Patricia on the hidden health crisis of mental illness.

Ashley Miller agrees that there's a mental health crisis, but makes the good point that since mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of crime, it's counterproductive to tie the issue to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Bridget Magnus correctly notes that since the guns used in Newtown were not purchased by Adam Lanza, it's not clear that stricter gun control would have prevented what happened. She's on Team Mental Illness.

Margaret and Helen are on Team Guns.

(For the record, I'm on both teams, particularly if, as has been reported, Nancy Lanza was a bit of a doomsday prepper, getting ready to protect herself from the marauding hordes when It All Falls Apart. I'd also be interested in knowing from whence she get these ideas and about her television and radio listening habits. OK. Carry on.)

Ramona doesn't need to know their names to give them faces.

Jayhawk attributes the increase in gun-related violence to our fascination with violence and death, from unjust wars to government-sanctioned assassinations to eliminationist rhetoric.

Walk a mile, etc. Via Susie Madrak comes this post by Lisa Long about living with a mentally ill son.

Digby notes that if we have a 50% jump in the number of guns since 1995, why isn't "More Guns" proving to mean less violence, as the right continues to promise?

(In closing, just a note: When I do these, I just click around my blogroll at random, then check out Facebook looking for interesting links. Usually these compendia consist of mostly male bloggers. No particular reason, it just works out that way. Today it's almost all women. Does the mass death of female public school teachers and six-year-olds resonate more with women because we are wired that way? Discuss.) .

Labels: 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day, guns, mental illness

In the aftermath of a horrific incident such as happened in Newtown, Connecticut, there's always a depressing sameness to the coverage. Yesterday this nation's view of teachers was as "moochers", taking generous compensation packages and getting summers off. Today it's about the heroic teachers who gave their own lives to save the children in their charge. In a few days, a week, a month, we'll go back to bashing teachers -- until the next tragedy, and there will be a next one, because this nation lacks the will to do anything to prevent it.

The next step is to try to isolate the gunman -- to turn him into some kind of "other" -- someone who could never live in OUR community, attend OUR local school, or be OUR child. To do that we have to put labels on him.

Yesterday on the local news they were talking about how the gunman was dressed all in black, as if an affinity for black clothing could automatically be extrapolated to somehow explain taking guns into a school for a massacre. I thought at that moment about Damien Echols, another young man with an affinity for black clothing who spent eighteen years on death row as part of the West Memphis Three for a crime he DIDN'T commit. It may very well be that kids who like to wear black clothes are more depressed than other kids, but for every kid who wears black and shoots up a school, how many millions more are there who don't?

Today, authorities are trying to come up with "clues." Here is one example of what we're getting so far:

So far, little is known about the 20-year-old who barely had a digital footprint, and didn't even have a Facebook profile. That is surprising not only because of his age but because he appears to have been a good student who was really interested in computers and was part of a technology club at Newtown High School. One source tells the New York Daily News Lanza “was like one of these real brainiac computer kind of kids.” One thing everyone seems to be able to agree on is that Lanza likely had some sort of mental disability or developmental disorder. One law enforcement official tells the Associated Press Adam Lanza might have suffered from a personality disorder and the New York Times reports that several who knew Lanza in high school had been told he had Aperger’s syndrome, a high functioning form of autism.

It certainly seems he had several tell-tale signs of the disorder, often making those around him nervous because he was painfully shy and seemed to struggle to be social and form connections with people. It was evident Lanza “had a condition,” a neighbor tells the New York Post. “You definitely notice it,” he added. Lanza was “kind of, like, needy. I wouldn’t say antisocial, but struggling to be social.” One “family insider” tells the New York Daily News Lanza “was a deeply disturbed kid,” who “had major issues” and “was subject to outbursts.” A 25-year-old neighbor who sometimes watched Adam Lanza when his mother would go out with friends, said he was on medication, reports the Washington Post.

Several people describe Lanza as withdrawn and awkward but not threatening. “Overall, I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don’t know, shy and quiet. Didn’t really look you in the eye,” a former neighbor said. “Just kind of a weird kid, maybe.”

Here's another:

He was dark and disturbed, a deeply troubled boy from a wealthy family who unnerved his neighbors and classmates.

Mass murderer Adam Lanza, 20, was a ticking time bomb, people who knew him told the Daily News.

“This was a deeply disturbed kid,” a family insider told the Daily News. “He certainly had major issues. He was subject to outbursts from what I recall.”

Lanza, who friends and officials said suffered from Asperger’s syndrome or a personality disorder, had a tortured mind.

He was socially awkward and at times unstable, but also extraordinarily bright.

“He was smart,” the insider said. “He was like one of these real brainiac computer kind of kids.”

A “longtime” family friend said Lanza had a condition “where he couldn’t feel pain.”

“A few years ago when he was on the baseball team, everyone had to be careful that he didn’t fall because he could get hurt and not feel it,” said the friend. “Adam had a lot of mental problems.”

A few weeks ago, the Magazine section of the Sunday New York Times had an article about Ashlyn Blocker, a Georgia teenager who has a genetic mutation that causes her to not feel pain. A rheumatologist studying her hopes to study her adolescence under the theory that someone who can't feel physical pain may also not be able to feel emotional pain either. I wonder if Adam Lanza perhaps had a similar condition and also had supposedly intelligent professionals wondering if his condition made him some sort of potential real-life Dexter Morgan.

My heart hurts when I read stuff like this because of the way it feeds into the kind of middle school stereotypes of kids who are different that makes growing up hell for those of us (and yes, I was one) who navigate childhood knowing that something about us makes us different from other kids and we don't know why. Many kids have trouble forming connections with people, for any number of reasons. Sometimes I wonder if we're labeling kids too much, calling kids "autistic" and explaining away shyness or just being different as "Asperger's." I don't doubt that these conditions exist, but I wonder if we're stigmatizing kids who are quirky or smart or otherwise different by labeling them with brain disorders.

My mother used to scream at me when I didn't want to go out to play but was happier alone in my room making dollhouse furniture out of construction paper and transparent tape. I was always happier reading than playing with other kids. I wrote little books about Snoopy and the Red Baron. I had one friend -- a boy -- who was also a quirky kid who enjoyed drawing things like a dog lifting its leg and peeing all over the Manhattan skyline. Today a drawing like that or a dollhouse full of meticulously-assembled reproductions of Danish modern furniture made of paper would be regarded as "evidence" of a mental disorder.

As a depressed high school student, I wore a poncho and my hair over my eyes every day. I had few friends and spent many lunchtimes alone reading sad poetry I'd copied into a blank book. When I did have friends, they were weird kids like me -- and there were precious few of them. Later on I got into a theatre group in town which pulled me out of myself a bit, but I don't think I really stopped hating who I was and what I was until I was well into my thirties. I wasn't really alone, there were plenty of kids like me. Back then, with no internet, you'd find them in ones and twos in your local school or community. Today it's easier for such kids to find each other, though it appears that Adam Lanza didn't.

I wonder sometimes, when every time this happens, the same words pop up in the news articles trying to make sense of the senseless: Brainiac. Quiet. Weird. Shy. These are words that should not have negative connotations, but when a socially awkward kid breaks and commits an atrocity like this, suddenly everyone who isn't captain of the football team or a cheerleader is automatically suspect. I'm so glad I'm not growing up now.

