Mental Health Foc us of Latest Tragedy

CT with some of strictest gun control laws in nation.

Mom with legal registered guns.

Son is 20, not a minor. But with problems. Intelligent, but 'socially backwards.' Shy. Not embraced by the rest of the tribe. Autism? Aspbergers?

Child of Divorce.

Single parent ... of barely adult child with mental health issues ... provides access to firearms, and she is first to pay the price. Shooting someone -- his mother -- in the face is a markedly personal act of hatred.

And then this damaged human gets in his dead mother's car which conveys him and his weapons for miles to a school where she was once an aid, and coldy guns down 5 year old children.

Shouldn't there be a hue and cry to ban automobiles, as well?

But not divorce, the real manufacturer of 20 yr old monsters.

No, that we need to embrace, because it is the most wildly embraced freedom. So let's look for freedoms we don't access, freedoms with distinct political agenda overtones and dry our teleprompter prompted tears on cue.

Post 1

Saturday, December 15, 2012 - 12:51pm

How long before the issue of 'mental health' becomes politicized?

Post 2

Saturday, December 15, 2012 - 1:24pm

I have always believed that good schools would be the place where monsters-in-the-making were spotted while there was still time to effect changes. But with government schools that isn't going to happen, and I wouldn't want them to be engaging in any diagnostic or treatment activities.

Branden included chapters in his Six Pillars book on helping kids with their self-esteem - one for teachers and one for parents. That is how a culture markedly decreases the number of kids who become more and more wacked out as they grow up. You spot the signs that they aren't using their consciousness correctly and that they aren't functioning correctly, and you get them help. And help can be made available to parents. But all of this would only work within a voluntary context - it isn't good to have government doing diagnosis, much less treatment - like Reagan said, "The scariest 9 words are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

Post 3

Saturday, December 15, 2012 - 1:50pm

Fred,

Mental health is the issue. It just isn't one we want government to get involved with.

When I mentioned Branden's 6 pillars book in the post above, I remembered that he also mentioned a 7th pillar. The will, and willingness to persist in exercising the 6 pillars (living consciously, being self-accepting, being assertive, etc.) and doing so in spite of the fact that they require effort, and often involve some short-term discomfort. He called this living heroically, or "summoning the hero within."

There is a strong causal relationship between those 6, and the 7th. The more consistently one practices them, the higher the self-esteem, and the higher the self-esteem the easier the 7th becomes. The more we behave heroically, even in very small ways, the easier it all becomes. Virtue is indeed a habit.

But there is something related to the heroic that is almost like an 8th pillar - but it isn't, because it comes from the outside and the person's job is to embrace it - to use it to emotionally refuel and to course-correct. It is about looking up to that which is heroic. It should live in the arts, literature, movies, hopefully in our friends, our mentors, our teachers, the events in history that inspire us - in a great many areas - and it is mostly about how we are encouraged to see things and our capacity to take them in.

It is about our moral compass on an emotional level. About our sense of life in terms of what we respect, admire, and want to emulate. This is far more critical for the development of a child than anything else.

In America we don't have strong family structures in many of our subcultures - and even in good families, the generation gap is greater than it should be, and peer pressure greater than it should be.

AND, we don't have a culture that respects the heroic - not any more.

It is best to have the combination of a strong and nurturing family, excellent role models at school, and a culture that presents the young with that which is good in man and in the in promise of a potentially benevolent universe which responds well to the heroic.

When we don't have good teachers, or a good culture or strong, nurturing families, then I'd expect a lot of broken people going off the tracks altogether as they grow up.

Post 4

Saturday, December 15, 2012 - 4:16pm

"Mental health" became politicized at least as long ago as the 1940s, though coerced treatment and commitment had been around long before. Thomas Szasz is the best source on this. Alan Turing's life story shows that the National Health brought such practices to England, too.

Post 5

Saturday, December 15, 2012 - 4:53pm

Thomas Szasz died a few months ago. He was a psychiatrist who claimed that there is no such thing as mental illness. He was a strong supporter of individual rights, and fought against government and professional abuse of patients.

But in terms of psychological theory he was totally off base. His position was that we only call things "mental illness" because we, as a culture, don't approve of them and that there is no such thing as mental illness.

An example would be his insistence that substance abuse should not be categorized as a mental disorder because people have the right to take drugs, and society only labels it a disorder because it is a behavior they disapprove of. Well, the person owns their own body so they should have the right to do what they want with it, but that doesn't mean that they are behaving rationally, or don't have a dysfunctional pattern of thinking and behaving that it makes sense to categorize as a mental disorder since it harms them.

