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Refusing to Confront Evil
In the wake of the Trump assassination attempt, I have noticed a number of people attributing the murderous actions of the would-be assassin to mental illness. Sometimes this is done directly, with a description of the shooter as “mentally ill” or “crazy,” and sometimes it is done indirectly, with references to the shooter as “sick” or comparisons to the “profile” of “school shooters.”
I think that this is a mistake, both in this particular case and in general. Personally, I have come to the view that the fields of psychology and psychiatry are almost entirely incorrect, and sometimes fraudulent. They put a scientific veneer on matters that have little or nothing to do with science. They excuse wicked or deviant behavior as the result of some form of “illness.”
I do think that these fields are rooted in a fundamental error, though this is a matter of faith. It seems to me that the fields of psychology and psychiatry deal with the “mind” and deny the existence of the human spirit. In Greek, these fields deal with the “psyche” while denying the existence of the “pneuma.” If materialism is correct, then psychology and psychiatry could be built on a solid foundation. If not, however, then these two fields are based on a fundamentally false assumption.
I think that the attraction of this approach is based on a desire to deny the existence of evil.
Hence, Thomas Matthew Crooks, apparently guilty of both the murder of a bystander and the attempted assassination of one of the most significant political figures in the world, is called “mentally ill” or “sick,” and therefore absolved of his individual responsibility and guilt.
Interestingly, there is an article in The Spectator by Theodore Dalrymple, written earlier this year but before the assassination attempt, making this point. It is titled, “It’s time to eliminate the concept of ‘mental health.'” For those who might not know, Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician and psychiatrist.
Published in Religion and Philosophy
Unhealthy thinking due to multiple dynamics (phsychology), chemical emballance (psychiatry) and spiritual wickedness (evil).
Can all take place singularly or combined.
In my opinion a Christian world view is an absolute necessity to navigate the complexity to mental problems.
When you medicalize behavior, you are deferring responsibility. “It’s not my fault!” We see this frequently in the case of so-called addiction: Addiction is not a “disease,” it is a choice.
Loved that Dalrymple piece!
This seems to be the same phenomenon that pro-aborts use. They refuse to see the evil of killing children in the womb and chalk it up to reproductive health or some such BS. If one can do this, one can dismiss the evil of a murderer very easily with some silly excuse.
I agree.
I think that others refuse to see the evil of killing civilian women and children, and chalk it up to a nation’s right to defend itself or some such BS.
We disagree on this. In my view, a Christian world view is inconsistent with either the psychological or psychiatric explanations.
We are spirits, but we are embodied spirits. I do agree that physiological causes can induce changes in our consciousness, but I think that consciousness is fundamentally spiritual.
Motive is the why of a criminal act. Proving motive is not necessary for the conviction of a criminal act. When I made an arrest, I needed probable cause and a reasonable belief that the person I arrested committed a specific crime as defined by the elements of a specific crime in a statute or several statutes.
Motive strays into rationalizations of committing a criminal act. Rationalizations lead to he/she was kind to small animals, started a hamster rescue shelter and someone’s sixth grade teacher who comments what a great kid they were even though the subject is now 20 to 40 years old.
This is so well argued I am going to give up being a psychotherapist and become a Priest.
Who is saying this? Nobody on the Right is dismissing his culpability. A third of people on Left think the whole thing is fake and the rest of Left have moved on, like it never happened.
When you think about it, the Holocaust was just a giant cry for help from Adolph and some other damaged German guys growing up unloved in uncertain times. It is almost like piling on to call them “evil” instead of looking for the precise life events that became root causes where timely forgiveness and a hug might have been the key.
Crooks was probably on psychiatric medications. Most mass shooters who are his age and background are. These meds have FDA warning labels which say that they can cause people of Crooks’ age to commit suicide. The modern mass shooting began only after these meds became available about 35 years ago.
You don’t have to disbelieve in evil to acknowledge that ingesting certain substances and chemicals can make you lose your mind.
I take the point. I too want people to hold themselves more accountable and regret “the triumph of the therapeutic” (Rieff). Still…
Maybe it is indeed an “either…or” choice, but as usual I am not sure. That an act is evil does not necessarily mean that the actor is evil.