Over the next few days, the news media will write more about Adam Lanza, and the stories they'll write will have the same tone of trying to turn a kid who was "different" into a monster. Because it's much easier to try to put Adam Lanza into which YOUR kid can't possibly fit, so we can delude ourselves that it can't happen here.

And the quirky kids -- the kids who wear black, the kids who would rather read or paint than play sports, the kids who want to read about the Buddha instead of about Jesus, the kids who like to wear hats from the 1940s, the kids who look for scratchy old blues records at garage sales, the kids who write poetry and would just as soon sit and think as play video games -- will continue to be looked askance at by both other children and ignorant adults who never got over their own skepticism of the difference. A few of them will simply break -- and we'll go through the same drill again.

Labels: mental illness, people who are different, quriky people

When I posted earlier this week about the Aurora shootings, I noted that my first thought after hearing about James Holmes was "schizophrenia". Looks like I may have been right:

The suspected Batman movie premiere gunman was seeing a university psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia before the shooting that killed 12, court documents showed Friday.

James Holmes sent a notebook to Lynne Fenton, who teaches at the University of Colorado’s medical school and heads student mental services there, that included details and drawings depicting his planned mass killing, according to reports.

It was unclear when the package reached the school, and officials remained tight-lipped due to a gag order imposed by the judge overseeing the case.

[snip]

In a preview of likely battles to come, the defense lawyers argued that the contents of the package should not be used as evidence because “Mr Holmes was a psychiatric patient of Dr Fenton, and his communications with her are protected.”

Holmes, who was studying neuroscience in a doctoral program at the University of Colorado Denver, is expected to be charged with 12 murders and 58 attempted murders at his next court appearance on Monday, when he is due to be formally charged over the July 20 shooting.

Sylvester granted a hearing on the defense motion also be held on that day.

Fenton’s research focuses on schizophrenia and other major mental illnesses.

Labels: guns, mental illness

=Sigh=

Are you getting as tired as I am of the same old arguments about guns every time something like this happens? It's the same old arguments, the same "experts" being trotted out to speculate about What Could Have Made Him Do It. Last night Mr. Brilliant pointed out that I said something like "Every time this happens...", and how it meant that some guy going off his nut and shooting a bunch of people for no reason is no longer all that unusual.

The blather about the sort of massacre that took place in Aurora, Colorado the other night is always framed in terms of gun control or the Second Amendment or the NRA, or speculation about whatever the Cause Du Jour is (in this case it seems to be bullying). Last night I ventured for a few minutes into the fetid swamp of right-wing talk radio, just to see how the right was spinning, as they do every time some guy goes off his nut and shoots a bunch of people, which causes people to start rationally thinking about some kind of responsibility to go with the right to amass a military-style arsenal. It seems that ABC News rumormonger Brian Ross, who is rarely right about anything, had decided that James Holmes was some kind of Tea Partier. Ross had to apologize later on when his speculation turned out to be baseless, but that hasn't stopped the Usual Suspects from continuing the Breitbartian meme (I'm not going to link to Breitbart, look it up for yourself) of some kind of Mass Liberal Media Conspiracy to make the Tea Party look bad. But on the radio last night, Mark Levin was ranting about how liberals hate conservatives and want to destroy them with baseless allegations like this, never once mentioning, or even thinking, about the Kenyan Muslim Terrorist Anti-Colonial Drug Addict kind of filth that people like Mark Levin have been flinging at this country's first black president for the last three-plus years.

I may have strong political leanings, but my first as-yet-baseless-speculation, especially in the aftermath of the Arizona shooting last year, was schizophrenia, a disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions, thought disorders, an altered sense of self, lack of motivation, flat affect, depression, and social withdrawal. Schizophrenia tends to manifest for the first time between the ages of 10 and 25, which puts Holmes right in the ballpark. Research is mixed about a correlation between high intelligence and schizophrenia, so the fact that Holmes graduated with honors from the University of California with a degree in neuroscience may or may not be significant. Neuroscience is hardly the sort of major that someone looking to slack his way through college would choose.

The other aspect of this evolving story that leaped out at me is that a guy who is described by everyone who knew him as being ferociously intelligent ended up working at a McDonald's after getting this honors degree in neuroscience. With all the talk we hear from Barack Obama on the stump about education, and about science education, we are still a nation in which an honors science graduate can't find a job and ends up slinging hamburgers. There aren't any reports about how much, if any, college debt Holmes ended up with, but when you live in a society where the president preaches about excellence in science but where science has no value in the job market, it's easy to imagine someone deciding to pursue a Ph.D. and then deciding it's all bullshit and might as well go out in a blaze of glory.

Was Holmes affected by mental illness? The planetary alignment in his birth chart? Fueled by economic rage and a sense of futility? A combination of all of them? Or are the Aurora shootings just a case of Shit Happens? We just don't know yet.

The only thing that's certain is that today this country is just a little more frightened and a little more confused. And that never bodes well.

UPDATE: Let the finger-pointing begin:

Rick Warren blames the teaching of evolution. Because if James Holmes had just stopped all this science nonsense and studied Jesus like a good boy, he wouldn't have left grad school and none of this would have happened. Or something.

The stupidest fucking person on the planet not named "Michele Bachmann" blames "attacks on our Judeo-Christian beliefs."

Are people really blaming Batman?

And there is at least one blogger who blames Obama. I won't link to the site, just google "Your n----- president", only spell out the word. Warning: Highly foul, vile, toxic stuff. AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Inevitably, everything with these people comes down to "Liberals Liberals Liberals We're Going To Heaven And You're Not Nyaah Nyaah Nyaah".

Labels: guns, mental illness, violence

Like anyone in America with a soul, I've been riveted to the horrific events that took place in Tucson, Arizona today. Here at Casa la Brilliant, we've been glued to the TV in a way we haven't been since the 9/11 attacks, and for much the same reason: How can something like this be happening in our country?

This may be the only time I'll ever say this, but Shep Smith was doing a great job on Faux Noise, where we tuned in to see what kind of wingnut spin was going to be happening. Smith is the only thing that is at all decent about the Murdoch Borg, and kudos to him for trying, however vainly, to try to keep his coverage factual. Of course later on the spin went over to trying to protect the GOP from any connection to the apparent assassination attempt on a Democratic Congresswoman, and also to pointing out that Gabrielle Giffords is a staunch defender of gun rights, but Smith did a great job. At MSNBC, the D-list team was trying valiantly to handle the story, which made me wistful for the good old days of REAL television journalism, when smart journalists handled such events instead of unlined plasticine news-bots. And CNN was largely blathering, grateful for the diversion of the various news conferences.

Right now we know little about Jared Lee Loughner, though the videos posted on his YouTube channel show the kind of obsession with mind control that one would associate with mental illness, though I'm not about to start consulting the DSM-IV to find a box in which to put this guy (though I'm sure that tomorrow there are mental health "professionals" who will). The right is already touting the fact that Loughner cites The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books shows he's a leftist, conveniently omitting the fact that so is Mein Kampf (except that the right thinks Hitler was a leftist too, so that won't stand in anyone's way).

Loughner also talks a fair amount about "conscience dreaming", though I'm not sure what that means, unless he is talking about "conscious dreaming" (or "lucid dreaming"), as explained here.

It's entirely possible that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, some of her staff, and other bystanders (including a 9-year-old child who has tragically died from her injuries) were the unlucky targets of a mentally ill person. He may be a teabagger, he may be ex-military with PTSD, he may be a Glenn Beckian, he may say his neighbor's dog Sam told him to do it.

