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Fascist Pigs, Fanatical Ideologues, and Delusional Illness
"Dr. Sanity"...I have not met or examined the individual who is in custody for this horrific attack. But I have read quite a bit of information about him now. Making a reasonable clinical determination (which will be impacted obviously by forthcoming information also); and based on his own writings and behaviors that were described prior to this incident, my best assessment is that Jared Loughner was likely suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a real physiological illness that usually begins in late adolescence, early adulthood; and it is like a youthful dementia; slowly tearing down the neural pathways in the brain and causing deteriorating cognitive functioning. The paranoia comes about as the person suffering from the disease tries to make sense of all the irrational, distorted and bewildering perceptions that their malfunctioning brain is attempting to interpret. Paranoid schizophrenics almost always have bizarre political and/or religious agendas. Their delusions almost always have relevance to the current political situation and context within which they live. I can give you hundreds of examples from my personal experience treating them: the CIA or other "secret" agencies are tapping into their minds; the "government" (and I have seen U.S., British, and multiple other governments implicated depending on the national origins of the individual in question) is out to destroy them because they know something they should not; they alone understand the urgency of the threat. When the Patty Hearst kidnapping occurred decades ago, almost all the schizophrenics I saw had delusions related to Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. More recently, a paranoid schizophrenic that I evaluated thought that President Bush practiced dark magic to force people into 'volunteering' for the military and that this was why no military draft was needed to get recruits to go to Iraq. The paranoid person himself is always at the center of some vast conspiracy that only he can see. He is special because of it--and this specialness likely compensates for whatever awareness he might have of his deterioring intellectual and social functioning. As that functioning gets more chaotic and dysfunctional, the paranoid gets even more desperate to explain what is happening to him and his world, and the delusions become more and more complex and eventually may have no connection at all to anything in the real world. In my career as a psychiatrist I have encountered many psychotic and schizophrenic individuals with religious and anti-religious delusions.... ...It takes a truly 'sick' person, in every philosophical/moral/spiritual and ethical sense of the word to say that such an ill person's motivations are the exact motivations of those with whom they happen to disagree. I have been treating schizophrenic patients for almost 35 years now. The point is that their illness impairs their cognitive functioning. Schizophrenics have a biological cause for their dysfunction.... Go read it all. Posted by: Mike 2011-01-10 |
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