The concept of evil requires the concept of freedom. Some say we are fully determined beings (academics mostly) and some say we are all always totally free to choose (reactionaries, mostly). I think only God can know in any given case how much freedom any individual has at a given moment. There is no doubt that psychosis exists and was not chosen by the ill person. Whether such an illness ever makes a moral choice impossible is very hard to know. But someone in the grip of a powerful delusion might well do a LOT of harm while thinking he was doing good. And in the Bible, there is no doubt that people, even children, can be possessed by demons, apparently not by choice. They might utter blasphemies and the like. But is it the possesed or the demon who is the evil one?( Christ seems to have had compassion for such folk.)
I can imagine a soldier driven to complete exhaustion and having been bombarded with incredible stressors like loud noises, constant terror, and lack of sleep. Would we hold such a person fully resonsible if he commited an act we label evil?
The old Christian saw, “Hate the sin but love the sinner” might still be useful, I suppose.
In any case, it’s hard for many of us to imagine certain behaviors carried out by anyone who isn’t nuts.
Here’s a thought that’s occurred to me recently:
There’s at least anecdotal evidence that psychotropic drugs may lead some few to commit mass murder/suicide, especially young men (hence the warning labels). Assuming for the moment that there’s something to this, what if these medications somehow make some patients more open to demonic influence?
I’ve heard several podcasts about this. A Google search found some recent stories speculating about mental illness, including the NY Post and Newsweek. A recent post at Ricochet called the shooter “crazy.”
I was principally reacting to a few podcasts and I don’t specifically recall which. I think that one was from Breaking Points.
These medications cause a risk for suicide because by reducing your anxiety, they also reduce fear. Fear is what holds you back from acting on any suicidal impulses. For some people it’s the only thing. And if you’re homicidal, same thing.
If demons are real, then certainly it makes their job easier if your fear of consequences for evil acts disappears.
[picture redacted by moderator for vulgar caption]
All the same, a C3PO meme would seem to be in order.
Should we start calling you Father Bryan?
No. We are spirit plus body. Both are essential to human identity.
Yes.
That’s pretty close to “unarmed black teen” Michael Brown, who although clothed, was still 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs.
What do we do with people who just don’t seem right in the head? Jerry, do you not believe people can be psychotic, psychopaths, sociopaths or whatever fancy psycholomological term one could use? There’s people in this world who need help because they could be potentially dangerous to themselves or society. Shouldn’t we try to prevent that with some form of treatment or therapy?
I think you’re pushing the point too far. Calling someone crazy doesn’t imply they’re not evil. Maybe their evil drove them crazy. Apples and oranges.
Also, there are plenty of people with mental illness that doesn’t cause them to do anything evil.
I don’t think we actually know the mental state of the assassin, whether he was deranged or motivated by some cogent political or cultural bias.
I’ve known people who battle mental illness, including some who have done unfortunate and damaging things and who are, nonetheless, not “evil” in any meaningful sense — at least by my estimation.
I’m willing to chalk up a lot of bad behavior to mental illness. It’s real, it’s a problem in this age of no-involuntary-institutionalization, and people whom I consider to be good and decent can fall victim to it.
And with the political and cultural power these pharmacuetical companies have now, I think we see those side effects and linkages getting burried. The Left want to talk about “guns!”, the statists want to take away “guns!” and the media want to keep the pharma advertising fees coming, so “guns!” are the problem.
True evil requires full awareness from the perpetrator that whatever act he is about to commit is wrong. That’s why we acknowledge Nazi Germany’s evil. There is no way that these people didn’t understand that mass murder went against thousands of years of humans’ moral understanding. (From slavery to mass murder to abortion it always begins with dehumanization.)
So what prevents any person from coming to that moral understanding? I think the initial reaction – mental incapacity – is the most charitable. It doesn’t require you to make a judgment about the way the person was raised, whether or not he had any religious education, or whether or not pharmaceuticals were involved.
I don’t think that your position about “true evil” is consistent with Biblical teaching.
“True evil” seems a strange term, to me. Is there some other sort of evil? “False evil,” perhaps?
It is also possible that you are arguing that ignorance is an excuse for evil. Romans 1 teaches otherwise.
