---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 15:47:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Andrew P. Ray" <aray at emory.edu>
X-Sender: aray at curly.cc.emory.edu
To: Star Bright <abrowne at chardonnay.niagara.com>
cc: bionet.neuroscience at emory.edu, sci.med.neuroscience at emory.edu
Subject: Re: [Fwd: LET IT BEGIN: Brain Awareness Week/BRAIN BOYCOTT]
In-Reply-To: <199605260650.CAA17593 at chardonnay.niagara.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SV4.3.91.960526145041.19416B-100000 at curly.cc.emory.edu>
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On Sun, 26 May 1996, Star Bright wrote:
> Andrew -
>> >Frankly, I'd like to keep these people's minds numbed - I don't want to
> have some Jeffrey Dahmer type
> >running around free because people like you think that it's OK for him to
> think differently (that people
> >are a food source). A lot of the people you think are being oppressed are
> locked up to protect the rest
> >of us from them. Don't forget that.
>> But Jeffrey Dahmer was found to be "sane" in ther courts. Also, please note
> that most people who commit mass or multiple murders and are therefore, at
> the most risk to us, are deemed to be free of any significant `psychosis' or
> `major psychiatric illness'.
Of course the law found him sane. First, the legal system has its own
version of sanity which is not the same as the mental health profession.
Second, declaring him insane would have been a bad political move and
could very likely have produced a vengeful response from people who were
disgusted by the decision. They HAD to bring him to trial, if for no
other reason than to try and keep some faith in the legal system. No
psychiatrist or psychologist worth his salt would say the man was sane
(off the record, that is). He was a sociopath - he could tell the
difference between right and wrong (the def. of legal sanity) but didn't
give a damn about it (probably a prefrontal lobe dysfunction, based on
previous case studies of people with traumatic prefrontal brain damage).
There is a very good body of research that suggests that personality and
social interaction (e.g. inhibitions on extreme behaviors) are mediated
primarily by prefrontal cortical areas. If a PET scan could have been
done while he was alive, I'll bet you would see decreased prefrontal
activity. Autopsies won't show functional problems very well, unless
there is gross structural abnormality.
Who deems most mass murderers sane and free of psychotic problems? No
one ever gets to check them, because you can't police their thoughts
until after they've committed their crimes. And with the exception of
gang warfare, which is a significant source of mass murders, the random
acts of violence of the type committed by Dahmer usually result in the
criminal turning the gun on himself at the end of the crime (Scotland's
recent massacre for example). Only rarely do these people get caught.
When they do get caught, it's even money whether they go to trial. The
man in New York who opened up on the people in the subway train, for
instance, would have been found insane had he not chosen to defend
himself. The judge just wanted to try him and be done with it, but after
the trial several psychiatrists and psychologists were interviewed, and
all of them said he was probably a paranoid schizophrenic.
Also, the reliability of psychiatric
> expertise in determining who is and who is not going to become violent is no
> greater than that of the rest of us.
Read an FBI psych. profile on one or two of these cases (like a serial
killer) someday. These profiles are about 80% accurate in predicting
violent behavior based on a person's history and information gleaned from
acquaintances or other sources. The problem, again, is that most of
these people tend to keep to themselves for long periods of time, so
there is limited contact, and there are very few public violent episodes
that might bring attention to the person in question.
>> >Depressives think differently than you and me, but they aren't locked up
> because they aren't going to
> >hurt other people. And I don't think the antidepressants they get are
> imprisoning their minds.
> >Generally, if someone is getting Thorazine, they usually need it.
>> If Thorazine and other meds were helping these recalcitrant depressives, why
> would they so badly want to be free of these drugs? That would defy common
> sense. I think the decision of whether or not to use drugs should be up to
> the individual, not the state.
>
Do you even know what Thorazine is? Thorazine is an antipsychotic, not
an antidepressant. If you know any depressives who are on thorazine,
they need a different doctor! As to why they would want to be free of
the drugs, let me use a personal example. My GF had a friend back in
high school who started out OK, but slowly became more violent and
paranoid throughout school. Finally, he was committed after he nearly
murdered his parents. They put him on antipsychotics. The drugs made
him drowsy much of the time and interfered with his creative abilities.
But he was lucid and would and could call her from the hospital during
the weeks right after his medication (monthly injections). Then, as the
med. wore off, his phone conversations became less and less intelligible
- he would go off on tangents, become unfocused, and more and more
violently angry. Toward the end of the month, she couldn't talk to him
because he would get angry and threaten to kill her. But for brief
periods even during these conversations, he could be lucid and still be
creative (he was a musician). He never wanted to get the next injection
when he had these brief periods of lucidity, but then he'd go off into
his paranoid delusions again, claiming she was part of the "conspiracy"
to get him (as he had with his parents) and threatening to kill her.
Then he'd get the next injection and be dulled, yet lucid enough to know
what was going on. I'll admit they probably gave him too much per
injection, and probably should have titrated his amount to give him less
per injection and more frequent injections (2/month maybe). Would you
say this man would not be a threat if he could voluntarily stop taking
his drugs? Considering that he had already nearly committed two
murders, I'd say he would have been.