do what you need to do to take care of yourself. Okay? All right, let's get into it.
So what is on the docket for today?
Well, this is kind of a complimentary episode to the Female Hysteria, where I looked more at the history of trauma research in Western medicine, and today I want to look more at the rhetoric around Dehumanization when it comes to scientific writing and research design and how societal biases can bleed into research and science. Okay. And the reason I wanted to go through this is Per Ash's Set curriculum for graduate studies. Everybody takes some level of research methods, right? We take some type of class, or it gets embedded in other classes where you learn how to be a discerning consumer of research.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: They want us to know about study design and external and internal validity and things like that. So that as we practice, as we look at new evidence we can discern. Is this evidence valid?
Does it actually apply to my clinical population or to this one case that I'm looking into? Is this pseudoscience or is this trustworthy evidence?
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Right?
[00:03:35] Speaker A: And that's wonderful. We definitely need all those things to be an evidence based field. But I also want us, in a trauma informed sense, to cultivate this more meta or kind of societal level of discernment when it comes to research and science, because then we can start to determine what evidence fits under a trauma informed paradigm and what doesn't.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Because I'm going to paraphrase the rice center here a bit, but if it's not socially just, it's not trauma informed.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: And if you ever had to take any kind of ethics class, if you were like a research assistant at all and you had to take some kind of ethics and research, to some extent, they probably mentioned a lot of how there's a lot of research out there, especially older research that was very firmly embedded in societal biases at the time.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: But all research is still technically embedded in societal biases of the time because scientists are people in society just like the rest of us, so they come in with the same implicit biases that anybody does.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: So my question to you and to myself really is how do we as a field learn to recognize signs of dehumanization and the sort of rhetoric around it in scientific writing, particularly when it comes to perhaps misinterpreting minority groups or over generalizing things to certain cultural groups or minority groups?
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: So that's what we're going to go through today. To do this, I'm going to start out with providing you a conceptual model of dehumanization that's going to be hopefully fairly brief, but I found a paper, and it's a model that tends to get cited a lot since this paper came out. So I think it came out in 2006, and it does offer a nice conceptual place to categorize types of dehumanizing language and rhetoric used. Okay, so then we're going to use that conceptual model and apply it to looking at some scientific writing that I've pulled, starting with some really old 19th century examples for more blatant dehumanization, moving into a 20th century example of a more notorious study in terms of scientific ethics and such. And then we're also going to take a look at more modern, even early 21st century quotes that are rather dehumanizing as well, so that hopefully we could start to see the pattern of the rhetoric of dehumanization in scientific writing so that we can have more awareness of it when we're looking into evidence to use in our practice.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Let's get going on learning a little bit on the patterns that we see in dehumanization and the kind of rhetoric and language used around it. Okay, so to do this, I'm going to be going through Nick Haslam's. I believe it's a 2006 article called Dehumanization and Integrative Review. This article was free for me to access because I'm not affiliated with university, so there's a lot of articles behind a paywall for me. And it does also have a fair number of citations and it does get referenced a lot. And Nick Haslam is a researcher who does a lot of social psychology stuff in addition to some other things. So in this big review article, nick Haslam put forth a model of dehumanization. One of the ways that he says this model is distinctive from other ones predating it is that it broadens the concept of dehumanization to encompass these two main forms that operate both interpersonally so on a one on one context and also in inner group context. So like, this group against that group, right. But it doesn't really conflate or confound it with there actually being explicit conflict or lack of empathy toward others and stuff like that, right. So you can still feel empathy toward that group but still be dehumanizing toward that group in this model.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:07:43] Speaker A: That's an important thing to think about because a lot of us don't like to think that if we feel empathy, we can still be dehumanizing, but we can. And that's really important for us to know about as clinicians, especially in terms of being trauma informed. Because if you're not really recognizing someone as fully human in front of you, that's going to come across in implicit ways that you probably are not aware of. But that definitely has a negative impact on that person. Feeling emotionally safe with you in particular, but safe in general. That definitely has an impact on safety, right, for that other person. So he also says haslam goes on to say, this model proposes that subtler forms of dehumanization occur in everyday life when persons are not granted full humanness as in stereotypes that deny groups uniquely human or human nature qualities.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:08:34] Speaker A: So this is how he distinguishes these two, is that if you're denying the characteristics that are uniquely human, he called that the animalistic model, wherein the person or group of people are denied characteristics like higher levels of thinking, like higher cognition, self control, civility, they're not as refined, right? This happens especially in racial stereotyping and attitudes toward immigrants where people get labeled as animalistic, like straight up called a certain type of animal or made comparisons to some type of wild animal, right? Because you're denying them that idea of human community and culture and society, right? Because that's one of the things we see as uniquely human versus animal world, animal kingdom. They might have communities, but they might not have, as far as we know, culture and all of that, right? As far as we know, that could just be us not knowing what's going on out there, but know.
So in the animalistic model, haslam says animal or organism metaphors for ethnic outgroups are commonplace in this particular domain as is the sense that inner group differences are as sharp and impermeable as boundaries between species.
