Extreme Immorality: Now, the Mentally Ill Rot in Prison
Why Nicholas Kristoff’s contention that we are becoming more morally upright is a damnable lie
By
David Gottfried
The Lords and Ladies of Cambridge and Columbia are very expressive when they feel the pain of other people. They forever tell us that three groups of people are deeply aggrieved and deserve all our succor and support. The three groups of their holy trinity are the blacks, the arabs and the women.
However, there are other oppressed peoples: Boys who have Duchene’s muscular dystrophy, whose muscles start to whither away at 18 months and usually die well before their 30th birthday. Christian Copts in Egypt who are a punching bag for the seething Muslim hordes. People who can’t get hired because they are unattractive. I knew a woman, at NYU Law School, who had made law review, had an LSAT of 770 and couldn’t get a job because she was short, fat, had acne and spoke like the star of “The Nanny.”
Today, I am going to talk about the mentally ill and America’s brand-new fad in treating them: Bashing them to death in prisons.
Why I am Not Writing About Israel Today
Writing a newsletter on Substack, or on any other platform for that matter, is a bit like being a politician. In both arenas, one is advised to stay on message or, more bluntly, to say the same thing every day, rain or shine, like a mentally ill person suffering from extreme perseveration (A term used by clinicians to describe patients who say the same thing incessantly.)
No doubt, perseveration pays off with abundant profits. For more than two decades, Ronald Reagan said that people on welfare lived high on the hog, never deviated from that contention, and he captured the presidency in 1980. Similarly, some writers have said that Trump is corrupt, and they have said this in virtually every article they have written since 2015, and they are adored by liberals who agree with them. The problem is: We know he is corrupt. The question is: When are people going to get up off their asses and do something about it. For various reasons, which I have discussed in prior essays, we cannot be so sure that the numerous legal actions against Trump will stop him from snatching the Presidency like a crocodile masticating on, and swiftly murdering, its prey.
Lately, I have written about the Mideast almost exclusively. I can continue to say the same thing in every post I write until I am blue in the face, but I don’t like repeating myself, and I don’t want to be like the Jews of the Biltmore Conference, in New York, in the 1940’s. At that conference, leading, distinguished, brilliant Jews talked and talked till they got laryngitis from hell – and they did virtually nothing. So to my fellow supporters of Israel I say this: Get up off your fat, lazy asses and take to the streets and become militant counter-protestors against the Arabist mob. Remember what Rabbi Hillel said Two Thousand Years ago: “If I will not be for me, who will be for me. But if I am only for myself, then what am I. And if not now, When.” Or, as my friend Amy used to say (A tad more tartly), “Either shit or get off the pot.”
Why an Assessment of a Polity’s Moral Stature is not Necessarily a Study of Meandering, Malleable Mush
A couple of days ago, I read an article by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times entitled “A Case for Hope.” The article, like its platitudinous title, was singularly uninspiring. Kristoff said, among other things, we are more “moral” than we have ever been. That was no platitude. That was a pernicious lie, and in this essay, I will try to explain why and how our treatment of the mentally ill is so patently barbaric, and so much worse than it was in the middle and end of the 20th Century, that our moral stature is little better than that of a reptile which eats its young.
I am sure many people, who pride themselves as being bright in the way Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada,” considered herself bright, i.e., she is bright because she can utter a dozen French words with an accent conveying dagger-like aristocratic disdain, would find an essay about morality boring, pointless and just a bit too sentimental for their sneering, sardonic sensibility.
Morals, they will remind me, is something ambiguous and debatable. Ohviously, Nietzsche’s sense of good and evil was very different from the moral perspective of both the Old and New Testaments.
However, such snarky adolescent reasoning was fatally torn apart by Wittgenstein who argued that although we might never know for certain whether something is true or not, we have to get up off our asses and make a decision, a provisional decision if you will. We have to act as if certain things are true, even if we are not certain of their veracity, because we have lives to live and decisions to make and a good scholar is nothing like the Saturday Night Live satire of a scholar, i.e., a good scholar uses his intelligence to effect the worthwhile and the good in the here and now.
And applying Wittgenstein, I conclude that certain moral points of view are better than other moral points of view.
Applying, Wittgenstein, I conclude that the Jewish and Christian moral point of view is superior to the Neitzschean and Nazified point of view. It is better to save a life than to waste of life. Kindness is better than the gratuitous wanton cruelty of contemporary, vice-infested urban America. The preservation of human life means something. A homely nun in a dull black habit, and an orthodox, married Jewish woman bereft of the “crowning glory” of her hair, are, in their way, more beautiful than a shimmering, glimmering, model on a runway. If I can’t prove this point with logic, I will rest my case with Spencer Tracey’s rejoinder to counsel for the Nazis in “Judgment at Nuremberg”:
“To be logical is not to be right. And Nothing on G-d’s Green Earth can ever make it right.”
And this, my friend, is why we have become a disgustingly immoral people:
Millions of Mentally Ill People are Confined to Prisons, Beaten to a Bloody Pulp, but the High Priests of the Media, and their corrupt accomplices in politics, have deigned, for the most part, to ignore this
In the 1960’s, progressives bemoaned the treatment of the mentally ill in hospitals. When we read, and saw the film version of, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” we cursed Nurse Ratched and wanted the inmates of the asylum to have a sort of glorious hippie revolution.
Today matters are infinitely worse. Now, most mental patients are not in hospitals; they are in prisons.
