Category Archives: Psychiatry

School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem

Education, Kids, Logic, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

The NEW COLUMN IS “School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem.” It’s now on WND.com. An excerpt:

The tele-experts assert that to do what he did—kill 10 and maim 13, at Santa Fe High School, in Texas—Dimitrios Pagourtzis had to be insane.

Likewise, Nikolas Cruz—killer of 17 in Parkland, Florida—and many shooters before him: All were victims of mental disorder. Or, so say the experts.

Come to think of it, the structure of argument coming from conservative and progressive corners is the same:

Conservatives blame mental health.

Progressives blame the National Rifle Association.

Both factions see the locus of responsibility for these murder sprees as beyond the reach and bailiwick of the individual and of what were once formative and corrective institutions: the church, for example.

As the language deployed in the culture might suggest, crimes aren’t committed, but are caused. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to do their deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors.

The paradox at the heart of the disease theory of delinquency is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds, however extravagant, are in no need of extenuation.

The evidence our tele-therapists advance for a killer’s “madness” is … the murder or murders he has committed.

Whatever the logical fallacy the psychiatrists commit—circular reasoning or backward reasoning—thinking people can agree: This is bad logic.

Fact: When they suggest a shooter is sick, they do so based on the fact that he committed murder.

Let’s run with this “logic”: The reductio ad absurdum of what the mental-health mavens are saying is that to kill, an individual must be deranged.

Does that not imply that the default condition of humanity is goodness?

Indeed, evil has been cast as a symptom of illness. It’s certainly so if to judge by the language used by the experts. …

… READ THE REST. “School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem” is on WND.com. And on The Unz Review, Constitution.com., etc.

Another Kennedy Crime: Child Abuse: Institutionalizing, Lobotomizing & Never Visiting Sister Rosemary Kennedy

Criminal Injustice, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Relatives

Other than that she was not “perfect” like her siblings; there was nothing terribly wrong with gorgeous Rosemary Kennedy. She had learning disabilities. But Rosary looked lovely and was a sweet child.

Alas, she “never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence.”

WHICH BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, YOU’VE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL.

Still, after being locked up in “a boarding school for misfits,” she was smart enough to pen a heartbreaking (grammatical) letter to her ruthless father, patriarch Joe Kennedy:

Darling Daddy, I hate to disappoint you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day.

Are these the words of an irredeemably retarded girl?

The rest of her life reads like a Medieval horror story. This is worse than genital mutilation, which can be survived. The bloody Kennedy clan was never implicated in decades of cruelty:

In November 1941 Dr. James Watts carried out a frontal lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy’s brain at a facility in upstate New York.

A psychiatrist present at the lobotomy asked Rosemary to tell him stories and repeat the months of the year. The doctor kept scraping away brain tissue until Rosemary could no longer talk.

Only then did Dr. Watts stop.

Following the lobotomy Rosemary could barely walk and knew only a few words. She would spend most of her life hidden away from the world and even her own family.

Such was the price the young Kennedy girl paid because her parents feared her condition would puncture the perfect impression of the relentlessly ambitious Kennedy clan.

Kate Clifford Larson revealed a host of new sources for her story of the tragic Rosemary for her book “The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,”published last year.

It is a book that shows Joe and Rose Kennedy in a dreadful light, prepared to sacrifice their daughter for their sons’ political careers.

Larson says that right from the beginning, when the obstetrician who was to deliver Rosemary was several hours late and a nurse botched the birth, Rosemary Kennedy was deeply unlucky.

By kindergarten Rosemary was called “retarded,” in the lingo of the times, and such children were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image, it was a disaster.

Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence and she was packed off to a boarding school for misfits.

From there she wrote her father a heartbreaking letter as Larson reveals: “Darling Daddy, I hate to disappoint you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day.”

Rosemary finally caught a break when her father became Ambassador to Britain and she thrived in a London convent school. But back in the States, Rosemary, a stunning looking girl, began attracting admirers. At twenty she was “a picturesque young woman, a snow princess with flush cheeks, gleaming smile, plump figure, and a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met.”

As Larson writes, “Her parents found her sexuality dangerous.”

In early 1941 Joe learned about frontal lobotomy, then coming into vogue, which allegedly “calmed” hyperactive patients.

Joe Kennedy ordered the surgery done immediately.

Later, Joe and Rose told all who asked that Rosemary was teaching at a school for handicapped students in the Midwest. In fact, she was in a home in Wisconsin, had the mind of a two-year-old, and was unable to do anything for herself.

After Joe Kennedy’s stroke Rose went to meet the daughter she had abandoned. When Rosemary saw her mother she ran to her then began beating her mother’s chest in deep distress crying and moaning.

It seemed, despite all the covering up, she still remembered her and what had been done to her.

The other Kennedy children also learned the truth and adopted an entirely different approach, visiting Rosemary and bringing her to Boston on many occasions.

Eunice Kennedy based her creation of the Special Olympics on Rosemary. She broke the family’s silence on Rosemary in the Saturday Evening Post, but it was not until 1987 that the story of the lobotomy became public.

Rosemary Kennedy was never allowed to live any kind of life by her ambitious parents, but in the end how she was treated by them, especially Joe, says far more about him than anything about her.

She just had the misfortune to be a Kennedy in an era when mental retardation was a large and ugly secret. She died in 2005 and, ironically, we have learned far more about her since her death than when she was alive and this new book adds valuable knowledge.

From: “The sad and dreadful life of Rosemary Kennedy.”

