Special needs parents

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Special needs parents distrustful and
suspicious, or paranoid? An application of
Kramers organisational paranoia framework

• Dr Angela Ayios
• BRESE

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Themes from the farewell letter

• Huge and constant challenges
• Loss of friends
• Nothing should be taken at face value
• Tribunal, High Court and Ombudsman cases
• Improper implementation by the local educational
  authority of tribunal decision
• Refusal to educate a sick child
• Admiration for those in the same boat

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Distrust its antecedents and outcomes

• Its development is a history-dependent process,
  arising out of an informational and social
  environment that creates expectations
• A priori expectations are set up, and
  post-poteriori ruminations on experiences are
  created, with expectations violated through
  experience
• Resulting in vigilant appraisal of others action
  to discern concealed intentions and motives
• The state to be avoided is that of hypervigilant
  dysphoric rumination(!)

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Distrust

• The absence of confidence in the other, a
  concern that the other may act so as to harm one,
  that he does not care about ones welfare or
  intends to act harmfully or is hostile. When one
  distrusts, one is fearful and suspicious as to
  what the other might do (Govier, 1993, p240,
  cited in Kramer, 2001, p3).

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Suspicion

• The social perceiver actively entertains
  multiple, plausibly rival, hypotheses about the
  motives or genuineness of a persons behavior
  (Fein, 1996, p1165, cited in Kramer, 2001, p3)
• Further, there is a belief that the actors
  behavior may reflect a motive that the actor
  wants hidden from the target of his or her
  behavior (Fein Hilton, 1994, p169, cited in
  Kramer, 2001, p4).

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Paranoia

• a form of heightened and exaggerated distrust
  that encompasses an array of beliefs, including
  perceptions of being threatened, harmed,
  persecuted, mistreated, disparaged and so on, by
  malevolent others These perceptions include
  suspicions that others are exploiting, harming or
  deceiving one, along with preoccupations and
  doubts regarding their loyalty or
  trustworthiness (Kramer, 2001, p6).

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Hold on a minute isnt that taking things a bit
far?

• Clinical psychology presumes paranoia to be
  located inside the head of the social perceiver
• Social psychological theory pays more attention
  to the social and situational origins
• Paranoia is experienced quite mundanely by us
  all, and is better characterised as misplaced or
  exaggerated distrust
• It is an intendedly adaptive coping response to
  disturbing situations rather than necessarily
  manifestations of disturbed individuals

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The diagnosis of autism a disturbing situation

• the doctor said yes well put him on the
  autistic spectrum and then he sent me out with
  the number of a social worker who ran the support
  group, she was away for the whole of August so
  there was no one there and I spent the whole week
  crying and that was it, Id got this little boy
  and now Ive been told hes got a condition that
  cant be treated and I walked out and I said hes
  autistic where do I go from here?
• The first meeting, the teacher was closing the
  door, and said I think Ivan is autistic. And it
  was just not a word you want to hear that!

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So much so that parents will try to avoid this
diagnosis and others will deny it

• When the autism specialist came to visit
  Stephan . I deliberately kept him quite calm,
  with a yoyo.
• So you know how to manage him to do that at the
  start?
• Yeah. You know, and I put his favourite, you
  know, DVD on to try and keep him calm. Anyway
  within seconds he was punching her and because
  shed done something that shed pressed the
  right buttons that she knew would spark him off
  (laughing) she deliberately did that, you know,
  she was laughing but then within, you know, ten
  minutes, I was absolutely sobbing
• and everyone was saying dont worry, hell start
  to speak in sentences and that, and it will be
  fine and you can forget it all, and obviously it
  didnt happen.

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A reminder that a hypervigilant state can be
rational

• distrust and suspicion are not always
  irrational. In highly competitive or political
  organizational environments, for example, an
  individual may have quite legitimate cause for
  suspicion and concern about others
  trustworthiness. In such environments, the costs
  of misplaced trust can be quite costly - and
  sometimes even fatal - to ones career (Kramer,
  2001).

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For example, if you trust the authorities to look
after your needs, you will come unstuck

• I had a kind you can have a place if a place
  comes up now but only because of my
  persistence and what about people who arent? I
  really meant it I was going to take my son to
  the school on the first day of September whether
  they had a place or not and tie my leg to a
  chair and HE WAS GOING, you know but really,
  how bloody minded can you be? He probably would
  not still have got there if Id not made a big
  issueI just thought this is ridiculous. I want
  it in the paper that a child, an autistic child
  cant get into his local autistic school.
• You know the latest crop of our members just
  havent got in?
• Well they need another school, they need another
  six, possibly however many they created theyd
  never fulfil the demand.