Branden did an excellent job of laying down a philosophy of psychology (most of the first half of The Psychology of Self-Esteem) which describes the standards by which one determines what is mental health and what is mental illness.

Post 6

Monday, December 17, 2012 - 11:01am

Szasz demonstrated that there is no such thing as mental illness and the mind as such cannot be ill. You can have organic brain damage which is always a physical disease such as in mental retardation. The concept of mind is an invented abstraction to describe a thinking process. No brain surgeon has ever located a 'mind.'
Wolfer's comments on Branden are laughable as Szasz totally destroys Branden's premises in Chapter 9 of Faith In Freedom:Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices.
Szasz goes on to shred Brandenian inventions like 'social metaphysics,' 'volitional consciousness,'and 'psycho-epistemology.'
Rather than reinvent the wheel here I would urge libertarians to purchase this book from Amazon. There is an interesting lengthy exchange between Marcy Hardesty and James Valliant after Valliant some brief snide remarks attacking Justin Raimondo's biography of Rothbard.This is in the comments section of the reviews of the Szasz book.
Szasz rips into Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Nozick, Hayek and other libertarians on the issue of psychiatry.
But his harshest criticism is reserved for Branden.
Book was published in 2004 by Transaction Books in New Brunswick, NJ and London, England.

Post 7

Monday, December 17, 2012 - 5:53pm

You haven't shown yourself to be much of a salesman. You want us to read this book, but you don't really tell us why - i.e. you don't tell us how it would fit our intellectual interests and what we would learn from it. We've all heard assertions like these; what would make the book interesting to the RoR audience is some indication of how Szasz argues for these claims.

Post 8

Monday, December 17, 2012 - 8:12pm

Goddard wrote,

The concept of mind is an invented abstraction to describe a thinking process. No brain surgeon has ever located a 'mind.'

The concept of mind is not invented in the sense that it has no referent in reality. And the definition of 'mind' must expand to be more than just 'a thinking processes.' There is volition, personal identity, and character.

Medical disorders are often defined in terms of the process that isn't working correctly, i.e., digestive disorders, auto-immune disorders, etc. These are physical processes and the causes are most often physical as well. To say that there can not be a thinking process that is disordered seems very strange to me. Physical processes are certainly not always pro-health.

Goddard says that no brain surgeon has ever located a 'mind' but that is either false (I know several neurosurgeons that concern themselves with the mental state of the patient as well as with the physical structures of the brain), or it's just a foolish non sequitur, like if I were to say that no mental health therapist has never encountered a brain stem. Duh.

It appears that Goddard "chooses" to believe there is no such thing as choice - a hard determinist's position. I have never understood how those who argue from this position can make calls for freedom. If no one can choose, what IS freedom?

What specifically has Rand or Branden said that goes against freedom? Perhaps Goddard will do something more than make unsubstantiated, personal attacks and offer a real argument.

Post 9

Monday, December 17, 2012 - 8:56pm

Goddard, You mentioned the "interesting lengthy exchange between Marcy Hardesty and James Valliant" in the Amazon.com review of the book. Those two had little of value to offer about the book, or about the issues you have raised. They both seemed preoccupied with their own peculiar brand of name-dropping and gossiping about personalities of the past rather than ideas. You found THAT interesting?

Post 10

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 5:25am

Fred wrote:

"But not divorce, the real manufacturer of 20 yr old monsters."

Care to elaborate? Plenty of children of divorce do not turn into monsters. Other children of intact marriages do. So please substantiate this claim.

Post 11

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 5:47am

http://www.mercatornet.com/mobile/view/these_tragedies_must_end
Some obvious flaws, but some interesting points of view if you can get past some of the obvious icky religious bits.

Post 12

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 7:40am

Thanks for the link, Jules. I think the author is so riddled with mysticism as to make his analysis deeply flawed. So I will try my own.

I think the correlation between broken homes and mass murderers stems from a deeper "root" cause that goes beyond the "proximate" cause of divorce. Using Ayn Rand's notion of "evasion as the root of evil," I contend that the root cause of divorce, mass murder, etc. is evasion. The divorce may "predict" but not "cause" the mass murderer's psychological development. I personally see no good reason to force a couple to stay together due to this correlative but not causative relationship.

That said, divorce itself happens in part because it is so easy to get married in the first place. If marriage were as difficult as divorce, there would be fewer marriages but more unwed mothers. These latter have their own correlations to social ills though not necessarily causative ones. Getting laid is so easy and so accepted these days that unwed mothers seem an inevitable consequence.

