Posted on 06/08/2016 10:43:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
Whenever a shooting event, like the murder-suicide at UCLA, gains national notoriety, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over “our” alleged failure to deal adequately with issues of “mental health.” Tragically, it is the rarest of figures who dares to challenge this consensus. But challenge it we must, for as innocuous as the term sounds, “mental health” is fraught with philosophically problematic assumptions and implications.
First, the sole reason for concluding that, say, Mainak Sarkar, the UCLA gunman, is “mentally ill” is that he became a murderer. Yet this in turn logically implies that anyone who murders is “mentally ill.” However, if the latter is true, then this means that such 20th century genocidal killers as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao; infamous mobsters like Al Capone, John Gotti, and James “Whitey” Bulger; those members of the KKK who terrorized and murdered blacks; homicidal inner city gangbangers; and members of ISIS are all “mentally ill.”
Yet these classes of killers are never described as “mentally ill” by those who can’t resist labeling as such school shooters and the like. This is because the former belong to different political-moral templates: “ideology,” “racism,” “power,” “greed,” “oppression,” “extremism,” and the like.
Second, the only reason for regarding as “ill” one who acts murderously or violently is the metaphysically dubious supposition that humans are, by nature, essentially good. This is an article of faith, a normative theory that, unlike, say, the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, flies in the face of the history of the human species. Indeed, this vision of humanity is so counterfactual that we’d be far more justified in endorsing the judgment of Dr. Sawyer, the miserable psychiatrist from Miracle on 34th Street, that it is those who seek to do good who are “mentally ill” (or “maniacal,” as he put it).
hird, if murderers are “mentally ill,” then rapists, armed robbers, and violent-doers of all sorts must be as well. In all fairness, the “mental health” enthusiasts don’t deny this. In fact, as far as they’re concerned, “mental illness” extends well beyond violence to explain even those select thoughts and feelings that the “experts” assure us are a function of bad health.
Fourth, as the late, prolific psychiatrist Thomas Szasz never tired of informing audiences, though the judgments of psychologists and psychiatrists are cloaked in medical terminology, this is just a veneer designed to mask moral judgments. Yet the latter, even when they are negative, are consonant with human dignity, the dignity that derives from the uniquely human ability to make choices.
In stark contrast, to explain away a person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions in terms of sickness most definitely is an attack against one’s dignity as a person. In giving up the language of morality—a language that pertains uniquely to persons, to subjects or rational beings—to explain human conduct in favor of the language of science, an idiom the subject matter of which consists of objects, human beings are reduced to things. Persons under the aspect of science, even if it is pseudo-science, are no longer persons but animal bipeds. They are no longer agents or actors exercising intelligence but fields within which impersonal forces or processes operate.
Fifth, once human agency and, hence, human dignity has been pushed aside—once it’s been declared by the “experts” that a person is “sick”—than there is no limit to the indignities that could be visited upon that person in the name of either “healing” him or, quite possibly, ending his “suffering.”
In other words, the principle of reciprocity or proportionality—a moral concept—places a line between the permissible and impermissible in distributing retributive justice. Yet this principle has no place within the contexts of “mental illness” and “treatment.”
Finally, since “mental health” and “evil” belong to two, entirely distinct universes of discourse, those who insist upon describing college campus, elementary school, and movie theater killers as “sick” or “mentally ill” are no more justified in regarding them as “evil” than they would be if they described cancer patients as evil. Not only are such folks not evil; not unlike the victims of cancer, they deserve our pity, our compassion.
Conversely, if we insist that these murderers are evil, then we must resist all attempts to label them “mentally ill.”
We can’t have it both ways.
Fighting against political correctness, which has now become a war.
‘Whenever a shooting event, like the murder-suicide at UCLA, gains national notoriety, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over “our” alleged failure to deal adequately with issues of “mental health.”’
LOL, no, theres the always reliable liberal knee jerk ban the guns screeching. Ive rarely heard an hoest well consdiered discussion of the actual causes of the crime.
The Soviets did this all the time. It was just propaganda for SHEEPLE.
“Mentally ill” is a tool of the totalitarian state which is where all politician correctness is going.