No matter how this turns out, is it unreasonable to ask that we take a look at the kind of political rhetoric that talks about "Second Amendment remedies", and draws gun-sight targets on Congressional districts (Facebook link / other link) and tweets "Don't retreat, INSTEAD Reload!"? Yes, every shooting like this is the work of a nut. But most of these nuts have cited the eliminationist rhetoric spouted by Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the rest of the Tea Party mouthpieces and deities. At what point do we get to draw an association, if not outright cast blame, with those who tap into the obsessions of the mentally ill and the paranoid? What are we really gaining as a nation that is faced with a probably unavoidable decline when this is the nature of the discourse?

Labels: Assassination attempts, mental illness

Today's honoree, Joan Walsh, who had the guts to articulate what I thought when I first saw the photographs, and then read about the web postings of the Christmas Day Liar Liar Pants on Fire would-be bomber:

Finally — and this is the sort of thing you're not allowed to say if you are, as Glenn Greenwald notes, a Serious Journalist — but every time I see Abdulmutallab's face I'm struck by how young and vulnerable he looks. His troubled Web writings left the same impression. I'm not sure what that means. He is, increasingly, the face of young militants — the product of a good home and education, even wealth, not of slums and deprivation (although the poverty and chaos of Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia certainly contribute to al-Qaida's strength and appeal there). Abdulmutallab reminds me more of a troubled American school shooter than, say, Mohammed Atta. Al-Qaida's appeal to such lost souls may well be high, but it's a misery that crosses boundaries of religion and race.

The first thing I thought of when I read how depressed and confused this young man is was not "waterboarding", but "Paxil." There's a lot more of Eric Harris, or, let's face it, Timothy McVeigh, to this young man than there is of Osama Bin Laden. However horrific the results might have been had the bombing attempt succeeded, this is not a trained assassin, this is a fucked-up kid who was ripe for the picking by jihadists. I know the right would rather turn the entire Middle East into a sheet of glass than use the words "root causes", but it seems to me that perhaps we might want to look at why a 23-year-old with every advantage possible would prefer flaming aerial death to living in this world another day.

Honorable mention: White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer, who finds enough nutsack to point out that Cheney talking about being ineffective against terrorism is like, if I may say, the pot calling the kettle black. Money quote:

Second, the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President – who is this nation’s Commander-in-Chief – needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama. In his inaugural, the President said “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” In a recent speech, Assistant to the President for Terrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan said “Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the extremists we will defeat.” At West Point, the President told the nation why it was “in our vital national interest” to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to fight the war in Afghanistan, adding that as Commander in Chief, “I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.” And at Oslo, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the President said, “We are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.”

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies.

I think Dan Pfeiffer just called Dick Cheney a pencil-dick. More like this, please.

Labels: mental illness, terrorism

What goes on in the human brain when its pushed to the breaking point? Could today's massacre at Fort Hood possibly be the result of a terra-ist plot? The country is shocked, shocked, once again, to experience the war right here at home. I believe they call this a frag, but I don't know if it could possibly ever be as simple as that. Bush's wars have created a new kind of crazy, and I'm afraid that we are only just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the particular form of pain coming our way in the fallout from these long, pointless wars and our shoestring budget for military after-care.

Major Nidal Malik Hassan was career military soldier, specializing in getting an education. He had not been at Fort Hood long; it was his first deployment and he was reportedly treating soldiers with PTSD. Hassan otherwise was just one of the close to 50,000 military members and almost 8,000 family members living at Fort Hood, America's largest Military base. Of course, in a population like that, the reasons for enlisting vary, and its safe to say that probably its the minority who actually look forward to overseas wartime deployment.

Before going for his M.D, Hassan got a masters in public health, so he owed years of service to the military, having attended their schools, and had recently found out that he was to be deployed himself. This was an idea that he was reportedly opposed to. In a country where higher learning is often so expensive as to be out of the reach of most people, the time had finally come for the perpetual student to pay the piper.
Hassan, 39 and on his first assignment, had become a military psychiatrist specializing in the most difficult cases of traumatic stress. It makes some sort of perfect sense in a senseless world that treating the victims of this war with their percussion injuries and paranoia about every little thing, was more than he had bargained for.

This incident is being covered wall to wall as if something like this could never possibly happen on American soil, and not just that, on the beloved soil of a military base. But really, it seems like a regular day full of all the possibilities of a trip to the Mall of America. Bush's America is armed and as surely as Hassan shot up the soldier preparation area of Fort Hood with 2 semi-automatic handguns, every 3rd person at the mall likely has one of those tucked somewhere waiting for the inevitable. This is not a case of a soldier with AK-47's shooting up the place; its actually less fire power than the average gang member off the street has; But it was enough to kill 13 people and injure 31.

Of course also, the name Hassan sounds a little too Arabic for comfort, which has caused some punditry to mention the possibility of him becoming a part of a terraist network or some such. According to the punditry, a shooting of this type was recently called for by Al Qaeda leader, ex-American wunderkind, Adam Gadahn, and heaven knows, anything is possible at this point. It gives Tweety something to go on about; could Hassan have contacted Al Qaeda on the Internet tubes and been converted in his spare time? The possibilities are endless and we will likely be treated to every scenario along the way.

The inevitability of this thing is what is so glaring. Yeah, it's unusual and shocking that the guy either acted to make a statement or succumbed to this level of insanity, directly before he was to be deployed and that no one noticed that something was wrong. And yeah, it makes little sense that he would kill the very people that he was trained to help. There is surely more to this story, but the rub here is that whether or not he meant for this to be a political statement, it is one. The injuries and PTSD suffered by the soldiers he treated may well have been horrific enough, and his empathy or fear deep enough, that he couldn't take it. So, for whatever reason, he cracked, for whatever reason he crossed over into a place where he could do this much harm. His actions speak volumes on the damage of these wars and how overused our soldiers, in every capacity, are.

Hassan killed 13 people who had lives and families, fears and beliefs of their own. He locked his own fate in those actions, as he must have intended to die today. There is just no knowing what causes someone to snap, but we have to know, very clearly, that we are going to be seeing more of this. Its not going to be something predictable or something that you can prevent. The injuries suffered because of the Bush Administration's lies are vast and deep. We were going after Bin Laden, not nation building, but all of these years later, now we're responsible for the whole area.

So expect the unexpected and keep your eyes peeled for odd behavior or normal behavior or packages left untended on the subway platform. Bring a biscuit for the bomb dogs in Grand Central and realize that this is how much of the rest of the world lives their lives largely because of our meddling. Get used to the new landscape; Obama cant make things OK again...too much has happened.

The unsure nature of things is really not so different than the rest of life, except that we know that we can stop the setting that causes this particular problem, and really, as much as our representatives don't listen to us, we may have to try to make a louder statement that we have to stop the wars...both of them...

Stop.The.War.s.

That's all.

**** ******* ****

Breaking 10:45 PM via CNN: Hassan, who had been believed dead in the massacre, is alive and in FBI custody. So, maybe we are gonna get some answers after all. So much for going out in a blaze of glory!

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: mental illness, military readiness, terrorism

Casualties of War:

An American Army sergeant shot and killed five fellow soldiers following an altercation at a counseling center on a military base in Iraq Monday, officials said. The attack drew attention to the issues of combat stress and morale among soldiers serving multiple combat tours over six years of war.