They aren’t criminals . They are merely severely disturbed, but as I write this, the mentally ill are being stomped on and stomped out of life by sadistic bastards who obtain so much fucking joy from berating and battering the lonely (Most mental patients didn’t just become mental patients; many years of ostracism, isolation and debasement made them “deranged.”), physically torturing the wistful, worried sweet souls of the tormented by kicking them in the nuts, kicking them in the ass, pissing in their mouths, raping them and giving them doses of AIDS and Hepatitis.
I will concede: It is not as bad as Auschwitz, but as G-d is my witness, many of the prison guards and prisoners want to inflict all of the evils of the Third Reich on the mentally ill. Indeed, that’s the one thing that brings prisoners and prison guards (Two sides of the same vulgar human being) together: Their mutual delight in demolishing the body and soul of the mentally disturbed.
Some people become crazy, in large measure, because of the persecution they have endured because a psychiatrist has given them a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and laymen, thoroughly oblivious to mental illness except for the trite simplifications they have learned from Oprah Winfrey or “The View,” are overwhelmed by the complexity and weird sounds of that mysterious polysyllabic Latinate word and assume, just from the sound of the word schizophrenia, that it refers to the devilishly mad.
The most common form of schizophrenia is schizophrenia undifferentiated type. These are people with no job, no family, no friends and no life. He does not see visions (Very few schizophrenics do). He does not smear feces on the wall, He simply rots in solitude. He has been rejected so many times, and by being solitary, he will not be rejected again.
R.D. Laing used to say that schizophrenics were the scapegoats of their families, and often their communities. They are people who have been rejected. And after they have been rejected, the people who condemned them get their cheap, sadistic thrills by badgering them some more.
Psycho-Diagnostics: Ambiguity in the Extreme
People are often hurt because they have been rejected because of a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Ergo, we ought to examine the accuracy of our diagnosis of psychiatric states.
When someone has a strep throat, we can readily discern certain characteristic symptoms: Pain in the throat, fever, swollen cervical lymph nodes, a throat that appears “beefy” and red, white spots on the throat, a positive result to a strep test and an elevated Sedimentation Rate (Of course, one generally does not need to gauge the sed rate to diagnose strep.)
By contrast, suppose we want to determine if one has a superego dominated personality. How might we go about making this determination? No one has ever seen or measured a superego. It is not a corporeal entity. Everything we say about it resides in the realm of the hypothetical.
Consequently, psychodiagnostics is a crap shoot.
Why American Doctors are More Apt to Diagnose Schizophrenia than British Doctors
According to Bleuler, schizophrenics usually possess what are termed the 4 A’s of Schizophrenia, or these traits:
A) Autism, i.e., their worlds revolve around themselves, they are preoccupied with themselves and are alone.
B) Loose Associations. When they talk, they free associate and jump from one subject to the next subject, seemingly unreasonably.
C) Ambivalence: The Patient is crazy enough to love Trump one minute and hate him the next. And then love him again
D) Inappropriate Affect: There is a schism between the content of one's speech and the manner of one’s speech. For example, if one said, “I want to kill you,” the content is seething hatred. If one said this in a very calm and detached manner, we would say that there is a schism between the content and form of the speech and this schism is considered indicative of schizophrenia.
The last one of the 4 A’s, Inappropriate Affect, is the trait which creates the marked divergence between American and British psychiatrists in diagnosing schizophrenia.
In Britian, customarily, people speak in a much more detached and emotionally pale manner. Encouraged to have a “stiff upper lip,” they might talk about their spouse’s death from cancer as if they were talking about seeing a bad movie. The English doctor may conclude that nothing is amiss. The American doctor is more apt to relegate the patient to the dustbin of psychiatric categories, schizophrenia.
Incidentally, this framework enables a doctor to conclude that you are disturbed no matter what you do. If your speech is drained of emotion, you are schizophrenic, but if you howl and cry when you talk about you wife’s death, the doctor will conclude that you suffer from what used to be called a “character disorder.” (I don’t know the name of the classification given today, but rest assured I am sure that crying about someone’s death will make at least one of the diagnostic categories seem eminently reasonable to a shrink)
The 1950’s – When the MMPI led Psychiatrists to Conclude that Effeminacy and Homosexuality were Running Rampant Among Latin and Black Men
Because of the Results of the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Psychic Inventory (The MMPI), many psychologists believed that black and Latin men were going queer
The test went into circulation in the 1950’s (perhaps the late 1940’s), and it was produced at a university or hospital (or some sort of amalgam of the two) in Minnesota.
If you haven’t been to Minnesota, try to remember Vice President Walter Mondale who was as Minnesotan as its frigid winters where the mercury dips well below zero.
Mondale was consistently liberal on economic issues, but culturally, he gave off the aura of the old-fashioned like a commercial for Pepperidge Farm cookies. When he ran against, and was trounced, by Reagan in the 1984 presidential election, one politico said that Mondale was the sort of man who thought he would not look presentable unless he was a wearing a white shirt.
In any event, the MMPI is such a boring test that it seems to have been designed to induce narcolepsy. It consists of hundreds of statements, and the subject must indicate if he agrees or disagrees with the statement.
One of the statements consisted of seven seemingly innocent words: I would like to be a singer.
The test, however, had been designed by good-natured but dour and dreary Midwesterners who knew that all real boys wanted to either drive a tractor or a tank. If a guy wanted to sing, he was a suspect sissy. Many black and Latin men indicated that they would love to be a singer. Hence, psychiatrists thought that black and Latin men were turning into Little Richard.
So much for the ability of doctors to assess one’s mental state.