This form of dehumanization also captures perceptions of the cognitively disabled, which, if you look in any sort of historical documents on anyone who's studying cognitively impaired people, especially from the time of insane asylums, when people got locked away, they got routinely compared to, like, puppies or monkeys or cats or they got compared to animals a lot, right? As seeing not having that ability to think at a higher level.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: This is also the type of model that is in The Ten Steps to Genocide. If you Google that, you'll actually find some articles on that. I'll also include a link in the show notes. But when you look at The Ten Steps to Genocide, animalistic dehumanization is a big piece of that, of making that very sharp distinction between the majority dominant group and those others. So this is also seen, for example, in the United States Declaration of Independence, or what is now the US. Declaration of Independence, where they called the indigenous people of this continent merciless Indian savages, which is very much so animalistic dehumanization saying they're merciless, as in they lack compassion, they're savage, they lack civility and culture, denying them those unique characteristics, which is also kind of weird, honestly, in a way. Like, I guess it's just the limited memory of humans when we celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday, which is this whole, like, the native peoples helped the colonists survive at all. And then however many, 100, some odd years after that, or nearly 200 years, I guess, nearly 200 after that, they're like merciless engineering savages. It's like, okay, that is some memory loss right there. Good job, colonist. Okay. Anyway, it's just kind of funny. They deny them compassion and empathy, but then still celebrate a holiday where their compassion and empathy is celebrated. It's just the cognitive dissonance. Sometimes it blows my mind a little bit. It's. Like what? This makes no sense. Anyway, so that's animalistic dehumanization. The other side of this model is a mechanistic dehumanization, okay? So this is where a group of people or a single person is denied characteristics that constitute human nature, characteristics that we accept are essential parts of human nature. Okay, so for Haslam, he says this is typically seen in work in the domains of medicine and technology, where it's like an explicitly mechanistic thing, right, where you're focusing on standardizing things, normalization statistics, instrumental assessments, being more passive with your decision making, things like that. This has also been looked at in terms of objectification of women when it comes to advertising and explicit messaging of this body is essentially an object that you can use as you wish, and it's not really a human body. That's a mechanistic dehumanization. So Haslam says mechanistic dehumanization is often accompanied by indifference, a lack of empathy, an abstract and de individuated view of others that indicates an implicit horizontal separation from self right. And a tendency to explain the other's behavior in non intentional, causal terms.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: So since they're not human, you're not even giving them the human trait of making explicit decisions and having their behaviors actually be explained through actual decision making, right, and just explaining it more in terms of, like, this completely unintentional it just didn't know what it was doing. It was like the robot walking into a wall or something. I don't know. Okay, so I've pulled some quotes from some old science, from 19th century science that is blatantly racist. Just fair warning, that's what's coming up. But I pulled these quotes to show a really blatant example of how this dehumanization occurs in scientific writing and rhetoric.
So let's go through some of these quotes. Honestly, the quotes are kind of a mix of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization, because you can definitely get the sense from the quotes that the scientists themselves had a mechanistic view of the people they were studying and could not really attribute actions and behaviors to true, coherent thought. So a bit of that is in here. Also some infantilization and that type of more animalistic dehumanization where it's like, okay, they just lack these higher skills. So little bit of a mix of both in these quotes.
So when we're looking at examples of dehumanization in science, probably one of the easiest places to find it and the most glaring would be in the 19th century, there was a rise of polygenism, which I believe is how you say it. It was the view that the human races have different evolutionary origins. So essentially looking at the different races of men as effectively different species. And there were some really well hailed big name scientists who totally got some great evidence for this, of course, by looking at skulls and anatomy and differences and blah.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: And I'm just going to include a few quotes from a couple of these guys. These quotes are pretty upsetting. First one, I'm going to talk about Luis Agassi. He was Swiss, but he did actually come to America, and he actually was at Harvard. He was like this big deal guy at Harvard for a while there. I will include some links to some articles below to further look into this guy, if you want to. One of the quotes he said when he was trying to publicize his theory about Africans, basically, he studied people of African descent. He also went to Africa to study people, and he studied African Americans who were slaves at the time. I think he actually took what's considered the first photographs of slaves ever, which was when he selected, I think it was about like eight of them or so, and had them all come to his lab and stripped down so that he could take these naked pictures of them and study their physiology. That in and of itself is horrific.
So I'm just going to read a quick quote from the harvard Crimson. This is by oh, no. I'm probably going to totally butcher this person's name, and I hope I don't, but sima S.
Iqbal. I-Q-B-A-L. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. I'm not sure what nationality this writer is, and I really greatly apologize if I completely butchered it. But I will also, of course, include a link below for you guys. So in this article, this quote says, so talking about Agassi, he declared that black people were in profound ways anatomically distinct from white people. He presented racist speculation after racist speculation, saying that even and this is direct quote from Agassi, the brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven month infant in the womb of a white.
I need to take a breath.
Pretty dehumanizing, right?
Pretty blatant with the dehumanization there.
