School shootings: Lots of hot air and missing the point.

 The latest school shooting against a Catholic school has generated the usual knee jerk analyses, most of which miss the point.

The problem is depression and self hatred. 

In the one school shooting that happened where I had once worked, it was anger because of abuse by his parents: and the first ones he shot were his grandfather, before shooting up a school that he didn't attend (he was on home classes). And where did he get his guns? His grandfather was a policeman. 

In this latest shooting of Catholic school students,  it was a trans person. 

Some people feel they should belong to the opposite sex, but often this feeling is transient, and the others often are gay. Most are harmless and their families and neighbors here in the Philppines just shrug and accept them, just like second wives are accepted.

However the trans lobby is making changing gender a social contagion: Often the motivation for such transitions is because a counseler pushed it as the cure all for the depression and anger. We see this also with people seeking plastic surgery: sometimes they just want to change their appearance etc. but some see it as a cure all for their inner depression/self hatred.

The problem: if you don't recognize this, there is a danger of increased depression and it's mirror image: Anger and acting out against a symbol you see as causing your problem.

The internet makes this worse: So the Red Lake shooter didn't want to be angry against his abusive parents, but the internet filled him with white supremicist (!) hate ideas so he could blame his school and those who tried to help him.

So in this Minnesota case, I also suspect that when his transition didn't soolve his psychiatric problems,   well he only had to go to the internet to find suggestions that his anger was justified against an innocent third party: parents, or in this case, a church.

Psychiatrists are supposed to check for thoughts of anger/depression/suicidal plans and homicidal plans when they monitor people on SSRIs being treated for depression. Was this done? 

SSRIs decrease suicide and depression but when the anger of depression no longer is aimed inward, the anger can become acting out. Angry outbursts   are especially dangerous if the person is bipolar and gets manic symptoms.

And hormones also affect mood: Something no one wants to discuss.

Finally, the ability to get guns is a problem but in Minnesota they have gun control. Were his guns legal? 

But didn't the parent monitor his guns? And why didn't she confiscate the guns? 

When my teenage adopted son was acting out, I confiscated his hunting rifles, but he insisted I give them back since he had bought them with his own money. So I gave them back, minus the firing pin. No, I couldn't get him hospitalized, and his therapist merely affirmed that his anger against me was justified (ignoring the abuse he suffered before he was adopted).  So excuse me if I am cynical about therapy.

So why no family intervention here? Intervention by friends? Someone monitoring his social media posts (don't say this is not being done).

Finally, there is a question of security: Apparently, the same governor of Minnesota who feels schools need tampons in the boy's room denied funding for basic security for Catholic schools. 

From the NatCathReg:

Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and the state Legislature both declined to act on repeated appeals from Catholic leaders seeking the same level of protection public schools receive.

of course, it might not be cost effective to send rent a cops to every church, church school, etc.

and the active gun rights community might say: Why didn't you provide your own protection? Train teachers and let them carry weapons.

Sigh. The problem? Most civilians freeze in time of danger

So how about prevetion?

The US military has people trained to use guns to kill people, and a lot of soldiers with PTSS and other risk factors for violence.

The Modern War institute has an article here about the problem

Protecting Soldiers, Preventing Harmful Behaviors, and Boosting Combat Readiness—with Data,

Project Prevention and the the Unit Risk Forecasting Tool (URFT), which applies predictive data analytics to give leaders an additional tool to keep their soldiers ready to train and fight.

much of the prevention focuses on the problems in units, not individuals, and of course, the loss of privacy would not be allowed in the civilian sector.

But high risk criminals are often known to the local police for less serious incidents and it is almost a joke when the police admit: This person was on our radar, meaning the cops were watching him or her.

The first line of defense of course is the community and family, including the extended family, local clubs, churches and even gangs who know who of their members are out of control.

In this case, the person was high risk and should have been monitored, or at least his social media monitored and his guns confiscated.

But the cops are the last line of defense in such cases because of civil liberties and the inability to get dangerous people committed into psychiatric institutions.

Sigh. Been there, done that...Sigh.

psychodelics. another fad soon to be debunked?

UK MAIL has an article about using a psychodelic for psychiatric treatment.

