Dr. Charles Krauthammer on James Holmes' Psychosis

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor Dr. Charles Krauthammer addressed the question we were discussing on this blog yesterday.

Link here… Krauthammer’s remarks on James Holmes begin ataround 2:45.

Why is it so difficult to commit a psychotic individual to a mental hospital against his will?

A former head of the psychiatric emergency unit at Mass General Hospital Dr. Krauthammer points out that in the old days a psychiatrist had far more discretion when it came to committing people he thought were dangerous.

He mentions Holmes and the Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner.

The times have changed, Krauthammer continues, because lawyers have gotten involved in the process to protect the rights of psychotics to walk free. Now it is nearly impossible to do so, given the risk of lawsuits.

To which O’Reilly adds, that, for this, we can thank the ACLU.

Heroic Men in Aurora, Colorado

Hannah Rosin wants to know what it means that three men in Aurora, Colorado took bullets to protect their girlfriends.

She answers correcty that these men were manifesting a primal male instinct: to protect women.

In her words:

In the movies the Dark Knight does not always save his lady, but in the Aurora theater the story unfolded differently. The male instinct to rescue and protect kicked in the way it does in less complicated superhero tales.

And also:

Throwing your body in front of your girlfriend when people all around you are getting shot is an instinct that's basic….

This implies that anyone who believes that the male instinct to protect women is a social construct is wrong. Not just wrong, but at war with human nature.

Also, those who had previously believed that men were fundamentally abusive toward women might now want to revise their views.

The male instinct to protect means that female life is more valuable than male life. Thus, men fight wars, first, because they are intrinsically stronger, and second, because they are more easily replaceable.

The concept is based on the Darwinian calculus of reproduction.

Rosin is correct to call it instinct, but she enters a more murky territory when she seems to be surprised that it has not gone the way of that other important male instinct, the breadwinner instinct.

Writing about a woman who is describing her heroic boyfriend, Rosin gets lost in a peculiar feminist reverie.

In Rosin’s words:

She [the woman] attributed that to his undying heroism, but it may also have to do with the fact that he, like a few guys in the theater, was working at Target and surely not making enough money to support one family, much less two. Young, meanwhile, had just finished getting her veterinarian degree, becoming the latest in an onslaught of women who have taken over that lucrative profession, which was not very long ago dominated by men.   

In Aurora Colorado and in many communities across America men are no longer the breadwinners. They earn less, have less glowing career prospects, and are reduced to working at Target [presumably a menial job] while their girlfriends become veterinarians.

Rosin seems to see the male instinct to protect women as a quaint relic, the last piece of manly behavior that feminism has not managed to subvert.

When the subject is discussed, most people say that the role of the male breadwinner was damaged by shrinking manufacturing and by outsourcing.

And yet, the result correlates so well with feminist ideology that you might be forgiven for believing that American culture, beginning with the educational establishment, has systematically undermined and repressed men in favor of women.

It’s certainly not an equality issue. It’s about favoring one group over another. And then wondering why so many men abandon their children.

Recently, Susan Gregory Thomas reported on the phenomenon of the female breadwinner in the Wall Street Journal.

In her words:

Perhaps because men of this generation were raised in the wake of the women's movement, a culture that introduced values of equality, many of them don't seem to have a problem with their wives earning more than they do.

There's one caveat, though: The men want their own salaries alone to be enough, in theory, to float the family. When they can't meet this standard, they can feel enraged, shamed, explosive. And their wives often feel resentful and pressured.

Men do not have a problem with women making more money if they themselves make enough money to qualify as breadwinners.

If not, they become hostile and abusive, “enraged” and “explosive.”

In other cases they simply walk away from their responsibilities to their families. They learned in school that women need men like fish need bicycles, so, why should they stick around when they are neither needed nor wanted.

Needless to say, it’s a volatile mix.

The meaning, however, is clear. In a world where feminist ideology has succeeded in depriving men of the role of provider, this fact, in and of itself, makes men more hostile toward women.

In a world that feminism wants to create there will be more, not less, male hostility toward women.

But, despite it all, in time of trouble a man will fall back on his instincts to protect his woman. 

The Psychosis of James Holmes

Yesterday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the appalling recommendation that police officers walk off their jobs until the politicians get the guns off the streets.

In Bloomberg’s New York, a city with draconian gun control laws, gun violence has recently been on the upswing.

Other cities that have strict gun control laws also have the most gun violence. Think Chicago and Washington, D.C.

As of now, Americans own some 200 million guns. The notion that we are going to eliminate guns is wildly impracticable.

This morning David Brooks is more on point when he suggests that we need to have more treatment programs for undiagnosed psychotics like James Holmes.

