Mental Health Blogs

With all due respect to the profession of psychiatry, I need to ask why the “world’s most famous psychiatrist,” E. Fuller Torrey, and his group the Treatment Advocacy Center are so far completely silent on the tragedy at Fort Hood, Texas. That’s where an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, shot up an Army building, killing 12 and wounding 31 before being captured. Maj. Hasan was wounded and is reportedly in the custody of the Army at a hospital.

Often, when a person in the mental health system loses it (for whatever reason) and commits violence, Torrey and the fine folks at TAC are quick to post (anonymously, of course) on their blog the details of the crime and to use it as a springboard to argue for forced outpatient commitment and forced medication for people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses and play their vomit-inducing game of arguing that bad behavior by one person diagnosed with schizophrenia, say, proves that pretty much anyone with a “serious mental illness” needs to be medicated into the ground.

Now, that a psychiatrist has blown away a bunch of outstanding Americans what does TAC have to offer on its blog? Silence, the telling kind. The kind that says they are hypocrites because Hasan clearly had psych issues (whatever his political and religious issues with America may or may not have been) and yet he did what he alleged to have done. TAC should at least say something. Silence.

What does the American Psychiatric Association have to say? Nothing. It’s silent, too.

It’ll be interesting to read what psychiatrists have to write about this bizarre and unacceptable tragedy. For those of you who read this site who are psychiatrists, feel free to email me your thoughts or leave them in comments.

Maybe it’s not fair to read Maj. Hasan’s act in the context of his being a psychiatrist. After all, who’s ever heard of a doctor much less a psychiatrist committing mass murder? Almost never, excepting cases of genocidal killers like Nazis Josef Mengele and Aribert Ferdinand Heim and Radovan Karadzic (a psychiatrist. Thanks for the reminder, Qwerty). So inevitably this story will be treated as the multi-layered, conflicted beast that it is and there won’t be much moment made of his being a psych doc, except to the extent where one might ask, “Why couldn’t someone who did psych evaluations realize he had lost it and seek help?”

But, then, Torrey and TAC are never so fair to the people they write about. They never have complete lives and souls, their motivations are never complex. They are just schizophrenics and bipolars, bad boys and girls who didn’t take their medicine.

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Related posts:

1. Fort Hood Shooting: Psychiatrist-Shooter A Domestic Terrorist
2. Fort Hood Shooting: Was Psychiatrist-Shooter Psychotic Or A Terrorist?
3. Fort Hood Shooting: Psychiatrist Calls Psychiatrist-Shooter "Terrorist"
4. Army PTSD Psychiatrist Suspected Shooter At Ft. Hood
5. Fort Hood Shooter-Psychiatrist To Employee Insanity Defense?