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Fein and Hiltons typology of suspicion

• PERCEIVERS
• See situational cues or have contextual
  information suggesting others might have ulterior
  motives
• Have forewarnings others might be insincere or
  untrustworthy
• Expectations about others have been violated

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Fein and Hiltons forewarnings in action

• Ulterior motives they dont have enough money
  to give us all the provisions that we may like or
  need, so I think that is a big factor, obviously
  a lot of them dont have a proper understanding
  so they dont perhaps understand the importance
  of the provision
• Insincerity/untrusworthiness They are on your
  side when youve decided you want the provision
  they provide, otherwise you end up landing in a
  black hole of non-answered calls and letters, and
  theyll play you off for ages.
• Expectations violated nobody from any kind of
  profession has come along and said well this is
  what you do, this is what we can do, you have to
  find out yourself, Ive never known anything like
  that I didnt realise that I have to pull all
  the strings.

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Kramers typology of paranoia

• Hierarchical relationships greater vigilance,
  adversity and omission bias, rumination of
  subordinates not matched by those in power
• Perceived social distinctiveness and social
  uncertainty/dysphoric self-consciousness
• Social uncertainty and the sinister attribution
  error paranoia among organizational newcomers
• Technologies that foster organizational paranoia
  the fragile trust between auditors and those they
  audit

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Kramers typology in action

• Hierarchy If you constantly ask for things and
  the answer is always no, then you feel your
  knowledge of your child makes no difference,
  you feel no control over processes directly
  affecting your child, you dont have choice,
  not without a battle, they are not, you know,
  giving the provision or certainly not giving it
  until theyre forced to give it
• Social distinctiveness/uncertainty on our
  holidays we do what everyone else does, we have
  to watch him in the pool in case he drowns a baby
  or something, but hes got better, it took me a
  while to get over that, not giving a damn about
  people staring, people are quite nervous about
  actually leaving home, I mean most of our
  families have never been on a proper holiday

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and the other two

• Sinister attribution error I think the head
  of the special needs nursery found that quite
  daunting that I actually came in quite strong,
  not emotional, not a complete wreck and she found
  that quite hard with me
• Surveillance with some people its just taken
  for granted that all parents of autistic children
  are going to have demands that are unreasonable,
  they feel that parents are asking for what they
  shouldnt have (laughter) yes thats my feeling
  at the outset you will be unreasonable

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There is a bit Ive missed out

• Kramers informational aspects
• Difficulties in generating trust-relevant
  experience the paranoid social auditor is not
  good at collecting data (or drawing the right
  lessons from it) in fact I found the opposite,
  that most accounts give quite sympathetic
  rationales for the behaviour of officials
  offering further evidence for the contextual
  basis of paranoia
• Kramers social aspects
• Gossip flourishes more on distrust than trust
  stories plenty of evidence that support groups
  are set up in the teeth of adversity, therefore
  the social stories and gossip that percolate
  are negative and trust-reducing

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To conclude, distrust and its extreme form of
paranoia

• Are the result of a history-dependent process an
  informational and social environment that combine
  to create expectations
• When that process goes awry, then hypervigilant
  dysphoric rumination becomes a reality, and when
  that reality arises within groups, particularly
  adversarial ones, the ties that bind can become
  the ties that blind in a paranoid state
• Paranoia may be considered an atypical or extreme
  manifestation of distrust The fundamental
  properties of a substance or object are often
  revealed through exposure to extreme conditions
  (Janoff-Bulman, 1992 p4, in Kramer, 2001, p5).

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Where does this go from here?

• Kramer (2001) argues that by studying the
  conditions under which presumptive trust
  unravels, a better appreciation is gained of the
  necessary and sufficient conditions for its
  resilience
• Therefore, the output is planned to be an article
  in a public sector journal on trust-reducing and
  paranoia-inducing ruminations of clients of
  public sector managers and their staff, looking
  at the cognitive toeholds for the development
  of paranoid cognition amongst this very broadly
  construed organization of special needs
  parents, their support groups, and the local
  officials charged with their care