PSYCHIATRY HAS MADE A FEW MISTAKES

I thought this was a particularly poignant example of a serious mistake that psychiatry has made, but I don’t introduce this to be anti-psychology, like those who speak mindlessly about “psychobabble”. They usually are still in denial about the things that have reduced them to a permanent case of infantilism. To put down psychiatry is their way of letting us know that, “I’m regressed but I don’t know it.”

“The effects of such lobotomies are well illustrated in the movies Francis and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I myself have observed their devastating results. The first patient with whom I attempted psychotherapy had taken off all her clothes one day and run around the streets of her home town screaming, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania!’ She was subsequently hospitalised and then was lobotomised within six weeks. She often continued to shout, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania,’ but she would not take off her clothes or otherwise express her clearly ambivalent and partially sexual feelings toward her father, because she would immediately forget what she was shouting about. Unable to concentrate for more than ten seconds at a time, she was unable to obtain a job outside the hospital or live with relatives. She had, in effect, been sentenced to life imprisonment for having expressed her feelings in a socially inappropriate way. Although lobotomies are now greatly reduced, destructive techniques are far from ancient history.” (from Robyn Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 49)


CHARITY, A PARTICULARLY LIBERAL THING TO DO

Premise: the government under liberals used to practice a pure form of charity. Under current conservative leadership and since sometime in the near past, say since Reagan, pure forms of charity have almost disappeared.

Have you noticed the number of drunks and drifters currently standing on street corners in most major cities of the U.S., holding up their begging bowls, er… signs? Even women have joined them. The question we should be asking ourselves is why this has happened. Drunks have been with us forever, but when I was child and youth, they weren’t standing on street corners. Not that I mind them standing on street corners. After all, if they’re begging for a living, conservative meanies can’t charge drunks with being on welfare, can they? Drunks on street corners with begging signs are earning their living in a not too agreeable way, but they’re at least earning a living. Most Americans who denigrate them probably wouldn’t have the courage to earn their own keeps in that way. They’d steal first, they’d take from the poor and give to the rich. They’d get their Ivy League college buddies to give them a job. That’s how they’d do it if they were brought up in Bush circles and were not too bright. That’s what Bush himself did. That’s Bush-league charity: you rub my back and I’ll rub yours. No charity at all. Do you think Bush would have gotten where he is in a fair test of skills and abilities?

In the past, under liberal leadership, the absolutely destitute drunk could get help and didn’t have to stand on street corners. Believe it or not, a drunk or hobo could get enough pure charity from Democratic government to exist without going to the curbside. Taking their cue from the mythological words of the mythological Jesus (who neocons claim to have close relations with), liberals didn’t judge the drunk. They just pitched in and built a governmental system that helped him. That’s pure charity, charity without strings, charity as it should be practiced if it’s to be called “charity”.

Now, under conservative leadership, pure charity has disappeared. It’s been lobotomized right out of the American consciousness. It’s been replaced by coercive giving, giving with puppet strings attached. Now, the drunk must kowtow to conservative values to get charity, or she must go to Bush’s religious charities to get a hot and a cot. Now government force is being used to make a drunk get Bush’s religion in order to find any help at all. Do it Bush’s way or starve. That’s right, government is now a Christian front organization. Charity has disappeared altogether to be replaced by coercion and bribery. There is no real charity under neocon systems.

In fact, if conservatives were honest, they’d admit that under their forms of governance, charity doesn’t exist. To a conservative, to need charity is already to be judged as unworthy of it. If you need charity, you don’t deserve charity. That’s the Catch 22 of conservative compassion. Even a mother with children is not worthy of help, not even the widow. “Send them to work,” conservative’s say. Never mind that welfare mothers can’t find affordable day care for their children. Screw the children, conservatives say. They say this not with words, because then we’d know them openly for what they are. They say it with every bill they pass and every regulation they level against the poor.

“Every man has three characters—that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.” —Alphonse Karr [Now this one tells on us all, eh?]