Yeah, go ahead and take a pause if you need to, but I'm going to go ahead and just include the other example from another polygenist named Samuel George Morton, also majorly, hailed during his lifetime as being this major scientist, and he studied the skulls of the different races of man, the five races of man. And through doing that, he made determinations about what made everybody so terribly different. So this is a direct quote from his Cranium Americana that I found on a website I will link below, and this is what he has to say about Native Americans and genuinely take some deep breaths through this. This is a rough quote. It's hard for me to read it, but I'm going to do my best.
So of speaking of Native Americans, morton says, they are crafty, sensual, ungrateful, obstinate, and unfeeling, and much of their affection for their children may be traced to purely selfish motives.
He goes on to say, Their mental faculties from infancy to old age present a continued childhood.
Take a deep breath if you need to. I certainly do.
Yeah, those quotes are really rough.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: But I did want to include them here because I wanted to use this as an example of how we're over 150 some odd years removed from these guys. Society has moved along. I know 100% there are people in the world who would still agree with the stuff these people say.
But on the whole, society has moved past this, and it's all too easy to think. On the whole, scientists have moved past this.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: And maybe when it comes to studying the different races, they have, but not when it comes to dehumanization, not when it comes to the rhetoric around animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization of others, of people determined to be different.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: And there's nothing wrong with seeing the differences and respecting those differences. The problem comes when we put a moral value onto the difference and we say that they're different from us, therefore they are inferior.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Right?
[00:20:01] Speaker A: That is where we get into the hierarchical culture. That is where we get into white supremacy culture. Yeah. So I just want to include these because, as Brene Brown says, we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing. Therefore, we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. And so that's the whole point of this, right? We're looking at this meta view of dehumanization and science, and then next episode, we'll look at dehumanization in medicine so that we start to understand this more meta side of being trauma sensitive, of being aware of these systemic signs of oppression and moralization and white supremacy culture, hierarchical culture and being able to recognize that so that we can be vigilant against using science. Thoroughly mixed up with societal biases as our evidence for our field.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Right?
[00:21:00] Speaker A: We don't want to do that.
Okay, so the Tuskegee experiment, or Tuskegee Syphilis study, sometimes it's referred to as this Tuskegee Syphilis project.
The study lasted from 1932 to 1972. So that's 40 years that the study lasted.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:21:20] Speaker A: And the purpose of the study was to essentially observe and report on the trajectory of untreated syphilis in a group of African American men. And they ended up having a group of nearly 400 men. Who were the patients with syphilis in the study, okay?
The official record is they didn't give them syphilis. They just showed up with it. So, ethically speaking, if you know anything about the timeline of antibiotics and when they became available, this might throw up a red flag in your mind, because 1932, okay, america is in the Great Depression. Antibiotics are not available. There is no cure for syphilis. There's only treatments. But they, of course, withheld those treatments from these men so they could observe what happens to the body. However, antibiotics started becoming widely available in the 1940s, and they cure syphilis. So for the majority of the time the study went on, there was a cure for syphilis which was not made available to these men. The other issue with this is really right off the bat, it sounds awfully racist. Why are they only studying it in African American men, right? So the reason this study looked at African American men with syphilis is because there was a debate in the scientific community at the time, in, like, the late 19th century, there was this ongoing debate of whether or not disease would affect black bodies differently than white bodies. Because, I mean, we knew the impact of untreated syphilis in white bodies. We had known that for a very long time. There were so many Europeans and aristocrats with syphilis throughout history. It was pretty well documented, right? So the question was, would it affect the African body differently? Which sounds an awful lot to me. Like, this has some legacy. This has some connection to the polygenism of the quotes that I just pulled from earlier in this episode. Because why in the world would you think a bacteria affects one body differently from the other? Just due to the skin color of that person unless the debate is couched in this idea that the different races of men are actually different species.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: You kind of can't think of that debate anyway. Then you just assume there's something inherently different within the body of people of African descent versus Caucasians European descent.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: So automatically pretty racist to begin with.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: But clearly the question comes from societal biases and also from the scientific legacy around racism and around justification for slavery, which is a lot of where polygenism came in. So the main reason I want to talk about this study right now and really pulling on Martha Solomon's paper, is that she proposes the question, which is often on my mind whenever I heard of the study, of why the study was allowed to continue for 40 years. Like, why was funding renewed? Why did it continue so far past the point where syphilis could be cured? Why was this happening? And I think she makes a strong argument that at least part of what led to the continuation of the study was the inherent dehumanization in the rhetoric of scientific writing and how science is reported. So I just wanted to go through this a little bit because the way I see this connecting in our field is really more of that meta level of what are we actually hearing? Like, okay, if this is how the science is presented, what do we need to do in order to be trauma informed with that? How do we need to filter that information?
[00:25:12] Speaker B: Right?
[00:25:13] Speaker A: What's the perspective we need to take that might not be explicitly stated in the research?
[00:25:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: What are the implicit implications?