The suspect had been disarmed after an earlier incident at the center but returned with another weapon, according to a senior military official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation into the shootings was ongoing.

Guys like this Army sergeant and the soldiers he killed yesterday were sent off to a war based on lies, a war based on ginned-up information. And they've been there ever since, for six fucking years. Stop-lossed nearly to death, being given tainted food and water and electrocuted by greedy corporations affiliated with Dick Cheney, the only surprise is that more Iraq veterans haven't gone off the deep end like this.

Somehow I don't think you're going to hear Sean Hannity talk about the anger issues that our returning veterans are dealing with; anger issues that could very well make them susceptible to the revenge fantasies of the militia movement. Of course we don't know what this particular soldier's motivation was, nor do we know that he in particular would have been targeted for recruitment by the eliminationists in this country. But just as we did the men returning from Vietnam no favor by ignoring the psychic wounds they suffered as the result of fighting in an unnecessary war, so do we do the veterans of George Bush's Iraq Adventure no service by ignoring the wounds they are bringing back. We can only hope that back stateside they can continue to get the help they may need so that they don't decide that killing Jews and other "nonwhites" to save the white race is a good course of action.

Labels: Iraq casualties, mental illness, Veterans

Do we really want a psycho time bomb like John McCain to have the decision-making power to drop a bomb on ANYONE?

John McCain cupped a fist and began pumping it, up and down, along the side of his body. It was a gesture familiar to a participant in the closed-door meeting of the Senate committee who hoped that it merely signaled, as it sometimes had in the past, McCain's mounting frustration with one of his colleagues.

But when McCain leaned toward Charles E. Grassley and slowly said, "My friend . . ." it seemed clear that ugliness was looming: While the plural "my friends" was usually a warm salutation from McCain, "my friend" was often a prelude to his most caustic attacks. Grassley, an Iowa Republican with a reputation as an unwavering legislator, calmly held his ground. McCain became angrier, his fist pumping even faster.

It was early 1992, and the occasion was an informal gathering of a select committee investigating lingering issues about Vietnam War prisoners and those missing in action, most notably whether any American servicemen were still being held by the Vietnamese. It is unclear precisely what issue set off McCain that day. But at some point, he mocked Grassley to his face and used a profanity to describe him. Grassley stood and, according to two participants at the meeting, told McCain, "I don't have to take this. I think you should apologize."

McCain refused and stood to face Grassley. "There was some shouting and shoving between them, but no punches," recalls a spectator, who said that Nebraska Democrat Bob Kerrey helped break up the altercation.

No punches? Well, that makes it OK, then, right? Sort of the way the one guy in this scene from I, Claudius who says that he'd only done it with Augustus' daughter once, or the other guy who seems to think that because he hadn't "slept" with her, it made the fact that he'd done everything else with her perfectly OK:



But there's more:

Former senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, expresses worries about McCain: "His temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him."

A spokesman for McCain's campaign said he would be unavailable for an interview on the subject of his temper. But over the years, no one has written more intimately about McCain's outbursts than McCain himself. "My temper has often been both a matter of public speculation and personal concern," he wrote in a 2002 memoir. "I have a temper, to state the obvious, which I have tried to control with varying degrees of success because it does not always serve my interest or the public's."

That temper has followed him throughout his life, McCain acknowledges. He recalls in his writings how, as a toddler, he sometimes held his breath and fainted during moments of fury. As the son of a naval officer who was on his way to becoming a four-star admiral, McCain found himself frequently uprooted and enrolled in new schools, where, as an underappreciated outsider, he developed "a little bit of a chip on my shoulder," as he recalled this month.

During a campaign stop at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, the most famous graduate of the Class of 1954 opened a window on what swirled inside him during his school years. "I was always the new kid and was accustomed to proving myself quickly at each new school as someone not to be challenged lightly," he told students.

"As a young man, I would respond aggressively and sometimes irresponsibly to anyone who I perceived to have questioned my sense of honor and self-respect. Those responses often got me in a fair amount of trouble earlier in life."

[snip]

Reports recently surfaced of Rep. Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican, taking offense when McCain called him "boy" once too often during a 2006 meeting, a story that McCain aides confirm while playing down its importance. "Renzi flared and he was prickly," McCain strategist Mark Salter said. "But there were no punches thrown or anything."

And that guy didn't actually "sleep" with Augustus' daughter, either.

I guess it all depends on what the meaning of "temper" is.

"I heard about his temper more from others," said Grant Woods, McCain's first congressional chief of staff, who is generally regarded as McCain's closest confidant in his early political years. "According to them, he really unleashed on some of them, and they couldn't figure out why. . . . It happened enough that it was affecting his credibility with some people. If you wanted a programmed, subdued, always-on-message politician, he wasn't and will never be your guy."

Woods helped orchestrate McCain's first House campaign in 1982 and worked to get him elected to the Senate in 1986. That year the Arizona Republican Party held its Election Night celebration for all its candidates at a Phoenix hotel, where the triumphant basked in the cheers of their supporters and delivered victory statements on television.

After McCain finished his speech, he returned to a suite in the hotel, sat down in front of a TV and viewed a replay of his remarks, angry to discover that the speaking platform had not been erected high enough for television cameras to capture all of his face -- he seemed to have been cut off somewhere between his nose and mouth.

A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona's Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening's celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler's chest.

"I told you we needed a stage," he screamed, according to Hinz. "You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it."

Hinz recalls intervening, placing his 6-foot-6 frame between the senator-elect and the young volunteer. "John, this is not the time or place for this," Hinz remembers saying to McCain, who fumed that he hadn't been seen clearly by television viewers. Hinz recollects finally telling McCain: "John, look, I'll follow you out on stage myself next time. I'll make sure everywhere you go there is a milk crate for you to stand on. But this is enough."

McCain spun around on his heels and left. He did not talk to Hinz again for several years. In 2000, as Hinz recalls, he appeared briefly on the Christian Broadcasting Network to voice his worries about McCain's temperament on televangelist Pat Robertson's show, "The 700 Club." Hinz's concerns have since grown with reports of incidents in and out of Arizona.

In 1994, McCain tried to stop a primary challenge to the state's Republican governor, J. Fife Symington III, by telephoning his opponent, Barbara Barrett, the well-heeled spouse of a telecommunications executive, and warning of unspecified "consequences" should she reject his advice to drop out of the race. Barrett stayed in. At that year's state Republican convention, McCain confronted Sandra Dowling, the Maricopa County school superintendent and, according to witnesses, angrily accused her of helping to persuade Barrett to enter the race.

"You better get [Barrett] out or I'll destroy you," a witness claims that McCain shouted at her. Dowling responded that if McCain couldn't respect her right to support whomever she chose, that he "should get the hell out of the Senate." McCain shouted an obscenity at her, and Dowling howled one back.

Doesn't it seem troubling that one man would carry this much anger, and wouldn't you think it'd be worrisome to more people that this kind of hothead may very well end up in the White House? I mean, it's one thing to fall into the myth of the "tough guy." It's another thing to shoot first and ask questions later. Haven't we had enough of that?

