_________________________________________________________________
VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 PSYCHNEWS INTERNATIONAL Sept/Oct 1998
-- AN ONLINE PUBLICATION --
_________________________________________________________________
SECTION H: LETTERS
_________________________________________________________________
Note: Please submit all contributions or
corrections for the letter section to
the PsychNews Int'l mailbox:
psychnews@psychologie.de
_________________________________________________________________
BEYOND INSANITY, OR TOWARDS INHUMANITY?
Ian Vine, C.Psychol, A.F.B.Ps.S
INTRODUCTION
In voicing my distaste for Amos M. Gunsberg's article which
purports to discuss 'psychopaths' in 'Beyond Insanity', PsychNews
Int'l 2(5)#4: Article II, Oct.-Dec. 1997], I must refrain from
accusing him of xenophobic prejudice against a tragically ill-
socialized human minority. I have to suppose he would insist that
such an objection would miss the whole point of his piece.
Yet I must invite fellow professionals to envisage its
possible impacts upon Internet-surfers who come across his style
of rhetoric. Some might be either bitterly aggrieved victims or
close relatives of someone with such a diagnosis - others could
even be psychopaths about to start therapy. In a world of
insecure electronic communications, pirated and edited versions
of Gunsberg's article might be devoured avidly on sites whose
readers are very differently motivated from the intended
PsychNews audience. Do such possibilities not make it imperative
that we show restraint in our own use of psychological language?
DEADLY RIDICULE
My own too rapid first reading of Gunsberg's tirade may be
instructive. I felt escalating horror that any behavioural
scientist or therapist could hold such venomous views about
anyone. My first thought was that the Bosnian Serbs are not
alone in harbouring those with evident contempt for the
psychological equivalent of a Hippocratic oath of impartial
caring concern. A careful re-reading showed that in one sense
the joke was on me, for not spotting immediately that the
piece had to have ironical intent. Its publication in the
PsychNews can only be credible if seen as an attempted, but
in my view very clumsy satire.
Gunsberg's convoluted and overplayed metaphor invokes the
label 'psychopath' to flail at insidious forms of aggressive
in-group defensiveness. It then turns its weapons onto other
manifestations of what the author sees as similarly irrational
thinking. I have no interest in siding either way in an
apparently sordid squabble involving Gestalt therapists. And
his generalizations are tenuous at best. But to see the
disturbing nature of the rhetoric he uses, one only needs
to go through the article substituting a term like 'Blacks'
for the label 'psychopaths'.
Gunsberg's word-play constructs a joke that is too sick
by far - likely to be misunderstood by the uninitiated as
expert encouragement for dehumanizing real psychopaths.
We know from research on racism that bigots readily create
perverse interpretations of polysemic messages - such that
even the most barbed satires can be taken as encouragements
for their xenophobic hatreds. In any case, the author is
rash to mimic the mind-set whereby a whole culture came to
scapegoat Jews, Gypsies, other non-Aryans, Communists, gays,
the disabled, and others as a class of verminous "Untermenschen".
Dehumanizing enemies is by no means confined to psychopaths.
The author's stereotyped description of his own profession's
'psychopaths' invites the casual reader to think experts
approve regarding real persons with clinical conduct
disorders as sub-human.
WHAT'S IN A WORD?
Gunsberg chooses to talk as if a human category labelled
as 'psychopaths' constitute a quite alien group of creatures
who are "physically in human form, but are not human beings"
[line 2]. As members of what is in essence "a different
species" [line 17], they do not qualify mentally as having
recognizable personhood. They are in effect represented as
some class of crazed cyborgs: inherently amoral and beyond
the pale of empathic human reason; only capable of simulated
feelings and deceit; unable to introspect (sic.); dedicated
to murdering human values; incapable of distinguishing truth
from false fantasy and hallucination; ready to force their
egocentrically distorted reality onto others; ruthless towards
those who expose and thwart them.
No doubt Gunsberg is well aware that this internally
contradictory list is something of a caricature of the DSM's
'anti-social personality disorder' - which is itself a
disputed hotchpotch category based largely upon prison
samples, and which many clinicians prefer to subdivide.
Diagnosis is unreliable, and the traits overlap substantially
with those of other serious offenders. But since the line
between substantive assertion and ironic hyperbole is so
clouded in the article, I too will talk as if his
'psychopaths' constituted a unitary and tidy category.
For there is substantial overlap between his depiction
and the traits of the most anti-social and callous
recidivist offenders.
PSYCHOPATHS AS HUMAN VICTIMS
Yet the author neglects to remind us that these
psychopathic murderers of humane social values -
and of people who frustrate their grossly egocentric
impulses - are at least predominantly victims themselves.