So first, let's go through how having objectivity as your main ideal leads to mechanistic dehumanization.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: So she goes through all these examples of the objective language used in the reports, like how the patient displays manifestations and presents evidence of and exhibits morbidity. So it's always that way of writing wherein the disease syphilis itself takes the active voice or the active role. And the human body that is infected with that disease is more of a passive scene through which that disease takes its course.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: What Solomon says with how this science is written is, and I quote, generic conventions may be so powerful pervasive and esteemed by society that they severely restrict rhetorical choice. Redditors inculcated with those generic conventions may become insensitive to alternatives and blind to the limitations and assumptions inherent in them. So basically what she's saying here is when scientists are training so extensively in scientific writing, it becomes all too easy for the scientist to be very desensitized to alternative perspectives and viewpoints, alternative interpretations of data, and maybe alternative study designs. Like, are you doing an appropriate comparison here? Is your comparison actually a bit dehumanizing to what you're trying to study? So it's through being desensitized to the inherent dehumanization within the way science is presented and written that automatically distances researchers from the people that are involved. And the subjective detachment in the writing style directly ties into this next example of mechanistic dehumanization she goes through, which is that the way the science is presented is that knowledge is the actual value here, not really the human lives involved with the study. It's the pursuit of knowledge that is the most noble quest, right, to obtain knowledge, to further human knowledge. And that's really the value. And when they wrote about the Tuskegee Syphilis study and its results, they talked about the knowledge as the primary value for why it was going on so long, right? Like, how could you stop the study? Because what about the cost? These men are basically giving their lives to these pursuit of knowledge, which, side note, the participants did not know. They didn't even know they had syphilis. Nobody even told them that. They just told them they had bad blood and they're coming in for treatment for bad blood, and they didn't know that they actually weren't getting treatment. That's another ethical side note here. But they presented it like kind of the way we talk about animal sacrifices in research now, which is what people talk about, animals sacrificing themselves for the pursuit of knowledge. That's how they talked about these men. They were essentially sacrificing these men for the pursuit of knowledge, which is far more noble. Right, and so that's automatic dehumanization right there, saying knowledge is more important than the human lives.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: And then also the idea that by having patients, the researchers were given the agency to observe the course of this disease, right. That also goes into that because the knowledge, the ability to observe it is far more important than the lives. So as Solomon says, implicit in all of this is evaluation of knowledge, regardless of the human costs, regardless of the lives impacted, the families impacted, the community that's impacted by this. So animalistic examples, she actually doesn't go into a ton of these. Solomon mainly mentions it as casual dehumanization, where and I love the way she wrote this, a hint of condescension appears. I love that in the scientific writing.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: Right?
[00:29:20] Speaker A: So some of the examples she gives are things where the researchers made dehumanizing assumptions about the values of the African American men in that community in terms of their diet choices and things like that. But I think the most salient example of animalistic dehumanization for the purpose of this episode is one that occurs in a report written in 1953. This report is talking about the incentives they use to get the men to come into the clinic, okay? For their observation, they mentioned things like they offered $50 of free medical examination, but the men in the study, they were way more interested in receiving hot meals. And the researchers judged that as like, oh, look at these guys, just not knowing what's really an incentive. Like, they're just not smart enough to realize the benefit of $50 worth of free medical care. Which I think is funny because, number one, these guys weren't even getting medical care when they thought they were. So that's ethically. Like, really, guys? Come on. And also, once again, you think of working with an impoverished community where people are living check to paycheck, and you think of Maslow's Hierarchy where physiological needs are at the bottom.
Food and shelter are the most fundamental things. They're going to be the priority above free medical care. You know what I mean? Not that free medical care isn't nice, but just based on human needs. Like, these researchers didn't even think about that, right? Because probably these medical researchers always had access to food. They probably never even thought about that fact that some people don't have the money to buy food all the time. But when it comes to dehumanization and scientific writing, the real kind of cherry on the Sunday of this animalistic dehumanization comes, I think, in this quote that Solomon included from the original 1953 report. So this original author says, quote, because of the low educational status of the majority of the patients, it was impossible to appeal to them from a purely scientific approach, which is just like, really? Okay, I need to verbally eye roll?
Really, dude? Come on.
This is all auditory, so I have to verbalize my eye rolls. But it's like, wow. So basically they're judging these men in terms of they're not valuing the knowledge.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: They're not valuing the science. That's not an incentive. You have to give them a better incentive to show up.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: Which is just such a myopic viewpoint. It's like this researcher is so saturated in their culture of research and in knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge being the ultimate goal in life, that they judge people who don't have that same value as inferior.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: And clearly for these men, it must be due to their lack of education, their lack of intellect, right? Like, it's all that dehumanizing. They're basically like kids, essentially.
So the main thing to take away, I think, from this paper for us in our profession is when we are digesting scientific research, when we are going to talks and listening to researchers present their science, considering things like while the objectivity is needed in order to reduce confounders and increase the validity of these studies. Making sure that objectivity isn't somehow blinding people.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Right?
[00:32:50] Speaker A: Always keeping in mind that flip side of, like, did anybody ask the participants what their perspectives were? Did anybody wonder? Or if it's an intersectionality question if they're studying a group that they are not a part of? Did they have anybody from that group as either a main part of the research design team or as a consultant towards research design and data interpretation, right? Just consciously looking for ways as consumers of the research to hold researchers accountable and ensure that they are taking additional steps. Beyond the review boards, beyond these ethical boards that they have to usually get the research project passed through. Because a lot of dehumanization that occurs and that still occurs in science is really implicit and really subtle, and because scientific legacy can echo for decades, as we've seen in this case as well. Sometimes those review boards are made up of other scientists who are like, yep, this looks pretty good, because this matches up with this others research question from 30 years ago.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: Right?