We were in FDA's trial for MDMA - here's why it should NOT be approved to treat PTSD

Trials looking at the health benefits of MDMA ignored patients' worsening suicidal tendencies, according to multiple people involved in the studies. Three volunteers with PTSD said they felt more depressed weeks into the trial and for weeks after it ended, an effect of taking the psychoactive drug, also known as ‘molly’. Lykos Therapeutics, the company masterminding the push to legalize MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, is accused of bias in reporting trial results to show a positive effect on people's PTSD symptoms, pressuring people to report positive effects, and ignoring those who said their symptoms got worse. The ongoing trials have been plagued with allegations of sexual misconduct and of doctors overseeing the study of holding ‘underground’ MDMA sessions not sanctioned by the trial using the drugs illegally.

the more things change the more they stay the same

 I am still rereading the Tale of Genji, and books about the culture of that period of Japan.

So quick: What does Genji, Lolita, and the film Pricilla have in common? Finding a young girl and grooming her to fit your idea of the ideal wife.

I could probably add WoodyAllen's seduction of his wife's adopted daughter, foot binding in China (this was done because men found small feet sexually arousing), and the way Confucian rules, Islamic rules, and even Christian rules limited women''s desire for self fulfillment...

Reading Lolita in Tehran is about the way that powerful men groom women into what they want women to be. In her book she finds a parallel between the pedophile writer of Lolita and the Mullah's crackdown on women in education and dress after the revolution.

The irony? In medical school, the book Lolita was used by our psychiatrist teacher to point out how very young women wanted sex:  but Nafisi points out that the book is actually written by the pedophile and is his point of view (to justify his sexual abuse of her). 

So add Freudian sexual theory into how men project their ideas onto women, and although his stress on trying to stop sexual repression was good, the end result was not liberation of women but teaching women it is better to be promiscuous than repressed as wives, meaning more responsibility free sex for men.

A lot of the patients seen by Freud were repressed (not just sexually of course: that's what he got wrong. These upper class ladies were put into a box telling them they had to be submissive wives, not independent workers and equal to their husbands).

One result of repressing desire (sexual and other personal areas) or by severe life stress (as in refugees) is conversion reaction: aka Hysteria.

We rarely see this in the USA, but I did see it in tribal Africa. And one only has to read Victorian novels where you read about those crazy ladies in the attic who were hysterics trying to cope with a society where they essentially were limited in what they could do. This was the theme of Jane Eyre, where Jane was trying to cope with her limited choices and of course the crazy wife in the attic who went crazy after a forced marriage...and this was one reason that it was both popular and controversial.

Back to Genji: how did women cope in this novel? Polygamy was fine for Genji and other men, but the women were miserable, as the female author of this book makes clear. Indeed, a lot of these women literally went crazy: in that society this hysteria was defined as spirit possession, and Genji's wives suffered from various versions of it.

Doris Bargen 's book on  Spirit Possession in the novel is titled: A Woman's weapon.

Goodreads review notes that by becoming possessed, women assert control over their own lives.

From this male-centered perspective, female jealousy provides a convenient explanation for the emergence of mono no ke within the polygynous marital system of the Heian aristocracy. Yet this conventional view fails to take into account the work's female authorship and its largely female audience. Relying upon anthropological as well as literary evidence, Doris G. Bargen foregrounds the motives of the possessed character and located mono no ke within the politics of Heian society, interpreting spirit possession as a female strategy adopted to counter male strategies of empowerment. Possessions become "performances" by women attempting to redress the balance of power; they subtly subvert the structure of domination and significantly alter the construction of gender.

My main disagreement with her excellent book is that this is written as if the spirit possession/hysteria was a deliberate choice, whereas I see it in the same way that passive aggression works in real life: the woman cannot chose, but her subconscious desires pop up and voila, conversion reaction occurs that helps her to cope (in this case, spirit possession but in real life, often hypochondria or exaggeration of real illnesses).

All of this is something to remember when you read stuff about the wonderfulness of polyandry or why we need to destroy marriage as a patriarchal institution.