In his words:

The best way to prevent killing sprees is with relationships — when one person notices that a relative or neighbor is going off the rails and gets that person treatment before the barbarism takes control. But there also has to be a more aggressive system of treatment options, especially for men in their 20s. The truly disturbed have always been with us, but their outbursts are now taking more malevolent forms.

Brooks is right to focus our attention on the killer, not the culture or the politics.

He is slightly off the mark when he prescribes “relationships.”

Keep in mind that Holmes was studying graduate level cognitive level neuroscience. Thus, he was surrounded by people who are especially aware of the signs of mental illness.

He must have known that if he had shared his megalomaniacal delusions they would have tried to have him committed.

So, he dropped out of the program and took the kind of action that, as I mentioned in a previous post, and as Brooks points out, would have affirmed that he was not crazy—that is, that his voices were telling him the truth. He did something that made him as important and famous as they said he was.

Brooks is correct to say that we need “a more aggressive system of treatment options.”

The problem is not the availability or accessibility of programs. Psychiatry is perfectly capable of treating such people with its current programs. There are relatively few undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics out there.

When Brooks talks of “aggressive” treatment, he is hinting that such patients should be subjected to forced hospitalization and forced treatment.

I suspect that the people who believe that gun control is the solution would fight to the bitter end to prevent the state from forcing treatment on a psychotic who does not want to be treated.

Some patients are treated against their will because they are deemed dangerous to themselves and to society. And yet, it is more difficult, from a legal perspective, to force treatment on someone before the fact, before he has committed murder and mayhem or before he has tried to commit suicide.

Like James Holmes many paranoid schizophrenics understand the system well enough to hide their delusions from those who would see them as crazy.

Some psychiatrists know how to engage a potential psychotic in a conversation that will reveal the extent of his problem. Too many psychiatrists do not know how to converse with patients and simply recite a checklist of questions.

It would also be good if there were a clearer psychiatric consensus that psychosis is a brain disease, not a psychogenic mental illness.

By that I mean that the psychiatrists who went on television to explain that James Holmes became psychotic because of bad parenting or unresolved childhood traumas are misleading us.

No reputable psychiatrist believes that psychosis can be treated by uncovering its infantile antecedents. It is irresponsible even to suggest otherwise.

When James Holmes was studying cognitive neuroscience he was most interested in the biological causes of mental illness. Doesn’t that alert us to the fact that Holmes knew that something was seriously wrong, that he did not know whether it was biological or psychological, and that he finally refused to believe that he was just suffering from a disease?

Is the Sexual Revolution Over?

Most sophisticated thinkers don’t believe in God. They do not attend religious services, considering them unworthy of their splendid intelligence.

That does not mean that they believe in nothing or that they worship nothing.

To a man or a woman, they believe in sex. They worship at the altar of the great god Eros.

For the record Aphrodite was created when the god Cronos cut off his father, Uranos’ genitals, and flung them into the Aegean. Out of the foam rose Aphrodite. And then Aphrodite begat Eros.

In Roman mythology the characters are called Venus and Cupid.

Worshiping Eros means paying obeisance to a love god. But Eros is not just any love god. Clearly, erotic love is meant to replace the adoration offered to the god of Agape, the god of Christian love.

If Eros is love, then other forms of love are precluded. That would include the adulation of authority figures and the love involved in friendship.

People worship Eros for the same reason that they worship other gods. They believe that the ritual enactment of their love for Eros will bring them health, happiness, salvation, redemption, and, of course, pleasure.

Rarely do people think of orgies as religious experiences, but clearly, they would not participate if they did not believe that they were gaining more than a mere physiological benefit.

Still, those who worship Eros do not see themselves as practicing religious rites. They believe that theirs is a political act, one that makes them part of the sexual revolution.

When a comely coed drinks herself into a mystical ecstasy by consuming what are commonly called spirits she might take the modern form of profaned communion, by dropping to her knees and taking a man’s body and fluids into her mouth.

She might not consider it a religious experience, but if she doesn’t, why is she doing it?

Through the sexual revolution, Eros has become a cult figure. His acolytes and adepts believe that the soul’s salvation depends on the prayerful worship of Eros. They will fight you to the death if you dare suggest that there be any restrictions on the free expression of your sexuality.

Presumably, the sexual revolution was about liberating sexuality. It promoted the transcendent virtue of sexual freedom.

By now sexual freedom has come to mean the freedom to do what you please when you please with whom you please, and not have to pay for the consequences.

But then, Mary Eberstadt points out, if you dare suggest that the free expression of your sexual vitality should be limited, those who love Eros will attack you with uncommon ferocity. Some things you are not free to say.

 At the least, you will be taxed with the imputation that you are sexually defective.

“What’s the matter with you, don’t you like sex?”