Labels: John McCain, mental illness

Ted Westhusing, was a champion basketball player at Jenks High School in Tulsa Oklahoma. A driven kid with a strong work ethic, he would show up at the gym at 7AM to throw 100 practice shots before school. He was driven academically too, becoming a National Merritt Scholarship finalist. His career through West Point and straight into overseas service was sterling, and by 2000 he had enrolled in Emory University to earn his doctorate in Philosophy. His dissertation was on honor and the ethics of war, with the opening containing the following passage: "Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge." Would that all military commanders took such an interest in the study of ethics and morality and what our conduct in times of war says about our development as human beings. Would that any educational system in this country taught ethics, decision making, or even political science that's not part of an advanced degree anymore.

Ted Westhusing, the soldier, philosopher and ethicist, was given a guaranteed lifetime teaching position and West Point by the time he had finished with his service and his education. he felt like he could do more for his country by trying to shape the minds coming out of the academy that were the ones that would be military commanders. He had settled into that life with his wife and kids, when in 2004 he volunteered for active duty in Iraq, feeling like the experience would help his teaching. He had missed combat in his active duty and it seemed like an important piece for someone who not only philosophized about war, but who was also preparing the military's future leaders.



But more than that, he was sure that the Iraq mission was a just one; he supported the cause and he bought the information that was put in front of him. Considering that vials of powder were being tossed around hearings by the highest level of military commanders how could he not? This was a man who was so steeped in the patriotism of idealistic military fervor that he barely could fit in regular society. His whole being was dedicated to this path, and he was proud to serve his country.

Once in Iraq, he found himself straddling the fence between a questioning philosopher and an unquestioning soldier. Westhusing had thought he was freeing a country in bondage, keeping America safe from a horrible threat, and spreading democracy to a grateful people. But the reality of what was happening in this out of control war was too much for him. His mission was to oversee one of the most important tasks left from the war; retraining the Iraqi military by overseeing the private contractors that had been put in charge of it.

As the assignment went on he found that everywhere he looked he was seeing corrupt contractors doing shoddy work, abusing people, and stealing from the government. These contractors were being paid to do many of the jobs that would normally be done by a regulated military, and they bore out the worst fears of those who don’t believe in outsourcing such vital work. He responded to the corruption that he saw by reporting the problems up the line, but the response from his commanding officers was disappointing. He had, for much of his career, idolized military commanders, and in that assignment he found himself with some of the military's most famous faces, doing the most important job, but he was terribly disappointed and alarmed to realize that they were greedy and corrupt themselves.

The wall of silence about this was impenetrable and the reality of the situation turned his entire belief system upside down, making him question everything that was going on, and his role in it. Having envisioned the top military commanders to be the most honorable that America has to offer, he was crushed to find out that ascending to power in this military could be more due to cronyism than expertise and that these men who he had aspired to be like were greedy and corrupt themselves. Upon reporting to his commanding officers, he realized that not only did the problems stretch to the level above him, but that they were systemic.
To these commanders the only real problem was the fact that they had a deeply honorable soldier in their command that was likely to rock the cash cow. Westhusing was so bereft at the realization of his part in this breakdown in the military's code of conduct, and the atrocities carried out in America's name, that he became despondent and finally in June, 2005, he shot himself. It was called a suicide, though there have been some questions raised about it.

He’s not the first Iraq suicide, though he was, at the time of his death, the highest ranking one. He was an oddity; a thinking soldier in a war that requires blind obedience, and unwavering dedication. The black and white world of Bush's military doesn't allow much for the grays that come into the picture when one is, at heart, a philosopher...and even in the face of seeing the reality of war, how can anyone come to terms with the revelation of corruption on this scale? More crushing was the realization that the leaders that he idolized, and the honor that he held as being the very foundation of his entire world as a military officer, were all a lie, and stories told to cadets at West Point that didn’t bear out in reality. The leaders in this war didn't care, and many were, as he outlined in his 4 page suicide letter, that was addressed to General's Fil and Petraeus, his direct commanders, only out for their own selfish enrichment.

Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name]—You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff—no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied—no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more. Trust is essential—I don’t know who trust anymore. [sic] Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it.

COL Ted Westhusing

Life needs trust. Trust is no more for me here in Iraq.

What troubled Westhusing was not just the death and destruction all around him, the obvious looting of the country, and the human rights abuses, but the seeming lack of attention to the problem by his two of commanding officers, General Joseph Fil, and General David Petraeus. Yes, that David Petraeus. So focused was he on the destructive role of these two, that his suicide note was written to them. Westhusing's widow said that her husband's death should serve to bring out the truth of the corruption that her husband saw. Author and journalist, Robert Bryce was recently able to get documentation of interviews with Westhusing's wife and many other bits of correspondence and Investigation documents through the freedom of information act. They leave more questions open than they answer, especially in light of the media's blackout on information about Petraeus' part in this...even during a week that he is center stage at hearings being conducted on the war.

The book Blood Money, by T. Christian Miller, relates in depth, the deep convictions of Westhusing, and his drive towards a sort of noble honor and how that ended with his death. His favorite saying was by Socrates from Plato's Phaedo: "Those philosophizing rightly are practicing to die." It’s more than a little disconcerting to find that he had acted detached and despondent for days or weeks before he committed suicide, often standing around looking at his gun closely and lost in thought, not paying attention to what was happening. In a war where there are a record number of cases of suicide and PTSD, is there no awareness training of the trouble signs going on? He exhibited all of the signs of depression and despondency, and it’s a mystery why no one stepped up and tried to help him. But this is the culture of the military, and this is probably what worked out better for his commanding officers, who were no doubt looking at a loose canon who was raining on their good deal out there in the desert. Was there more to Westhusing's death? There is quite a lot of speculation out there that something was amiss at the death scene, and about who found him, (a contractor who reportedly tampered with the scene,) and that things don’t add up exactly.

General Petraeus is appearing before congress this week to try to defend his "surge" and to stop any further troop withdrawals. He is also making the case for an additional 100 billion dollars.
The surge is not working, no matter how it’s spun. If we keep combat troops in Iraq there could arguably be a reduction of violence, depending on many factors, but if its actually "working," as in helping Iraq to be more self sufficient and to end our participation in the problems there?...well, that depends on your definition of "working."

The fact that Petraeus has a long history of being wrong in his assessments of Iraq, and the fact that when directly questioned about current violence, he tends to defer blame to Iran, aside, at some point you have to question how much Petraeus' risen star and earning potential is tied to this war and its continuation. To say that this administration is in any way even a little translucent is laughable. Never has there been such an almost psychotic grab for all encompassing power with no body overseeing the actions of a few in power. Never has there been an attitude that the executive is above the law and the need to somehow document that for some sort of long range plan.

At some point the level of spending and loss of funds is so incredible that we must be compelled look at management, even if it’s unseemly in a time of war. At some point the American people have to demand an accounting. You would think that America had never run a war before. Surely it must be embarrassing when the top military officer has to get up in front of congress and try to explain some very small incremental improvement at such a huge cost. These improvements can also be easily explained away by so many factors, such as payments to a certain faction to stand down, ethnic cleansing having actually worked, and just the fact that more troops might put off the inevitable civil war that will happen now or in 20 years once the US security forces are pulled out. None of that speaks to a lasting improvement or even a partial repair of what we’ve done there.

A lot of this is common sense, and the fact that all Americans want so badly to feel like we've won, or that this was a just cause and not just some construct of Imperialism and the oil wars...much less, plans that happened in some conference rooms above the rule of law and our governmental checks and balances...well, we may be just caught in a nightmare here and waking up is not an option for those in power. We must realize that at some point we're doing more harm than good, and that may involve admitting that we are not necessarily on the side of right. But that's the rub here, and that's where we get back to Westhusing; any action in life comes with the possibility of a later realization that what you were positive about at one point could have been wrong.

