Links for Today

This is a good presentation of mental illness. The description resonates with my (second hand) experience and so does the manner of the speaker. Power, control, and death would seem to be common points of obsession. Mass murders, intrusions, plots, The Mission.

To say that schizophrenia is the condition of a shattered mind is evocative but not adequately specific. Alzheimer’s could be described as a shattered mind, too, perhaps. There is a malice in schizophrenia that clinicians are too quick to dismiss. I am not talking about the sometimes violence of the schizophrenic sufferer; I’d guess that everyone would respond in basically the same way to the same stimuli. But just as it makes we normal people feel better to think that madmen are at peace tied up, lobotomized, or sedated, so too we are much more comfortable believing the schizophrenic’s condition is impersonal chaos and not an irresistible evil.

We Americans, I think, are especially terrified by the thought of an unstoppable evil; our taboo extends to the grave we desperately ignore in our “celebrations of life.” Sufficient positive thinking will fix anything: the economy, cancer, warfare, and especially mental illness.

My friend: I may laugh at your defenses, but I will never laugh at your enemy.