By ignoring questions of causation, he masks how most
emerge from grotesquely chaotic, usually brutal domestic
environments, in which childhood was an extended horror
story. If his morally empty 'humanoid' shells are in one
sense pseudo-persons, they became so through subjection
to what can be breath-takingly gross and vicious mental
and physical abuse. (Saddam Hussain seems to qualify as
such a case.) Through no direct fault of their own, their
sense of selfhood was grotesquely battered by the abusive
intimacies which brutalized them, yet passed for 'normal'
family life. They learned that human vulnerability was a
crime in itself - and that the weak and trusting only
deserve to be victimized.
Remember also how often those psychopaths whom we
eventually detain and incarcerate in prison cells will
enter a familiar world of casually brutal authority-figures
and bullying inmates. For society foolishly chooses
hopelessly counter-productive coping strategies to protect
itself from the harm they cause. We do everything to
consign them to a human waste-bin in which rehabilitation
is usually made quite impossible - because we have
convinced ourselves that these creatures are beyond
redemption. Such is the nature of self-fulfilling
prophecies. And sensationalist popular journalism gladly
amplifies dehumanizing myths about these moral deviants -
ones which professionals too rarely correct.
We collude in abandoning most of these badly damaged,
dangerous persons to punitive institutional sub-cultures,
to regimes which systematically reinforce their moral
immaturity. Instead of painstakingly nurturing their
fragmented humanity towards some semblance of health,
we leave all but the luckiest few to their fate. This
ensures that they will never heal, never become fit for
civilized community-life. Those who have served their
term will return to the social world, not cured by more
punishment, but ever more reliant on the only ways they
have learned for dealing with perceived social rejection
and frustration.
WHO ARE THE REAL MONSTERS?
So a smugly self-righteous middle-class society gladly
scapegoats the psychopaths created by its own crimes of abuse
and neglect. It pours guiltily repressed self-hatred onto
the wretched victims of their parental generation's
conspicuous failures. We seemingly cannot face our own
culpability for the collective inability to secure for
every child everywhere sufficient cherishing and respect
for growing into personal wholeness and social responsibility.
What should surprise us is not the psychopath's anger, but
that so many victims of early brutal abuse do somehow
survive, and instead overcome gross perversions of the
familial love that was their lost birth-right.
Above all, we engage in the pigeon-hole thinking which
culminates in the atrocity which Gunsberg's caricature
exposes. Faced with people who _involuntarily_ dehumanize
others, we ourselves commit the greater 'crime' of _freely_
ignoring one half of our moral awareness. Our indignation
condemns their evil, yet is allowed to block out the caring
sympathy without which moral anger remains blindly vindictive.
By deeming psychopaths to be innately anti-social, or at
least incurably so, we excuse how we ourselves assign them
to the "Untermenschen" waste-bin. Then we are freed from
according them _any_ human rights. Hence we often execute
them - not in immediate self-defence, but as a coldly
impersonal act of 'just' judicial revenge.
In our own fantasies, this restores a moral balance and
illusion of security. Yet so long as they are far enough
from invading and leaving victims in our own back-yards,
most of us show minimal concern about the immoral impact
of those other real psychopaths who remain free. They
operate dictatorial political regimes, lead brutal armies,
and of course beat, torture and 'disappear' their most
oppressed citizens in the name of law and order. Or else
they control multi-national companies which cheat on taxes
and savagely exploit employees and our global ecology alike.
But let us face more facts. My own social-psychological
research focus marries the individual's progress through Lawrence
Kohlberg's moral development stages with the related process
of acquiring more socially inclusive inter-personal and
intra-group social identities and loyalties. The pinnacle
of socio-moral maturity is thus theorized as fully acknowledged
caring respect for others as Kantian ends-in-themselves - not
just our nearest and dearest, nor just tribal kith and kin,
but encompassing *all* human beings as individuals and groups.
Yet clearly this is empirically uncommon, even as an ideal.
(In some respects the transcendence of speciesism, in a
quasi-Buddhist commitment to the Earth's whole eco-system,
is a still more inclusive but even rarer moral ideal.)
In these terms, ethnocentric immaturity and parochial
social loyalty are the norm. Few of us reliably and
authentically function much beyond the level of ethnic
or nationalistic social concern - if we judge this not
by a hollow rhetoric of 'universal' rights and justice,
but by practical readiness to uphold such ideals at significant
personal and in-group cost. The archetypal psychopath fills
us with horror because he is the limiting case of our own
restricted moral loyalties, the ultimate egoist.
Yet ordinary racism and nationalism are only better by
degrees - effortlessly dehumanizing alien peoples as
deserving of few if any rights. Psychopaths provide an
uncomfortable reminder of how shallowly we universalize
'equal' moral consideration of every person's interests.
