All posts tagged "Mental Illness"

Former President Donald Trump's mental deterioration and disdain for America itself is becoming clear even to his die-hard fans, conservative commentator and former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols told MSNBC's Joy Reid on Friday — but they have a surprising mentality around it.

This comes as Trump delivered a recent speech in which he proclaimed, "Cities are choking to death, our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying. Right now, our country is known as a joke. It's a joke."

"Tom, not only is none of that even close to true, it's ridiculous, honestly," said Reid. "I wonder what does one say about a country where adults listen to that and then listen to Biden and say no, I want that. That is what should be the president. That's how the president should sound."...

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For some reason, this week's Newsweek was really great, with an interesting story about how sports wives and girlfriends are an easy target for fan rage and Andrew Sullivan's pretty good article on the contraception debacle, where he rehashes my theory that Obama set it up this way. (However, he still insists that abortion is different, even though anti-choicers have shown their true colors with the attacks on contraception.) But one article I found really fascinating was this brave one by Nancy Hass decrying the intense media indulgence of parental delusions attached to a bout of mass hysteria in LeRoy, New York. For those who haven't heard, a bunch of teenage girls have been overcome with a series of uncontrollable tics, much like Tourette's syndrome, and---this is critical to understanding what's going on---it's spreading. It's an open and shut case of mass hysteria: localized, no physical cause, contagious, and concentrated in teenage girls. While mass hysteria can occur in other groups, it most commonly occurs in teenage girls, probably because the stresses unique to being a teenage girl create the perfect situation for this. But the parents don't want to hear it. They want the answer to be roughly "anything else". And, according to Hass, a number of media sources are giving them a sympathetic audience to make their understandable but still deluded claims that it's something other than mass hysteria. 

[rebelmouse-image 24749947 original_size="650x433" expand=1]Conservatives are deep into denying that environment could play a role in pushing someone suffering from mental illness towards violence (except, of course, if they're suggesting that someone mentally ill might be just really angry about health care reform), at least insofar as they need to in order to deny that someone with a mental illness who has an obsessive hatred of a politician could be egged on by living in a community where harassment and violent speech towards that politician had become commonplace. (I can't stop marveling at the fact that preserving that steady stream of harassment, lies, and violent speech is the hill they're willing to die on.) So, I thought it would be useful to look at issues that fall somewhat out of the usual partisan brackets and ask if Loughner really lived in a bubble that had no relationship to the real world, or was he influenced by it?

[rebelmouse-image 24749924 original_size="480x640" expand=1]Holding the right responsible for their paranoid, incendiary, violent rhetoric reminds me strongly of trying to put a cat in its carrier. You know it has to be done, but you really don't want to do it. The cat is going to lash out. She's going to hide under the bed. She's going to hiss and scream. She's going to grab the sides of the carrier as you push her in, in a pathetic final bid not to go the carrier. But you have the fight anyway, because you can't just renege on your responsibilities the second they become a problem.