It’s a confidence game. You are forced to declare publicly that you worship Eros because otherwise you will be assumed to be revealing that you have a sexual problem. 

The revolution has not quite gotten to the point where people are obliged to provide visual evidence of their sexual skills-- though that time seems to be fast approaching-- but adults feel obliged to talk about sex all the time. Unfortunately, all of the sex talk has shredded the veil of modesty and that used to surround sexuality. The result: we are becoming desensitized to sexual stimuli.

The sexual revolution has not really delivered on its promise.  Eberstadt suggests that all the articles about how women are unhappy these days demonstrate the failure of the sexual revolution.

In her words:

Or you could just peruse the last few years of tony secular magazines like the Atlantic for writing on relations between the sexes. What are these women saying? Some are giving up on marriage. Some are giving up on men. Some are creating purposely fatherless homes because they can’t or won’t have a man in their life. And all of them wonder aloud about what’s killing romance and sex.

Why are all these educated, enlightened, relatively well-off women so unhappy, in their very own words? Well, one explanation could be that contrary to what they’ve been told to believe all their lives, the revolution and its cheerleading squad, modern feminism, haven’t delivered the human goods.

If, as Eberstadt and many others have suggested, the sexual revolution flooded the market with easily available sex, the result has been that sex has been cheapened. It costs less, it entails less responsibility. Now sex is merely a way to pursue pleasure, a form of mental and physical hygiene.

To use an economic metaphor, in the sexual revolution the market in sex was deregulated.

The forces that want to impose every manner of regulation on the free market—because human beings are suffering from so much “cupidity” that they are not to be trusted—strongly favor deregulating the market in sex—because if sex is freed from regulation it will naturally express itself in wholesome and healthy ways.

Of course, the proponents of sexual deregulation insist on the phrase “consenting adults.” Between condom-sheathed consenting adults, anything goes.

More and more articles are showing that women are displeased with their current sexual prospects. Some writers have even discovered that single motherhood is not such a good thing. I have to keep readers of this blog informed about these developments.

To Eberstadt they are a sign that the sexual revolution is coming to an end.

She explains:

The revolution is like a big party that a lot of people really looked forward to, but that’s now gotten way out of control. Nobody wants to be the first to leave, and nobody wants to tattle on anyone else — but everybody knows things have run seriously amok. At this point in the evening, we’re like a bunch of drunks reassuring ourselves that everything’s going to be fine tomorrow, even as most people know deep down that it isn’t.

Alexander Cockburn on Thomas Friedman

Alexander Cockburn was neither as famous nor as renowned as his fellow British journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Yet, when he passed away over the weekend an articulate and intelligent voice was silenced.

It would be unfair to call Cockburn a man of the left. He was a man of the radical left. For that among other reasons I rarely read what he wrote.

I may have been wrong. John Fund writes in the National Review that Cockburn’s views had been mellowing in recent years.

Recently, Cockburn had set his sights on radical environmentalists, with intellectual vigor.

Cockburn told Fund:

The environmental Left wants to deindustrialize America so they can exercise political power and control people’s lifestyles.

Like Hitchens, Cockburn was a master of withering political invective, of the masterful rhetorical put-downs that few natural-born American writers can manage.

Where American writers tend to believe that the strength of their feelings will carry the day, Cockburn, like Hitchens, tried to wrap it in words.

Your language is always more memorable than your feelings.

In his honor I offer a few passages from a classical Cockburn take-down of Thomas Friedman. (Via James Taranto on Twitter) You know Tom Friedman, the famed and highly respected New York Times columnist about whom I have not had too much to say lately, largely because I cannot bear to read him anymore.

Surely, if the corporate and political elites of this nation idolize the likes of Tom Friedman we are in worse shape than anyone thinks.

Anyway, Cockburn described the Friedman style:

Friedman’s is an industrial, implacable noise, like having a generator running under the next table in a restaurant. The only sensible thing to do is leave.

And then there is Friedman’s legendary egomania. Cockburn described it here:

Friedman is so marinated in self-regard that he doesn’t even know when he’s being stupid. "While the defining measurement of the Cold War was weight–particularly the throw-weight of missiles–the defining measurement of the globalization system is speed." Sounds good in a corporate roundtable, means nothing. The man just isn’t that smart, beyond the dubious ability to make money out of press releases praising the New Globalism and American power.

Cockburn closes with a true story, one that he has on the good authority of his brother. In three paragraphs he shows why we are right to think that there is something radically wrong with Friedman’s writing, especially with its constant assertion of self-importance. Apparently, the Friedman ego is so powerful that it drowns out reality.