Real strength of character involves being able to admit to wrong, even if that realization is terrible. In some societies the idea of having made mistakes brings dishonor on entire families. In our society the military culture is such that honor is everything; or it was. This administration has pulled the heart and guts out of any such code of honor in favor of allegiance to their plan for domination and their version of "right." But that too depends on your definition of "right."

The fact that much of what they espouse has to do with their Christian religion, and that a new culture of religious intolerance and pressure has grown up in the military academies of America, is no secret. When the love of country and honor...ideas, decision making, and weighing things... is replaced with allegiance to an ideology represented by a very powerful minority, ruling with fear rather than strengthening our collective will by reminding us what our American values are, we are no longer the America of the founders. Westhusing subscribed wholeheartedly to the credo of Honor or Death. He embraced the ideals of this country to the point that they were woven into his being. The realization that so many representatives of our country, of us, were not only corrupt, but committing atrocities, and the realization that the commanders had no intention of doing the honorable thing and stopping these abuses, was too much for him.

Was Westhusing murdered? Well, conspiracy theorists out there have some information and I suppose that one could make a case for further investigation. But one thing is for sure; He was a man of honor, he was despondent over corruption involving his direct commanders and said as much in a suicide letter addressed to them, and regardless of who pulled the trigger, he got the information out. I will leave the energy for trying to convict a lesser employee of a subcontractor to others who like to dig these things out. No direct connection will ever be found to Petraeus. It just doesn't work that way.



The implication is there, but the bigger implication is about the man whose finger will never be physically placed on the trigger; David Petraeus. This is the man who would immediately stop the very slow withdrawals that Bush began last year. This is the man who would continue to pour good money after bad into a situation that cannot even be basically stabilized after so many years. Today, All Spin Zone covers the hearings and asks that if Petraeus were a CEO or any top management in any business, wouldn't he be fired for this poor performance? What does someone have to do to get fired in this administration? At some point, aren't we going to question the implications and accusations floating around this man? At some point doesn't he lose all credibility as someone implicated in so many failed plans? Where is the honor in this leadership and where is the honor in this war?

RIP Ted Westhusing, and everyone else who has given their lives in this farce...RIP.

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: corruption, General Petraeus, Iran, Iraq War, mental illness, PTSD

Despite the best efforts of the department of defense, stories of a surge in veteran and active duty, in country, soldier suicides have plagued this war since we settled in for our long, long stay. Many have been presented as anecdotal, even though they really represented an alarming trend in what amounts to lack of treatment and understanding of what the problems of soldiers are going to be as this war winds on. Most Americans cant seem to focus for long on much these days, and the inability to view even a people magazine article as an indicator of a trend, leaves most regular people unprepared for the real sacrifices that are going to be necessary and the ground work being laid. Surely the care of thousands of depressed and PTSD citizens is not part of the grand budgeting for this war.

In this new world, where we are told to go shopping rather than make any vague sort of sacrifice, where we are not allowed to see even photographs of caskets being offloaded from military transports, where most communities are ill-prepared for their damaged brothers and sisters return to normal life, something is gonna have to give.

Now comes word that CBS has done that rare thing which we see so seldom these days from our media conglomerates; they actually did some research and dug up some information ...and then even reported a real story. So odd was this phenomenon that the method is part of the story, in that they first took the numbers from the states, then took the military numbers...then...then...Its all very fascinating and I hope that it gets huge ratings so that other M$M reporters might look up from their daily briefing from the White House, get off their asses, and look critically at some independent statistics.

According to Alternet CBS has uncovered some hidden statistics that the counters would prefer that we not know in this time of "the surge is working," (if you don't count the "crime" shootings in the front of the head, or was that the sectarian shootings in the back of the head?) Our brave soldiers are committing suicide at an alarming rate. We are talking about 120 dead per week, which is an average of 17 every day!

Anyone that has ever dealt with mental illness of any sort; PTSD, depression, or suicidal ideology, can tell you that an attempted or completed suicide comes from a place of complete and utter pain, such despair and desolation, a break from reality, and that it is not a situation usually where someone hasn't at least tried to get some relief in other ways. Blame it on the anti-malaria drug, the war, or any number of factors, the numbers are going up and regardless of the cause, its a problem that belongs to us all.

The fact that the veterans administration is not prepared for the physical injuries that this war has wrought is well documented, but the real rub here is going to be the numbers of psychologically damaged soldiers returning on top of those that are here already, that are not being treated properly, if they can be treated at all, and who are going to overwhelm a system that is unprepared for this. With the VA backlog already in the millions, how is this problem going to play out in our cities and towns? There is no money for this...there are not enough trained professionals at the ready, there is a lack of mental health care on the ground in Iraq, when some of this could be caught early, and the line snakes around the corner and back again.

The hot career path of the future may well be in mental health, folks. This is not the stuff of take a Prozac and feel better. This is not social anxiety like on the commercials. Its debilitating and disabling, and the cure is not simple. The numbers are bad enough right now, but the stories of the government propping up and shipping out anyone who isn't actively cutting their wrists on their way to the airport, are troubling, to say the least.

Meanwhile, many of those who are able to get enough help to at least document their problems, are dismissed as having "personal problems" rather than any reaction to the war, violence, long deployments and redeployment's, and a different type of percussive head injury that is probably not fully understood yet. I could also imagine that anyone in the position of having volunteered as a reservist and then realized that they were going into war, untrained for the most part, unequipped, and that the tours have been extended and are going to be repeated, might feel quite a bit of helplessness and despair. Add to that the ongoing grind of an ill conceived war that has had our forces clearing one area and then moving on, only to have to come back to the same area again...in other words, there are not enough forces there to hold any part of what they are able to clear.The frustration of risking your life every day for a policing operation that never ends, is some sort of nightmare; you roll the boulder up the hill and it rolls back down...forever...At some point it must be nice to be someone who can embrace the talking points and follow orders blindly, but it must be pretty damned hard for anyone over there right now not to see whats happening on the ground.

We can only extrapolate from CBS's numbers that many, many active duty soldiers are feeling really badly...and I mean that in a dangerous sense. How many depressed and suicidal soldiers are out there as important parts of squadrons on patrol? How many armed veterans are walking around at home with unaddressed despair?
Our unpreparedness and obvious inability to treat the epidemic of PTSD and depression in the military is not only inhuman treatment of society's bravest members, but it is actual torture. What are we going to do when the military, lacking resources to deal with this problem, is flooded with returnees? What of the outsourced army who definitely have the same sorts of problems? What are we gonna do?


c/p RIPCoco

Labels: Iraq War, mental illness, PTSD

Last week Glenn Greenwald took a page from Digby's book and wrote about Chris Matthews' manlove for Fred Thompson in a larger post about the celebration of (faux) masculinity on the right, a milieu in which toughness is all about talk and not at all about action.

Republicans have long tried to exploit masculinity images and depict Democrats and liberals as effeminate and therefore weak. That is not new. But what is new is how explicit and upfront and unabashed this all is now. And what is most striking about it is that -- literally in almost every case -- the most vocal crusaders for Hard-Core Traditional Masculinity, the Virtues of Machismo, are the ones who so plainly lack those qualities on every level.