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Like they know the legacy of it and sometimes that can blind people to the inherent biases that are baked in there. So to highlight this, let us move on to a more modern example where we see this implicit dehumanization. Well, really, honestly, the dehumanization is fairly explicit, but it's implicit in the sense that most researchers, especially in psychology, for a very long time did not and probably still do not recognize some of this phrasing and the language as inherently dehumanizing and discriminatory against this particular clinical population.
I guess. Spoiler alert, I'm bridging this to studies of autistics.
Ding. That's what we're going to do. Because there's been a lot of use of dehumanizing language around autism and how clinicians and how scientists have categorized autism. So that's what I want to bridge this to because this is another example of how this dehumanizing language we saw in the Tuskegee Syphilis Project, there's that objectivity and detachment, there's blatant biases and cultural blindness and how they were making some blind, clearly racial biased, prejudice statements on what these men value in life, right? But we see a lot of this repeating itself. Essentially, this similar rhetoric is repeating itself in a lot of autistic studies. So to start bridging this, I'm actually going to swing back really quickly to Nick Haslam's 2006 article. Because in that article, guys, as much as I liked the animalistic versus mechanistic models, and I find that categorization very helpful when it comes to identifying it, even within this article, near the end of it, he says, and I quote, work on, quote, unquote empathy disorders. For example, autism, psychopathy, frontotemporal, dementia. These disorders are often described in the same terms as mechanistic dehumanization, marked by a lack of emotional depth, warmth, and prosocial concern. Now, that sentence sounds maybe a little good, like, oh, he's recognizing people have mechanistic dehumanization toward, like, autistics and people with certain psychological disorders. But no, this is what he says. He says people with autism have difficulty recognizing others'beliefs wishes and emotions and are sometimes said to perceive others in rigid and mechanical ways.
So Haslam in his paper is using his mechanistic dehumanization. What he's saying is autistics are the ones that are dehumanizing other people. They're the ones with the empathy issue. And so they see people as machines to work for their needs. And we've heard that before, right, where autistic children use people as objects and stuff, which is like, that is a clear bias toward not seeking to understand what their behavior is and what they're doing, which oftentimes is communication and trying to get a need met. Yeah, spoiler alert. But yeah. So this is basically highlighting what is going to come up in one of the other quotes here, which is the double empathy problem, which I'm not sure if you know about. So I wanted to throw in a little definition of that. The double empathy problem, it was coined in 2012 by an autistic researcher, Damien Milton, and he proposed this theory that the social and communication difficulties present in autistic people when socializing with non autistic people or Alistics are at least partly due to a lack of mutual understanding between autistic people and Aalistic people. So basically, Milton is saying autistics are demonstrating emotions and compassion and empathy towards people, but neurotypicals and well, Aalistics in general are missing those cues. So both parties could be empathizing with the other, but the communication of that is getting lost in translation, essentially.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: The neurotypical brain is not interpreting the signals the autistic is sending correctly, and the autistic is also not interpreting these signals of empathy from the neurotypical the way that it's intended, basically. So you have this double empathy problem. They're both empathizing, but the message isn't getting out.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Right?
[00:38:28] Speaker A: And that got coined by an autistic researcher of autism because that is what he sees as one of the fundamental issues with a lot of these earlier research into categorizing autism. And that's essentially what Haslam is pulling from is those type of studies where he talks about like, oh, yeah, the problem is they mechanistically dehumanize other people, not that neurotypicals and Alistics are dehumanizing the autistics. He kind of missed the boat on that one. Hopefully he's changed his opinion on that. So one of the ways I'm going to bridge this, I found some great articles by Bonique botha or botha. I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce her name. She is a researcher in the United Kingdom. She's an autistic researcher in the field of psychology studying autism herself. Okay? And she put out two articles. One I'm going to focus more heavily on because quotation wise, I think it exemplifies more of this rhetoric around dehumanization. But the other, I'm going to include one little quote because I think it's just a very strong point she makes of how society impacts the culture of science and research. So got to acknowledge that as well. But the very first one is going to be botha's study titled Academic Activist or Advocate? Angry, entitled and emerging a critical reflection on autism knowledge production.
[00:39:52] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:39:53] Speaker A: So as I said, Monique Batha is herself an autistic, okay? So this is essentially a paper where she uses her own educational experiences and her experiences submitting research papers as examples of the systemic barriers, oppression and dehumanization faced by autistics.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:40:15] Speaker A: So it's essentially using herself as kind of a case study. So I'm going to read through some example quotes of dehumanization of autistics in some of the studies that she had to review and learn about in her graduate degree. The very first one is a somewhat notorious quote by, I don't know, he's the guy who invented applied behavioral analysis aba in 1974, I believe this was from an interview. He was on like a daily talk show or something. And I think this is what he said during an interview. He says, you see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense. They have hair, a nose, and a mouth, but they are not people in the psychological sense.
