They were ridiculed and sidelined by the leadership of the American Psychological Association, which they accused of complicity in human rights abuses. When the association voted to ban psychologists from these activities on Friday, the rebels scored an improbable — and emotional — victory.

TORONTO — They call themselves "the dissidents." Officially, they are the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. In reality, they're just six psychologists united by a shared moral outrage at their profession's involvement in torture. Last month, these tenacious rebels were vindicated by a damning independent report, which concluded that the American Psychological Association (APA) colluded with the Pentagon to allow psychologists to help U.S. military interrogators employing brutal methods on terrorist suspects. On Friday morning, amid emotional scenes, the APA's governing Council of Representatives overwhelmingly backed the dissidents' proposal to ban psychologists from taking part in national security interrogations. That the rebels stuck together for so long, in the face of the powerful forces ranged against them, is remarkable — especially given their own differences. "We did not come together as like-minded people or friends," Jean Maria Arrigo, the whistleblower who the group coalesced around, told BuzzFeed News. Arrigo is an independent social psychologist from California who has formed close ties with Army interrogators who oppose torture. Some of her colleagues, meanwhile, are pacifists who wouldn't dream of collaborating with anyone from the military. "We have fights about this," Arrigo said. "We do not tend to ideological conformity."

Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News Jean Maria Arrigo

The coalition came together in the wake of the APA's Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), which issued the 2005 report that has thrown psychology into crisis. Arrigo was a member, but quickly came to the view that the task force was a sham. It came up with no firm rules to prohibit psychologists from being involved in interrogations using the harsh methods — including sleep deprivation, isolation, and painful "stress positions" — that were being used at CIA "black sites" and the U.S. military's detention camp at Guantánamo. "I was manipulated into the task force and then lied to with the result that I became complicit," Arrigo told the APA meeting on Wednesday. "Even though I'm an introvert and would rather be reading poetry, I had to take this moral stand." Also driven by outrage about psychology's failure to distance itself from what was happening to detainees in the "war on terror" were Steven Reisner, a New York psychoanalyst, Stephen Soldz of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and Brad Olson, a psychologist at National Louis University in Chicago. That core group was later joined by Roy Eidelson, a consulting psychologist in Pennsylvania, and Trudy Bond, a counselling psychologist from Ohio. She opened a new front by filing ethics complaints with the APA and state psychological associations against psychologists who had worked at Guantánamo. The group came under repeated attack from the APA's leadership. In a 2006 column in the association's magazine, then-President Gerald Koocher criticized "opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars" who were alleging abuses by mental health professionals. The following year, after Arrigo appeared on the radio and television program Democracy Now, Koocher issued an open letter alleging that she was biased by the "sad emotional aftermath of a troubled upbringing" and the suicide of her father. It was an astonishing claim, given Arrigo's father was alive at the time. Realizing that any mistake they made would be seized upon, the coalition became obsessive in fact-checking its statements. "When Soldz and Reisner put something out, I know that it is right," Arrigo told BuzzFeed News. "I can put my life on it." Worse than the attacks, Eidelson told BuzzFeed News, was simply being ignored. He took on the job of sending each of the group's statements to every member of the APA's Council of Representatives. "I'd send to 175 email addresses and wait for the silence," Eidelson said. "It would often feel like an exercise in futility, but I would do it anyway."

Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News Brad Olson