Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

In the era before cellphones while driving outside St. Louis, my car got stuck on a road's divider while making a turn.

It was early morning with no help or cars to be seen. As I stood beside it, a car finally appeared and stopped opposite mine. It held four huge guys and I regretted leaving my pistol at home.

The driver came over and asked what happened. "My car's stuck," I said nervously. After briefly speaking to his companions they came to my car, picked it up, and moved it back onto the road.

I wanted to pay the driver but he refused. "There's a revival meeting at St. Louis Stadium tomorrow night. Come," he said.

Then, without another word, my four angels drove off and vanished into the night.

A December 10, 2024 Wall Street Journal article reflected on the inadequacies of America's students ("In a Test of Adult Know-How, America Comes Up Short The least-educated workers are falling behind on basic skills such as reading a thermometer and planning a trip.") To explain the problem with America's students' literacy, look to early-life parenting. When first read to and then with as toddlers, almost all children will learn to read on their own since the child's mind has the innate ability to induct the nature of reading just as it does the language grammar of the nation into which they are born. No formal teaching of reading is needed. But, sadly, some children do not experience a "good-enough" (not perfect!) parenting. Culture matters too, whether parents prize education and achievement, but these are not popular political talking points. Nor should teachers be expected to re-parent their students.

A recent robust online clinical discussion concerned whether a teenager's proper diagnosis was autism or a subtype of schizophrenia despite the treatment of both conditions being the same: for the therapist to provide such a comfortable experience that the patient will eventually renounce the symptoms which keep them socially isolated and gain social skills. Both conditions reflect what has been termed Elements of a Borderline Psychotic Psychostructural Organization: the weakness of basic ego capacities which develop during the earliest years of life and control thinking, behavior, the sense of who one is, and more.

Autism is vastly diagnosed. With true autism the very young child senses the grave inadequacy of their parenting and tries to function independently. After inevitably failing because of their age and despairing they enter a personal universe to psychologically protect themselves, which is the autism. An Australian study found that when the parents of very young children with autistic features were provided extensive parenting education almost all the children were no longer diagnosable as autistic by the age of four.

A recent Wall Street Journal article inspired this blog ("Three Killings, One Suspect, and a sister Who Warned Her Brother Needed Help" - Nov. 30, 2024). Forty-one-year-old Chris Ferguson struggled with mental illness since his twenties, working as an unskilled cashier despite being a college honors graduate.
Though experiencing a dozen psychiatric hospitalizations and prescribed psychotropic medications his improvements were brief and tenuous. Longer than his provided three-day hospitalizations was barred without his consent or a court order, causing recurring experiences of deterioration. Despite his sister's plea that he was losing control, the hospital refused to admit him without his consent, which he refused to give. He was finally hospitalized after murdering three elderly neighbors, having been arrested while staggering through the neighborhood shirtless and barefoot with bloody footprints, recorded by security cameras. His latest trip to the hospital was his fourth in five months.
While the prediction of violent behavior will always be imprecise, several factors seem relevant here and with similar events: the reliance on psychotropic medication to allegedly "cure" mental illness; the limited knowledge of child psychological development and developmental psychopathology by doctors who have had minimal training in psychotherapy, today's psychiatric residents receiving only ten-percent of the training in psychotherapy they did seventy-years ago.
While state psychiatric hospitals were imperfect they did provide a place of safety for patients and the public. Their closing with the promised savings promised for supportive housing and outpatient services never occurring, the myth that medication can cure complex problems of living having been accepted..
An exhaustive study of severely disturbed, hospitalized psychiatric patients conducted more than fifty-years ago found that the lowest rate of recidivism (re-hospitalization) occurred with patients who were given no medication in the hospital, the next lowest rate was those provided medication in the hospital but not upon discharge, and the poorest prognosis was of patients taking medication both in the hospital and following discharge.
While legal and treatment changes cannot guarantee against crimes like Ferguson's, continuing present policies will guarantee their occurrence.