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Democracy's mental health report card [1]
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Date: 2023-01-12
Republican fanatics and mentally ill causing mass hysteria
Take a look at what’s happening on the House floor. Insanity. Republicans tearing each other apart. Inmates running the asylum. Democrats have been sitting back with popcorn, watching the spectacle. It certainly has been entertaining. But brace yourselves: the next two years—and likely more--are going to be all kinds of crazy. So how do we sort through the garbage and learn to distinguish between Republicans who have chosen fanatic extremism, and those who are mentally ill, albeit without a formal diagnosis? Our next Republican Presidential nominee will likely be one or the other. Forewarned is forearmed, minus the guns.
Marjorie Taylor Greene babbles Jewish laser nonsense, while a homeless lady mutters the same to herself on the street—what’s the distinction other than audience size? I’m guessing neither has healthy relationships. Neither seems to cope well with adversity or have a happy life. So how does one separate those who choose the fanatic’s disease, much like alcoholism, from those who have a treatable medical condition?
I like the mentally ill. They’re not boring; they keep you on your toes. Unfortunately, they’re also incapable of managing themselves, controlling unreasonable behaviors or governing illogical thought processes. Which is why I feel no hatred for Trump. Diagnosed or not, this sad person has a medical condition caused by a mix of body chemistry and childhood trauma. It’s not his fault that fanatic extremists elevated him to the position of our first Special Needs President and expected him to function without the benefit an Individual Education Plan or cadre of educators to implement it. He doesn’t realize he needs professional help. Happiness will always elude him, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
I’m no psychologist. I accepted whatever difficult students were assigned to my classes and applied a smorgasbord of therapeutic strategies to maximize learning. I left the diagnoses to the experts. But after 45 years working with Special Education students, I can spot the deranged. And though their behaviors can be strikingly similar to a fanatic’s, I also learned to differentiate them.
I began my career as an Exceptional Student Education (ESE) teacher in 1977, in a high school classroom for what was then called the Severely Emotionally Disturbed. Earlier that year, in January, I had interned in a class of younger students with mental illness. Imagine your father passing you around for his poker buddies to rape at age seven. Or having had your arm purposefully broken for the first time when you were six weeks old. Many of my students had this sort of upbringing. Others, like Trump, apparently lost their minds due to some mix of emotional trauma, illiteracy or superstition combined with a physical issue—a thyroid condition, for example.
I graduated in March, and accepted my first paid teaching assignment with the high school students, who were just as messed up. Some were straight out of a mental institution: psychotic, schizophrenic, socially maladjusted. A couple had profound Autism, and were with me only because at the time there was no other place for them. Seven teachers had come and gone by the time I took over that class. Somehow I managed to finish that first year and make it through the next.
I opened my heart, sympathized and did my best to help. Easier said than done with grown-ups, especially fanatics, or those enabled and supported by them. What else would you call voters who believe that half the country are a conspiracy of pedophiles and all gays are groomers? What would you call the preacher who said, “co-vid vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called Luciferase so you can be tracked” and endlessly on and on?
Thank goodness the mini-Trumps I educated over the years were few and far between. Labeled “multi-handicapped,” they had an unfortunate combination of Learning Disability (LD), Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Emotional/Behavior Disorder (E/BD) and Language Impaired (LI). They hated reading, lacked an ability to focus, babbled incoherently, had a loose connection with reality, and indiscriminately lashed out for no apparent reason. Sound like someone we know?
The mini-DeSantises were different. They were Socially Maladjusted (SM). Generally more intelligent, they found clever ways to torment peers while avoiding repercussions. Being more articulate and cunning, they planned and implemented attacks on the vulnerable, who had less resources, then sat back and smugly watched their targets go ballistic. Who gets punished—the bully who started it with an unkind word and covert action? Or the one who screamed bloody murder, flipped over furniture and lunged at the instigator? As an adult political fanatic, this type of bully enjoys using cruelty to gain votes and threaten the Special Olympics to appeal to brutality-minded followers.
Lately we’ve been experiencing rapid societal changes, setting the stage for the rise of fanatic extremists who feel alienated from the past, afraid in the present, and believe they have no control of the future. It is a mass hysteria event, decades in the making and snowballing as we speak. Don’t expect the media to report this, but the 20th Century trifecta (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin) has been born-again in the 21st (Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban). Waiting in the wings are Lenin and Trotsky (DeSantis and Abbott). It’s a great time to be a Brownshirt. Er, I mean, Proud Boy.
Mass hysteria “transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population and society as a result of rumors and fear.” Medically speaking, the term describes a manifestation—or spontaneous production of body chemicals—by more than one person with the same hysterical physical symptoms. Call it fury-craze, when everyday people lose their collective shit and start behaving in ways they normally wouldn’t.
Events like this have occurred historically on a regular basis since the Middle Ages. It happens all over the world, but in America the Salem witch trials (1692-93), the War of the Worlds broadcast (1938), and daycare sex-abuse hysteria (1980’s-early 1990’s) are just three of the more infamous examples. Don’t get me started on the Holocaust. Where else but in Germany could one deranged person, with a bit of help from other members of his party, convince a large portion of an entire country that it’s OK to terrorize and kill? Oh. Yeah, I forgot--here. Now. In the USA.
So what to do? Arguably, people with mental illness cannot be cured. With treatment, they can learn to manage their body chemistry and find productive ways of living. They can recover. But it should be obvious even to a potato by now that Trump, whether in jail, in the White House or in between at Mar-A-Lago, will never avail himself to meds and cognitive behavioral therapy.
Fanatics, on the other hand, can be cured. Just deny them what they want most—recognition. In time they either change or self-destruct. I witnessed this phenomenon up close and personal for several years in the 1970’s, when my parents participated in the Catholic Charismatic Pentecostal movement. Sometimes they prayed with Jimmy Carter’s sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, a faith-healing Christian evangelist. They spoke in tongues, had religious visions, and with other members of their organization, observed and performed “miracles.”
Over time, the fervor dissipated. My parents regained their perspective and objectivity. They no longer needed frenzy to give their lives meaning or feel special and important. They stopped denying logic and facts that conflicted with their world views. What finally restored them to their senses? The movement fizzled. Then they had a choice to make: seek a similar route, or find a more productive outlet for their energies. Dad decided to go back to working as an insurance consultant. Mom joined her county Democratic Women’s Club. Et voila! Just like that, I got my parents back.
Recently Marjorie Taylor Greene “cured” herself of QAnon fanaticism. On TV she says, "Well, like a lot of people today, I had easily gotten sucked into some things I had seen on the internet. But that was dealt with quickly early on. I never campaigned on those things. That was not something I believed in. That's not what I ran for Congress on. So, those are so far in the past."
OK, well bullshit. A number of things could have precipitated her so-called “change”. Maybe she suddenly realized she wanted to be taken seriously. What’s important to note is that this particular fanatic made a conscious, though self-serving, decision to tack toward normal. Given the motivation, say, the threat of losing their jobs, the other fanatics could, too.
Unfortunately, sitting back and hoping sanity catches on can’t be an option. Democracy’s report card is in, and it got an ‘F’ in Mental Health. Shrug your shoulders, pass the popcorn, turn on the TV and watch the Republican shitshow. That’s how some of my students’ parents reacted when their kids brought home a bad report card. But most of them sincerely wanted to know what they could do to help improve their kids’ prospects. Usually I told them to do what we did last November for the mid-terms: let’s all work together as a team. It’s how we win. Now we just need to work harder.
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