This quote makes my stomach turn a little bit, but it's like incredibly blatantly dehumanizing, right? He literally says they are not people in a psychological sense. Like their minds are not human minds, is what he's saying.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:21] Speaker A: They look like humans, but they're not actually humans. Which I feel like is fairly mechanistic in the sense that he's straight up denying human nature.
[00:41:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: It hits pretty hard, right? So that's love us. And then the next two quotes are a little bit later in time. One is from 2005. It's by Thomas Seyo, I'm going to guess or Thomas, I'm not sure which nationality at all. But it says, in general, it seems that neither apes nor children with autism have at least not to oh, God damn it. I hate this one. Total disclaimer. This one's hard for me to read. It has some pretty, I think pretty nasty language in it. So little disclaimer here. But in general, it seems that neither apes nor children with autism have at least not to the same extent as typically developing human children.
That's the phrase. I hate the motivation or capacity to share things psychologically with others.
This means that they both have very limited skills for creating things culturally with other persons. So in 2005, they are making a direct comparison to autistic children, to apes, as well as saying typically developing human children to just make that comparison even more pronounced, right? That the typically developing children are the humans here and the autistic children, or as he uses person first, children with autism are nowhere near human, essentially, right? So there's clear animalistic dehumanization here where it's like they don't have any motivation or capacity to share things, which is just like, could you be more biased, dude? Really? Wow. I hope most of us as clinicians knows that's untrue, that is blatantly untrue, or they have very limited skills for creating things culturally with other persons is I almost feel like that last one is almost more mechanistic dehumanization, really, in a way where it's like they basically can't create a culture which is also untrue. Just complete bunk. My goodness.
That one's a tough one for me. And this is the third one I'm going to push through. I'm going to do. The third quote of Dehumanization of autistics. This is from 2008. Barnenbaum I think it might be a book instead of an article, but this is the quote here the person with autism difficulty is more profound, making the possibility of identifying with a community more daunting. While it is true that communities of persons exist, disabled or otherwise, it is not the case that a community of autistic people is one of them.
I am getting very upset. I'm sorry.
There is not, nor could there be a community of autistic people, since a failure of theory of mind would preclude being part of any community.
And I am getting really angry. So I need to regulate a secondary.
This is patently false.
There is a very wide reaching community of autistics, particularly in online spaces, because that's an easy, safe space for them to be.
But yeah, completely untrue.
What I think I find particularly pernicious about this quote is that Barnenbaum acknowledges that disabled people can create community, but denies the ability of autistics from creating community.
Yeah. So I don't know if you notice, but these quotes from this, both the articles, they sound a lot to me like some of those quotes from the polygenism movement or whatever it was the Agassi and Morton quotes, right?
It's pretty dehumanizing.
Also, Editor Kim would like to let you know I am leaving in that section where I cursed a bit under my breath, which apologies, I know there will be people out there who feel that's very unprofessional, but I am leaving in that part and I'm doing it on purpose. I keep calling it dysregulation. It's not really, it's just sympathetic response to the dehumanizing language, which is emotional challenge and emotional upset is an appropriate response to that. So I'm going to leave it in on purpose because I want to normalize that. It's normal to feel upset at these things, right? So instead of just pushing it aside, I want to normalize feeling that feeling and model our need to take a breath, to pause, to not deny the feelings, but to process them instead and acknowledge them. Okay, so this is the end of the editor Kim interjection.
So to follow up those quotes, because I'm feeling so horrible, I'm actually going to use Botha's quote on how these quotes hit her, okay? Because I want to use an autistics voice here. So this is botha saying I became not just a triad of impairments, or someone who lacked the ability to infer the minds of others or empathize, but something that was described in terms of categorical, subhumanness, incapable of culture, friendship, community and reciprocity. Someone who is less domesticated, more aggressive, an economic burden with integrity equivalent to nonhuman animals alone. I balanced sitting exams with sifting through objective accounts of my complete insufficiency as a human being, often getting lost in the most egregious descriptions of what it means to be autistic.
I just want to sit with that a second because from a trauma informed perspective, this sounds so incredibly traumatizing to me to sit there and read these descriptions of people who are like you, and you are a graduate student studying this stuff, and whoever is presenting these articles probably isn't even thinking about the fact.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: She also actually mentions in the article how a lot of them would do a caveat like, oh, not you, though. Clearly not know Dr. Botta, who wasn't doctor at the time, but Monique bothna like, clearly not you. We're not talking about you not autistics. Like you you're acceptable, you're fine.
[00:48:19] Speaker B: Right?
