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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Meeting the Challenge of Change

By Ken Pope
Excerpted from Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Practical Guide, 5th Ed. 
Forthcoming January 2016.

Here is an excerpt:

When complicity with torture, violations of human rights, misleading the public, and other vital matters are at stake, organizations must address not only personnel, policies, and procedures but also the powerful incentives from inside and outside the organization, sources of institutional resistance to change, conflicting ethical and political values within the organization, and issues of institutional character and culture that allowed the problems to flourish for years, protected by APA's denials.

Organizations facing ethical scandals often publicly commit to admirable values such as accountability, transparency, openness to criticism, strict enforcement of ethical standards, and so on. These institutional commitments so often meet the same fate as our own individual promises to a program of personal change. We make a firm New Year's resolution to lead a healthier life. We pour time, energy, and sometimes money into making sure the change happens. We buy jogging shoes and a cookbook of healthy meals. We take out a gym membership. We discuss endlessly what approaches yield the best results. We commit to eating only healthy foods and to getting up five days a week at 5 a.m. for an hour of stretching, aerobics, and resistance exercises. But one, two, and three months later, the commitment to change that had taken such fierce hold of us and promised such wanted, needed, and carefully planned improvement has loosened or lost its grip.

The entire article is here.