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To: betty boop
Thank you for sharing your insights and previews to this books, dearest sister in Christ!

Based on how far as I've gotten into The Man without Qualities by now, I'd have to say Musil is an even more penetrating analyst of the human psyche than Dostoyevsky.... And man, for me that's saying a lot.

That is a huge endorsement - and now I want to read it, too. LOL!

768 posted on 10/14/2009 9:33:40 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
That is a huge endorsement - and now I want to read it, too. LOL!

Oh, thank you dearest sister in Christ, for your very kind words of support!

Mind you, I wrote my last as a person whose "clinical experience" with bona fide, "certifiable" psychiatric patients consists of two summers spent during my college years as a nursing assistant at a Massachusetts State psychiatric hospital. My first summer was on the "chronic" ward. My second, on the "rehab" ward. [Whatta joke "Rehab" was. "Chronic" was a model of sanity in comparison, but only just barely.]

It was especially on my tour on the Rehab ward when I began to appreciate two things in particular. (1) The patients could be perfectly "reasonable" when the purpose suited them. [E.g., to earn "step privileges" for their defined "good behavior," which would allow them greater freedom to, among other things, go to the canteen at will to buy chocolate and other goodies.] (2) I began to wonder who was "more crazy" — the patients themselves or the professional staff, their supposed guardians and healers. [I can give examples of this; but I'm trying to keep this communication as short as possible, at least here. Ask questions, anyone who wants to.]

Anyhoot, this questionable status quo — keeping people who really were a potential danger to themselves and others, one way or another (from, for instance, drowning in a ditch, or freezing to death as the prize of a successful escape) on such an idiotic treadmill of futility did not seem to me at all "reasonable."

The Rehab patients had no concept, for all their skills at cunning yet self-serving reasoning whenever it helped them — of how to be "safe" from themselves.

And whenever "reason" didn't serve their purpose, as when they had accumulated so many "steps" (for "good behavior") that they became candidates for release into the larger community (which no one wanted!!!), thereby to lose all the institutional protections on which they had come to depend — they'd end up "acting out," soon to be in straightjacket and confined to the isolation room. And from there, upon release from IR, back to the status of zero steps, thus to begin moving upward again from there in the step-earning game — to the chocolate, but not ever so far as to risk release into the community — to a self-responsibility of which they were clearly incapable.

I still have not answered the question for myself, to this day, as to whom was "crazier": the patients, or the professional staff of psychiatrists and nurses, who believed the "rehab system" had any potentiality of success in the first place.

I just figure them folks were way too "Skinnerian" in their psychiatric ideology, and thus were totally out of touch with the realities of real human nature, disturbed or otherwise.

Anyhoot, mainly the patients "won" under this configuration of the psychiatric practice in effect at the time.

Governor Dukakis eventually took care of all that, as it turned out, with his "deinstitutionalization" program. He said: "Hey, these patients are perfectly fine in society as long as they take their meds." So he released most of them, into the wider community into which very, very few of them wanted to go. Then there were "problems": the releasees were not taking their meds. And THEN the state courts weighed in, and said: We cannot force these people to take their meds.

And so, if you ever come to Boston, and wonder who these people are who go about night and day with shopping carts loaded with whatever motley contents that the cart-pushers associate with their life, by which they in fact identify their current state of being — you are looking at the "street people" that Governor Dukakis created. The Pine Street Inn [May God ever bless them!] combs the streets for these people summer and winter, just to keep them from starving or freezing themselves to death....

Don't we just love the "tender mercies" of the Democrat party for the "downtrodden," the "disadvantaged?"

But I see I'm digressing here. Time to stop.

I'm wishing you a blessed "good night!" dearest sister in Christ!

769 posted on 10/15/2009 12:21:09 AM PDT by betty boop (Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is. —Pope Benedict XVI)
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