S Pawlett wrote: > > W. Kiernan wrote: > > > > As far as I can see, those two typified or exemplified nothing > > outside the classic textbook symptom list of paranoia. > > I see. Time for a little schizo bashing. Why not? They can't defend > themselves, in fact they usually can't even understand what you're > saying. So-called schizophrenia and so-called manic depression are > rarely enough to drive one to such extreme anti-social behavior. > Someone in the middle of acute mania (awful as these terms sound) is > more likely to become hypersocial e.g. spend all one's money on > lavish parties etc. The notion of two schizophrenics acting in > concert is absurd. No, as a matter of fact, it is not. Why do you say I am "bashing" anyone? > Have you ever met a real schizophrenic? Half my childhood, my father was in and out of mental hospitals under diagnosis of schizophrenia. > Marek Lugowski wrote: > > > > And this padded cell bullshit is just that. There are no padded > > cells. > > - padded - > > Wrong, dude. I seen 'em, > wrestling mats on the wall > down at the Bay Pines > US Veterans Hospital, > building 22, third floor > behind the buzzer lock door > when I was a little kid > visiting my dear old Dad. More: as Nabokov phrased it, "readers will be distressed," here goes my credibilty I suppose, but so what? When I was about the same age as Klebold and Harris, I walked into the local, free, no-questions-asked, public mental health clinic, and after two or three interviews, a genuine M.D.-type psychiatrist pinned the same diagnosis, schizophrenia, on me. He prescribed Stelazine, which I took for about two or three years. Once I got on the pills and got calmed down I started sleeping all night long and I didn't cut my wrists any more. What a relief it was to get that nonstop voice in my head finally to shut the fuck up. Also, incidentally, a.) I too was the best math student in my school, and b.) I too used to make pipe bombs "for fun," and c.) I too very much wanted to kill everybody in my high school, particularly those God damned athletes; I thought they were all out to get me. I used to hang out with my equally antisocial buddies and talk about doing it. That attitude eased up once I started taking phenothiazines. You are free to disbelieve the last two paragraphs if you like. If I were you I might. It's all true, anyway. Back then, I didn't know anywhere I could get a gun. These days, so I'm told, any teenager can get hold of a black-market gun more readily than he can get a marijuana cigarette. > I will send you all my David Cooper and R.D. Laing books if you could > understand anything that person said. If you ask, "Did you ever understand anything your father told you?" the answer falls in a grey area between "yes" and "no," and who understands himself? (ask Yoshie, she says "self-critique is impossible") so the bet's off. > That men aged 17-18 could plan and carry out such a complicated > operation (even if it is of such barbarity) suggests minds that are > highly engaged with reality and also very intelligent. There are other forms of schizophrenia, e.g. hebephrenia, which ruin the ability to make organized plans, but many paranoid schizophrenics are clear, lucid thinkers who score well above average on intelligence tests. And it doesn't take all that much smarts to kill a bunch of people you hate with guns and bombs. Any three pages of Klebold's calculus homework involved more "engagement with reality and intelligence" than his scheme of "revenge." > > Maybe the saying is true that "schizophrenia isn't a diagnosis but a > > prognosis." Still what might have saved them (their victims too) > > would have been regular doses of phenothiazine tranquilizers, maybe > > accompanied by some old-fashioned talk-therapy > > Maybe, but the side effects of such drugs often includes psychosis. Yes, that happens in about 5-10% of people who get phenothiazines prescribed. That's where the "talk-therapy" comes in; a competent psychiatrist (or for that matter, anybody who can read a PDR) should be on the lookout for that common abreaction. Unfortunately, in your ordinary mental ward, the staff is way too indifferent to the patients to care that the "anti-psychotic" medication is having the paradoxical effect of multiplying the patient's symptoms. When they finally notice the poor guy is getting way crazier, hallucinating out loud and all the rest instead of calming down, what do you suppose the S.O.P. is? You got it, strap him to the bed and increase the dosage. Yours WDK - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
