thelastpsychiatrist.com - Another Final Word On Cho's Mental Illness. Adnotated.

Hi. Not surprisingly, many peoples have not liked my Cho comments. Here's an exampleⁱ from a psychiatrist, and I responded with a comment there that I might as well put here.

As background, most people are yelling, "how the hell can you say this guy wasn't crazy? He was talking to imaginary friends, he thought he was an Ax, etc." As [a] point of fact, these weren't delusions because he knew they weren't true, but that's a side point.

Psychiatric pathology exists on a spectrum. It's not binary "ill" or "not ill," and impairment in one realm doesn't explain impairment elsewhere. A diagnosis does not define all of your existence, or even all of your actions.

I should not, however, have said he wasn't mentally ill. What I should have said was he was not insane: he knew what he was doing, he knew what he was doing was wrong, and he had the ability to control himself. So he is entirely to blameⁱⁱ, i.e., the mental illness, even if substantial, is incidental.

You might say, ok, he's not insane, but only someone with a mental illness would do this. It doesn't lessen his culpability, however.

Well, actually, it does: you can't execute the mentally ill, for example. Forget about your personal stance on the death penalty. Fact is, mental illness is rapidly becoming an exclusion to a sentence that everyone else is subject to. I know, it seems so righteous to say the mentally ill shouldn't be executed. Ok, here: it would mean you can be sentenced to death, but he can't. Does that make any sense, moral or legal?ⁱⁱⁱ

Clearly, maladjusted and sexually frustrated college kids don't often go on rampages, so there was something in him that moved him to this. Perhaps that was the mental illness. But add up the body counts in the past twenty years. What's in common in mass murderers isn't mental illness, but frustration, impotence (metaphorical) and anger. Or are all those suicide bombers in Israel bipolar?^iv

You'll say, "but he wasn't a suicide bomber." His mental framework had much more in common with a suicide bomber than with John Wayne Gacy.^v

But let's put this aside and ask a different question, about us, not him: why do so many people want him to be mentally ill? Because its an explanation that doesn't implicate society, or themselves. It means the world can be divided into "us" and "them," which is always fun. It's the easy scapegoat that seems to be so obvious as to be unassailable.

And if it is mental illness, what do we intend on doing about it? My bias implies harsher sentences, societal changes, etc^vi -- we can debate that later. But if it is all mental illness, then what? Do we lock up the "mentally ill" like we do pedophiles and terror suspects, before they even commit a crime, just on suspicion? And who decides who is suspicious? Psychiatrists? Do you trust every psychiatrist to be good at this? Or should it be the government?

Would you have been happy -- I mean this in all seriousness -- if George Bush had Cho arrested last year for being a terror suspect? Which part of that bothers you? It would have been legitimate, because he was dangerous. So is it that he was arrested before he committed a crime, or that George Bush did it? See? This is what you'll have to contend with with these policies.

Oh yeah. Treatment. You want to make "treatment" mandatory? Great. Tell me exactly who should decide who needs treatment, and for how long, and what kind. And tell me how this treatment is going to work -- what is the specific end point? -- and for how long, and tell me what we should do when the treatment doesn't work.

You can't just make this stuff up as you go along, enacting policies which are politically expedient but destroy the society. Ask Vladimir Putin. Oh, wait, bad example.

1. I'm not linking it ; it's entirely substance-less cuntfluff. [↩]
2. Nope. The only anyone to blame is the cunt coven at Virgina tech. [↩]
3. Actually, these things aren't what you think them to be. [↩]
4. Well, they sure as fuck ain't fat old women with delusions of self importance, are they now. You wanna make the world a better place, start hanging those. Nevermind the "reasons", you'll find reasons as you go along. Witchcraft. Heresy. Vagrancy. Gossiping. Nagging. There's plenty to choose from. [↩]
5. There is absolutely no difference between some dorks "diagnosing" Gacy with "antisocial personality disorder" in 1968 and me "diagnosing" Lucinda Roy with "heresy" above. They're both nudely political acts of oppression, it's just that one just happens to target the wrong kind of people. Outside of the projection of political power, the cognitive content of either "diagnosis" is exactly null.

   In fact, I could just re-use the ridiculously broad "antisocial personality disorder", and just shuffle around the specific rights of others that are being "systematically disregarded". Does Roy strike you as at all conscionable about her sheer impudence ? So there you have it : a history of writing bad poetry, low moral sense and going around derping about how things should be in her view. Check, check and check, 10 years in Anamosa. She can share a cell with Cornelia Giovanni.

   What, you think I'm kidding ? I'm not fucking kidding.

   

   As is typical in Antisocial Personality Disorder, the offender callously persists in disregarding prevailing social norms. Here, shamelessly displaying her complete lack of internalized guilt or any kind of conscience as well as complete disregard for risk or probability of success, the old woman is still attempting to manipulate the mechanism of her punishment towards her own, self-directed ends.

   [↩]
6. Certainly -- pillories in every supermarket parking lot, for holding topless & bare ass middle aged women judged insufficiently polite by any respectable male of social influence and sufficient wealth ; and stocks by every urinal, for easy beating of the soles and urinating on the mouths of "poetesses"/"activists"/etcetera. You know they hadn't these "sprees" back before 1872, yes ? Well ? Are you going to go with evidence-based medicine or aren't you ? [↩]