A comment about hazing during training got me to thinking about training, panic and hazing. It is important we define what we mean by hazing, within the context of this conversation. I'm limiting my comments to training procedures in which leadership personnel take an active role in making a student's situation in the water more difficult, without warning, for example turning off a student's air or removing a student's mask. While I am against hazing, I think it is useful to examine the underpinnings of hazing so that any useful elements may be retained, and the retrograde elements may be rejected
To my way of thinking the argument if favor of this sort of hazing is that, when judiciously applied, it is a fairly realistic simulation of what happens in the course of a "diving accident." There is one failure piled on top of another until both the diver's ability to deal with the immediate crisis and the diver's situational awareness (in this case the ability to see other problems coming and head them off before they compound the crisis) are compromised. So judicious application of hazing can simulate this situation and take a student right to panic, and even a hair over it, whilst they are still protected from real harm by leadership personnel.
There are some who would have you believe that everyone will panic at some level of stress and that you can not be trained not to panic. Let’s first take a cursory look at what panic is. A panic attack is defined as "a discrete period of intense fear or discomfort that is accompanied by at least 4 of 13 somatic or cognitive symptoms," as described by the American Psychiatric Association in 1994. The somatic symptoms described include shortness of breath, dizziness, and accelerated heart rate, whilst the cognitive symptoms consist of fear of dying and fear of going crazy or losing control. The distinction between somatic and cognitive symptoms, lead Clark in his, “Cognitive Approach to Panic" (Behavior Research and Therapy, 24, 461-470) to advance a cognitive model of panic in which panic resulted from the "catastrophic misinterpretation" of bodily sensations whereby the perception of these sensations as far more dangerous than their cause(s). Palpitations may be interpreted as a sign of an impending heart attack, slight breathlessness may be perceived as evidence of cessation of breathing and possible resulting death, shakiness may be interpreted as signaling loss of control or insanity. He also proposed that such catastrophic misinterpretation may play a critical role in the vicious cycle which culminates in a panic attack and panic disorder. When you combine “normal” diving sensations with the fear that many people have of drowning or suffocating then it becomes easy to see why many divers are operating at close the edge of panic (oft without realizing it) much of the time. All it takes is one small incident or addition to push them right over the edge into a full blown panic state where offering a regulator or shouting "inflate your BC" are completely ineffective treatment modalities.
We were “designed” by either evolution (or a creator with truly lousy design capabilities) to operate properly only within our natural environment. We have altered our natural environment, created technologies that do not conform to its rules and that expanded the natural world to include items and locations that we did not evolve to deal with. SCUBA equipment is a great example, divers are subjected new experiences that they misinterpret, e.g., an illusion of lack of air brought as a result of a tight fitting wet suit, the mechanical failings of a regulator, or the increasing density of the air they are breathing. When we subject ourselves to such phenomena and do not take the time to provide comprehensive learned feedback for these sensations, we guarantee that panic will result. Panic is only dealt with in one of two ways, technical solutions to help avoid the trigger sensations (e.g., a properly fitting wetsuit, a balanced first stage and “over-balanced” second stage and less dense bas mixtures for deeper dives) or comprehensive learned feedback to desensitize us to the sensations and/or retrain our responses. I am not a big believer in technological solutions. They have a way of going awry , either through the perversity of the universe or the stupidly of human kind. Rather I seek solutions through desensitization exercises and the retraining of responses.
We teach our students to hold their breath for rather long periods of time. This has several salubrious effects, it’s a great place to jump off to a discussion of shallow water blackout with the innumerable attendant physics and physiology topics; it gives the students an immediate feeling of major accomplishment, their having completed something that they doubted they could; it creates incredible confidence amongst the students in their instructors; and it provides a wonderful way to get them “back on the horse” when they hit a snag. There are several reasons for doing this, one is to teach them a relaxation technique, another is to help them to gain confidence that what we ask them to do and be done and yet a third is help them to gain confidence in themselves and their own ability to master things that they initially see as difficult or even impossible. Permit me to expand on some of these ideas.