There are few things more disorienting than listening to Rush Limbaugh declare himself the icon of machismo and masculinity and mock others as "wimps." And if you look at those who have this obsession -- the Chris Matthews and Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldbergs and Victor Davis Hansons -- what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one's "traditional masculine virtues" -- the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions -- themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."

Meanwhile, the REAL tough guys, the guys who have put their asses out there on the line, are coming back like this:

U.S. troops returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer "daunting and growing" psychological problems -- with nearly 40 percent of soldiers, a third of Marines and half of the National Guard members reporting symptoms -- but the military's cadre of mental-health workers is "woefully inadequate" to meet their needs, a Pentagon task force reported yesterday.

The congressionally mandated task force called for urgent and sweeping changes to a peacetime military mental health system strained by today's wars, finding that hundreds of thousands of the more than 1 million U.S. troops who have served at least one war-zone tour in Iraq or Afghanistan are showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety or other potentially disabling mental disorders.

"Not since Vietnam have we seen this level of combat," said Vice Adm. Donald Arthur, co-chairman of the Department of Defense Mental Health Task Force. "With this increase in . . . psychological need, we now find that we have not enough providers in our system," he said at a Pentagon news conference yesterday unveiling the report. "Clearly, we have a deficit in our availability of mental-health providers."

The ongoing "surge" of more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will exacerbate this gap, as will the rapid growth in the number of soldiers, Marines and other troops -- now about half a million -- who have served more than one combat tour, heightening the risk of mental illnesses, the report said.

As in the aftermath of Vietnam, the costs of untreated mental illness will rise dramatically over time, the report warned. "Our nation learned this lesson, at a tragic cost," it said. "The time for action is now."

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is required by law to develop a plan of action within six months on the 95 recommendations included in the 64-page report.

The task force, composed of seven military and seven civilian professionals with expertise in military mental health, was formed in May 2006. It based its report on visits to 38 U.S. military care facilities in the United States, Europe and Asia; interviews with care providers, military personnel and their families and commanders; as well as expert testimony and research.

Good luck getting a plan in action in place -- and funded -- by this bunch. This country is led by a guy who couldn't even lay off the blow long enough to show up for his cushy stateside National Guard assignment and a guy with a bum ticker who "had other priorities" when it was his time to serve, and who thinks doing the quail equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel makes him a tough guy. These guys are cheerled by a wizened little Jewish man whose idea of being in combat is to pump his fist at the screen and shout "Yeah!" and "All right!" while watching a fictional portrayal of American troops in Bosnia and a cadre of talk show heads not one of whom has ever served.

In the faux machismo world of these chickenshit politicians and the pundits who worship them, PTSD is a sign of weakness -- and flies in the face of the myth of the American soldier. Military training may be designed to turn human beings into killing machines, but when even those killing machines have what remains of their souls after the military tries to pry them out of them ripped from their bodies, we owe it to them to try to help -- and to speak out against those who would continue to worship the kind of dick-waving bullshit that brought them to this state.

Labels: Af, Iraq, mental illness, PTSD, wingnuttia

The sheer and utter cluelessness that accompanies the coverage of the mind of Cho Seung-Hui, who has been identified as the Virginia Tech shooter, just boggles the mind. That authorities are looking for "what triggered the rampage" is just ridiculous. Who says there has to be a trigger? There were many, many indications that this was an extremely troubled young man, even one with violent tendencies -- and it's astonishing that even after the Columbine massacre, the signs that this kid was a danger to himself and others were right there:

Cho Seung-Hui rarely spoke to his own dormitory roommate. His teachers were so disturbed by some of his writing that they referred him to counseling. And when Mr. Cho finally and horrifyingly came to the world’s attention on Monday, he did so after writing a note that bitterly lashed out at his fellow students for what he deemed their moral decay.

[snip]

Joe Aust, who shared Room 2121 at Harper Hall with him, said he had spoken to Mr. Cho often but had received only one-word replies. Later, Mr. Aust said, Mr. Cho stopped talking to him entirely. Mr. Aust would sometimes enter the room and find Mr. Cho sitting at his desk, staring into nothingness.

[snip]

Lucinda Roy said that in October of 2005 she was contacted as head of the English Department by a professor who was disturbed by a piece of his writing. Ms. Roy, rebuffed by Mr. Cho, contacted the campus police, counseling services, student affairs and officials in her department. Ms. Roy described the writing as a “veiled threat rather than something explicit.”

University officials told her that she could drop Mr. Cho from the class. Or, they said, she could tutor him individually, and she agreed to do so three times from October to December 2005. During those sessions, she said in an interview, he always wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low.

“He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,” she said.

[snip]

In another writing class, Mr. Cho submitted two profoundly violent and profane plays. Ian MacFarlane, a classmate who now works for America Online, posted the plays on the company’s Web site Tuesday, saying they had horrified the rest of the students.

“When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare,” Mr. MacFarlane wrote. “The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of.”

As a result of them, Mr. MacFarlane added, “we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter.”

In one play, called “Richard McBeef,” Mr. Cho wrote of a teenage boy who accuses his stepfather of murdering the boy’s father and of trying to molest the boy himself.

“I hate him,” the boy says of the stepfather in a copy of the play on the Web site. “Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die.”

Now I've been interested in psychology from childhood, and I was a depressed, lonely adolescent, covering myself up with a poncho and wearing my hair in my eyes, sitting alone in the schoolyard at lunchtime writing moody poetry into a blank book. I went to a small, very provincial college in Pennsylvania where from the day I got there I was shunned because I was short, chubby, not a prom queen, too Jewish, and just too weird. I called home in tears the first night I was there. So I know a bit about what it's like to be a troubled kid. I also work in mental health research, turning psychological assessment forms into data entry screens, so perhaps I'm just more attuned to this than most people.

But how on earth can you have a kid on campus who sits in his room staring into nothingness and writes violent plays containing revenge fantasies about child molesters, and decide that the way to handle it is to let an English teacher drop the kid from the class? And when the teacher agrees to tutor the kid and he seems to be crying all the time, how on earth can anyone, after the kid decides he can't take anymore and he'll get back at the teachers who ignored him, the kids who perhaps snubbed him because he was foreign, because he was Asian, maybe they thought him "geeky", buys some easily-accessible guns and decides to go out in a blaze of glory, taking a few of those he imagines were his tormentors with him, how can anyone say, as a federal law enforcement official did:

“What was this kid thinking about? There are no indications.”

What the fuck??? No indications? The kid practically had a big, red, Tex Avery-style neon sign pointing at his head screaming HELP ME!!

Over the next few days, we're going to see a great deal of hue and cry in the media about the "monster" who did this. Already, yesterday, a school official was using the Bush-tested "Nobody could have predicted..." line. I'm sorry, but this was a very troubled kid, not a monster. I would also like to know more about the "prescription medications related to the treatment of psychological problems" found in Cho's belongings -- what they were, who prescribed them, and what kind of ongoing monitoring of the drug's effects was going on. Given Cho's status as a loner, it's unlikely he was one of those kids passing their prescription drugs around to their friends. And while 23 years old is hardly an adolescent, it's not that far out of adolescence, and we know that the use of antidepressants can increase the likelihood of suicidal ideation in children and adolescents.