Harvey Sweinstein Is Evil, Not ILL

Feminism, Hollywood, Morality, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

For once and for all, conservatives will have to reject outright the illness model of misbehavior if they want to hold on to their delicious outrage over Harvey Weinstein’s exploits.

If you’ve sexually assaulted individuals, you’ve committed a crime. You’re not sick; you’re just a SOB.

Sexual compulsion, like drug addiction, is a misbehavior, not a disease. It certainly does not compel crime. Human beings as moral agents are expected to control their impulses. If they don’t, you punish them. If they can’t; you have them locked up (after due process) for the protection of others .

There is a price for using the therapeutic idiom for crimes or misdemeanors. The price is the medicalization of misconduct. Punishment, then, becomes problematic. For if the offender is seen as without an ability to form the intent to harm—how do you justify punishing him?

Punish evil, don’t exculpate it. The idea of rehab for Harvey is as laughable as the notion that Harvey Sweinstein is deprived, rather than depraved.

Practice: Is this red-carpet celebrity “sick,” in need of a group hug, or just an exhibitionist and a slut? (Feminists will tell you she has the right to walk around like this and expect the Harveys of the world to behave around her. But that’s for another day.) Ol’ Harvey’s was not exactly surrounded by upstanding women. Hollywood hos are not as the sanctimonious Sean Hannity portrays them (“naive, innocent young things”).

UPDATE II (6/22): THE WAR ON TRUMP: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals

Bush, Business, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Russia

“THE WAR ON TRUMP: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals” is the current column, now on Daily Caller. It connects the atavistic dynamic undergirding two wars waged by the American establishment. An excerpt:

Periodically, America experiences episodes of mass, hysterical contagion.

What is “hysterical contagion”? A sociologist explains it as the spread of symptoms of an illness among a group, absent any physiological disease. It provides a way of coping with a situation that cannot be handled with the usual coping mechanism.

For example, in 1983, girls in the West Bank fell ill, one after the other. Soon, all the schools and finally the entire community was engulfed, affected with the same symptoms. Arab doctors implicated the Israelis. But of course. The Israeli Occupation had poisoned the girls by gas to reduce their fertility. When real doctors arrived on the scene to examine the neurotics; the girls were pronounced physically healthy.

The frenzied behavior known as mass hysteria or hysterical contagion is well documented. The Trump-Russia “collusion,” “obstruction of justice” probe qualifies, with an exception: This particular form of mass madness involves a meme, a story-line, rather than the physical symptoms observed in the West Bank.

Rumor recounted as fact for which no evidence can possibly be adduced: Indeed, the Establishment and opposition elites have poisoned the country’s collective consciousness. However, it’s the emotional pitch with which the Trump-Russia collusion group-think is delivered, day in and day out, that has gripped and inflamed irrational, febrile minds.

What sociology terms “a collective preoccupation” is fueled by organizational- and communication networks. Friendship networks (the liberal kind) and work organizations (government departments infested with like-minded individuals) serve as nodes in a system that transmits faulty signals across the synapses of this collective, damaged brain.

The storyline du jour is manufactured by America’s gilded elites. During the era of Bush II, DC operative Karl Rove put it plainly: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

When you’re the most powerful entity in the world, as the US government certainly is—the only government to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations (“good” bombs, because dropped by the US)—you get to manufacture your own parallel universe with its unique rules of evidence and standards of proof. What’s more, as the mightiest rule-maker, you can coerce other earthlings into “sharing” your alternate reality. Or else.

The manufacturing of Fake News by the Deep State, circa 2017, is of a piece with the anatomy of the ramp-up to war in Iraq, in 2003. (Chronicled in achingly painful detail in Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture.) Except that back then, Republicans, joined by diabolical Democrats like Hillary Clinton, were the ones dreaming up Homer Simpson’s Third Dimension.

Conscripted into America’s reality, Iraqis paid the price of this terrible American concoction. Hundreds of thousands of them were displaced and killed due to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Because of Fake News generated so effectively by the likes of Judith Chalabi Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter at the time, American soldiers paid dearly, as well. Miller shilled for that war over the pages of the New York Times like there was no tomorrow. She’s now a Fox News “specialist.”

To manufacture consent, elements in the intelligence community worked with neoconservative counterparts in Bush 43’s administration, in particularity with “the Office of Special Plans.” And while Fake News babes did wonders to sex up the cause of senseless killing—the dissemination of Fake News, vis-a-vis Iraq, was hardly the exclusive province of Fox News. With some laudable exceptions, Big Media all was tuned-out, turned-on and hot for war.

Now, it’s all-out war on Trump. Then it was war on Iraq. …

… READ THE REST. “THE WAR ON TRUMP: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals” is now on Daily Caller.

UPDATE (6/20/017): I’ll be on: The Bill Meyer Show (southern Oregon’s AM-1440 KMED). Day: June 21, 2017. Time: 8:10 AM PST. Topic: “The War On Trump: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals.”

UPDATE II (6/22): Neocons, statists and party loyalists (categories not mutually exclusive) will reject the thesis is this column. It’s to be expected. (I still thank them for reading.) The column, after all, touches on a deeper truth.

The column was titled more accurately on a libertarian site thus:

“Beware The Atavistic Dynamics Undergirding Two American Wars.”

Open yourself up to seeing the way our mindless establishment—media-military-government, cheering only for itself—stumbles about the world, on “our behalf”; and you’ll come closer to freedom.