They reflect back just how the rest of us can also be
prepared to treat those we assign to out-groups counted
as enemies - being prepared to exterminate them with
weapons of mass destruction when the need arises.
So until humanity at large is ready and able to
transcend not just egoism, but the extremes of
ethnocentrism at every level of social exclusiveness,
the lesson should be clear. We all need a considerable
measure of humility when tempted to see moral awareness
and pro-social commitment in all-or-nothing terms. Once
we categorize psychopaths as moral monsters beyond the
human pale, we ourselves commit their error of dehumanizing
others. And arguably we do this, in our bourgeois
complacency, with far less excuse than some of the
'monsters' have.
DEHUMANIZATION REVISITED
I trust that Gunsberg's ironic rhetoric had no such
serious aim. Nevertheless, I find the language he deployed
both chilling and dangerous. Holocaust resonances are surely
not something to trifle with. I am surely not alone in
finding it objectionable to read any kind of usage of phrases
like "put the dog down", or "kill the rattlesnake BEFORE it
kills us" [last paragraphs]. We have too recently heard
euphemisms like 'ethnic cleansing' again used to mask
genocidal strategies - and within the same continent whose
peoples' guilt for permitting Nazi atrocities is still
continuing to be revealed.
Some may find Gunsberg's lurid hyperbole harmless.
But we already have far too much fantasy fiction on our
TV and cinema screens - of that kind which encourages us
to entertain the thought that apparently ordinary people
can be wolves in sheep's clothing, hiding lethal alien
attributes behind a facade of human skin. Such invitations
to paranoia may entertain sensation-seekers, but amplify
the real fears of the old and vulnerable. The media have
already led them to expect that every stranger who accosts
them in the street, every tradesman who knocks on their
door, can be a psychopath in disguise.
Of course our socially fragmented modern lifestyles
do mean that these dangers _are_ sometimes too real for
comfort. But the lessons we should draw are clear enough.
Caring parenthood and neighbourliness can no longer be
taken for granted and left to chance. There are few if
any natural, congenital monsters in human wombs. Rather,
we create our own psychopaths through disgraceful indifference
to families we count as 'welfare scroungers', through our
blindness to child victims of systematic domestic abuse,
and our resistance to paying taxes to fund adequate remedial
programmes (instead of just building more human cages)..
British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently shook the hand
of the Sinn Fein republican leader, widely regarded as
closely associated with the IRA terrorists of Northern Ireland.
He was immediately reviled and abused by Protestant Unionists
for this symbolic recognition of a bond that signifies a
readiness for co-operative dialogue. Yet in every bitter
inter-group conflict the situation is the same. Either old
hatreds and cruel tit-for-tat violence must continue to
add to unending legacies of misery, brutalization, and
death - or else people must choose to nurture every sign
of their shared humanness.
CONCLUSION
We are all prone to adopting psychopathic perspectives,
when we neglect the inherent humanity of those with whom
we acknowledge no meaningful moral ties. Attribution errors
like blaming the victim are a pervasive blot on our own
self-righteous moral characters. Whenever we are tempted
to dehumanize whole out-groups - in the name of ethnicity,
religion, or whatever - we need to wonder at our own wilful
failures. Why do we neglect to deploy more inclusively that
same moral capacity which we manifest within the exclusive
in-groups that we do identify with and cherish?
Perhaps upon reflection Gunsberg will agree that it is
just too unwise to fabricate self-indulgent satire around
images of dehumanization. Careless words themselves may not
kill directly, but can certainly help to trigger self-justicatory
double-think, once we even contemplate that some persons are
irredeemably sub-human. This blunts our inhibitions, then
permits us to regard those kinds of people as devoid of even
the right to life itself. I shall never forget what I heard
an enraged Israeli woman scream out at Arab demonstrators
demanding Palestinian rights: "Send them to the gas-chambers!"
It is sometimes the victims of monstrous inhumanity who have
the most moral learning to do.
Ian Vine,
Lecturer in Social Psychology
i.vine@bradford.ac.uk
Dept.Interdisciplinary Human Studies,
University of Bradford,
Bradford, England, BD7 1DP.
Tel.+ (0)1274/ 233988 (direct) or 233995 (secretaries)
Fax.+ (0)1274/ 720494
Internet (IHS site)
_________________________________________________________________
ON "THE TYRANNY OF EXPERTS (Morris E. Chafetz)
(PsychNews 3(2), Fifth Column)
Marilyn La Court, M.A. CMFT, CICSW
The emperor is a funny looking little naked man. Even when this fact is
spotlighted, most refuse to "see". But even more alarming is the
behavior of those who know but will not tell. Instead they go about
perpetrating myths in their own best interest.
Take for example the American Psychiatric Association. These experts
cannot possibly believe the myths they feed the public and the insurance
industry in their laughing stock best seller, The Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV.
