Controversial Treatments in Applied Settings.

Catalog description

This graduate seminar covers the varieties and consequences of pseudoscience in the helping professions and how to avoid being influenced by them. The helping professions comprise a significant industry in the United States. This includes medicine, psychology (including behavior analysis), psychiatry, social work, and other forms of counseling. It includes community mental health centers, and other venues such as mental hospitals, crisis centers, and schools. Each profession has a code of ethics that calls on professionals to help clients, to avoid harm, to honor informed consent requirements and promote independence. Professional codes of ethics call on professionals to draw on practice-related research findings. What do we find if we look closely at their everyday behavior? To what extent do professionals and researchers honor obligations described in such codes of ethics? Although this course will encompass a variety of disciplines and settings, primary attention will be given to those disciplines intersecting the practice of applied behavior analysis and on those settings in which behavior analysts in practice are most likely to operate. Prerequisites: Psychology major and graduate student status.