We use a series of exercises, built into a kata, to teach our students breath holding. I am not, here and now, going to describe exactly how we teach breath holding (that‘s a separately priced product). First we conduct a “raise your hand” poll: “I can hold my breath for about three minutes! How long can you hold your breath?” one of the staff says, “Ten seconds? Raise your hand. Twenty? Raise your hand, if that’s too long for you lower it. Thirty? Forty-Five? A minute? Minute and a half? Two minutes? Longer than two minutes?” Everyone raises their hand for ten seconds. We lose a few at twenty, a few more at thirty. At forty-five way less than half the class is left and at a minute there might be two, one of whom gave up at a minute and a half, the other will still be going (usually with a slight smirk) at “Longer than two minutes?” Those last two we’ll have to watch, they’ll be paired up and put with two of the best free divers on the staff (they go out, free dive and spear tunas! A little out of my league).
The session continues: “Okay class … let me tell you what’s going to happen. Today each and every one of you will hold your breath for a minute. Most of you will reach a minute and a half and a few of you will reach two minutes. By the midterm every one of you will be able to breath hold for two minutes. Okay?” The general reaction is usually one of slight nervousness and insecurity. Then we describe and teach the kata and we do the kata, out to two minutes at the beginning of every pool and open water session. You can imagine the level of psych in the class when at the end of the first pool session they all make a minute or more. If you told that next class we will have a session where they learn to walk on water they’d believe it.
So what’s the big deal? So what if students can hold their breath? They’re here to learn to scuba diving not free dive! Right? Wrong! One quick example: think about how easy it is to teach a student to clear their mask who can confidently hold his or her breath for a minute. We spent 15 minutes on breath holding and now in less that five minutes everyone in the class has actually "mastered" repeated clears, effortlessly. That tradeoff alone makes it worth while, everything else is gravy.
But I was discussing desensitization exercises and the retraining of responses. We concentrate on exercises that force students to the edge of discomfort due to moderate exertion whilst breath holding and then we ask them to perform a fine motor skill that takes a little time. An example of this is our free diving doff and don:
- In full gear, including 7mm wet suit and gloves, but no hood:
- surface dive to 13',
- remove mask and place it on the bottom,
- roll out of weight belt place it on the bottom,
- make a flared ascent,
- recover your breath on the surface,
- surface dive down against the buoyancy of your suit,
- roll into your weight belt and fasten it (wire or SeaQuest buckle really helps here),
- and now to the fine motor skills: recover mask and don it,
- clear mask,
- surface with hand up, circling, with mask and snorkel clear.
There are a great number of other skills learned here too, a powerful surface dive, the advantage of dolphin kick for low gear and flutter kick for higher gear propulsion, operating without a mask, weight belt removal and replacement, etc. But most important is learning how to do something slowly and methodically when you’ve got an accelerated heart rate, trembling or shaking sensations, shortness of breath, feeling of choking, and chest pain or discomfort, tight-chested feeling. Heck, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders you only need four of those five to be diagnosed with a full blown panic attack.
Almost no one succeeds in this exercise on their first try, we build up to it with propriary receptor training for pike surface dive position, diving to the bottom with and without a weightbelt, doing just the mask, doing just the weight belt and then finally doing both. After each attempt of each skill the student lies flat at the surface and engages in the breathing kata. This is extremely relaxing and teaches them how to click quickly into a meditative state that desensitizes them and retrains their responses.
By the time we are done, the student is in an entirely different “head space.” He or she knows that they can comfortably hold their breath for two minutes, that they can comfortably hold their breath for a minute, even on exhalation. This make concerns over things like emergency swimming ascents or sharing air (regardless of technique) rather irrelevant to them.
In my experience it is relatively easy to design exercises that are “self-stressing” so that there is no need to bring leadership personnel into them to make them more difficult. Well designed exercises will, without breaking the chain of trust, serve to allow students to experience panic and the kind of situations that lead up to it so that they are able to lean not just the correct mechanical response to a situation (what some instructors refer to as “relevant“ or “practical“ or “realistic” exercises), but are also taught to identify, control and work with the physical sensations and mental processes that are part an parcel of panic (such “irrelevant“ or “impractical“ or “unrealistic” exercises).
Please note that we accomplish this without any recourse to hazing of any form. I do not believe in hazing because I feel that first and foremost it will have a souring effect on the relationship between the diving instructor and the diving student. Hazing diminishes, even destroys, the absolute trust that a diving student should have in his or her instructor. Less mature diving instructors may, if permitted to haze, cross over the line and actually endanger diving students all in the name of fun and games. Hazing can bring out the worst in human behavior.
I will tackle them as soon as I am a little bit more settled, I have just come back from Mexico. 