I have no easy and ready answers but I want to avoid the argument favoring divorce as a root cause since it is a red herring easily used by mystics to support the maintenance of unhappy marriages.

Post 13

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 11:11am

Luke:

Over three hundred million Americans survive all kinds of stress without misbehaving; the context is, the causes of fringe stress at the edges, the forces which push those already on the edge right over and create fringe mayhem.

Sure, plenty -- most even -- survive the breakup of their parents in divorce. But it is a total rationalization to claim that kids are happy about these events, or indifferent, or are not often deeply scarred by the breakups. I know many more examples of kids of divorce who are a mess than not. Drugs. Failure to engage. Peter Pan Syndrome. Suicide attempts. 32 year old children, never quite whole from the experience of seeing their parents split at the age of 6.

I understand this is the new norm in America. 50% of marriages, and pushing 80% of marriages with children who are special needs end in divorce. You go to the local Special Olympics, and you will find plenty of Adam's Mom's at the end of their ropes, wrestling with the guardianship issue-- and, that is just the tiny subset of such children that are actually clinically diagnosed with some medical condition, genetic deletion, or syndrome. It doesn't begin to address the real epidemic -- the distraught parents of children who are just 'a little' different, with absolutely no diagnosis of anything, but subject to the out of all control over-normalization of the Tribe.

Adam was "devastated" by the 2009 breakup of his parents. 50-80% of those of us married might want to uncomfortably sprint by that, but we shouldn't. It's been reported that she was in the middle of pursuing legal guardianship for this 20 yr old, so that she could legally have him committed. Maybe in some Shonda Rhimes dufus fantasy, hip kids actually love it when their parents get divorced, but I've never actually seen an example of that in real life. Ever. In real life, I get frantic calls from Divorced Dad because his son threatened to kill himself and can't be found. I listen to Divorced Mom's cry because they discovered their twenty something daughter has been cutting herself ... twenty years after the divorce.

It's not OK to bring kids into the world as a couple, then leave them bleeding on the battlefields of our failed marriages(sorry-- "unhappy marriages." What kind of a reptiliean fucking idiot brings children into an unhappy marriage? Accidental coitus? What the Hell is that? Coitus 'mystically' governed by our Holy Intentions?)

It is totally fucked up, no matter how many of us do it. It is not healthy, liberating, or enlightened, or better for the children in the long run.

It is fucked up, period.

regards,
Fred

(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 12/20, 11:50am)

Post 14

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 12:09pm

Nice rant, Fred, and with substance to boot.

Now what fix do you propose?

Will it include provisions for unmarried couples with children?

That the latter can part company more easily than the traditional marriage already just encourages more people to reproduce without marriage.

How many mass murderers come from "never married" homes?

Does the false expectation of "happily ever after" create more problems than it solves?

Post 15

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 7:34pm

A lot in this thread is speculation. There is trouble when you attempt to go from a single case to the norm or back the other way. It may be that divorce doubles, triples, or even quadruples the risk of harmful behavior in kids -- but it's difficult to pin it down as the cause here. I have a guy friend who is in divorce court right now. Though I have a dog in that fight, I want to express the opinion that "she" is a monster. Hell hath no fury. Imagine a woman who wanted custody of children for the purpose of causing psychological harm to them. Evil exists. To meet the speculation already in this thread with some of my own brand of speculation, this tragic event may be a case of a terribly evil woman (his mother), and the played-out consequences of that evil.*

Read M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie for details.

Ed
*Perhaps the right information will surface and we will discover whether the mother was evil or not, or whether the divorce was crucial or not.

Post 16

Friday, December 21, 2012 - 7:45am

Ed:

From observation, the breakup of marriages with children is -usually- mainly the result of the actions of one parent, not both. The reason being, bringing children into the world -is- a huge responsibility widely taken seriously, and it is rare that two people would simultaneously wax reptilian("Can I hump it? Will it hump me?")at the same moment. Piers Morgan with a hot career in the UK and three boys at home between the ages of 8 and 15, about to become victims of Piers' intense reptilian desire to rub one out with the strange.)

I was involved in a failed marriage. We were young, and had put off having children. And that divorce was sad, but not contentious in the least. In fact, nearly painless. We split on good terms and moved on to what we both wanted out of life, which was not the same thing.

