Author: Frank

New Insights into the Mind of the Mass Shooter

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This writer has refrained and delayed entering into this subject for a number of years, though it has occupied my thoughts for a long time. Recently with the commencement of trials for recent adolescent mass shooters, I had decided with myself not to comment of these traumatic replays and upon this subject until later for humanistic reasons.

However, a recent news report caught my eye that I felt could open the subject on this blog without appearing to or inadvertently trading in the notoriety of these stories as is almost unavoidable in any media no matter how restrained the reporting. This report thankfully highlighted the clinical comments of a very well based veteran psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Schwartz of the Institute for Living in Hartford CT. His topic centered around his growing clinical hypothesis that social factors play an enormous role in the development, over time, in the teen and young adult mass shooter. I would heartily recommend the reader follow this link to WTNH televison’s report in Hartford/West Hartford CT for a fairly well done tv news segment on Dr. Schwartz’s recent speech on this topic. His interest is no accident as the Sandy Hook CT elementary school shooting of two years ago is in that area of Connecticut and the venerable well respected Institute of Living facility and teaching center is in that part of the state. Further this tv report site has a brief and concise but insightful quote from Dr. Schwartz that handily summarizes his clinical hypothesis that will make its point quickly to the viewer and I strongly recommend viewing the interview clip on that site.

I expect and hope that it will give the viewer a truly valuable piece of insight and perspective with which to take in the present and coming onslaught of media coverage we have been undergoing since the start of the Boston Marathon Bombing Tsarnarov case, and the two most recent mass shooter trials commencing this month in different parts of the country.

 

A Mere Observer Like Me Can Only Hope

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The last two days, the news has been debating and detailing the news from the Iran nuclear six nation negotiations that resulted in the framework agreement for a comprehensive deal on Friday. It was surprising and in a way a possible relief and way out of this growing crisis. I had had experience in the Middle East for several years on both sides of the conflict but spent the most time in Israel as a teen. I was very gung ho toward Judaism and Israel being raised a Catholic, and then Episcopalian. I have followed Israel and certain Arab countries in the Middle East and had been studying seriously long term and in real detail and true historical and political readings and research I think much more than the Average American ordinary citizen on the constant crises in the Middle East especially becoming more probtative in my reading during the times of the Infitada uprisings three decades more more ago. I had studied an unusual ongoing deep interest in radical anarchist and revolutionary groups in my college days not as an idealist naive American college student identifying with Che Guervara and all that popular goofy radical stuff but going into the history of the movement of anarchism in Europe in the last 1800’s, radical Americans such as Eugene V. Debs the Socialist, Emma Goldman, Mikhail Bakunnin and many others. This interest eventually took a parallel course as I charted the extremist revolutionary American student groups such as the S.D.S. and Weathermen. Where I attended college, that community was a national center and hotbed of ferment and many student radicals lived there, wrote seminal manifesto and declaration, The Port Huron Statement now largely forgotten. I heard many of the big names then in the late sixties and early seventies speak publicly and watched the radicalization and turning to violence that evolved and saw many parallels and in the true tradition of the eager geek intellectual naive college student of those days, wrote a senior honors thesis on parallels between anarchists and the emerging American and European radical violent student groups.

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Life in the Supermax Prisons: Terrible for Anyone’s Mental Health…

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As a psychiatrist I have long consulted to various kinds of correctional facilities including local county jails, state prisons both low or “minimum” security facilities and “maximum” or “high management” units, a federal correctional evaluation center of some past fame and notoriety because of its infamous inmate-patient referrals especially in the turbulent 1980’s, juvenile correction detention centers in regional settings in the Southwest and one of the country’s largest adolescent detention center in a very large urban city. I also served as a forensic examiner at a state level maximum security state hospital based forensic correctional inpatient unit.

I have long been acutely aware that 1) a substantial percentage, at least one third in the old days, to now a growing majority these days with the last ten years of shifting of the chronically mentally ill from public psychiatric hospital beds to the jails at all levels in this country,  have been mentally ill, and that, 2) the mental health treatment services in all correctional settings have always been and still are, woefully inadequate, and that 3) there is inadequate training for correctional personnel, that 4) management of the mentally ill offender has become consequently, and understandably necessarily more and more reliant on coercive, physical control measures in settings at all levels. This has been a disaster long in the making and obvious to any student and practitioner of correctional facility mental health services delivery who has had a long enough career to see it worsening in the last 10-15 years.

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The Evidence for Vaccinations Against Infectious Diseases

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This infographic published in the venerable Wall Street Journal shows the success of vaccinations against almost ALL the formerly dreaded infectious diseases that would regularly ravage the country and the world for millennia until the mid 1900’s when vaccination science came to be reliable and applied against more and more of these infectious diseases the killed adults and children alike, but more so children.

Take a look at this incredible infographic that makes the case far more effectively than anything I could write:

http://tinyurl.com/nxp3oya

 

The Latest Controversy about ADHD

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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has been around and known by different names since the early 1900’s when in the Boston area, the first child behavioral (psychiatric) established by the then family/child court system of Boston started to have to deal with behaviorally out of control, hyperactive [thought that term came into use later] children in sudden new higher numbers after World War I. Most medical historians feel that ADHD has always been with us but the time after WWI saw an increase in children who had unfortunately suffered mild brain damage from what was known then as “Von Economo’s Encephalitis.” This was the CNS manifestation of the “Spanish flu pandemic” that swept the world shortly before the end of WWI and through somewhere around 1920-1921. This was the first great known documented influenza pandemic and many books in the last 20 years have documented beautiful this pandemic as the modern scientific and public world began to become interested in infectious diseases, emerging diseases, largely set off the AIDS epidemic that rose to public awareness in the late 1970’s and especially the 1980’s.[ For the very best book on the start of the AIDS epidemic, the reader is referred exclusively to the now dated book AND THE BAND PLAYED ON by the late San Francisco newspaper reporter Randy Shilts.]

To explain what happened in the Spanish Flu pandemic, the influenza virus is capable in anyone of producing an “encephalitis,” a viral infection of the brain. Nowadays we are acquainted unfortunately with annual “equine encephalitis” outbreaks in various parts of the country. Any of these viral infections of the brain can cause real brain damage, paralysis, loss of virtually any brain function or capacity. Strikingly though, this viral outbreak that was part and part of the Spanish Flu pandemic produced as it were, “artificial,” causes of Parkinsonism by the thousands as an aftermath residual symptom of having the influenza brain viral infection. Patients young and old had the visible and even in those days nearly 100 years ago now, the tremors, halting gait, imbalance and slow gait of the adult Parkinsonism patient. But in the young people they seemed more likely to develop sudden hyperactivity, wild difficulties with impulse control, poor or absent concentration and focus. Sound familiar? They got into all kinds of behavioral, legal and delinquent behaviors and turned by the dozens, then hundreds, in the Judge Baker juvenile court, one of, if not the first of its kind in the country. The court and this jurist were wise and recognized that these were not criminal youth, but that something had altered them self-control and resulting behavioral styles drastically for the worse. It was a tough time as there was really NO treatment for this new avalanche of a patient cohort with a new condition not seen before. But that is likely the historical start of the recognition of ADHD. It came to be then appreciated in the school systems that there were other youths who had much the same behaviors, but who had NOT had the influenza nor Von Economo’s encephalitis. Thus, the concept of the “hyperkinetic” child started in the decades after World War I.

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