L.J. Davis refers to the DSM IV as "The Encyclopedia of Insanity.
Psychological hand book lists a madness for everyone" in Harpers
Magazine. February, 1997.
John Leo states, "The DSM is converting nearly all life's stresses and
bad habits into mental disorders in his article "Doing the Disorder
Rag", U.S. News and World Report., October 17, 1997.
Joe Sharkey in "You're Not Bad, You're Sick. It's in the Book", in the
New York Times, September 28, 1997 calls the DSM an 886 page bible used
to identify a set of behaviors as mental illness.
In a new book "Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the
Creation of Mental Disorders" by Herb Kitchins and Stuart A. Kirk, the
authors state that the DSM is a handbook that medicalizes problems that
are not medical and gives formal diagnostic labels and code numbers to
behaviors that are better described as eccentric, irresponsible,
foolish, or sinful.
For many mental health professionals, the DSM IV is a joke. In the real
world, none of us is exempt from experiencing problems of living, but
the fact is, we can’t all be mentally ill.
In the insurance world however, Managed Care Companies (MCCs) rely on
the DSM to determine what is considered medical necessity. They don't
just rely on it, they insist on it. Joe Sharkey, New York Times,
September 28, 1997 quotes Dr. Thomas Szasz, a Syracuse psychiatrist,
"Inclusion in the DSM is the key that opens the strongbox; you cannot
bill for treatment without using it." Insisting on a DSM diagnosis
however is like no gate keeping at all. Just about every human behavior
you can think of will qualify for a diagnosis of mental illness in the
DSM, and therefore treatment will be covered by insurance.
If the drug companies have their way, we all need drugs to cure our
mental illness. Drug companies advertise magical cures for mental
illness to the public. The DSM diagnosis of mental illness required to
get the prescription filled will not be hard to come by. Insurance will
cover the cost for the doctor to diagnose and it will also, in many
cases, pay for the drug as well.
There has been a lot of discussion about who decides what is a covered
benefit when Managed Care Companies (MCCs) run the insurance industry.
When it comes to mental health however, there can be no doubt that the
APA and the drug companies run the insurance industry.
For many mental health professionals, seeing the naked emperor is not
enough. When one's livelihood depends on keeping the secret the
necessary blinders are easily constructed. Many times I have heard my
benevolent colleagues say, "what difference does it make what you call
it as long as the people who need our help are served".
It's true that the word is not the thing. However the power of language
can turn the thing into the word. A diagnosis of mental illness, and
all that goes with it can have devastating effects on a human being.
The tyranny reaches conspiracy proportions when our government insists
on the use of the DSM IV in state certified mental health clinics even
when insurance is not used to pay for services. I do not know about
other states, but this is the case in the state of Wisconsin.
I agree with your observation that many people want to believe that
someone in fact does have answers they do not possess, and that this
makes them vulnerable to the tyranny of experts.
There are people who oh, so willingly supply those answers for a price.
References:
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. (DSM IV)
Davis, L. J. "The Encyclopedia of Insanity. Psychological hand book
lists a madness for everyone." Harpers Magazine. February, 1997.
Kutchins, Herb and Stuart A. Kirk, Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric
Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders. Free Press, 1997.
Leo, John "The DSM “Doing the Disorder Rag", U.S. News and World
Report., October 17, 1997.
Sharkey, Joe "You're Not Bad, You're Sick. It's in the Book". The New
York Times, September 28, 1997
Szasz, Dr. Thomas, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory
of Personal Conduct, rev.ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974. (first
published in 1961)
Marilyn La Court, M.A. CMFT, CICSW
Confidential Counseling Services, LLC.
Email ccsllc@execpc.com
_________________________________________________________________
TO DR. SCHALER
(PsychNews 3(2), Letter Section)
Cyrus McCandless
Dear Dr. Schaler,
I would like to see you correct the following statement on
Psychnews: "The reasons for using illegal drugs are the same ones
for using legal drugs, i.e. to avoid coping with experience."
Unfortunately, unqualified statements like this are those which
muddy the waters of reasonable debate, and I'm sure that when you
consider this, you will realize that it's tone is at least a bit
parental, and possibly religious in character. Some people do
indeed use drugs to avoid coping with experience, but there are
many others who use drugs in order to cope with more experience
than they would otherwise be able to, or even to cope better
with their current experience. Consider that, under normal
circumstances, cigarettes are not subject to "abuse" under
DSM-IV, nor is amphetamine, when used by truck drivers. I
do not wish to excuse these behaviors, but they are certainly
means of coping 'better' (by social standards, the same ones
you are invoking here) with ones environment, rather than
avoiding it.
Thanks
Cyrus McCandless
NIH Animal Center
Poolesville, MD
Email chmccand@midway.uchicago.edu
_________________________________________________________________