[00:48:19] Speaker A: And it's like that doesn't make it doesn't it's not validating to hear that because you've achieved a certain level of what someone perceives as value or perhaps because you're masking enough that they find you acceptable, an acceptable form. That doesn't make it better. That doesn't make the dehumanization less intense. And it also even quite frankly, highlights how extra dehumanizing it is that you have to meet a certain standard or else you are put in this other category with burdens and non humans.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:49:00] Speaker A: Subhumans basically. Okay, so that's what I have to say about that. The next little bit from this paper that I just wanted to get into was her systemic struggles with submitting her own papers. So Botha does a lot of work on looking at minority stress model, which is something I'm going to actually get into in the future. Minority stress model, meaning the levels of chronic stress suffered by minorities in society originally developed in studying genderqueer, people gender, fluid, non binary trans, but then also has been studied to apply quite greatly to many other minorities in society. And Bata is doing a lot of great studies on how the minority stress model applies to autistics, just so you know, because when I go through this quote, she's going to mention an article or a study she did essentially where she looked at distress, the psychological distress scores, and that's what it's referring to. She was looking at levels of stress or distress among the minority population that is autistics. Okay.
So this is more reflecting on the societal barriers she still faces as a researcher herself. So this is where she goes into talking about submitting her first paper to be published. It was on minority stress and mental health in autistic people in the autistic community. It was during her first year of her PhD. And she talks about how initially it was dest rejected by a journal because they felt there weren't enough autistic people for it to be actually of interest to a general audience. But this was a journal that specifically published on a lot of minority stresses and a lot of other sub minority groups. So that was suspicious and interesting.
So then somebody else commented that she used identity to first language instead of person first, and they were like, offended because she should emphasize the person with autism and their personhood should be emphasized despite the fact that she's an autistic researcher and she's using an identity first, because that is what the community prefers. I think she's still a fairly young new researcher out there. So this is not that long ago. Okay, and then here's the quote that I wanted to include because, remember, she's studying the amount of chronic stress in the autistic community and seeing if it relates to the minority stress model, right? So here's what she says. One reviewer asked me to double check the psychological distress scores because the scores being normally distributed would indicate a very distressed sample. I double checked the data. It is still accurate, normally distributed, and yes, autistic people are still not.
[00:51:46] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:51:48] Speaker A: So basically, that reviewer couldn't believe that autistic participants in her study were as distressed as they were reporting. This is a self reported thing, and likely this reviewer couldn't believe that because isn't that an issue with empathy? And would they even have the emotional capacity?
It's that dehumanizing do they have the human trait of emotions, right? So that's coming from that. And then she goes on to talk about later in her PhD program and into her career.
This one's a really interesting one.
She says, during my last year, I submitted another paper, qualitative first as a preprint and then for review. It has a section on the dehumanization of autistic people in research, a section that I highlight with specific examples dating over 60 years. Three things happened. Firstly, I received an irate email from an author declaring me slanderous for characterizing their work as dehumanizing, saying that I should remove the reference to the work if I cannot understand it. Secondly, when peer reviews returned, a reviewer asked that I say not all autism research is dehumanizing, as if any amount would be okay.
And I wanted to include a little side note here, listeners, because within the biases shown in this quote, right, one person getting incredibly offended that their research gets included in how autistic people get dehumanized in research, right? This researcher got incredibly offended and demanded she remove it, right? And then someone else saying like, oh, but not everybody dehumanizes, not all autism research dehumanizing, right? Like, got to put in a qualifier.
I wanted to include this thing that jumped out to me, which is this includes a lot of examples of white supremacy culture. So swinging back to that. So, for example, the right to comfort, which is an aspect of white supremacy culture, right to comfort being the person who is upset and basically either wanted them to correctly interpret it or remove it, right?
You should be comforting and appeasing essentially that person who is upset by what you said about their work. Also, right to comfort in the, like, oh, you should put in, like, not everybody dehumanizes, not all autism research, right? Like, not all white people, not all this, not all men, these sort of qualifiers is part of that supremacy culture of I am of this majority group and I have the power here, and I expect to not feel emotional discomfort when somebody says I've done something potentially harmful or blatantly harmful. Even that's an issue with that, right? So this is where if you read autistic people of color, when they talk about their experiences and BIPOC parents of autistic children, you hear them talk about how essentially white supremacy culture really can't be distinguished from ableism and from ableist culture because it's essentially all rooted in that hierarchical way we think of society in the sense of these people are at the top. They're the ones with the power, therefore they earned it, or they're worthy of it, and everyone else just falls short of the ideal of this expected ideal.
[00:55:20] Speaker B: Right?
[00:55:20] Speaker A: So I just wanted to highlight that because that still plays a pretty big role here in terms of dehumanization, but also in how people handle being told they've been doing some dehumanizing actions, right? And this is just a throwback to being systemically aware of these things, being trauma aware at that more systemic level of society. And biases. To be trauma informed means to regulate through your own discomfort. You learn to comfort yourself. You learn to regulate yourself so that you can listen and so that you can deprogram these implicit biases that society just plants in our brain and normalizes for us. We have to put in the effort to deprogram those things.
[00:56:09] Speaker B: Right?
[00:56:11] Speaker A: Okay, let me stuff off my soapbox and let's get back to the article quotes. Botha. And Cage put out an article in November 2022 called Autism Research is in Crisis, a mixed method study of researchers constructions of autistic people and autism research.
