Psychology got out of the torture business yesterday. By a nearly unanimous vote, the APA’s governing Council of Representatives voted to make human rights more important than political expediency. As a result, psychologists can no longer be used by the military or intelligence agencies to interrogate national security detainees.

The approved resolution included a letter to be sent to “appropriate officers of the U.S. government, including the President, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, CIA Director, and Congress” stating in part:

“It is a violation of APA policy for psychologists to conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any individual national security interrogation, nor may a psychologist advise on conditions of confinement insofar as those might facilitate such an interrogation. Furthermore, based on current reports of the UN Committee Against Torture and the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, it is also a violation of APA policy for psychologists to work at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, “black sites,” vessels in international waters, or sites where detainees are interrogated under foreign jurisdiction ‘unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights’ or providing treatment to military personnel.”

Understanding the importance of this development requires remembering that psychology is still a young profession, unlike medicine going back thousands of years to the Hippocratic oath psychology is just a little over one-hundred years old. As the science of mind, experience, and behavior continues to develop the question of what to do with what we know becomes more urgent. With this vote, and thanks to the moral leadership of a small group of activists, the profession resoundingly rejected the gunslinger model. No longer can anyone, even the military, hire a psychologist to use psychology to intentionally hurt someone in an interrogation. Instead of being guns-for-hire the profession has decided to be protectors of human rights .

This would not have happened had it not been for that small group of psychologists who stood up to tell the truth. The moral leadership of people like Jean Maria Arrigo, Steven Reisner, Stephen Soldz, Brad Olson, Roy Eidelson, and Frank Summers as well as all the others whose actions emboldened them to stay laser-focused on factual truth-telling despite being criticized and maligned or ignored is remarkable. Such leadership from the outside just may serve as a case example for how outsiders can save an organization from its own internal rot.

But there is much work still to be done. Gunslingers don’t become human rights activists overnight. The APA’s President-elect, Susan H. McDaniel, has already pledged to move the work forward. She has been quoted saying, “We have much work ahead as we change the culture of APA to be more transparent and much more focused on human rights.”

Or, as an exhausted Arrigo jokingly told me in a brief email exchange late on the day of the vote, “After the Wicked Witch of the East died, Dorothy still had to get back to Kansas.”

And with human rights prioritized over professional or political expediency, thanks to moral leadership from the outside, we just might be welcoming Dorothy back home.