In Cockburn’s words:

There’s another. Back in 1984 I remember my brother Patrick, then working for the Financial Times in Beirut, describing an exacting day covering bloodshed and mayhem in the company of Friedman, at that time the Times’ Beirut correspondent. They returned to the Commodore hotel, thankful to be alive. Friedman went up to his room to file. Patrick went to the bar, which was deserted. He poured himself a stiff whiskey and sat at a table sipping quietly. Enter a Shiite gunman, who reviewed the bottles of booze with displeasure and proceeded to smash them methodically with his rifle butt. He didn’t notice Patrick, who was glad to be thus unperceived, concluding that (a) journalists drinking Scotch were unlikely to be viewed with fondness by the fundamentalist gunman, and (b) he was drinking the last Scotch likely to be consumed in the Commodore for quite a while.

Eventually Friedman descended, and Patrick described the episode. A couple of days later a Friedman dispatch noting it appeared in The New York Times. But it wasn’t long before the "I" took command. In Friedman’s 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem we find, "My first glimpse of Beirut’s real bottom came at the Commodore Hotel bar on February 7, 1984... I was enjoying a ‘quiet’ lunch in the Commodore restaurant that day when..." And lo, suddenly it’s Friedman who sees the bottle-smasher at work, Friedman who vividly recounts how the Shiite "stalked behind the bar" and Friedman who arbitrages the story toward a Deeper Note: "The scene was terrifying on many levels..."

He wasn’t there, according to my brother. I’ll bet that by now Friedman probably believes that he was. In the capsule of his immense ego, the world is what he wants it to be.

Byron Wien vs. Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini and Byron Wien do not see eye-to-eye on the stock market and the economy.

Professor Roubini sees gloom and doom ahead. When he looks into his crystal ball he sees us on the verge of an economic contraction. We are not, he says, even close to an economic recovery.

Strategist Wien sees a brighter future ahead. That is, if you think that 2% growth is good news. Wien is not worried by the depression that will probably never happen.

Roubini wrote:

For the last three years, the consensus has been that the U.S. economy was on the verge of a robust and self-sustaining recovery that would restore above-potential growth. That turned out to be wrong, as a painful process of balance-sheet deleveraging—reflecting excessive private-sector debt, and then its carryover to the public sector—implies that the recovery will remain, at best, below-trend for many years to come.

Even this year, the consensus got it wrong, expecting a recovery to annual GDP growth of better than than 3 percent. But the first-half growth rate looks set to come in closer to 1.5 percent at best, even below 2011’s dismal 1.7 percent. And now, after getting the first half of 2012 wrong, many are repeating the fairy tale that a combination of lower oil prices, rising auto sales, recovering house prices, and a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing will boost growth in the second half of the year and fuel above-potential growth by 2013. 

Wien is more optimistic, but his optimism is clearly tempered:

James Freeman reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The bad news, he [Wien] adds, is that while America is the best of the developed economies, "we're a mature country. We should only grow at about 2%" adjusted for inflation. Add in 2% inflation and 1% annual productivity gains and he says corporate earnings should be growing at 5%, down sharply from the annual average of 8.4% since 1945.

Real GDP growth of 2% is the bull case? "The world is just plain a more competitive place," explains Mr. Wien. And he thinks it may get much more competitive. He's bullish on emerging markets and adds that while we may think of China, for example, as a place that simply assembles our inventions like the iPad, that could easily change. "China is filing lots of patents these days. There are a lot of smart Chinese and eventually they'll become innovators too."

He also discusses massive federal debts in the U.S., our persistently high unemployment, and the possibility of "social unrest" as a result. He notes that there are more Americans who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more than ever before in our history.

There you have it, two great students of the markets seeing the world from two different angles.

As I posted previously, Wien has shared views that differ markedly from his own. See his report of a European friend's bleak pessimism. 

In that spirit I am happy to offer competing visions of the future. There's too little respect for differing points of view, so consider it a gesture in the right direction.

In Aurora, Three Men Died Protecting Their Girlfriends

Reports this morning tell us that three men lost their lives in the Aurora massacre protecting their girlfriends.

The New York Daily News has the story:

Three survivors of the Colorado movie-theater massacre escaped with minor wounds, but were left with broken hearts because their heroic boyfriends died saving them.

In final acts of valor, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves used their bodies to shield their girlfriends as accused madman James Holmes turned the Aurora cineplex into a shooting gallery.

Blunk’s girlfriend, Jansen Young; McQuinn’s girlfriend, Samantha Yowler; and Teves’ gal pal Amanda Lindgren made it out of the bloodbath — but they would have been killed had it not been for the loves of their lives.

In a time where men are routinely denounced as abusive and where women insist that they do not need men to protect them, it is worth taking a moment to honor the memory of three men who knew what was right and did it.