I'm not trying to excuse what Cho Seung-Hui did, although the simplistic-minded wingnuts who occasionally visit this blog are likely to brand me as a bleeding-heart, root-causes liberal. Already we have morons like Debbie Schlussel trying desperately to create a Muslim connection out of the name "Ismail Ax" written in red ink on Cho's arm and calling for stricter controls on the admission of foreign students (even though Cho had come to the U.S. with his parents at the age of 8); and Michelle Malkin, of all people, trying to allude to this sort of massacre being an Asian thing by noting the 1991 University of Iowa shootings by a Chinese doctoral student. Is it any wonder that Korean students are already fleeing the Virginia Tech campus in response to and in anticipation of sweeping generalizations about Korean males? Funny how no one talked about white kids' propensity to violence after the Columbine massacres.

It seems to me that by now we have enough information about this kid and the other school shooters that have preceded him; shooters that include plenty of white guys, to realize that while yes, there may be issues of a violent culture, and yes, there is an issue of too-easy accessibility to guns in this society, the troubled college life and death of Cho Seung-Hui -- and those other depressed high school and college students who may be ticking time bombs even as we speak -- is first and foremost a mental health issue. So can we please start paying attention when a kid like this cries out for help but doesn't know how to ask for it?

Labels: mental illness

Perhaps more than any other war, the Iraq War is steeped in the American mythos of the stoic warrior; the manly, macho man with a gun, doing his patriotic duty and then returning home to a life of quiet stoicism. It's a myth perpetrated by such well-meaning folks as Tom Brokaw in his "Greatest Generation" books, Clint Eastwood in his 2006 WWII diptych Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, and over fifty years of war movies. It's an image nurtured and fostered by a president parading around in macho military drag and a chickenhawk vice president whose obsession with death permeates every speech.

The Vietnam war should have taught us what happens when a country sends its young off to a war without point, a war without end, a war based on lies. Nearly a third of Vietnam veterans have soffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at some point in their lives.

With today's increased knowledge about and awareness of mental illness, one would think that more troubled returning soldiers would have access to and seek treatment. But the old myths of the Stoic Warrior do not die easily. As early as 2004, as many as 1 in 8 soldiers returning from Iraq were showing evidence of PTSD. A study published in the March 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine reported that nearly a third of veterans returning from Afghanistan were diagnosed with some form of mental illness.

We've seen how the Bush Administration treats the physical injuries of the soldiers it has sent into these wars. The care of wounded veterans has been held by this bunch to be less important than the desire of Dick Cheney to stuff his pockets with more and more texpayer cash by awarding expensive contracts to the company which still compensates him.

But there is a very real toll that these troubled returning veterans are suffering, one which flies in the face of the Myth of the Stoic Warrior, and therefore one which the Administration wants to just hide.

Bob Herbert writes about one of them today:

The war in Iraq began four years ago today. Fans at sporting events around the U.S. greeted the war and its early “shock and awe” bombing campaign with chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Jeffrey Lucey, who turned 22 the day before the war began, had a different perspective. He had no illusions about the glory or glamour of warfare. His unit had been activated and he was part of the first wave of troops to head into the combat zone.

A diary entry noted the explosion of a Scud missile near his unit: “The noise was just short of blowing out your eardrums. Everyone’s heart truly skipped a beat. ... Nerves are on edge.”

By the time he came home, Jeffrey Lucey was a mess. He had gruesome stories to tell. They could not all be verified, but there was no doubt that this once-healthy young man had been shattered by his experiences.

He had nightmares. He drank furiously. He withdrew from his friends. He wrecked his parents’ car. He began to hallucinate.

In a moment of deep despair on the Christmas Eve after his return from Iraq, Jeffrey hurled his dogtags at his sister Debra and cried out, “Don’t you know your brother’s a murderer?”

Jeffrey exhibited all the signs of deep depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Wars do that to people. They rip apart the mind and the soul in the same way that bullets and bombs mutilate the body. The war in Iraq is inflicting a much greater emotional toll on U.S. troops than most Americans realize.

The Luceys tried desperately to get help for Jeffrey, but neither the military nor the Veterans Administration is equipped to cope with the war’s mounting emotional and psychological casualties.

On the evening of June 22, 2004, Kevin Lucey came home and called out to Jeffrey. There was no answer. He noticed that the door leading to the basement was open and that the light in the basement was on. He did not see the two notes that Jeffrey had left on the first floor for his parents:

“It’s 4:35 p.m. and I am near completing my death.”

“Dad, please don’t look. Mom, just call the police — Love, Jeff.”

The first thing Mr. Lucey saw as he walked down to the basement was that Jeff had set up an arrangement of photos. There was a picture of his platoon, and photos of his sisters, Debra and Kelly, his parents, the family dog and himself.

“Then I could see, through the corner of my eye, Jeff,” said Mr. Lucey. “And he was, I thought, standing there. Then I noticed the hose around his neck.”

Here's another one, this one from January 2006:

By his own admission Douglas Barber, a former army reservist, was struggling. For two years since returning from the chaos and violence of Iraq, the 35-year-old had battled with his memories and his demons, the things he had seen and the fear he had experienced. Recently, it seemed he had turned a corner, securing medical help and counselling.

But last week, at his home in south-eastern Alabama, the National Guardsman e-mailed some friends and then changed the message on his answering machine. His new message told callers: "If you're looking for Doug, I'm checking out of this world. I'll see you on the other side." Mr Barber dialled the police, stepped on to the porch with his shotgun and - after a brief stand-off with officers - shot himself in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

And another:

It took two years of hell to convince him, but finally Jonathan Schulze was ready.

On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn.

[snip]

And so, with his father and stepmother at his side, he confessed to an intake counselor that he was suicidal. He wanted to be admitted to a psychiatric ward.

But, instead, he was told that the clinician who prescreened cases like his was unavailable. Go home and wait for a phone call tomorrow, the counselor said, as Marianne Schulze, his stepmother, describes it.

When a clinical social worker called the next day, Jonathan, 25, told again of his suicidal thoughts and other symptoms. And then, with his stepmother listening in, he learned that he was 26th on the waiting list for one of the 12 beds in the center's ward for post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers.

Four days later, on Jan. 16, he wrapped a household extension cord around his neck, tied it to a beam in the basement, and hanged himself.

And another:

It took several months of pushing, but finally, Chris Dana was ready.

The 23-year-old veteran of the Iraq war, who served with the 163rd Infantry Battalion, Montana National Guard, agreed to see a counselor for post-combat stress.


Members of his family, concerned for months about his change in behavior, believed they were starting to get through to him. Their son and brother promised to seek the help they all knew he so desperately needed.

Then Dana canceled the appointment. He began screening his calls. He stopped showing up at drill with the National Guard. He quit his job at Target, cleaned his car and the trailer he shared with a friend. And then, on March 4, he shut himself into his bedroom, put a blanket over his head, and shot himself.

Joshua Omvig was another one.

Paul Rieckhoff has more on the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act (S. 479 and HR. 327), to mandate addressing the problem of mental health treatment in the military.

I realize that facing the very real toll that this war is taking on even those soldiers who manage to come home in one piece means bidding farewell to the Hollywood images of the strong, invincible good-guy warrior that have certainly and obviously fed George W. Bush's lust to fight a battle using other people's blood. But as we should have remembered from Vietnam, the people our leaders sent to fight war are flesh and blood human beings who deserve better than to have their souls ripped out of them by a military and a government that cares not a whit for them, and then be sent home to try to make their way without any support. If that means we have to finally put a stake in the heart of the warrior myth, so be it.

Labels: Iraq, mental illness, PTSD