Psychiatrist brings back concept of evil

[emad]

Sunday Times
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor



EVIL, a concept long reviled by psychologists, may have been rehabilitated. A study of serial killers and mass murderers suggests that some criminals are so inherently bad that there is no other word to describe their actions.

The term evil has been derided because it is regarded as unscientific and carries unhelpful religious connotations. Psychologists argue the most awful crimes can usually be explained by mental illness.

However, this orthodoxy is now being questioned by Michael Stone, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York.

He looked at 500 British and American serial killers including Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and Fred West, to work out their motives. He found that while some were the victims of mental illness, others were perfectly sane — and had decided that they would enjoy killing.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1482339,00.html

[emad]

1. Horrible co-incidence of the Prof's namesake:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2001/michael_stone_verdict/default.stm

[ablbodyed]

2. Add the name Dubya to the list of>>>>

EVIL ONES.

[ananda]

3. bad seeds

What strikes me as interesting is how normal or folksy evil can look. Remember that brilliant article on malignant egophrenia?

Sue

[Tux]

4. This sucks

http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec03/religion.html


THis is why there is renewed interest in evil. Dumping Christianity into therapy just for the hell of it makes me sick.

[emad]

5. The Observer: That way sanity lies

A psychoanalyst who hates the 'intrusiveness' of therapy, a rigorous sceptic whose brilliant books have tackled despair, disillusionment, boredom and ... tickling. Now, Adam Phillips has turned his focus on the elusive concept of Being Sane. Here, he talks to Sean O'Hagan about the madness at the heart of modern life

Sunday February 13, 2005
The Observer

Adam Phillips writes in the same room in which he practises psychoanalysis. It is book-lined, bright and airy, cluttered but in a way that seems necessary and ordered rather than neurotic and self-defeating. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of room one would imagine a psychoanalyst would write and practise in. It feels odd then, to be sitting on his leather couch, while he sits in the chair opposite, and to begin an interaction that is in many ways the antithesis of the interactions that usually take place in this room.

I am here to interrogate Phillips about his new book, Going Sane. He seems eager to get down to business and there is something about him, a kind of polite intensity, which suggests that small talk, an often productive preliminary to a revealing interview - though perhaps not to a successful therapy session - is not an option. So we jump immediately into madness. Although Phillips's book is essentially about the notion of sanity - what it means, how it might be measured, whether it can be attained and indeed sustained - it is difficult, as he points out, to talk about one without the other.

'Sanity does not immediately strike us as a fascinating idea the way madness does,' he says, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes closing in concentration as they will throughout our conversation, 'even as an alternative word to mad, sane is so blank. But, it seems to me that either madness is another word for human nature, and that we are all very strange and life is, as it were, maddening, or, we are capable of actually being something else. Now, what is that something else? That is what I am trying to explore and I think that it is actually very obscure, and neglected.'

This would indeed seem to be the case. While there have been countless books written about madness, sanity has, until now, been an intriguingly overlooked subject, untouched by Shakespeare, Freud, Blake or Jung, and all but ignored by the self-appointed gurus of the self-help industry. This suggests to me that we take our sanity for granted, that only when it is dramatically ruptured - by grief, depression, breakdown - do we think about it at all. Like Bill Wyman's famous definition of a great bass player - you would only realise how good he was if he were to stop playing mid-song - sanity is defined mainly though its absence. And, while we have invested certain kinds of madness with a kind of romantic allure - the tortured genius of Sylvia Plath, the creative madness of Artaud or Van Gogh - sanity, as Phillips acknowledges early on in the book, has never been fashionable. Or, as he puts it, 'Sanity has always been an unfashionable term that has never quite gone out of fashion.'

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1410136,00.html

[Branjor]

6. self delete

[Sporadicus]

7. This Shoots Holes in Fundies' Assertions

that *The Evil One* is loose in the world, responsible for causing unwary humans to commit atrocities. It's uncomfortable to face the fact that malevolent throughts & deeds spring from peoples' minds - without supernatural intervention - but it's better to face the truth than to live with superstition and an assumption that 'people are basically good.'

[puddycat]

8. my argument: the field of psychiatry is the real EVIL

Psychiatry is no better than voodoo. And frankly I am sick of hearing about "mental illness" whenever someone commits a crime. Most crime is committed by supposedly "sane" individuals, so I wonder what their excuse is?