In the above photo I see the image of a female whose parent’s failed her utterly.
PS: Note the use of the word “our” in the article, as if it is somehow my fault that leftists allowed this to happen. Leftists are big on collective guilt.
Look, Jack, can the sophistry.
I’ll call guys like that crazy or evil however I see it. And if I call them crazy and evil both, then that’s what they are.
And by the way, this jerk is called crazy for WHY he murdered. Not just that he murdered. So the bulk of your premise is useless at the outset
or just simple projection?
If the mass murderer is a conservative like the OK City Bomber, he is not mentally ill and is put to death immediately. If the murderer is liberal or a member of a victim group, then he is of course a lone wolf/mentally ill. See also John Hinkley and the Unibomber.
That's not true. It appears that Sarkar had delusions of persecution. Since most other people familiar with the situation concluded that these feelings were unjustified and since paranoid delusions are one of the most common symptoms of mental illness, there are are certainly sound reasons to think that Sarkar was probably mentally ill.
Second, the only reason for regarding as “ill” one who acts murderously or violently is the metaphysically dubious supposition that humans are, by nature, essentially good.
That's not true either. No one is saying that everyone who acts murderously is mentally ill. If someone murders because they are perceiving reality in a distorted fashion, then they may be mentally ill.
If murderers are “mentally ill,” then rapists, armed robbers, and violent-doers of all sorts must be as well.
Not all these people are perceiving reality in a distorted way.
As the late, prolific psychiatrist Thomas Szasz never tired of informing audiences ...
Thomas Szasz said that schizophrenia is not a real illness. Brain scans show that there are serious physical problems in the brains of schizophrenics. Therefore Dr. Szasz was full of crap as was already known by anyone who has a family member with schizophrenia.
Whether or not someone has a particular mental illness and whether or not someone is evil are judgments with respect to whether or not someone meets or exceeds the criteria of each condition. It is possible for someone to meet the criteria for both mental illness and evil at the same time since they have different criteria.
Yes we can have it both ways because its reality. One can be chemically
Unbalanced or genetically mentally ill without BEING evil. Their evil acts are the results of mental illness. It is also true that one can be eminentally sane and be evil. Mental illness is biological. Evil is spiritual. Some mental illness can be treated. Evil cannot. Mengele was evil and sane. Someone who thinks he is from Alpha Centauri is insane but not evil. Choice is also a factor with evil. Conscious deliberate choice as well as a degree of satisfaction in being/doing evil defines evil . Choice is not a part of insanity. An insane person thinks people walking on the street are zombies trying to kill him , so he runs them over with his car. An evil person runs them down because he feels like killing znd likes it. An insane evil person thinks he has the right to kill zombies and humans and enjoys the carnage.
And after they have assigned this guilt to the collective ("we"), they conveniently exempt themselves from both.
1) Thomas Szasz’s works are awesome. Amazing writer, everyone should read one of his scholarly books. You will feel smarter by page 2.
2) The only reason tyrants want to expand ‘mental illness’ labels is to use it, under the pseudoscience of “Obamacare,” to seize Americans’ guns because we’ll be “officially diagnosed” with some made-up “illness” or “disorder” such as an obsession with buying one kind of potato chip, playing ‘too many’ computer games, your common sense “phobia” about trillion-dollar deficits or [Fill in your favorite hobby or sane political concern HERE].
3) “Tyrannical tendency” is itself a form of mental illness under their description but never be DXed.
In order for someone to be a murderer, their brain has to be wired wrong. There is nothing wrong with pointing out that people who commit such acts are seriously abnormal.
However, the leftist notion is that someone who is mentally ill is incapable of controlling or understanding his/her actions. That is completely untrue. Psychopathic murders know murder is wrong, and they know exactly what they are doing when they commit murder. Often, they enjoy committing murder. The fact that they are mentally ill—that something is demonstrably wrong in their brains—should not excuse their behavior or be used to exonerate them.
Once they commit murder, they prove themselves less than human, and should be put down the way a vicious dog would be put down. It’s a matter of public safety.
The whole debate is founded on invalid premises.
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