Yes, under Confucian laws (in Genji), Islamic laws, or the now almost defunct laws of Christian fundamentalism in western Europe, women were put into a box and had choices limited. But men were also limited: they were pressured to take care of the women they seduced and the children they begot in such societies.

But if you want to raise children safely, being in a safe box with a man to protect you might be better than trying to cope with a full time job and raising children without any husband or extended family to help you.

Finally I should note that in Genji, another way women coped when threatened by unwanted attention or marriages  was to cut their hair and become a Buddhist nun.

 This probably worked in medieval Europe, both for women who didn't want a husband or for women who wanted to be nurses or teachers or scholars. However, contrary to the plot of the frustrated wife in She Came to Me, modern convents in the west won't let you come in to flee your marriage or the world.

so what is the answer?

I don't have a single answer. Life is complicated, but the modern idea to just destroy these rules ignore the innate biological facts that we were born sexual beings, and the religious idea that we were born in a time and place and with a body that includes sex and other desires, and it is how we cope with all of life that is important in the long run.

Which is why Murasaki's novel remains important to study to introduce a non Western voice into the loud rhetoric of the modern man hating feminists.

Social contagion: The Werther effect

Another school shooter who is trans and bullied who decides not to shoot those who bullied him but innocent grandschool kids.

These school shootings come in clusters because when the press pushes one, others decide to do copy cat crimes.

is the social media to blame? There are reports of the fist trannie murderer quoting the trans day of rage to justify her murders, so maybe there is stuff being discussed in certain discussion groups that encourage people to act on their negative impulses.

The only school shooter that I know about personally was a boy from a very abusive background who was placed in the care of his grandfather. He was not going to school but getting class assignments at his home at the time. But reports said that he had been obsessed with white power/nazi hate sites on the internet (he was AmerIndian). So apparently those sites suggested killing those who he believed harmed him was okay and justified. Never mind that he projected this idea onto people who had nothing to do with his abusive parents but were those who tried to help him.

We docs know about social contagion: when press releases glamourize or justify a murder, or more commonly a suicide.

That is why the public health authorities traditionally told the press not to show suicide victims in a sympathetic light (and Catholic church would not bury them in blessed ground): to discourage people from thinking such actions were an acceptable action.

when activists point to the problem of gun violence, they rarely note that half of gun deaths are suicides, usually older white men. Substance abuse often involved. So it's not just women and children harmed by the culture of individualism, and overdoses are not the only way that substance abuse harms people.

The various anarchist and other revolutionary fads that inspired violence in the 19th century was proceeded by a suicide fad inspired by a novel:

the idea of suicide being a social contagion was first noticed after a wave of copycat suicides inspired by a popular novel: 

from Lancet: Goethe's Werther and its effects

Beyond any doubt, Goethe's Werther altered the way its readers viewed their lives; doubtless many lived or wished to live differently because of it.” And it was a literary sensation.... 

More chillingly dramatic than the extraordinary commercial success of Werther, is the fact that it was said that people in many countries were so persuaded by the novel that, if disappointed in love, they imitated Werther's manner of death. According to Goethe, “My friends…thought that they must transform poetry into reality, imitate a novel like this in real life and, in any case, shoot themselves; and what occurred at first among a few took place later among the general public…”

That there was significant imitation of Werther's suicide was never demonstrated conclusively, but we do know that various authorities were sufficiently concerned to move them to ban the book.

so who is vulnerable to such suggestions? 

“The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.” ― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Quotation of the day

 

it is now becoming understood that pornography is chemically addictive in the same way as drugs, tobacco, gaming, and gambling

. It changes the way people see, relate to, and interact with others by physically altering the brain’s chemistry. The cumulative effect is a degradation in the quality of intimate relationships, possible erosion of respect shown to other humans, and potential culmination in sexual harassment or assault (SH/A). 

source: USNI Blog

like all addictions/vices there is a difference between occassional use of the harmless type of porn (Debbie Does Dallas) and heavy use of porn that includes the perverted type (snuff films).

Given the number of non pornographic films with torture etc. as part of the plot, where the film essentially has the viewer identifying with the perpetrator, not the victim, I suspect there is an overlap of this type of problem.

Essentially it makes one think certain deeds are normal.

psychology today on how habits work