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.
A Psychologist's Thoughts on Clinical Practice, Behavior, and Life
How Societal Failings Led To Three Killings
Teenage Video Gameplay And Mental Illness
Some parents believe their child's emotional difficulties derive from excessive video gameplay but this is not true. Video games are heavily obsessive-compulsive. An obsession is a repetitive thought and a compulsion is a repetitive behavior. An example is repeatedly worrying that one did not lock a door and then continually checking that it was done. Thus both youth and adults who play video games excessively do so because they're anxious, and the gameplay reduces their anxiety using the mind's instinctive obsessive- compulsive ego defense.
So it is anxiety which creates excessive gameplay and not the gameplay which creates anxiety or emotional difficulties. To reduce their child's play, a parent should try to discover what is distressing their child and alleviate it, alone or with the aid of a mental health professional. Only then will the gameplay become less important to them. Odering their child not to play the game won't work and will create the feeling they are misunderstood and arouse distrust.
Why Psychiatric Diagnoses Are Often Worthless
Frequently after a horrifying multiple murder surfaces, news of the criminal's prior psychiatric diagnoses follows: that he had been diagnosed as "psychotic" or suffering from OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder") or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) or another. Yet the treatment that followed each diagnosis was unsuccessful and the critical question remains: why?
Despite the complexity of human behavior this answer is simple: because naming a condition according to current diagnostic nomenclature (ICD-10), which is required for insurance payment, has taken the place of understanding the person for which study of their childhood is essential but usually absent.
To explain a person's behavior one must know the state of their ego capacities, which develop before the age of four- years, since these govern the ability to control thinking and behavior, to modulate mood, to distinguish reality from fantasy, and others, all comprising the Executive Function. But for decades, the false reductionist pseudo-neurological/chemical notion of what governs human psychology, as the existence of a "chemical imbalance" best treated with medication haa been followed, with only recent increased criticism of this spurious notion. As the crimes and suffering continue.
The Benefit and Danger of Holding An Inaccurate Self-Image
While it is often believed that holding an incorrect concept of who one is (what psychologists term a "sense of self") is harmful, this is not always true. Being common with emotional disorders, these sufferers do benefit for it grants them hope and protection from deep suicidal despair. Moreover, the fantasy may indicate an embryonic talent which could lead to significant achievement after their healing through treatment. Yet while comforting, holding an unrealistic fantasy with no hope of success can lead to greater despair.
Treating the Diagnostically Hopeless Psychiatric Patient
To successfully treat those with severer mental health disorders, the therapist must take little for granted, ignoring accepted beliefs about prognosis and motivation since clinician prejudice can arouse unjustified feelings of defeatism and hopelessness.
Each person is unique with another being unable to know their experience fully and the depth of their suffering. The sicker patient knows much about themself but, from guilt or fear of acting-out impulsively, is afraid to allow themselves to feel what they know. Nor because of their low self-esteem do they value this knowledge. So they retreat from what is most useful: to feel what they know.
Thus when a patient refers to the presumed hopelessness of the diagnoses they had formerly been told, they should be reminded that they are a complex human being and not a simple diagnostic classification.
Assisted Suicide For the Intractably Mentally Ill: The Persisting Notion of Incurability in Mental Illness
Considering the widespread public and clinician ignorance about psychological development it is unsurprising that Canadian legislation is being considered to assist suicide of the "unbearably suffering mentally ill." While death is inevitable for all and none would wish to prolong pain, I suggest that this proposal reflects both the universal fear of insanity and the reluctance to accept that treatment competence affects healing.
The fear of insanity has a central organizing role in living since what is termed the Executive Function controls behavior, what is considered human. To sense its importance, try to consider how your life would change were you to believe yourself sliding toward psychosis. Many widespread fears, as that of flying or elevators, owe their power to this underlying fear which is usually repressed and thus unavailable for conscious awareness.
While a doctor's skill is considered crucial in the treatment of biological illnesses, this tends not to be the case with psychological disorders though education and talent should logically be considered critical factors in the healing of both. This disparity derives from the widespread ignorance of public and clinicians of the effect of stresses on normal psychological development, this enabling the attractive notion that significant life issues can be quickly resolved using drugs or gadgets. There are now being marketed do-it-yourself, brain-wave machines which purportedly eliminate depression and anxiety. Where little is understood, everything is deemed possible and particularly among those who treat feelings as facts.
To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his final line of The Great Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Our sorry past of lobotomies and shock treatments which have destroyed so many lives.
More about Canada's assisted suicide law for the mentally ill
The Tragedy of Mental Illness:
Rudolph Schoenheimer, a loner and brilliant biochemist, was forced to leave Germany in 1933. He discovered that body constituents are in a continuous state of chemical renewal with chemicals appearing and disappearing even in adult organisms while their structure and form remain unchanged. Believed to be a certain winner of the Nobel Prize, he suffered from manic-depression and killed himself at the age of forty-three in 1941.