Once again, really liked this paper. They did a qualitative analysis of researcher opinions and biases on autistic people and also some objective measures of how researchers essentially rhetorically talk about it and how they design their studies based around certain biases and things like that. Okay, this is another quote, I think, that really highlights placing societal biases and how they can come through in research design and scientific writing in the form of the rhetoric of dehumanization and also how it imbues itself into the culture of being a researcher as a whole, the professional culture around research. You know what I mean? So this is the quote from that Bota and Cage article. It says, Interestingly, there was a gap between what participants described as their personally preferred language when it comes to identity versus person first language and the language they used in their research, whereby participants used person first language in research even though their preference was for identity first. Further, some participants in biological fields had knowledge relating to neurodiversity, such as double empathy, but felt it would not have a place in their work because peer reviewers would not recognize this work as valid. So I love that quote because it just goes to show that sometimes the researchers that are using the language that autistics cringe at, that they don't like the person first language, they're doing that because they're trying to get their paper published, not because it's actually their personal preference. Sometimes they want to be doing research and using terminology that is affirming to the narrativerse community and sometimes they understand things like double empathy, but they're not going to put that in their paper because they're in a publisher parish type of field, right? You got to keep cranking out those publications to get your tenure. You got to get the funding.
So it's this cog, this cog and this wheel of research and the culture of it and how the societal biases just sort of bleed into it that then will sometimes stop individuals from actually really doing what they feel is right in certain settings or will make compromises just to be able to move themselves forward. And so that's why I wanted to go over this. I wanted to make sure we keep this sort of meta level of how does trauma sensitive apply to science and how does it apply to evidence that might come out? And if we feel we are being evidence based or not, how does the evidence fall under a trauma informed paradigm?
[00:59:15] Speaker B: Right?
[00:59:16] Speaker A: Because I think when you're asking whether or not it falls under trauma informed paradigm, what you're really asking is, is there a significant societal bias such that implementing a treatment like this or assuming this research is fact and therefore interpreting all this other person's behaviors under that umbrella of fact, like autistics don't have empathy or something. If you're operating under that assumption and you see it in research, therefore it's fact.
Well, so now you have a problem because how is it trauma informed if you're operating on an assumption that is not true? And that leads you to perhaps misinterpret the cues of someone who's actually not emotionally safe, right? Because you got to promote emotional safety in order to really be trauma informed. That's what this is about. We can't fall for the rhetoric that science is always inherently objective and bias free. And to conclude that point, I'm going to use another quote from Botha, which I think is just a great quote to conclude with because it's exactly what I'm trying to say here.
She says, Even if you have applied the scientific method, you cannot take the scientist out of the science. We discuss data as if it speaks for itself rather than as the product of our measurement, design and creation, all of which are predicated on the assumptions brought into the investigation.
As such, all of science is entangled with the people who create it. And that's what I want us to remember. You can't accept any level of dehumanization that you happen to be consciously aware of and also be trauma informed. Those two things don't go hand in hand and I'm sure 20 some OD years from now, there will probably be another population that comes out and says, the way people approach this harms us. And if that does happen, as a trauma informed therapist, it is your responsibility and your ethical duty to listen to what people are saying, be flexible, adjust what you're doing and change.
So I hope you found this somewhat helpful when it comes to thinking of how do you apply evidence in a trauma informed paradigm, how do you read about treatments and new evidence or use older evidence? How does it fit?
[01:01:41] Speaker B: Right?
[01:01:42] Speaker A: If it doesn't feel like it fits, honestly, if it doesn't feel like it fits, it might not fit. And being trauma informed might require a change of approach. So if you want to switch instead of being more compliance based with Autistics, for example, if you want to switch from that to being more neuroaffirming, there might not be as much research on neuroforming treatment paradigms, right? You're not going to be pulling from, oh, we saw these many improvements from these many participants. You know what I mean? Not that type of evidence. But you definitely 100% if you're being more neuroaffirming, you are pulling from trauma informed research and evidence, for which there is a huge amount, because psychology has been studying this for quite some time. Psychology and neuropsychology and cognitive psychology and sociology and all these places, social psychology, all these different fields have been looking into trauma and minority stress and all this other stuff. So you're pulling on different evidence. Not that you're not being evidence based, you're just pulling on a different body of evidence that will ultimately help because you're being more salutogenic, you're being more individually focused. You're taking a holistic approach, and you're taking a strength based approach to encourage and to promote emotional, physical, psychological safety and also to teach the person to be more empowered so they can find their own safe spaces and they can get their needs met, right?
So I hope you found all of this somewhat helpful if you're out there thinking big picture thoughts and you just need a concept or a model under which to stick those thoughts, because that's what I always find helpful. With all that said, I hope you join me again next time as we talk about dehumanization in medicine.
So far, script wise, it should be a shorter episode. Let's see what actually happens when I start to edit, but I hope you guys have a great week or two. My school SLPs out there, especially in the United States. It's getting to the end of the spring semester. Hang in there, guys. It's a crazy IEP world out there right now for school SLPs, so show them some love if you happen to know any. And just hang in there, guys. Do what you need to do to take care of you, okay? And I hope you all do join me back next time as we all start to learn what it really means to be trauma informed. SLPs. Bye.