As to the Nazis, our country also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians during WWII, particularly in Germany and Japan. We engaged in dehumanization of the people of both countries, and did so before the German slaughter of large number of civilians was even known.
I do not say this to contend that WWII-era Germany did not commit horrible crimes, as well. I do dissent from the standard narrative, as I don’t think that there were any “good guys” in World War II. It was baddies against baddies.
I don’t find the psychological or psychiatric terms, such as psychotic, psychopaths, sociopaths, to be helpful. These terms are trying to categorize people in terms of improper behavior, but the very terms imply that the underlying problems are medical. That is the part that I believe to be incorrect, at least in the vast majority of cases.
Bad behavior should be punished or otherwise sanctioned, and should be addressed with criticism and teaching about the behavior being bad.
It is not a medical issue, in my view. Empirically, I think that considering such problems to be a medical issue, rather than a moral or spiritual issue, has not worked well. I have not investigated this in detail. My impression is that greater deployment of psychological or psychiatric methods has coincided with an increase in the problems that such methods are supposed to address.
I will add a caveat. I do think that it is possible that physical brain injury might cause such behavioral problems, and that mind-altering drugs can also cause such problems. The latter is one of the reasons for my opposition to the legalization of such substances.
I understand, though I disagree. I think that the fundamental disagreement is that we have a different conception of evil. Mine is based on Christian teaching, yours is not.
We don’t have to argue about faith, but I think that it’s helpful to identify the source of the problem.
I think that your view may be at odds with your own philosophical view of the world, as I understand your views. Your final paragraph is contrary to the idea of personal responsibility, which I think is an important component of your world view.
This is the fundamental issue that I sought to address in my post. You acknowledge “bad behavior,” but absolve people of personal responsibility for it, because you “chalk it up . . . to mental illness.” You then say that the perpetrator of the bad behavior “can fall victim to it.”
I think that the explanation for your reclassification of perpetrator as victim is also in your final sentence. You observe “people whom [you] consider to be good and decent” engaging in bad behavior. One possibility, the Christian one, is to conclude that such people aren’t actually good and decent. The other possibility is to find some reason to absolve them of their responsibility for their own bad behavior.
One final theological point. In Christian teaching, no one is good and decent all of the time, except Jesus. I don’t believe that I myself am good and decent all of the time. This is because of my sinful nature, and I am the guilty one, in my view. When I behave badly, I am not the victim of something called “mental illness,” in my view.
Yes but…the psychiatric terms do allow us to categorize the behaviors as demonstrated by the patient. I have seen many of my patients and other people come out from states of “improper behavior” to health by using anti-manic, anti-depressant or anti-schizophrenic medical therapy.
Sanctioning someone with type two bipolar disease who hears voices telling him to hurt himself, or to spend money like a drunken sailor, or to engage in some other self-destructive behavior, will not change things. Giving him a little depakote or lithium can often restore such a person to good mental health.
Where I disagree with modern psychiatric practice, and I write both as a citizen and as a physician, is the tendency to treat *everything* with meds. Cognitive behavioral therapy and other approaches can be very helpful for a variety of psychiatric ills. The problem is that a primary care Doc has neither the training nor the time to spend dealing deeply with psychiatric patients. My experience tells me that patients with a psychiatric symptom, whether you attribute it to an illness or to a behavior, will get better care from a psychiatrist or neurologist than from a primary Doc. And for goodness’ sake, don’t let gynecologists and pediatricians prescribe for such patients, for a little knowledge is truly a dangerous thing.
So I think we need more psychiatrists, not fewer.
I would be interested to have responses to this matter from other Ricochet physicians.
I’m not sure if we actually disagree about the first part, but we might.
In my view, our spirit is the essence of what we are. I am a spirit, and I have a body. I think that in Christian teaching, if I die before the Lord returns, then there will be a period of time during which I won’t have a body. The New Testament teaches that for a believer, absence from the body is presence with the Lord. This implies a period of existence as spirit only, except for those still physically alive when the Lord returns.
I think that Christianity teaches that we will have bodies in the eternal state, after the resurrection of the dead in the end times.
I think we are all priests. Maybe not very good ones.