Posts Tagged ‘connect the dots’
Medicalization of dissent in neo-theocratic states
Breaking hiatus a day after I announced it is bad form, I know, but I can’t sit on this until April. Luckily for me, I don’t have to actually write anything; the articles speak for themselves.
Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia (Russian: вялотекущая шизофрения; vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya) was a category of schizophrenia diagnosed by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. At the time, Western psychiatry recognized only four types of schizophrenia: catatonic, hebephrenic, paranoid, and simple.
The diagnostic criteria for this fifth category were so vague that it could be applied to virtually any person not suffering from mental function impairment and having interests beyond survival needs. The diagnosis was sometimes applied to dissidents who were not in fact mentally ill, so that they could be forcibly hospitalized in mental institutions and subjected to treatments including powerful antipsychotics and electroconvulsive therapy.
Three tables separated Anders Behring Breivik and psychiatrists Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim. The killer’s left arm was constrained by a belt around his stomach, and his feet were fettered. Two prison guards watched over him as he sat for 13 sessions with the psychiatrists.
The two ultimately diagnosed Breivik with paranoid schizophrenic psychosis.
This week Korean-American KPOP songwriter Jenny Hyun had some interesting Twitter comments regarding blacks. It started when black boxer Floyd Mayweather belittled the achivemenets of Asian basketball star Jeremy Lin.
…She has been admitted to a mental hospital – seriously. (For paranoid schizophrenia, of all things. – nyd.)
One night in October 2009, a team of police officers, led by a deputy chief, raided the home of a police officer named Adrian Schoolcraft, and dragged him out of his bed and to the psychiatric emergency room at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. He was held for six days in a locked ward. No judge was involved. There was no hearing.
The decision to take him to the hospital was made solely by armed men who happened to be his superior officers in the Police Department with a vested interest in shutting him up.
For more than a year, Officer Schoolcraft had been collecting information about what appeared to be illegal arrests and manipulation of crime statistics in the 81st Precinct, in Brooklyn. Along the way, he secretly recorded orders from supervisors to lock up people without cause. He also documented cases in which armed robberies were classified as “lost property” cases. A few weeks before he was seized in his home, he met with investigators for the Internal Affairs Bureau and told them about what he had uncovered. He began recording after his bosses accused him of loafing because he was not meeting their goals for arrests and summonses.
Connect the dots: Narcissism in America
Due to various interruptions from the strange land of real life, mostly midterms and the transformation of my sleep schedule into something not even remotely worthy of the term ‘schedule’, I have not been able to write a full post recently. Instead, take these quotes and connect the dots. There’s not much I could add here anyway; the point should be clear enough.
If I were to speechify to a conclave of Tea Partyers, “America is the free-est…the most democratic…the best educated and most dynamic country the world has ever known, an example to all mankind,” the assembled would hoot and hooroar and applaud in dizzy exaltation. Here is the soul of the American approach to existence, bottomless self-admiration devoid of knowledge or curiosity, wrapped like a psychic burrito in the patriotism of overwrought middle-schoolers. And there are many, many of them.
…
Americans believe this stuff. There is probably no one in France, and here I include asylums, drains, and morgues, who could be so narcissistically stupid.
Christopher Lasch: (quoting from the Wikipedia summary because I don’t have my copy of the book at hand)
The book proposes that post-war, late-capitalist America, through the effects of “organized kindness” on the traditional family structure, has produced a personality-type consistent with clinical definitions of “pathological narcissism”. This pathology is not akin to everyday narcissism — a hedonistic egoism — but rather a very weak sense of self requiring constant external validation.
The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.
The friend of popular Governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice [faction]. … The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular Governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.
