Category Archives: Psychiatry

UPDATED: Philip Chism, Killer Kid (Allegedly)

Crime, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Reason

“He wasn’t violent at all. He was really the opposite of agressive [sic].” Predictably, that’s how a classmate has described a black, 14-year-old, who murdered his white math teacher, near Boston, Massachusetts.

Philip Chism, the alleged killer, was clearly aggressive enough to kill.

The other options the idiocracy will opt for—they set the parameters of the debate on crime—are 1) racism. The white teacher’s or the white kids’, but never the black student’s. When blacks take the life of a white, it is never taken as a sign of racial hatred.

2) An “illness.” From “EVIL, NOT ILL”:

the tele-experts, understandably self-serving, … work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. … conjuring so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances.

This mode of thinking amounts to backward logic. It’s logically fallacious.

Poor Colleen Ritzer was only 24. This beloved teacher had “graduated magna cum laude from Assumption College in Massachusetts with a math degree.”

UPDATE (Oct. 24): “A law-enforcement source said authorities believe Chism attacked Ritzer with a box cutter. The source said the boy was seen on school security video pushing a large recycling bin, which authorities believe he used to take her body outside.”

More.

Wanna Die? Get Real Animated In Public

Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Liberty, Psychiatry, The State

Whatever you do, don’t gesture wildly in public, limp or act spastic. People around you could die. Those who swore to “To Protect and to Serve” all Americans—the halt and the lame too—may just take a potshot in your general direction. This is what happened to one New Yorker:

The 35-year-old man was behaving erratically, standing in the middle of a busy intersection and unsuccessfully weaving his way through the cars, when police confronted him around 9:30 p.m. Saturday night. “He tried to run and ended up getting hit by three different cars,” one witness told The New York Times. Or, perhaps, some think he was trying to be hit. “It appeared that he wanted to be struck by cars,” New York Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly said at a press conference early Sunday morning. There was some debate as to whether he had actually been hit by any cars. But there was little debate concerning his mental state. “He definitely looked like he was high on something or was mentally off. He couldn’t walk in a straight line. He was limping and jerking his legs around,” one witness told the New York Daily News.

“While officers were attempting to subdue him, [he] ‘reached into his pocket, took out his hand, and simulated as if he was shooting at them,’ Kelly told reporters. One officer fired a single shot and missed; another fired two rounds and missed.”

The militarized police force in action.

Our town has a “madman”; a young man who cannot stop waving his arms, gesturing frantically and praising the Lord loudly. Local businesses often harness his exuberance; they give him ad signs to hold up on street corners. He has boundless energy and enthusiasm, and is quite beautiful; his biblical-length locks tumbling down his shoulders. To think he may be imperiled. …

UPDATED: ‘See a Shrink, Lose Your Guns’ (And To Hell With HIPAA)

Government, Individual Rights, Law, Psychiatry, Regulation

“Expect a reduction in the use of counseling services among gun owners,” BAB warned on December 24, 2012. If he thinks that his doctor is likely to pass on information about his mental state to federal or state authorities, how likely is a gun owner to seek help for psychological/marital/familial problems? Not very likely.”

And indeed a troika of traitors—Senators Pat Toomey (R) and Joe Manchin (D), with Chuck Schumer working behind the scenes—are seeking “an amendment in the bill to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act),” caution the Gun Owners of America.

“…you could have your guns taken away because your private shrink thinks you’re ‘dangerous’ and could send your name directly to the FBI Instant Check system. Did you think it was terrible that 150,000 military veterans had been added into the NICS system because they’d seen a VA shrink about their PTSD? Well guess what? Now it’s going to happen to the rest of the population … by the millions!”

As with all government regulation, there will be unintended consequences that’ll immeasurably compound the problem the proposed, new gun legislation is intended to “remedy.”

Fearing the loss of a natural right to self defense, individuals will avoid seeking help for life’s stressors.

UPDATE: TO HELL WITH HIPAA. “HIPAA Laws,” reports The Blaze, “are likely being compromised and the 4th and 5th Amendments violated,” as New York gestapo proceed to confiscate “weapons and permits where someone has been prescribed psychotropic drugs.”

Diagnosed With … Gun Incompatibility Disorder

GUNS, Individual Rights, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Regulation

Scarcely had the cowardly attack on kids in Newtown, Con., transpired than forces on the left and right began clamoring to restrain “predisposed” individuals before they transgressed.

Any sweeping prior-restraint legal efforts will have “unintended” consequences. Since undesirable outcomes will follow such laws as night follows day—one wonders why they’re considered “unintended” or unforeseeable.

Expect a reduction in the use of counseling services among gun owners. If he thinks that his doctor is likely to pass on information about his mental state to federal or state authorities, how likely is a gun owner to seek help for psychological/marital/familial problems?

Not very likely.

The Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the Rosetta Stone of the profession, has grown since its inception in the 1950s from 60 categories of abnormal behavior to over 410 diagnostic labels and counting. Many of the disorders described in it are more about trend and niche than science.

In the late 1990s, I told readers of my Calgary Herald column about one Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard associate professor and a well-respected, prominent psychiatrist, who claimed, in his 1997 book Shadow Syndromes, that quirky behaviors were actually mild mental illnesses resulting from brain dysfunction.

The lout who is appropriately obsequious with the boss because he knows where his bread is buttered, but who is less dainty with the wife, even thumping her occasionally, would be a candidate for compassion. He is after all doing battle with what Dr. Ratey terms “Intermittent Rage Disorder”. And the dad who dotes on his children while they are with him, but fails to mail them child support money as soon as they are out of sight, is simply afflicted with “Environmental Dependency Disorder”: He remembers his kids only when they are around. Is there proof for these sub-rosa disease categories? None whatsoever, although this has not prevented Ratey and many like him from coating their pronouncements with a patina of scientific respectability—and then cashing in.

Given the tenuous ties between psychiatry and science, how likely is it that “evidence” for new diagnoses will be marshaled in order to keep more people from being able to defend their lives and loved ones with guns?

Very likely.