Serial killers are probably just people without conscience. Sociopaths. But many sociopaths are also quite socialized and in mainstream society. Top corporations are probably chock full of sociopaths. Afterall, you don't become a super rich person without
walking over the backs of many many people.

Anyone, ANYONE who can prove that any DSM is a scientific document I will give $5,000 to. Its no better than the myth of religion, and probably much more dangerous.

[undergroundpanther]

9. Deliverance therapy

Don't forget New freedom initiative folks.. I guess we all get tested for EVIL now...



I wonder what they will do with those who are deemed "defective" by the norm police?

Will they force them into faith-based coercion therapy?


http://www.unknownnews.net/040712a-upits.html

Is mental illness gradually being redefined as demonic possession? With the prodding and encouragement by certain fundamentalist Christian rightwing types,and thier money (funding sources you usually would not accept begin to look appealing despite strings,as certain state programs get funding cut and people are suffering)..A certain kind of virulent Christiananity that is growing popular today sees anything that is unbiblical in a persons conduct as evil.They see mental illness as demonic posession.It's called deliverance ministry,(see the likes of Derek Prince who thinks he can cure schizophenia with exorcism and prayer alone)

(see Dr.Scott Peck too ) http://www.mscottpeck.com/html/scott-peck.html

Check out the blurb for "pigs in the parlor"
http://www.impactchristianbooks.com/products.asp?category=deliverance

This is sad,and scary.
\
Is calling mental illness evil becoming a "trend" now??? If this"way of looking at it" grows..it's kinda ironic since Psychiatrists can't find the cause of mental illness without condeming this competitive individualistic empire culture,so instead the "professionals" call it evil.What a cop out.
And evil by it's alleged nature mythic, supernatural, So what kind of brutality and taking away of human rights will be justified to do to people to shut up the supernatural evil in them diagnosed by a "professional"?

Forced drugging,forced incarceration(oops we already DO that) ,forced prayer 'ala Gitmo or worse?? Hello dunking plank ,iron madien and rack. That'll make those evil crazy people behave and be appropriate and do thier job...

Sheesh.This trend has been lurking for a long time in pentacostal charismatic churches already. But now these churches are controlling the white house and bigots like fallwell get airtime to spew his crap and chritian bully people believe it too..

Gays were once "evil" then they were "mentally ill" as soon as they got"normal" there are steps to deny thier human rights now because they are not the scapegoated class they once were long ago they are out and society can't play pretend that gays don't exist and if they do they are inferior human beings(at least not as freely as say 50 years ago)..Eugenics isn't dead it's just turned religious and medical.

Who's defining who the evil people are and who the mentally ill are now? The shrinks,or is it the church 's shrinks operating through deliverance ministries?
I wonder if more therapists jump on this garbage and walk out of the realm of science ..
Will they admit they were witchdoctors all along ?

Dr.Scott Peck plays loose and heavy handed on declaring who's evil..This shrink in the article below seems to apply it only to certain sociopaths..I fear it's a trend and with a "true believer" in the whitehouse I am sure the study of the evil mentally ill will be funded with "faith based initiatives.

When will it degenerate to witchburnings and torture of the people who just won't behave,just won't obey,just won't be loyal,who just don't believe,being officiated by shrinks?
Life growing up in a warlike,competitive,atomized, monocultured ,hierarchical,conform or die empire makes most of us sick by default.

[puddycat]

10. a scary story that happened in a church I was visiting recently

I was a guest in a church--a fundie church--recently. People were giving testimonies (I think this is supposed to be how they came to be with the Lord). A woman jumped up and said that she had been mentally ill for 30 years but then the Lord cured her and she no longer has to be hospitalized perioidcally.

That scared me. Because if you could see these people jumping and clapping and rolling on the floor you would know that the real mental illness is this kind of right-wing religion.

At that moment I decided not to accept any more invitations to be a guest in right-wing churches. My stomach can't take it.

[Festivito]

11. A compelling lie, that we can touch the absolute.

Buy into the lying statement that humans can touch the absolute, here evil, then it it easier to get people to buy into other lies. This is how Rush bamboozles his audiences.

The prize. You get to be just like God. Just like the devil himself failed, only to have the same repeated in the story of Adam and Eve's fall, and history repeats itself over and over and over again.