And I thank God we didn't leave children behind. Would/could I have done that? Clearly yes, looking at the vast human evidence. I don't know how reptilian I could have been, and can't say that I wouldn't have. But I do know it would have been wrong, a disaster. And I do know, I would have been able to rationalize my reasons away.

I've never seen a divorce that involved children that wasn't painful, contentious, and with long lasting and lingering lifetime impact, not just on the kids, but on the parents and extended families and extended para-legal families.

We don't fix that with a law. Our culture is broken. Enough of us have to soberly stare at that activity and stop rationalizing it away as OK simply because it is epidemic and widespread. And, if not enough of us do, then it simply continues to be -one of- the contributors to fringe mayhem at the edges, where unlike the vast majority of folks who weather all such influences without becoming mass murderers(if we discount suicide attempts, self-injury, and other forms of abuse that seldom makes the front pages), a few inevitable fringe get pushed over the edge by a confluence of interests like that.

But the -real- context of my bringing this up is not 'how do we eliminate rare fringe mayhem caused by life's stresses and human failures.' That is secondary, and we can drive the entire nation crazy with such attempts. The context(on another thread) was 'how do we understand the inner demons driving Piers Morgan in his current high volume public tear.'

regards,
Fred

(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 12/21, 10:25am)

Post 17

Friday, December 21, 2012 - 4:37pm

Fred,

We have more in common than I had imagined. I'll check out the thread on Piers Morgan ...

Ed

Post 18

Saturday, December 22, 2012 - 10:46am

Ed:

You need to be careful, or else you will end up a grumpy old grey haired guy.

I was married way too young (Jr. in college, 21). We'd been together since HS, and stayed married for almost 6 yrs. So, we were together nearly 10 years. We both wanted kids, but both had careers, too; we just put them off for a while. And the stress that mainly(I think, because I can't think of anything else)broke us up was external and -- well, really bizarre. Like, I'm writing a book bizarre, 30 yrs later. I was the dumpee, not the dumper. When she broke the news to me--on her birthday--, I was shocked. But then, my being shocked was evidence to me that maybe she was right. See? You can rationalize anything.

She was/is a great girl, landed on her feet, happily married, as am I.

But...daughter of acquaintance brutally murdered, unsolved to this day. Another close acquaintance of ours possibly involved(she was being stalked to shut up about what she knew), and -she- disappeared from the face of the earth 30 yrs ago, two years after the murder. The last day we saw her was at her -commitment- hearing, where she had asked us to come testify on her behalf...where we and about 30 other of her friends learned that she was a multiple; most of us knew her by different name and background! (This is someone who'd been in our wedding party...the executive secretary of the man whose daughter had been murdered...)

Anyway, all of that and much more --bizarreness- caused us both to re-evaluate our lives; what did we want? Was this it? Or, maybe we just wanted new friends who weren't MPD and possibly involved in a brutal murder. Like, hitting the reset button on your life when it becomes too remotely bizarre to deal with and you cant solve the riddle no matter how hard you try...

There was no infidelity or strife or even anger. It was just kind of sad. In fact...we kind of maintained a relationship(even sexual relationship; how usual is that for a divorce?)for a few months after our breakup, until we both decided to start seeing other people. It was easy...almost painless. We had no children. We had made a grand tour of our friends to announce and toast our pending divorce over dinners...and it was truly bizarre, because we weren't at each others throats. (Our friends would stare at us like we'd just landed from mars..Huh?... and we'd laugh.) But we were just.. kind of emotionally washed out and questioning everything, and at least part of that, I am convinced, was due to the bizarre circumstances around that still unsolved murder.

The story in total is just ... mind boggling. (example: the victims brother, a sophomore at college, frustrated over the lack of progress in the case, told his father he was going to spread a (false) rumor that he knew who the killers were, to try and draw them out; within months-- less than six months after his sister had been brutally murdered--, -he- died in a freak gasoline explosion at the garage he worked at part time, and in spite of the obvious motive, it was ruled 'probably an accident...' !?!?!?!

But, that is a tiny fraction of the bizarre events surrounding that murder(a 17 yr old girl, the daughter of someone who my ex worked with in a small sales office), and hence...the book. Fall of 2015 is my current schedule.

The murder happened on the first day of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident...March 28, 1979, which in some theories of the murder, plays into the events.

I couldn't make that stuff up, and that is barely a fraction of it.

Re; Piers Morgan. Not a whole thread, just some rant of mine on the "Beautiful blue eyed blond..." thread.

regards,
Fred

Post 19

Saturday, December 22, 2012 - 1:54pm